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Epistemic virtues are character traits conducive to principled ways of thinking, leading to a life of flourishing. Recent years have witnessed an emergence of theoretical accounts describing how they develop. However, few if any studies have conducted rigorous empirical investigation into the mechanisms of intellectual virtue development. In this study, we review several significant frameworks before utilizing a randomized, pretest/posttest control trial design to understand the impacts of a novel thinking disposition intervention on intellectual virtue growth. We ascertain the direct and indirect effects of the intervention on four key intellectual virtues: curiosity, humility, integrity, and tenacity. Additionally, we test theoretical mediators of virtue learning. Clear evidence favoring a theory-inspired mediator is observed, though we observe weaker signals of direct effects, with nuances across the virtues. For instance, tenacity and curiosity variables appear to respond more to the intervention than do humility and integrity. Findings are discussed in light of contemporary theoretical perspectives.

Recent changes have been made in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) education in the United States with the goal of increasing the number of students pursuing degrees and careers in STEM. The Next Generation Science Standards (NGSS) integrate new science and engineering standards in an attempt to achieve this goal and are the first national engineering standards for curriculum below the undergraduate level. Towards accommodating these changes, we present a project-based learning engineering program for high school students that teaches fundamental concepts in programming, robotics, and control engineering. The students complete increasingly sophisticated projects that expose them to large solution spaces where creativity and exploration lead to unique solutions. The learning goals of the program align with the NGSS practices while also giving the students a head-start on material and key skills they will need when pursuing bachelor's degrees in engineering. Specifically, the program gives students experience completing engineering projects, from concept and design through implementation and evaluation. We describe the projects, including learning goals and outcomes, as well as the hardware and software we used so that others can reproduce the program. Finally, we present feedback from students as well as insights from the mentors. Ultimately, we found that students leave the program with a better understanding of what practicing engineers do and with motivation to apply critical thinking and other NGSS practices in their future learning and careers.

By, in effect, rendering pharmacokinetics an experimentally adjustable parameter, the ability to perform feedback-controlled dosing informed by high-frequency in vivo drug measurements would prove a powerful tool for both pharmacological research and clinical practice. Efforts to this end, however, have historically been thwarted by an inability to measure in vivo drug levels in real time and with sufficient convenience and temporal resolution. In response, we describe a closed-loop, feedback-controlled delivery system that uses drug level measurements provided by an in vivo electrochemical aptamer-based (E-AB) sensor to adjust dosing rates every 7 s. The resulting system supports the maintenance of either constant or predefined time-varying plasma drug concentration profiles in live rats over many hours. For researchers, the resultant high-precision control over drug plasma concentrations provides an unprecedented opportunity to (1) map the relationships between pharmacokinetics and clinical outcomes, (2) eliminate inter- and intrasubject metabolic variation as a confounding experimental variable, (3) accurately simulate human pharmacokinetics in animal models, and (4) measure minute-to-minute changes in a drugs pharmacokinetic behavior in response to changing health status, diet, drug-drug interactions, or other intrinsic and external factors. In the clinic, feedback-controlled drug delivery would improve our ability to accurately maintain therapeutic drug levels in the face of large, often unpredictable intra- and interpatient metabolic variation. This, in turn, would improve the efficacy and safety of therapeutic intervention, particularly for the most gravely ill patients, for whom metabolic variability is highest and the margin for therapeutic error is smallest.

Hybrid systems are inherently fragile with respect to perturbations when their state experiences jumps on surfaces. Zero-crossing detection algorithms are capable of robustly detecting the crossing of such surfaces, but, up to now, the effects of adding such algorithms to the system being simulated are unknown. In this paper, we propose a mathematical model for hybrid systems that incorporates zero-crossing detection as well as a hybrid simulator for it. First, we discuss adverse effects that measurement noise and discretization can have on hybrid systems jumping on surfaces and prove that, under mild regularity conditions, zero-crossing detection algorithms can robustify the original system. Then, we show that integration schemes with zero-crossing detection actually compute a robustified version of the fragile nominal model. In this way, we rigorously characterize their effect on solutions to the simulated system. Finally, we show that both the model and simulator are not only robust, but also that the hybrid simulator preserves asymptotic stability properties, semiglobally and practically (on the step size), of the original system. Several examples throughout the paper illustrate these ideas and results.

Moral education is open to worries about indoctrination given the controversies there are about a wide range of ethical matters. I argue, however, that moral education is no more liable to being "indoctrinal" than education in history or science. I begin by proposing an account of what indoctrination involves. I then note that moral education takes different forms and that the different forms raise different concerns about the potential for indoctrination. First is "moral socialization," which can begin before children have moral concepts. Second is "propositional moral education". Some propositional moral education occurs in the teaching of moral concepts or as an outgrowth of moral socialization. But some addresses highly controversial issues of the kind that raise the greatest concern about indoctrination. I argue that even in such cases, moral education need not involve indoctrination. In concluding, I discuss the objection that my defense of moral education relies on debatable meta-ethical assumptions.