An Integrated Design and Simulation Environment for Rapid Prototyping of Laminate Robotic Mechanisms

Laminate mechanisms are a reliable concept in producing lowcost robots for educational and commercial purposes. These mechanisms are produced using low-cost manufacturing techniques which have improved significantly during recent years and are more accessible to novices and hobbyists. However, iterating through the design space to come up with the best design for a robot is still a time consuming and rather expensive task and therefore, there is still a need for model-based analysis before manufacturing. Until now, there has been no integrated design and analysis software for laminate robots. This paper addresses some of the issues surrounding laminate analysis by introducing a companion to an existing laminate design tool that automates the generation of dynamic equations and produces simulation results via rendered plots and videos. We have validated the accuracy of the software by comparing the position, velocity and acceleration of the simulated mechanisms with the measurements taken from physical laminate prototypes using a motion capture system

Personal reflection in medical education

Medical doctors are nowadays expected to be able to reflect in both a scientific and a personal manner in order to be an excellent doctor. However, more precise knowledge is needed about the construct of personal reflection, as applied in the daily practice, and about the related educational strategies. Personal reflection is defined as: the careful exploration and appraisal of experience, thus clarifying and creating meaning for the benefit of balanced conduct, learning and development, and the well-being of the doctor. An educational model for medical educators, using the angler’s float as a metaphor, is described. The ‘behaviour’ of the reflective practitioner is visible above the water level; beneath the surface are cognitive-affective levels of thinking: ‘clinical reasoning’, ‘scientific reflection’, ‘personal reflection’ and ‘unconscious thinking’. A new scale to measure personal reflection, the Groningen Reflection Ability Scale (GRAS), was developed and validated. The GRAS proved to yield reliable data that contribute to valid inferences about the personal reflection ability of medical students and doctors. The expectation that ‘experiential learning’ is an effective educational method for encouragement of reflection was tested. We could conclude that enhanced experiential learning has a positive effect on the development of personal reflection of undergraduate medical students. A conceptual framework was described, for a more precise understanding of personal reflection in order to identify, use, and encourage it. Reflection was defined as a competence for the medical education continuum. Artsen moeten tegenwoordig wetenschappelijk èn persoonlijk kunnen reflecteren om een excellente arts te worden en te blijven. Beide soorten reflectie zijn in gelijke mate nodig om evenwichtig te functioneren. Dat is van belang voor de kwaliteit van de medische zorg, het ontwikkelen van allround vakmanschap en professionaliteit, inter-professionele samenwerking en ook voor hun eigen welbevinden. Dit proefschrift richt zich op persoonlijk reflecteren. Artsen die persoonlijk kunnen reflecteren zijn in staat met aandacht te functioneren richting patiënten en collega’s. Zij zijn zich bewust van en leren van hun praktijkervaringen en hun emoties/gevoelens, lichamelijke gewaarwordingen, gedachten en beelden. En zij weten de door reflectie opgedane inzichten te gebruiken voor de verbetering van hun functioneren en de medische behandeling. Dit proefschrift rapporteert over verschillende projecten. Er is een onderwijskundig model ontwikkeld, ‘het dobbermodel’, waarmee persoonlijke reflectie concreet gemaakt kan worden voor medische docenten. Boven water steekt het zichtbare gedrag. Onder water bevinden zich de verschillende lagen van denken: klinisch redeneren, wetenschappelijk reflecteren, persoonlijk reflecteren en onbewust denken. Er is een instrument, de Groningen Reflection Ability Scale (GRAS), ontwikkeld en gevalideerd waarmee het persoonlijke reflectievermogen van medische studenten kan worden gemeten. Het effect van de methode van ervaringsleren op de groei van het reflectievermogen van eerstejaars medische studenten is onderzocht. Er is een positief effect vastgesteld. Verder is een conceptueel raamwerk gemaakt om wetenschappelijke en persoonlijke reflectie beter te kunnen begrijpen en in de praktijk te kunnen gebruiken en bevorderen. Tot slot is reflectie als competentie voor het medisch onderwijs gedefinieerd.

Socio-Technical Energy Systems: Configurations That Work Better for Some

The political character of the energy transition requires a fine-grained perspective on the power games occurring to bring it about. There are approaches specifically geared towards calling out the identity-based inequalities in such social processes termed as grand challenges, and then there are those specialised in studying the role of technology in the energy system and how actors in that system interact with these technologies. Feminist social scientists have highlighted the entanglements of intersectionality with technology in general and energy more specifically. At the same time, the literature on Science and Technology Studies (STS) emphasizes a social dimension, e.g., how technology is co-constructed by societal actors or how large technical systems structure our daily lives. Of relevance for feminist social scientists, STS approaches are well-positioned to analyse how technology creates, re-enacts, or mirrors power asymmetries. STS approaches understand technologies as socio-technical systems that inadvertently incorporate societal realities in production and consumption which allows an analysis of the covert seats of power in socio-technical systems. Similarly, energy systems have been a popular research object in STS due to their large-scale, often high-tech character, especially when considering modern energy technologies. Regardless of the common scope of intersectionality and STS regarding power asymmetries, there is still significant room for “hybridization” of these approaches. Although the energy domain has seen efforts being made with the development of notions such as energy poverty, energy justice, or energy democracy, the hybridization effort with STS has not been taken further significantly. This paper, we contributes to the hybridization of the STS and intersectionality lenses