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Few people have made greater contributions to protecting and improving the environment than the scientist, teacher, activist Dr. Barry Commoner. For half a century, Dr. Commoner has been an international leader in the environmental movement. On the occasion of his eightieth birthday, a symposium was held at which invited speakers discussed his contributions to a wide range of environmental issues. This book, collecting many of the invited papers, provides fascinating insights into the life and work of one of the twentieth century's most influential scientists and social activists. Chapters contributed by other activists, scientists, and scholars including Ralph Nader, Tony Mazzocchi and Peter Montague cover many of Dr. Commoner's major contributions.

Grace Burnham McDonald (born in 1889) was a founder of the Workers Health Bureau in New York City in 1921. She started the Bureau after her experience with the Joint Board of Sanitary Control. The Bureau assessed workplace health and safety risks, educated labor unions about these issues, and advocated for laws to ensure the highest degree of workplace protection. Her Bureau colleagues were Harriet Silverman and Charlotte Todes (Stern). Burnham McDonald supported the Bureau with part of her 1923 inheritance from her first husband. After years of effective work, the Workers' Health Bureau shut down in 1929, largely as a result of diminished support from the unions, whose focus had shifted to purely economic issues, and the dissociation of the AFL from the Bureau. In later life, Burnham McDonald moved to California, where she became involved in some of the same causes, especially as they affected agricultural laborers. An interview with Charlotte Todes Stern follows and appears on page 337 of this issue.

This article was written by Crystal Eastman when she was Secretary of the New York Commission on Employers' Liability and Causes of Industrial Accidents, Unemployment, and Lack of Farm Labor. It was published in July of 1911, in Volume 38, Number 1 of the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, pages 98–107. The issue title was “Risks in Modern Industry.” Eastman calls for the prevention of workplace accidents through three essentials: injury surveillance/reporting (with annual public reporting of the data); government enforcement of accident prevention laws, via departments with well-paid and well-trained officials and inspectors, fines that are high enough to be a deterrence to employers, and the power to have police shut down a factory if preventive measures are not installed; and a workers' compensation system—“a system of liability by which an employer can reduce his accident costs, not by hiring a more unscrupulous attorney and a more hard-hearted claim agent, but only by reducing his accidents.”

Charlotte Todes Stern (5/5/1897-11/15/1996) was a radical activist for most her life, beginning with her introduction to YPSL (Young People's Socialist League) during her college years. In 1923, Todes Stern became a staff member of the Workers' Health Bureau (WHB), and two years later she became their Organizing Secretary. She traveled the United States organizing for the WHB until 1927. This is the third of seven interviews with Charlotte Todes Stern, conducted by Rosalyn Baxandall for the Feminist History Research Project. This interview focuses on the Workers' Health Bureau, its formation, early efforts with the Painters' union in New York, its accomplishments and efforts to obtain safer and healthier working conditions for workers throughout industry, and its organization of annual national conferences for occupational health and safety. Todes Stern discusses the conflicts with the American Federation of Labor and the demise of the Bureau. An interview with Grace Burnham McDonald appears on page 327 of this issue.

This paper is based on a case study of practice which explores the use of social media within a blended mode of study. Specifically, it aims to consider the professional use of online social contexts to support teaching and encourage collaboration between learners. It will illustrate some factors intended to protect their digital identities, confidence and online well-being. This paper draws upon the recent report within the University of Glasgow - Analysis of digital media: supporting university-wide online learning via Moodle (Dunn et al, 2015). This case study is also based upon similar international works, for your reference, (Carpenter and Krutka, 2014: Honeycutt and Herring, 2009: Kassen-Noor, 2012: Junco et al, 2010).

Donald Elisburg has spent his career advocating on behalf of workers. Trained as a labor lawyer, Mr. Elisburg has legal, legislative, policy development, and executive management experience in the fields of labor standards, workers' compensation, environmental and occupational safety and health, wages and hours, and employment and training. In the interview, Elisburg shares his insights on how to move a bureaucracy to advance worker health and safety and workers' rights.

In the afternoon of March 23, 2006 a Providence firefighter was diagnosed as having cyanide poisoning after working at a building fire. In the aftermath of three fires at commercial and residential sites that day, eight additional firefighters (out of 28 tested) were found to have elevated levels of cyanide. Numerous other members reported symptoms consistent with cyanide poisoning, including headaches, weakness and fatigue, nausea, and shortness of breath. The Providence Fire Department (PFD) established a joint union management committee to review the situation.

Australia is now the third largest provider of education to overseas students. Between 1994 and 2000 the number of overseas students taught by Australian universities increased by 150% to 107,622. It is estimated that 41% of the recent growth in international education has been in offshore enrolments, with each of Australia’s 38 universities now providing offshore education. This paper reviews recent Australian literature on transnational teaching and presents an overview of a study with academics who teach transnationally and who are drawn from nine Australian universities. The study covers the professional development and teaching experiences of these academics and their perceptions of the induction/orientation and ongoing professional development needed to support the delivery of quality trans‐cultural education offshore.

