Developing the Critical Verbatim Theater Artist during the Pandemic: A Transatlantic Collaboration

Following recent social upheavals and an unprecedented pandemic, the development of theater students to work with stories from the community has become more urgent. Because verbatim theater brings to focus real voices and often involves sensitive topics, artists/educators consider key ethical questions before their engagement with educational or community contexts. Artists/educators are developed within the fieldwork of applied theater, during their study at university, through supervision to engage communities. The pandemic made such fieldwork difficult due to online learning and teaching, so university educators tested alternative ways of simulating the experience of working with participants. This article analyzes the rationale, application and evaluation of an educational verbatim theater case study that involved British theater students and American nursing students, from the University of Chichester and Kent State University respectively. It identifies how international collaborations might offer an alternative environment to fieldwork by inviting students to consider key ethical questions before their engagement with communities. The narrative of practice reveals how it was rooted in Paulo Freire’s pedagogy. The artist/educator’s reflection highlights how such collaborations invite students to explore dialectics and the ethics of representation in verbatim theater, and to develop accountability and empathy when working with participants, which hopefully, they bring to their future fieldwork

Design and Modelling of a Microfluidic Electro-Lysis Device with Controlling Plates

Many Lab-on-Chip applications require sample pre-treatment systems. Using electric fields to perform cell-lysis in bio-MEMS systems has provided a powerful tool which can be integrated into Lab-on-a-Chip platforms. The major design considerations for electro-lysis devices include optimal geometry and placement of micro-electrodes, cell concentration, flow rates, optimal electric field (e.g. pulsed DC vs. AC), etc. To avoid electrolysis of the flowing solution at the exposed electrode surfaces, magnitudes and the applied voltages and duration of the DC pulse, or the AC frequency of the AC, have to be optimized for a given configuration. Using simulation tools for calculation of electric fields has proved very useful, for exploring alternative configurations and operating conditions for achieving electro cell-lysis. To alleviate the problem associated with low electric fields within the microfluidics channel and the high voltage demand on the contact electrode strips, two "control plates" are added to the microfluidics configuration. The principle of placing the two controlling plate-electrodes is based on the electric fields generated by a combined insulator/dielectric (gladwater) media. Surface charges are established at the insulator/dielectric interface. This paper discusses the effects of this interface charge on the modification of the electric field of the flowing liquid/cell solution

Transient Flow Dynamics in Optical Micro Well Involving Gas Bubbles

The Lab-On-a-Chip Application Development (LOCAD) team at NASA s Marshall Space Flight Center is utilizing Lab-On-a-Chip to support technology development specifically for Space Exploration. In this paper, we investigate the transient two-phase flow patterns in an optic well configuration with an entrapped bubble through numerical simulation. Specifically, the filling processes of a liquid inside an expanded chamber that has bubbles entrapped. Due to the back flow created by channel expansion, the entrapped bubbles tend to stay stationary at the immediate downstream of the expansion. Due to the huge difference between the gas and liquid densities, mass conservation issues associated with numerical diffusion need to be specially addressed. The results are presented in terms of the movement of the bubble through the optic well. Bubble removal strategies are developed that involve only pressure gradients across the optic well. Results show that for the bubble to be moved through the well, pressure pulsations must be utilized in order to create pressure gradients across the bubble itself

3D scanning a crime scene to enhance juror understanding of bloodstain pattern analysis evidence

There are numerous crime scene investigation applications of 3D scanning that have been previously documented. This paper documents the application of a 3D point cloud in the presentation of Bloodstain Pattern Analysis evidence to mock jurors. 150 mock jurors viewed a presentation of Bloodstain Pattern Analysis evidence from a murder trial in the UK. After viewing the evidence, the participants were tested on their knowledge of the evidence and repeated the test again 2 weeks later; to simulate criminal trial conditions; whereby there is a time lapse between the initial viewing of evidential material and deliberation. This paper found that the mock jurors who additionally viewed a 3D flythrough of a point cloud of the crime scene, better retained knowledge of the evidence over time, reported a greater ability to visualise the crime scene and had higher levels of interest in the evidence. Crucially, the 3D flythrough group did not report different levels of confidence in the accuracy of their memories of the evidence, nor different levels of emotional arousal to the group that viewed the evidence without the 3D presentation. Together, these findings suggest that 3D scanning of crime scenes, and the resultant point cloud’s presentation to jurors, could add further value to the justice system when spatial information, such as Bloodstain Pattern Analysis evidence, is presented

Bursts in a fiber bundle model with continuous damage

We study the constitutive behaviour, the damage process, and the properties of bursts in the continuous damage fiber bundle model introduced recently. Depending on its two parameters, the model provides various types of constitutive behaviours including also macroscopic plasticity. Analytic results are obtained to characterize the damage process along the plastic plateau under strain controlled loading, furthermore, for stress controlled experiments we develop a simulation technique and explore numerically the distribution of bursts of fiber breaks assuming infinite range of interaction. Simulations revealed that under certain conditions power law distribution of bursts arises with an exponent significantly different from the mean field exponent 5/2. A phase diagram of the model characterizing the possible burst distributions is constructed.Comment: 9 pages, 11 figures, APS style, submitted for publicatio

Photoelasticity of crystalline and amorphous silica from first principles

Based on density-functional perturbation theory we have computed from first principles the photoelastic tensor of few crystalline phases of silica at normal conditions and high pressure (quartz, $\alpha$-cristobalite, $\beta$-cristobalite) and of models of amorphous silica (containig up to 162 atoms), obtained by quenching from the melt in combined classical and Car-Parrinello molecular dynamics simulations. The computational framework has also been checked on the photoelastic tensor of crystalline silicon and MgO as prototypes of covalent and ionic systems. The agreement with available experimental data is good. A phenomenological model suitable to describe the photoelastic properties of different silica polymorphs is devised by fitting on the ab-initio data.Comment: ten figure

Selecting reliable interatomic potentials for classical molecular dynamics simulations of glasses: The case of amorphous SiO2

This paper presents an approach to judge the quality of classical interatomic potentials used in molecular dynamics simulations of glasses. The static structure and dynamical properties of amorphous SiO2 were simulated by classical molecular dynamics using a series of well known interatomic potentials. Theoretical X-ray and neutron structure factors and effective neutron-weighted vibrational density of states of amorphous SiO2 were computed from the obtained atomistic configurations and quantitatively compared to experimental results. The interatomic potential which best reproduced the experimental X-ray and neutron scattering data severely failed to reproduce the experimental vibrational density of states of amorphous SiO2. It is found that only the potential developed by van Beest, Kramer, and van Santen (BKS) was able to adequately reproduce both static structure and dynamical properties of amorphous SiO2. Thus, the fact that an interatomic potential is able to properly reproduce static structures of amorphous systems should not be considered as a basis to use this potential to simulate other properties of these systems