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Building Community Resilience to Extreme Heat: Lessons Learned from Spokane, WA Community Conversations
Full text linkHeat is the primary cause of weather-related mortality in the United States. The 2021 Northwest Heat Dome highlighted this susceptibility. In Washington State, 159 excess deaths were attributed to the 7-day period of unprecedented extreme heat between June 26th and July 2nd. This impact was felt even in some of the more acclimatized parts of the state, like Spokane County, where 19 heat-related deaths were reported. As climate change increases the frequency, duration, and intensity of extreme heat events, creating and sustaining heat-resilient communities has become an urgent public health priority. On 6 June 2023, Gonzaga University, in partnership with the University of Washington, hosted the Spokane Extreme Heat Risk Intervention Stakeholder Synthesis Symposium. The goals of the symposium were to debrief from recent heat events, identify extreme heat risk reduction interventions used in the region, and characterize remaining practice-relevant research priorities. The symposium convened 45 stakeholders including representatives from local and state agencies, academia, and community-based and Tribal organizations. Symposium participants engaged in small group discussions using the World Café MethodTM. Notes from each discussion were coded using a content analysis approach. Symposium participants identified strengths, barriers to heat resilience, and solutions to reduce risk throughout the Spokane community. We present these findings by practice topic, including risk communication, intervention, collaboration, policy, and research. Additionally, we utilize the Socio-Ecological Model as a conceptual framework to illustrate the complex interplay of factors that govern an individual\u27s experience of, and ability to respond to, extreme heat events. Given extreme heat\u27s impact on global public health, the methods used to increase community resilience in Spokane, WA, USA could be used by other communities worldwide to increase their own heat-resilience
Introductory Activity for Generative AI
Full text linkThe basic mechanics of this activity are simple: choose a reading from class and try to manipulate the LLM to recreate it as close to the original as possible. As a rule, I generally try to produce and run activities that are modular, interchangeable, and adaptable. This activity is no different. In one course, we used the prompt and only the prompt—no scaffolding. In other courses, we scaffolded LLMs, understood how prompt engineering might work, and worked as a class to construct the prompt we thought would produce a suitable outcome.
For students, the limitations of the LLMs become clear almost immediately. With non-scaffolded classes, students will often attempt to put in the name of a text and instruct the LLM to recreate it—often to some hilarious results. Even with the scaffolded and carefully crafted prompts students begin to recognize the limitations. This might come in the form of length, depth, or even understanding of an abstract concept.
The most unexpected outcome was how deeply the students had to re-engage with content from the class. Of course, we have had discussions about voice, style, tone, message, etc. But, in this case, they felt compelled to clearly articulate these ideas to the LLM
