Attached to this post is a rough draft of a printed version of the exposure analysis workbook for demonstration purposes only (PDF format). The general layout of this document is expected to be similar to the final version, although currently many sections are incomplete. We are also exploring different avenues for licensing and publishing, since the hardcopy and web-based versions will be synced and we want to make as much of the workbook available to the public as possible.
Since the workbook will be intially and perpetually an online resources, we have at our disposal all the technologies currently deployable over the internet. We may also wish to provide standalone software or computer code that can be run on a student's home or school computer.
Possible web technologies that can be used are as follows:
The main objective of the workbook project is to provide a resource that undergraduate and graduate students can use to learn quantitative methods in studying human exposure to hazardous agents in the environment.
An ongoing list of specific objectives is given below:
Provide short tutorials on how to perform calculations and simulations related to exposure science
Provide problem sets that can be worked out on paper or by computer
Provide example computer code for carrying computational tasks
This workbook is intended as a collaborative effort among many exposure scientists. The current book is intended to lay out the broad scope and structure of the workbook, but the way in which content is added to the workbook is intended to be free-form, with each contributor adding rough ideas or more refined ideas as they see fit.
The committee of editors will be tasked with managing the contributed nodes by checking them for errors, rewriting them, and/or assigning them to one or more contributors who can further develop a rough idea.
The broad categories for the workbook are envisioned as follows. These may correspond generally to chapters in the printed workbook, but can be thought of as top-level categories for the online version. Subsections will be child categories in the workbook vocabulary. Nodes in each category can be a problem, a review question, a tutorial, a descriptions of a dataset, an introduction to a model, or anything else.
The book "Exposure Analysis" (533p), edited by Wayne R. Ott, Anne C. Steinemann, and Lance A. Wallace, was published in 2007 by CRC Press, Boca Raton (Taylor & Francis Group). It is the first complete resource in the emerging scientific discipline of exposure analysis.