Printing in a pandemic: the makers response to COVID-19

uCreate Studio is the University of Edinburgh’s Community Makerspace. The uCreate Studio team worked throughout the COVID-19 lockdown, collaborating with other local teams to produce personal protective equipment (PPE) for staff in the National Health Service locally. This paper describes the work of the uCreate Studio team and how they used their skills, knowledge, network of contacts, and the specialist equipment in the uCreate Studio in the production of PPE

Schematics of a Water Balloon Launcher Design and Reproducible Water-Balloon-Filling Procedures Used for a Middle School Summer Science Camp

We recently held a Science Summer Camp for middle school students, designed to infuse young people with increased excitement for STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) subjects. Our efforts, which received nationally-syndicated news coverage,1 included the invention of a versatile water balloon launcher. This document contains: (1) detailed construction schematics and user operation guidelines for our balloon launcher; (2) data and instructions for reproducibly filling water balloons to specific volumes and weights, within used by students during the summer camp

Housing - the digital revolution

The Building Alliance and the Digital Construction Research Centre at Birmingham City University recently worked with 50 key stakeholders, to identify the opportunities that digital construction can offer to improve the process of building and living in new homes. The participants concluded that digital construction offers the housing industry enormous opportunities to improve their financial return and customer satisfaction. This can be achieved through efficient design and construction processes, an enhanced customer experience and pro-active management of whole house performance and maintenance

When the Rubber Hits the Road: Real-World Digital Preservation

Digital preservation remains a challenging and almost abstract idea for those responsible for ensuring the longevity of digital materials. During this lightning round session, seven information professionals will share practical, cost-effective, and realistic approaches to digital preservation. The conversations will be framed by the findings presented in “Trends in Digital Preservation Capacity and Practice,” published in the July/August 2017 issue of D-Lib Magazine, as well as by findings from the Beyond the Repository IMLS grant investigating the integration of local repositories with distributed preservation networks. This session will highlight trends in digital preservation in practice and offer an open conversation about “good enough” preservation steps that can be taken when you are faced with limited resources. Topics include: Alternative preservation measures to combat costs associated with a quickly growing digital storage footprint; Reflections after five years of implementing a tiered approach for preservation of electronic college records; The challenges of creating, promoting, and managing Indiana Digital Preservation (InDiPres), a community-based digital preservation solution; Considerations when preserving audiovisual materials and large file formats; Integrating open source platforms to establish more robust and efficient preservation workflows; and Balancing the ideal vs. the real world when constructing an accessible digital preservation environment. This session is intended for anyone responsible for digital preservation, from those in initial planning, to those doing “boots on the ground” preservation, to special collections administrators. Information presented in this session will be useful for a variety of institutions with all sizes of digital collections, including those with minimal staff and funding

You Do Not Have to Get through This Alone: Interpersonal Emotion Regulation and Psychosocial Resources during the COVID-19 Pandemic across Four Countries

While experiencing the unpredictable events of the COVID-19 pandemic, we are likely to turn to people in order to regulate our emotions. In this research, we investigate how this interpersonal emotion regulation is connected to affective symptoms, above and beyond intrapersonal emotion regulation. Furthermore, we explore whether perceived psychosocial resources moderate these associations, i.e., if individuals reporting healthier social connections benefit differently from interpersonal emotion regulation. N = 1401 participants from the USA, UK, Germany, and Switzerland completed an online survey that included text samples. Affective symptoms (depression, adjustment disorder, fear of COVID-19) were examined based on self-reported as well as language-based indicators. As psychosocial resources, we examined social support, loneliness, attachment style, and trust. We defined latent variables for adaptive and maladaptive interpersonal emotion regulation and analyzed how they were associated with affective symptoms controlling for intrapersonal emotion regulation. Further, we analyzed how they interacted with psychosocial resources. Maladaptive interpersonal emotion regulation strategies were associated with affective symptoms. With lower psychosocial resources, the associations between interpersonal emotion regulation and depressive symptoms were more pronounced. The results highlight that maladaptive interpersonal emotion regulation is associated with worse mental health. These effects are not buffered by more psychosocial resources and are stronger for people with low psychosocial resources

Teaching Under Crisis: Impact and Implications of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Education in Minnesota

A mixed-methods exploratory study was conducted to explore the impact that the COVID-19 pandemic had on Minnesota teachers. A convenience sample of 976 teachers were surveyed in mid-April 2020 via the Qualtrics version of the Swaggert Instructional Practice Under Crisis (SIPUC) questionnaire containing 43 questions. The SIPUC data were analyzed following the Leadership in Times of Crisis Framework for Assessment (Boin et al., 2013), that is, an emergency instructional triage to determine which teachers had been mostly impacted and the scope and effect the pandemic had on their instruction and lives. Teachers described the pandemic as an event that disrupted their teaching practices as well as their personal lives. Teachers remained focused on providing relevant learning experiences to their students in spite of the instructional challenges and the educational equity issues that became evident very early on. Resilience as well as confidence in their educational leaders was reported by the majority of teachers. A detailed description of the findings is provided as well as recommendations for educational leaders

2017 Proceedings: Exercise Your Faith

https://knowledge.e.southern.edu/reysymp/1000/thumbnail.jp

Patterns in Crew-Initiated Photography of Earth from ISS - Is Earth Observation a Salutogenic Experience?

To provide for the well-being of crewmembers on future exploration missions, understanding how space station crewmembers handle the inherently stressful isolation and confinement during long-duration missions is important. A recent retrospective survey of previously flown astronauts found that the most commonly reported psychologically enriching aspects of spaceflight had to do with their Perceptions of Earth. Crewmembers onboard the International Space Station (ISS) photograph Earth through the station windows. Some of these photographs are in response to requests from scientists on the ground through the Crew Earth Observations (CEO) payload. Other photographs taken by crewmembers have not been in response to these formal requests. The automatically recorded data from the camera provides a dataset that can be used to test hypotheses about factors correlated with self-initiated crewmember photography. The present study used objective in-flight data to corroborate the previous questionnaire finding and to further investigate the nature of voluntary Earth-Observation activity. We examined the distribution of photographs with respect to time, crew, and subject matter. We also determined whether the frequency fluctuated in conjunction with major mission events such as vehicle dockings, and extra-vehicular activities (EVAs, or spacewalks), relative to the norm for the relevant crew. We also examined the influence of geographic and temporal patterns on frequency of Earth photography activities. We tested the hypotheses that there would be peak photography intensity over locations of personal interest, and on weekends. From December 2001 through October 2005 (Expeditions 4-11) crewmembers took 144,180 photographs of Earth with time and date automatically recorded by the camera. Of the time-stamped photographs, 84.5% were crew-initiated, and not in response to CEO requests. Preliminary analysis indicated some phasing in patterns of photography during the course of a mission (significant quadratic and trimodal models). There was also a small but significant increase in photo activity on the weekends. In contrast, fewer photos were taken during major station events and for a period of time immediately preceding those events. Data on photography patterns presented here represent a relatively objective group-level measure of Earth observing activities on ISS. Crew Earth Observations offers a self-initiated positive activity that may be important in salutogenesis (maintenance of well-being) of astronauts on long-duration missions. Consideration should be given to developing substitute activities for crewmembers in future exploration missions where there will not be the opportunity to look at Earth, such as on long-duration transits to Mars