This paper reports differences in belonging and connection to various levels of community between distinctly different technical fields: electrical engineering, civil & environmental engineering, and computer science. Established (reliable and validated) constructs have been used to assess community strength in these three fields at a major research university. The results emphasize gender differences within fields and between technical fields.Belonging (and sense of community) has been implicated in drop-out rates and lack of engagement in grades K-12; likewise, isolation (lack of belonging) has been cited as a persistent reason that female undergraduates leave engineering early in their programs. Our results show that sense of belonging (and connection to community) is consistently higher for women in engineering fields where women are present in higher numbers. In addition, these important affective constructs are higher overall in fields where women are more highly represented. These results may suggest that greater numbers of women enable a stronger sense of community or alternatively, the inherent nature of the field provides increased opportunity for belonging and developing a strong sense of community. In either case, related technical fields with stronger community can serve as role models for those that demonstrate less robust connection to community in helping these fields to improve their recruitment and retention of women.

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The high vertical resolution of temperature and salinity measurements from expendable conductivitytemperature-depth (XCTD) instruments can be useful for inferring small-scale mixing rates in the ocean. However, XCTD temperature profiles show distinct spectral spikes at frequencies of 5 and 10 Hz, corresponding to 1 and 2 cycles per five measurement points. Peaks at these same frequencies are often present in the conductivity spectra as well. The spectral spikes occur in XCTD profiles from both the subtropical and subpolar regions. They appear to originate as digital electronic noise within the probes. A finite impulse response filter design procedure was used to develop filters that could remove the spectral spikes while retaining as much high vertical resolution as possible. For most purposes, the application of an 11-point, least squares, low-pass filter proves sufficient for removing the spectral energy at 5 and 10 Hz, and results in an effective minimum vertical resolution of about 0.7 m.