Background: The availability of increasingly sophisticated technology has meant that ambulation can be measured with precision over an extended period. Methods: An integrated circuit tag-monitoring system was set up to measure the distance moved in a dementia care unit in Korea in 2006. Various indicators were developed to measure temporal patterns of ambulation over time, such as the median distance moved per hour and the percentage of hours moved. Results: 12 consecutive days of movement data were available for 8 subjects. The mean age of the subjects was 76 ± 5.3 years. The median distance walked per day ranged from 206 to 976 m, and the percentage of hours with movement ranged from 28% to 81%. The changes in the activity level during daytime, evening, and nighttime also differed among the 8 subjects. Discussion: The indicators developed appeared to differentiate temporal patterns of movement in demented persons.

There has been a recent increase in research interest in the ways that visual representation is used to facilitate students’ understanding in science classrooms. Yet while many studies have explored individual students’ drawing, few studies have looked into drawing as a collective tool to engage students in thinking and talking together in science classrooms. This study employed a case study approach to understand some of the possibilities for visual representation construction as a collective reasoning tool. By examining two cases of visual representation construction during classroom talk in two elementary science classrooms, this study demonstrates how teachers use visual representation as an instructional strategy, and how visualization engages students’ reasoning, meaning making, and social interactions. We selected two cases that demonstrate the emergence of the teacher’s and students’ drawing activities and analyzed each with a focus on the interactions that occur during the construction of visual representation and how this interaction promotes scientific reasoning and meaning making. For the case analysis, three researchers reviewed the video cases separately several times, and then collectively developed in-depth discussion to bring forth possible themes. The findings include (a) that there were common grounds of visual representation established for collective reasoning, and (b) that visual representations expanded knowledge and reasoning from the individual to social level, thus playing a critical role in students’ reasoning and knowledge building during classroom talk. Pedagogical questions and reflection are discussed for further research on visualization as a cognitive and social tool in classrooms.

Engineering ethics cannot be reduced to the ethics of individual engineers but must be considered in situ, within the sociocultural and environmental contexts of a research or design project. We studied teams in academic engineering research laboratories and how they understood and practiced ethics in their own work. Problems arise for ethnographic methods for researching this aspect of engineering ethics; namely, voluntary ethics discussions rarely occurred in the lab. In our field site, we observed many spontaneous discussions, but engineering ethics issues were not among the topics discussed. Ethical decision-making seemed to be like a rare, shy species of bird, hard to spot, requiring methods to flush it out of hiding or attract it. We adapted structured interview and facilitated discussion protocols to accomplish this. Success was modest. The problem lies both in engineering culture and in the methodological difficulties in studying situated, distributed ethical deliberation and responsibility.