School For Civic Action at Roskilde Festival 2018

The School of Civic Action at Roskilde Festival was a ten-day long summer school hosted by public works with Roskilde Festival which explored ideas around temporary use and the making of the instant city. The school is conceived as a three-year long programme which will lead up to an international conference and publication and critically reflect Roskilde’s contribution to the wider discourse on temporary use and city making. This will also conclude and coincide with the 50th anniversary of the festival in 2020. The first year of the summer school focused on the unique knowledge produced by the festival over the last 48 years in constructing and refining the temporary city. Under the theme of ‘Temporary Commons’ we brought together students, practitioners and academics to explore shared practices and concerns around the notion of temporary use set against the backdrop of Northern Europe’s largest annual music festival. We will explore the festival’s capacity to promote new forms of living and examine how temporality can be understood as a strength enabling us to gain new knowledges and methods to help us shape the way we live beyond the duration of the festival. The School of Civic Action at Roskilde Festival will develop over a three-year cycle: 1) The first outing of the summer school was focused on understanding the festival from the inside out. 2) The second iteration in 2019 will be dedicated to the large international networks created by the festival which carry the culture of temporary use across the globe. 3) The third and final summer school in 2020, together with the publication and conference will help to reassert temporary use as a positive force to promote the values and ethos of Roskilde Festival at large. The Summer School took place on the festival site in the week before doors open to the public, while all the venues for Scandinavia’s largest temporary city are being constructed. Together we designed and constructed components for Scandinavia’s largest temporary city and hosted open fabrication workshops during the first three days of the festival. The hands-on workshops were accompanied by reflective seminars, lectures and discussions exploring the role of temporary use in today’s city making through the eyes of various disciplines such as art, engineering, curating, architecture and geography. The result of the workshop were captured in a contribution to a week long programme hosted by The School of Civic Action at Tate Exchange in London in July 2018

Designing a remote aerial system to image and analyze the health of grape crops at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo

In the last decade the prevalence of unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) has exploded; however, the presence of UAVs in research situations is still a relatively new and untested field. The autonomous flight lab (AFL) at Cal Poly San Luis Obispo is a new lab site that is dedicated to using UAVs to benefit research for all backgrounds. Before AFL was able to fly missions we first needed to actually receive our vehicles, create a lab space that would provide all of the necessary resources and equipment necessary to fly, and to be granted permission by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to fly. AFL’s first contract was with the Cal Poly Agricultural Department to photograph their vineyards and analyze the health of the grape crops using a hyperspectral camera. The camera used was the Selectable Hyperspectral Airborne Remote sensing Kit (SHARK) that uses a Visible/Near Infra-Red (visNIR) scanning spectrometer to image the grape crops. Throughout the 9-week STAR placement the SHARK was obtained and a lab station was created to test, troubleshoot, and train new operators in the use of the SHARK. The SHARK has been used to take preliminary pictures to ensure that it will operate correctly on its first aerial helikite mission. Work still needs to be done to determine a safe and user-friendly way of mounting the SHARK to the helikite and powering the SHARK while airborne. The work done during the 9-week placement will allow for AFL to begin field-testing of the SHARK and to begin collecting data in the months to come

Inventory Vascular Plants of the Kahuku Addition, Hawai`i Volcanoes National Park

Reports were scanned in black and white at a resolution of 600 dots per inch and were converted to text using Adobe Paper Capture Plug-in.In 2003, the National Park Service acquired 46,943 ha of Kahuku Ranch, in the Ka’ū district of Hawai`i. This addition to Hawai`i Volcanoes National Park includes a diverse assemblage of vegetation communities. No recent vegetation inventories existed, and since the last vegetation map had been created many vegetation types within the former ranch had undergone changes due to grazing pressure, logging and fire. As a result, little was known about the communities and their floristic composition, and appropriate management practices could not be developed. Surveys conducted between 2004 and 2006 in Kahuku described vegetation communities and located rare, threatened and endangered plants, as well as disruptive alien weeds. Forty-one kilometers of transects and 177 vegetation plots were ground-surveyed, and 6.5 hours of helicopter surveys were conducted. Surveys encountered a total flora of 455 vascular plant species, of which 40% were native. Five endangered, one threatened, one candidate endangered, and seven species of concern were found, as well as 26 locally rare native species. Forty-three disruptive alien plant taxa in and near Kahuku were mapped. Several sites containing high numbers of either rare or invasive plants were identified. Information from this inventory allows managers to identify priority areas of alien plant and ungulate control and rare plant recovery, and serves as a baseline to document future changes in the vegetation. Results from this study will also enable managers to develop a framework for long-term management priorities and strategies in Kahuku.National Park Service Cooperative Agreement CA8012 A00

Designing Politics: the limits of design

What are the limits of design in addressing the political and/or when has design not been enough? A collection of thought pieces written by Theatrum Mundi’s Designing Politics Working Group following a workshop at the Villa Vassilieff in Paris on 25th May 2016. This working group is supported by the Global Cities Chair at the Fondation Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris

How Public is Public?

