¿Influye la proximidad física en el conocimiento de la estructura y formación de los volcanes? Un estudio de caso empírico en dos escuelas alemanas en Ecuador

Ecuador ist weltweit das Land mit der größten Dichte an Hochrisikovulkanen. Wirkt sich dies auf das Wissen von Schülerinnen und Schülern über Vulkanismus aus? Der vorliegende Beitrag liefert Teilergebnisse einer umfassenden Gesamtstudie über das Wissen von Schülerinnen und Schülern aus Ecuador über den Aufbau und die Entstehung von Vulkanen/Vulkanismus. Es wurden Schülerinnen und Schüler der Jahrgangsstufe 6 an den Deutschen Schulen in Quito und Guayaquil befragt, die in der Schule noch keinen Unterricht über Vulkanismus hatten. Zusätzlich wurden auch Daten von Schülerinnen und Schülern der Jahrgangsstufe 12 durch Befragungen erhoben. Die Ergebnisse dieser Teilstudie deuten auf einen Einfluss des Schulstandortes (Nähe zu Hochrisikovulkanen) auf das Wissen über die Entstehung und den Aufbau von Vulkanen/Vulkanismus hin.Ecuador is characterized by the highest density of high-risk volcanoes worldwide. Does this affect students’ knowledge of volcanism? This paper provides partial results of a comprehensive overall study of the knowledge of students from Ecuador about the structure and development of volcanoes/volcanism. The study used a questionnaire administered to sixth-grade students without prior formal training on volcanoes and volcanism. Twelfth-grade students also This questionnaire was also answered by high school students. In addition, the questionnaire was also presented to twelfth-graders. The results of this sub-study indicate an influence of the proximity to high-risk volcanoes on the knowledge about the formation and structure of volcanoes/volcanism.Ecuador se caracteriza por contar con la mayor densidad de volcanes de alto riesgo en todo el mundo. ¿Afecta esto a los conocimientos que tienen los estudiantes sobre el vulcanismo? Este trabajo proporciona resultados parciales de un estudio global y completo acerca del conocimiento que tienen los estudiantes de Ecuador sobre la estructura y el desarrollo de los volcanes. Para desarrollar el estudio se utilizó un cuestionario que fue facilitado a los estudiantes de sexto grado sin entrenamiento formal previo sobre volcanes y vulcanismo. Igualmente, también fue proporcionado a los estudiantes de 12º grado y a los de secundaria. Los resultados de este estudio indican que existe influencia en el conocimiento de los volcanes en función de la proximidad en aspectos relacionados con la formación y estructura de los volcanes

Corona Health -- A Study- and Sensor-based Mobile App Platform Exploring Aspects of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Physical and mental well-being during the COVID-19 pandemic is typically assessed via surveys, which might make it difficult to conduct longitudinal studies and might lead to data suffering from recall bias. Ecological momentary assessment (EMA) driven smartphone apps can help alleviate such issues, allowing for in situ recordings. Implementing such an app is not trivial, necessitates strict regulatory and legal requirements, and requires short development cycles to appropriately react to abrupt changes in the pandemic. Based on an existing app framework, we developed Corona Health, an app that serves as a platform for deploying questionnaire-based studies in combination with recordings of mobile sensors. In this paper, we present the technical details of Corona Health and provide first insights into the collected data. Through collaborative efforts from experts from public health, medicine, psychology, and computer science, we released Corona Health publicly on Google Play and the Apple App Store (in July, 2020) in 8 languages and attracted 7,290 installations so far. Currently, five studies related to physical and mental well-being are deployed and 17,241 questionnaires have been filled out. Corona Health proves to be a viable tool for conducting research related to the COVID-19 pandemic and can serve as a blueprint for future EMA-based studies. The data we collected will substantially improve our knowledge on mental and physical health states, traits and trajectories as well as its risk and protective factors over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic and its diverse prevention measures

The effects of grids in topographic maps on cognitive representations of map information

Erkenntnisse aus Raumkognitionsforschung belegen, dass kognitive Raumrepräsentationen, die auf der Behaltensleistung von Informationen aus kartographischen Darstellungen basieren, Verzerrungsmustern und damit voraussehbaren Einflüssen unterliegen. Um Objektpositionen und -relationen der Karte mit geringeren Verzerrungen im räumlichen Gedächtnis behalten zu können, eignet sich u.a. der Eintrag von aufliegenden Gitterstrukturen. Die Hypothese dieser Arbeit ist, dass Gitter im Verarbeitungsprozess räumlicher Karteninformationen korrigierend wirken können, in dem sie dem Gedächtnis durch die systematische Aufteilung des Kartenbildes in gleichmäßige Regionen eine räumliche Referenzierungsshilfe bieten. Die vorliegende Dissertation beruht auf fünf kartenexperimentellen Studien, mit welchen die Einflüsse von Kartengittern und ihrer verschiedenen Gestaltungsparameter (Art, Opazität, Gitterlinienabstand, 3D-Tiefenversatz und Farbe) auf das menschliche Positionsgedächtnis untersucht wurden.Experimental research from the field of spatial cognition has demonstrated that cognitive representations of learned map information are subject to systematic and - at least partly - predictable errors. The main hypothesis of this thesis is that map elements dividing a map surface into regions, such as grids, provide an orientation pattern that can help users to reduce distortions in their spatial memory. The thesis is based on five empirical studies that were conducted to measure and evaluate the effects of map grids and their different design parameters (type, opacity, line separation, depth offset and colour) on human object-location memory

