This open access book examines how the social sciences can be integrated into the praxis of engineering and science, presenting unique perspectives on the interplay between engineering and social science. Motivated by the report by the Commission on Humanities and Social Sciences of the American Association of Arts and Sciences, which emphasizes the importance of social sciences and Humanities in technical fields, the essays and papers collected in this book were presented at the NSF-funded workshop ‘Engineering a Better Future: Interplay between Engineering, Social Sciences and Innovation’, which brought together a singular collection of people, topics and disciplines. The book is split into three parts: A. Meeting at the Middle: Challenges to educating at the boundaries covers experiments in combining engineering education and the social sciences; B. Engineers Shaping Human Affairs: Investigating the interaction between social sciences and engineering, including the cult of innovation, politics of engineering, engineering design and future of societies; and C. Engineering the Engineers: Investigates thinking about design with papers on the art and science of science and engineering practice.

This volume offers insights from modelling measures of parental involvement and their relationship with student reading literacy across countries, exploring and incorporating cultural differences. This is a significant contribution to a field where cross-cultural comparisons from a triangulated perspective are sparse. For readers interested in exploring the relationship between parental involvement and student attainment, the literature review provides a useful starting point. Meanwhile, for the more methodologically interested reader, this report presents state-of-the-art ways to identify and model cultural differential item functioning in international large-scale assessment (ILSA), illustrating the extent to which the parental involvement construct may be influenced by cultural differences and how this may affect the outcomes of cross-cultural comparisons. The framework is generic and should provide a solid foundation for future ILSA practices and secondary analyses. ILSA studies like the IEA’s Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) provide valuable data, containing both student achievement data and contextual background data from schools, teachers, students and parents for over 41 countries.

This book highlights the ethical issues and dilemmas that arise in the practice of public health. It is also a tool to support instruction, debate, and dialogue regarding public health ethics. Although the practice of public health has always included consideration of ethical issues, the field of public health ethics as a discipline is a relatively new and emerging area. There are few practical training resources for public health practitioners, especially resources which include discussion of realistic cases which are likely to arise in the practice of public health. This work discusses these issues on a case to case basis and helps create awareness and understanding of the ethics of public health care. The main audience for the casebook is public health practitioners, including front-line workers, field epidemiology trainers and trainees, managers, planners, and decision makers who have an interest in learning about how to integrate ethical analysis into their day to day public health practice. The casebook is also useful to schools of public health and public health students as well as to academic ethicists who can use the book to teach public health ethics and distinguish it from clinical and research ethics.

Analysts in criminal intelligence analysis regularly face data from multiple sources that are often incomplete, possibly deceptive, un-reliable and messy. This creates situations with high uncertainty and ambiguity, which makes the generation of plausible, reliable arguments difficult or impossible. However, many visual analytics and machine learning systems require that data for analysis be available, with the system substituting, for example, system averages for missing data. This makes it difficult for analysts to deal with the reality of facing deceptive and missing data. Failures in the assessment of criminal situations or the inability to come to a conclusion as the result of an analytical process can lead to severe consequences. A lack of awareness, overlooking or not realising the need to locate a key piece of information because one does not know the data exist can also lead to human errors. One solution to this problem is the facilitation of storytelling. Storytelling requires data to be assembled and organised to tell a story that explains a situation or phenomenon. By externalising and making the storytelling process visible and tangible to the analyst via a computer display, it becomes possible for the analyst to inspect his or her own reasoning processes. This creates the possibility to check one’s analyses and assumptions for omissions and contradictions. Analysts need a kind of user interface that allows them to easily explore different ways to organise and sequence existing data into plausible stories or explanations that can eventually evolve into narratives that bind the data together into a formal explanation. If an analyst is presented with limited data or even no data, then such a tool must allow the analyst to easily make assumptions and suppositions that could be used to initiate a line of inquiry or connect separate pieces of data to concoct a plausible explanation.