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Advanced General Chemistry
Alexandra E. Strom
Textbook adapted for CHM 118 at Smith College:
This course is for students with a very strong background in chemistry. The elementary theories of stoichiometry, atomic structure, bonding, structure, energetics and reactions are quickly reviewed. The major portions of the course involve a detailed analysis of atomic theory and bonding from an orbital concept, an examination of the concepts behind thermodynamic arguments in chemical systems, and an investigation of chemical reactions and kinetics. The laboratory deals with synthesis, physical properties and kinetics.
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Public Feminisms: From Academy to Community
Carrie N. Baker and Aviva Dove-Viebahn
The field of feminist studies grew from the U.S. women’s movements of the 1960s and 1970s and has continued to be deeply connected to ongoing movements for social justice. As educational institutions are increasingly seeing public scholarship and community engagement as relevant and fruitful complements to traditional academic work, feminist scholars have much to offer in demonstrating different ways to inform and interact with various communities. In this collection, a diverse range of feminist scholar-activists write about the dynamic and varied methods they use to reach beyond traditional classrooms and scholarly journals to share their work with the public. Here is an opportunity to reflect on the meaning and importance of community engagement and to archive some of the important public-facing work feminists are doing today. Faculty, graduate, and undergraduate students, as well as administrators hoping to increase their schools’ connections to the community, will find this volume indispensable.
“In Public Feminisms, Baker and Dove-Viebahn have curated a vibrantly intersectional collection of essays that speak both to the longstanding commitment of feminisms to education and activism and the urgent need for this work in the contemporary moment. This book shows how scholar-activists are bringing together knowledge production and the sharing of that knowledge and community engagement through a series of compelling case studies. I can’t wait to teach it.” —Carol A. Stabile, Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at University of Oregon
Carrie N. Baker is the Sylvia Dlugasch Baumann professor in American Studies and a professor in the Program for the Study of Women and Gender at Smith College. Aviva Dove-Viebahn is Assistant Professor of Film and Media Studies at Arizona State University.
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Organic Chemistry II
Layne Morsch, Steven Farmer, Krista Cunningham, Zachery Sharrett, and Kevin M. Shea
This text has many contributors. It was adapted for use in CHM 223 at Smith College by Kevin Shea with the assistance of a Smith College Library OER Incentive Grant.
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Women and Political Systems Worldwide
Carrie N. Baker and Marcela Rodrigues-Sherley
In March 1964, two major events happened in the life of a 16-year-old Brazilian girl from Belo Horizonte: her country experienced a coup d’état that would lead to a twenty-one-year military dictatorship. She also started high school. Central State High School was no regular high school; it was the biggest hub for student activism in the country and the place where Dilma Rousseff would start her lifelong fight for democracy.
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La Princesse de Clèves by Lafayette: A New Translation and Bilingual Pedagogical Edition for the Digital Age
Hélène E, Bilis; Jean-Vincent Blanchard; David Harrison; and Hélène Visentin
La Princesse de Clèves, written in 1678 by Marie-Madeleine Pioche de La Vergne, countess of Lafayette, is widely known as the first modern French novel. This open-access pedagogical translation and edition draws on the digital format to offer a rich variety of materials for readers of French and English. Translator’s notes enhance the fresh and lively translation, actively comparing the current version with earlier editions to heighten awareness of linguistic nuance and complexity. Interactive paragraphs and lexical definitions encourage readers to move with ease between the French and English texts. Accompanying didactic essays empower readers to reflect on Lafayette’s vocabulary and on practices of translation more broadly.
This ebook edition offers pedagogical dossiers and a variety of innovative resources influenced by the Digital Humanities, such as a mapping interface with georeferenced historical maps, word mining exercises, a digital timeline, and social network analyses. In addition to overviews of Lafayette’s milieu and adaptations of La Princesse de Clèves, the editors also include excerpts from rarely-translated letters published in an early modern gazette in response to the novel. These features enable a new generation of readers to grasp the seventeenth-century public’s reaction to Lafayette’s work.
Drawing on the affordances of the digital format to promote multilingualism and humanistic inquiry, the edition simultaneously encourages active engagement with the specificities of a particular language and culture. This project results from a collaboration between four professors who teach at liberal arts colleges and argues for critical approaches to digital technologies to celebrate a classic text.
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Organic Synthesis
Kevin M. Shea and LibreText
My goal in writing this text is to help advanced undergraduates and beginning graduate students learn key topics in organic chemistry that often don't come up in your Organic I and II classes. So, you can think about this as an Organic III text. My focus is on key reaction types that enable the construction of complex organic molecules: pericyclic reactions, transition metal catalyzed reactions, rearrangements, fragmentations, radical reactions, and carbene reactions. I hope that this text is a resource that helps you understand the mechanisms of these reactions and enables you to use these reactions in your own syntheses. I have provided a variety of mechanism and synthesis problems to help you practice these skills and make them your own. One of the main goals in my Organic Synthesis class is to engage deeply with current papers from the literature. I hope you will do the same and that this text will help you understand some of the concepts and reactions that often go unspoken in publications.
Chapter 1: Pericyclic Reactions
Chapter 2: Transition Metal Catalyzed Carbon-Carbon Bond Forming Reactions
Chapter 3: Neighboring Group Participation, Rearrangements, and Fragmentations
Chapter 4: Radical Reactions
Chapter 5: Carbene Reactions
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An Introduction to Logic: From Everyday Life to Formal Systems
Albert Mosley and Eulalio Baltazar
An introduction to the discipline of logic covering subjects from the structures of arguments, classical and modern logic, categorical and inductive inferences, to informal fallacies.