Georg Simmel Goes Virtual: From ‘Philosophy of Landscape’ to the Possibilities of Virtual Reality in Landscape Research

With his text “Philosophy of Landscape” (German original: “Philosophie der Landschaft”), the German sociologist and philosopher Georg Simmel laid a foundation for landscape research that is still significant today. In the text, he equates the creation and perception of landscape with the creation of a painting. In doing so, he provided an essential foundation for landscape research with a constructivist orientation. In order to be able to grasp the differentiated nature of landscape analytically and to apply it to Simmel’s understanding of landscape, we resort to the approach of the three landscapes, which was developed from Karl Popper’s theory of the three worlds. The pictorial metaphor of Simmel’s understanding of landscapes, however, had the effect of limiting landscape to the visual, and often to what he described as ‘natural’. It did not address the power-bound nature of landscape. These aspects, however, are of great importance in current discussions about landscape. Aspects of power, multisensuality, and the incorporation of non-natural elements gain additional currency through the creation of augmented and virtual landscapes. This concerns, on the one hand, the creation of these landscapes, on the other hand, their individual internal consciousness, as well as their social construction. These show, not least, the contingency of landscape construction. They offer possibilities for the investigation of landscape stereotypes, and how innovations can be fed into the social construction of landscape to engage other senses beyond the sense of sight. The aim of our paper is to use conceptual critique to reflect on the conceptual development of social and cultural studies in landscape research since Simmel and to present its potential for framing research on AR and VR landscapes

Aesthetics and Cartography: Post-Critical Reflections on Deviance in and of Representations

Cartographic representations are subject to sensory perception and rely on the translation of sensory perceptions into cartographic symbols. In this respect, cartography is closely related to aesthetics, as it represents an academic discipline of sensory perceptions. The scholarly concern with cartographic aesthetics, by today, has strongly been focused on the aesthetic impact of cartographic representations. The consideration of the philosophical sub-discipline of aesthetics however is rather restrained. This is also true for the connection between sociological questions and the social construction of aesthetic judgments. We address both topics in this article. We refer to post-critical cartographic theory. It accepts the socially constructed nature and power-bound nature of maps but does not reject “traditional” and widely established positivist cartography. Drawing on the theory of deviant cartographies related to this, we understand cartography designed according to aesthetic criteria as meta-deviant, as it makes the contingency of world interpretations clear. Especially augmented and virtual environments show a great potential to generate aesthetically constructed cartographic representations. Participatory cartography enables many people to reflect on the contingency of their spatial experiences and spatial abstractions without expert-like special knowledge. A prerequisite, however, is the greatest possible openness to topics and representations. This is not subject to a moral restriction

“Ma sõidan bussiga Tartust Pärnusse” – The Acquisition of Interdisciplinary Space-Related Knowledge through Multimedia Cartography

Whenever speakers of the Estonian language express motion events from one place to another, they change the geographic names according to specifically categorised rules of grammar. This fact, which can be confusing for Estonian language learners at the beginning, furthermore bears a high potential for the use of products of geographic visualisation. Therefore, an example of multimedia cartography used to teach linguistic features of Estonian combined with topographical facts about Estonia has been developed in the Geography Department at the Ruhr-University, Germany

Effects of visual map complexity on the attentional processing of landmarks.

In the era of smartphones, route-planning and navigation is supported by freely and globally available web mapping services, such as OpenStreetMap or Google Maps. These services provide digital maps, as well as route planning functions that visually highlight the suggested route in the map. Additionally, such digital maps contain landmark pictograms, i.e. representations of salient objects in the environment. These landmark representations are, amongst other reference points, relevant for orientation, route memory, and the formation of a cognitive map of the environment. The amount of visible landmarks in maps used for navigation and route planning depends on the width of the displayed margin areas around the route. The amount of further reference points is based on the visual complexity of the map. This raises the question how factors like the distance of landmark representations to the route and visual map complexity determine the relevance of specific landmarks for memorizing a route. In order to answer this question, two experiments that investigated the relation between eye fixation patterns on landmark representations, landmark positions, route memory and visual map complexity were carried out. The results indicate that the attentional processing of landmark representations gradually decreases with an increasing distance to the route, decision points and potential decision points. Furthermore, this relation was found to be affected by the visual complexity of the map. In maps with low visual complexity, landmark representations further away from the route are fixated. However, route memory was not found to be affected by visual complexity of the map. We argue that map users might require a certain amount of reference points to form spatial relations as a foundation for a mental representation of space. As maps with low visual complexity offer less reference points, people need to scan a wider area. Therefore, visual complexity of the area displayed in a map should be considered in navigation-oriented map design by increasing displayed margins around the route in maps with a low visual complexity. In order to verify our assumption that the amount of reference points not only affects visual attention processes, but also the formation of a mental representation of space, additional research is required