While 31 million Americans have been diagnosed with asthma, children are most severely affected. Asthma also is common among teachers, indicating that the school building environment may be associated with asthma prevalence among occupants. Children are sensitive to environmental pollutants, which are more concentrated in indoor air environments. Schools are a significant source of indoor air pollutants. Yet little research has addressed the causal relationship between asthma and specific levels of indoor pollutants. Indoor air quality is seldom controlled in schools in a way that minimizes such exposures. While few laws limit indoor air pollutants in schools, some laws outline or mandate practices that can control exposures. This report presents recommendations for laws and regulations that control and, ideally, prevent indoor air quality problems and aims to reduce or mitigate such disease.

An international campaign was waged questioning the benefits of BP's Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline in an effort to avoid a “zone of sacrifice” there. This article is an offshoot of that effort and explains the contemporary struggle over the pipeline project. The authors describe the project's background and evaluate the actual and potential impacts of the project in which they consider eight areas. They also assess BP's capacity to confront resistance to the pipeline.

An association of epidemiologists looks at the state of regional public health preparedness in a time of terrorism in a report that gauges regional readiness. The report examined the status of preparations to deal with chemical and radiological events, and looked at planning gaps, resources, and interagency agreements to coordinate emergency response. The research found inadequate levels of preparedness, planning, and established interagency partnerships and puts forth recommendations to improve the nation's ability to respond.

Within a framework of shrinking public funding for universities, competition for students and pressures for the internationalization of education, Australian universities have formed partnerships with Asian organizations to offer Australian degrees to fee‐paying students in their home countries. Teaching Asian students in Asia is complex, expensive and challenging for the university, its local partners, students and academics. However, Singapore and Australia have recently signed a free trade agreement and others may follow, thereby increasing the amount of teaching Australian universities undertake in Asia. Issues of education and cultural empathy have become more important than ever in this new environment. This paper discusses one international degree program and the way it is experienced by its Singaporean students and Australian academics as each group strives to understand the academic and cultural needs of the other. Singaporean students in the study reported a range of different learning styles an...

This book promises critical reflection on a theme that many teachers find daunting. The words teaching and digital technologies are often banded around with little regard for question, instead suggesting that they offer all the answers. The usual rhetoric and facsimile approach to technology enhanced learning and teaching is challenged here and is in perfect equilibrium with pedagogy, policy and curriculum. This book review will illustrate my perspective on the works edited by Henderson and Romeo.

Below is testimony in support of a city-wide worksite smoking ban presented by NYCOSH (The New York Committee on Occupational Safety and Health) to the New York City Council on November 12, 2002.

Brazil has a Federal Ergonomic Standard [1] enacted in 1990 that attracts the attention of practitioners in occupational health and safety fields because it is viewed symbolically as a political gain and because of its technical advances. The 1990 ergonomic standard modified a former one that was issued within a set of 28 occupational health and safety regulations established in 1978 [2]. This article focuses on the social and historical steps in a persistent workers' struggle for a healthier work environment in the late 1980s that resulted in this federal standard as a “command-and-control” regulation pioneering a wide tripartite process of policy-making in Brazil.

New Solutions is republishing this 1991 article by Robert Asher, which reviews the history of organized labor's efforts in the United States to secure health and safety protections for workers. The 1877 passage of the Massachusetts factory inspection law and the implementation of primitive industrial safety inspection systems in many states paralleled labor action for improved measures to protect workers' health and safety. In the early 1900s labor was focusing on workers' compensation laws. The New Deal expanded the federal government's role in worker protection, supported at least by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO), but challenged by industry and many members of the U.S. Congress. The American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the CIO backed opposing legal and inspection strategies in the late 1940s and through the 1950s. Still, by the late 1960s, several unions were able to help craft the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1970 and secure new federal protections for U.S. workers.

Congress may soon face a decision about what agency will take responsibility for worker and facility safety at Department of Energy (DOE) sites as the DOE moves to external regulation. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) occupies a prominent place on the short list of candidates. Thus, an examination of the NRC's historical record on health and safety, in particular, its record in protecting workers, is warranted. This look at the record shows that the NRC does not adopt a strong regulatory stance; exposure standards for workers have not changed despite evidence of harmful effects at low doses of radiation exposure; record-keeping and worker monitoring are lax; the NRC is blind to internal cultural problems; it appears more concerned about its public image than about entrenched problems; it is too lenient to the industry it is supposed to regulate. The NRC's history of recent problems has caused some critics to call for Congressional hearings or additional oversight of the agency.

The purpose of this research project was to determine the effect of a training session about achieving natural growth goals on perceptions of a university classroom as a learning organisation. The results indicated that a short training session on how to achieve natural growth goals in an organisation appeared to have a boomerang effect on perceptions of a university classroom as a learning organisation. This study should alert us to the inevitable consequence of having our best training efforts backfire when they conflict with powerful, though latent, beliefs or cultural values.

Why should an employer who sends a worker to his death in an unmonitored confined space or an unprotected 12-foot deep trench not be prosecuted under a felony as opposed to the Occupational Safety and Health Act, where the maximum penalty for willfully killing a worker is a misdemeanor with a maximum of six months in jail? They should be so charged. The author deplores merely waiting for Congress to increase OSHA penalties.

Barry Commoner died September 30, 2012, at the age of 95. Daniel Tanuro reviews Commoner's books to remind us of both his scientific and political contributions. Tanuro sees Commoner as a scientist and a Marxist whose research and writings as well as his role as a public spokesperson laid the foundations of ecosocialism.