- Over 30 years of development provides a sound empirical based pedagogy throughout the text.
- Examples in ordinary language using familiar examples avoids the suggestion of an alien cultural imposition.
- A focus on the basic representational techniques of classical and modern logic.
- Students introduced to basic concepts of set theory, using Venn diagrams to represent statements and evaluate arguments.
- Students introduced to basic concepts of propositional logic and the use of truth-tables.
- Students introduced to basic concepts of predicate logic and the use of mixed quantifiers.
- Students introduced to the relationship between logic diagrams, circuit diagrams, and gate diagrams in computer science.
- Students introduced to the use of logic in ordinary and scientific contexts.
- Students provided a historical introduction to the development of modern probability theory and its relationship to logic.
- Students introduced to basic concepts of statistical inference, with non-technical treatments of hasty and biased statistical generalizations. And a unique treatment of stereotypical thinking in terms of statistical syllogisms.
- Students introduced to basic notions in analogical and causal inference.
- Exercises requiring both passive (recognition) and active (construction) skills.
- Exercises including locutions and examples from standard English and ethnic dialects of English (African-American, Hispanic-American, etc)
- Answers for sample exercises provided, making the text closer to a self-teaching module
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Calculus in Context
James Callahan, David Cox, Kenneth Hoffman, Donal O'Shea, Harriet Pollatsek, and Lester Senechal
Designing the curriculum
We believe that calculus can be for students what it was for Euler and the Bernoullis: a language and a tool for exploring the whole fabric of science. We also believe that much of the mathematical depth and vitality of calculus lies in connections to other sciences. The mathematical questions that arise are compelling in part because the answers matter to other disciplines. We began our work with a "clean slate," not by asking what parts of the traditional course to include or discard. Our starting points are thus our summary of what calculus is really about. Our curricular goals are what we aim to convey about the subject in the course. Our functional goals describe the attitudes and behaviors we hope our students will adopt in using calculus to approach scientific and mathematical questions.
Starting Points
- Calculus is fundamentally a way of dealing with functional relationships that occur in scientific and mathematical contexts. The techniques of calculus must be subordinate to an overall view of the questions that give rise to these relationships.
- Technology radically enlarges the range of questions we can explore and the ways we can answer them. Computers and graphing calculators are much more than tools for teaching the traditional calculus.
- The concept of a dynamical system is central to science. Therefore, differential equations belong at the center of calculus, and technology makes this possible at the introductory level.
- The process of successive approximation is a key tool of calculus, even when the outcome of the process--the limit--cannot be explicitly given in closed form.
Curricular Goals
- Develop calculus in the context of scientific and mathematical questions.
- Treat systems of differential equations as fundamental objects of study.
- Construct and analyze mathematical models.
- Use the method of successive approximations to define and solve problems.
- Develop geometric visualization with hand-drawn and computer graphics.
- Give numerical methods a more central role.
Functional Goals
- Encourage collaborative work.
- Enable students to use calculus as a language and a tool.
- Make students comfortable tackling large, messy, ill-defined problems.
- Foster an experimental attitude towards mathematics.
- Help students appreciate the value of approximate solutions.
- Teach students that understanding grows out of working on problems.
Impact of Technology
- Differential equations can now be solved numerically, so they can take their rightful place in the introductory calculus course.
- The ability to handle data and perform many computations makes exploring messy, real-world problems possible.
- Since we can now deal with credible models, the role of modelling becomes much more central to the subject.
The text illustrates how we have pursued the curricular goals. Each goal is addressed within the first chapter which begins with questions about describing and analyzing the spread of a contagious disease. A model is built: a model which is actually a system of coupled non-linear differential equations. We then begin a numerical exploration on those equations, and the door is opened to a solution by successive approximations. Our implementation of the functional goals is also evident. The text has many more words than the traditional calculus book--it is a book to be read. The exercises make unusual demands on students. Most are not just variants of examples that have been worked in the text. In fact, the text has rather few "template'' examples.
Shifts in Emphasis
It will also become apparent to you that the text reflects substantial shifts in emphasis in comparison to the traditional course. Here are some of the most striking:
How the emphasis shifts:
increase: concepts, geometry, graphs, brute force, numerical solutions
decrease: techniques, algebra, formulas, elegance, closed-form solutions
Since we all value elegance, let us explain what we mean by "brute force." Euler's method is a good example. It is a general method of wide applicability. Of course when we use it to solve a differential equation like y'(t) = t, we are using a sledgehammer to crack a peanut. But at least the sledgehammer works. Moreover, it works with coconuts (like y' = y(1 - y/10)), and it will even knock down a house (like y' = cos2(t)). Students also see the elegant special methods that can be invoked to solve y' = t and y' = y(1 - y/10) (separation of variables and partial fractions are discussed in chapter 11), but they understand that they are fortunate indeed when a real problem will succumb to such methods.
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Case Studies in Systems Chemistry
George Fleck
This publication was produced as a teaching tool for college chemistry.The book is a text for a computer-based unit on the chemistry of acid-base titrations, and is designed for use with FORTRAN or BASIC.computer systems, and with a programmable electronic calculator, in a variety of educational settings. The text attempts to present computer programs that are relatively free of reliance on specialized large computer systems programs. The case-study approach presented is highly research and laboratory oriented. Similar subject matter is conventionally taught in most introductory college chemistry courses, but this text material attempts greater depth of instruction through utilization of the computational resources of a computer.