26. JAN 2024 (6-8pm)_How Public is Public? This roundtable will be discussing how we can overcome issues of access and publicness, looking at how we can create structures to enable us to live with others

A solution scan of societal options to reduce transmission and spread of respiratory viruses: SARS-CoV-2 as a case study.

Societal biosecurity - measures built into everyday society to minimize risks from pests and diseases - is an important aspect of managing epidemics and pandemics. We aimed to identify societal options for reducing the transmission and spread of respiratory viruses. We used SARS-CoV-2 (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2) as a case study to meet the immediate need to manage the COVID-19 pandemic and eventually transition to more normal societal conditions, and to catalog options for managing similar pandemics in the future. We used a 'solution scanning' approach. We read the literature; consulted psychology, public health, medical, and solution scanning experts; crowd-sourced options using social media; and collated comments on a preprint. Here, we present a list of 519 possible measures to reduce SARS-CoV-2 transmission and spread. We provide a long list of options for policymakers and businesses to consider when designing biosecurity plans to combat SARS-CoV-2 and similar pathogens in the future. We also developed an online application to help with this process. We encourage testing of actions, documentation of outcomes, revisions to the current list, and the addition of further options

Menstrual health interventions, schooling, and mental health problems among Ugandan students (MENISCUS): study protocol for a school-based cluster-randomised trial.

BACKGROUND: Menstrual health is an increasingly recognised public health issue, defined as complete physical, mental, and social well-being in relation to the menstrual cycle. The MENISCUS trial aims to assess whether a multi-component intervention addressing physical and emotional aspects of menstrual health improves educational attainment, mental health problems, menstrual management, self-efficacy, and quality of life among girls in secondary school in Uganda. METHODS: The study is a parallel-arm cluster-randomised controlled trial with 60 schools (clusters) in Wakiso and Kalungu districts, with a mixed-methods process evaluation to assess intervention fidelity and acceptability and economic and policy analyses. The schools will be randomised 1:1 to immediate intervention or to optimised usual care with delayed intervention delivery. The intervention includes creation of a Menstrual Health Action Group at schools and NGO-led training of trainers on puberty education, development of a drama skit, delivery of a menstrual health kit including reusable pads and menstrual cups, access to pain management strategies including analgesics, and basic improvements to school water, sanitation, and hygiene facilities. Baseline data will be collected from secondary 2 students in 2022 (median age ~15.5 years), with endline after 1 year of intervention delivery (~3600 females and a random sample of ~900 males). The primary outcomes assessed in girls are (i) examination performance based on the Mathematics, English, and Biology curriculum taught during the intervention delivery (independently assessed by the Uganda National Examinations Board) and (ii) mental health problems using the Total Difficulties Scale of the Strengths and Difficulties 25-item questionnaire. Secondary outcomes are menstrual knowledge and attitudes in girls and boys and, in girls only, menstrual practices, self-efficacy in managing menstruation, quality of life and happiness, prevalence of urogenital infections, school and class attendance using a self-completed menstrual daily diary, and confidence in maths and science. DISCUSSION: The trial is innovative in evaluating a multi-component school-based menstrual health intervention addressing both physical and emotional aspects of menstrual health and using a "training of trainers" model designed to be sustainable within schools. If found to be cost-effective and acceptable, the intervention will have the potential for national and regional scale-up. TRIAL REGISTRATION: ISRCTN 45461276 . Registered on 16 September 2021

Expanding the diversity of mycobacteriophages: insights into genome architecture and evolution.

Mycobacteriophages are viruses that infect mycobacterial hosts such as Mycobacterium smegmatis and Mycobacterium tuberculosis. All mycobacteriophages characterized to date are dsDNA tailed phages, and have either siphoviral or myoviral morphotypes. However, their genetic diversity is considerable, and although sixty-two genomes have been sequenced and comparatively analyzed, these likely represent only a small portion of the diversity of the mycobacteriophage population at large. Here we report the isolation, sequencing and comparative genomic analysis of 18 new mycobacteriophages isolated from geographically distinct locations within the United States. Although no clear correlation between location and genome type can be discerned, these genomes expand our knowledge of mycobacteriophage diversity and enhance our understanding of the roles of mobile elements in viral evolution. Expansion of the number of mycobacteriophages grouped within Cluster A provides insights into the basis of immune specificity in these temperate phages, and we also describe a novel example of apparent immunity theft. The isolation and genomic analysis of bacteriophages by freshman college students provides an example of an authentic research experience for novice scientists