Data Probes: Reflecting on Connected Devices with Technology-Mediated Probes

We introduce Data Probes, technology-mediated probes designed to reveal some of the inner workings of connected devices, including common embedded sensors and the data they collect. By making these common features both accessible and unfamiliar, the probes supported research participants in looking at these technologies from a different perspective and reflecting on capabilities and behaviours that may be obscured by the design of commercial products. During a study where participants lived and travelled with the probes for a month, we were able to gain generative design insights into people’s attitudes towards and relationships with connected devices, suggesting new opportunities for designs that take alternative approaches to currently entrenched visions of the Internet of Things. We present this exploratory study as an illustration of how a technology-mediated probe might prompt reflection on their technologies and open up new design spaces

Supporting the Cross-cultural Appreciation of Traditional Chinese Puppetry Through a Digital Gesture Library

In recent years, digital cultural heritage has attracted much attention in the HCI domain, but there are currently few studies that focus on enhancing the appreciation of intangible cultural heritage content amongst cross-cultural audiences. This article reports on the development of a Digital Gesture Library to support cross-cultural appreciation of traditional Chinese puppetry. We describe fieldwork with professional puppeteers to understand their practices and art form, which informed the development of the Digital Gesture Library, which uses a three-perspective archive of puppetry gestures and a tangible interface to support cross-cultural audiences’ appreciation of puppetry and encourages further exploration of Chinese culture. We present findings on the efficacy of the Digital Gesture Library from qualitative and quantitative user studies and, from this, discuss the opportunities and challenges for developing digital technology for cross-cultural appreciation of intangible heritage

Seeking Resonances for Remote Communal Chanting Practices

We take a Research Through Design (RtD) approach to explore Buddhist communal chanting practices, seeking to develop tangible design research products that support meaningful techno-spiritual remote connections. This work is informed by an autoethnography in a Buddhist community in the UK. We focus on the experiential and multi-sensory aspects of these practices, presenting three experiments that expose the sound environment as a design material for our future work. In doing so, our attention is drawn to the resonances we encounter in the chanted vocalisations, the interplay with sonic ritual equipment, and the soundscapes of the rooms in which they are practiced

Nesting ecology of hawksbill turtles, Eretmochelys imbricata, in an extreme environmental setting

<div><p>Relatively few details of hawksbill turtle (<i>Eretmochelys imbricata</i>) nesting ecology exist within the Arabian Gulf. Moreover, little is known about how their nesting dynamics compare to nesting populations throughout the rest of the world. Due to the extreme environmental setting, nesting ecology of hawksbills in the Arabian Gulf is of significant interest to researchers and conservationists. The current research reports on a long-term tagging and monitoring program undertaken at Fuwairit beach, Qatar. To investigate nesting behavior, site surveys and tagging were employed from 2010 to 2016. Presence of nests and clutch sizes were confirmed by excavation. Over the entire study period, nesting hawksbills had a mean curved carapace length of 70.8 cm (SD±2.8). A total 187 nests were confirmed, which contained a mean 78.9 eggs per clutch (SD±17.1), over an annual nesting season that lasted an average of 52.2 days (SD±6.3) from the start of April to the start of June. Meta-analysis with other global regions showed these characteristics to be significantly reduced when compared to nesting hawksbills from other populations. Meteorological data analysis showed air temperatures in the Arabian Gulf to increase on average 13.2°C (SD±0.26) from start to the end of nesting annually, which is significantly greater than other global nesting regions. Their smaller body size and reduced fecundity coupled with the extreme change in ambient air temperatures support the hypothesis that hawksbills in the region are more at risk than the already critically endangered hawksbill populations elsewhere in the world.</p></div

Methylmercury, Trace Metals, Organotins and Their Effects on the Qatari Mangrove Shrimp, Palaemon khori

The Qatari mangroves of Al-Khor are being increasingly exposed to a wide variety of anthropogenic pollutants due to land reclamation and urban expansion. In this study, we evaluated the lethal and genotoxic effects of methylmercury, trace metals, and organotins, assessing mortality and aneuploidy levels (abnormal number of chromosomes) in the endemic shrimp Palaemon khori under laboratory conditions. In the experimental design, two different concentrations were used for each family of contaminant (single or combined): an environmental concentration equivalent to the maximum value reported in the environment and a value ten times higher, for a period of eight weeks. Survival decreased significantly when pollutants were administrated in combination, even at environmental concentrations (as shown by Cox proportional hazards ratios): similar levels of mortality would be reached by individual type of pollutants only at ten times the environmental concentration. This critical result, under controlled lab conditions, highlights the importance of monitoring mixtures of contaminant types over single ones in the marine environment. Aneuploidy was reported in all treatments and control ranging from 5% to 19% at week four and from 7% to 21% at week eight. All treatments presented significantly higher aneuploidy levels when compared to the control. However, no significant difference was observed between the two time periods, even though 30% of the treatments could not be assessed at week eight, as not enough animals were still alive. In conclusion, the use of endemic species should be considered a valuable tool to determine local perturbations, representing a regional bioindicator of multiple environmental stressors from the initial stages of contamination

Faunal mediated carbon export from mangroves in an arid area

The outwelling paradigm argues that mangrove and saltmarsh wetlands export much excess production to downstream marine systems. However, outwelling is difficult to quantify and currently 40–50% of fixed carbon is unaccounted for. Some carbon is thought outwelled through mobile fauna, including fish, which visit and feed on mangrove produce during tidal inundation or early life stages before moving offshore, yet this pathway for carbon outwelling has never been quantified. We studied faunal carbon outwelling in three arid mangroves, where sharp isotopic gradients across the boundary between mangroves and down-stream systems permitted spatial differentiation of source of carbon in animal tissue. Stable isotope analysis (C, N, S) revealed 22–56% of the tissue of tidally migrating fauna was mangrove derived. Estimated consumption rates showed that 1.4% (38 kg C ha−1 yr−1) of annual mangrove litter production was directly consumed by migratory fauna, with <1% potentially exported. We predict that the amount of faunally-outwelled carbon is likely to be highly correlated with biomass of migratory fauna. While this may vary globally, the measured migratory fauna biomass in these arid mangroves was within the range of observations for mangroves across diverse biogeographic ranges and environmental settings. Hence, this study provides a generalized prediction of the relatively weak contribution of faunal migration to carbon outwelling from mangroves and the current proposition, that the unaccounted-for 40–50% of mangrove C is exported as dissolved inorganic carbon, remains plausible.Qatar National Research Foundation, National Priorities Research Programme research grant: NPRP 7 - 1302 - 1 - 24