Digital lace:a collision of responsive technologies

Designing with properties such as colour-change and light using electronics and digital control brings new challenges within art and design, and a range of new possibilities for aesthetics, tactility and functionality. Heimtextil 2014 (accessed April 2014) promotes emerging materials and technologies as one of four trends which highlight the increasing demand for unique products utilizing novel material properties and digital making. However, there is still limited insight into the creative potential of these materials that are fundamental to the exploitation of 'smart' material properties, the development of new 'smart' surfaces and digital tools that facilitate designing with colour-change and light-emitting properties specific to textiles. This submission to the Fiber arts category presents new material concepts as Digital Lace: a novel, multifaceted textile which will be presented as an interactive table runner for a digitally manufactured console table. Digital Lace explicitly pools together the digital-craft skills base and disparate expertise of printed textile practitioner and thermochromic specialist, Sara Robertson (SR) and constructed textile practitioner and light-emitting optical fibre specialist, Sarah Taylor (ST). Within the context of 'smart', material development and experimentation, Digital lace exploits and amalgamates the responsive technologies of dye and fibre with digital-control

The Value of Citizen Scientists: Data Collection for American Eel Using Non-Traditional Field Gear & Social Media

American Eel (Anguilla rostrata) is a facultative catadromous species with a unique and complex life history. After hatching, larval eel begin their journey as leptocephalus in the Sargasso Sea and drift on ocean currents along the Atlantic coast, Gulf of Mexico, and Central and South America. They transform into glass eel as they approach shore and begin to develop pigment as they settle in estuaries or move upstream into rivers as elvers. American Eel then spend 3-40+ years in these habitats as yellow eel until they sexually mature into silver eel and return to the Sargasso Sea where they spawn and presumably die. State and federal agencies, multiple universities and numerous citizen science volunteers are working to better understand their movement patterns and recruitment window in Texas. Citizen scientists with coastal chapters of the Texas Master Naturalists (TMN) have taken a lead role in assisting with this effort. Since February of 2018, TMN have established a network of monitoring sites across the mid to upper Texas Coast to sample for juvenile American Eel using eel mops. Eel mops have been deployed for various lengths of time at 29 sites throughout the past two years and checked routinely for glass and elver eel. Volunteers have conducted approximately 250 eel mop checks and provided record of their catch by category (e.g., eel, shrimp, crab, other fish, etc.) based on occurrence or abundance. TMN have documented close to 7,000 individuals across all categories with various species of crab, shrimp, and fish being the most common groups collected. While no glass or elver eel have been collected in an eel mop, TMN have provide valuable data for this project by testing a common gear type that is often used to monitor for American Eel on the Atlantic Coast.Integrative Biolog

What Does It Mean to Respect One’s Mother? A Narrative Approach Exploring Maternal Respect Through the Perspectives of Zulu Mothers And Their Children

This paper attempts to synthesize both background research and interview content on respect, specifically respect for mothers from their children in Cato Manor. Cato Manor is populated with largely single-mother, matriarchal households of Zulu identifying people. I conducted eight interviews with four mothers and their children, with the “children” ranging in age from 19 to 29. I requested that my participants share as many stories with me as possible in order to help me write my findings in a narrative approach. I asked about a variety of topics, including what respect is in general, what it means to respect one’s mother, and how respect differs when it comes to fathers. Zulu culture and black culture were factors in many of the responses I received. Cultural expectations shaped respect in general: who was respected and how to show it. Lessons learned from one’s mother and one’s community were essential aspects in one’s personal perception of respect and how to show respect towards one’s mother. Children spoke about respecting their mother as being obedient and behaving well outside the home, as they are a reflection of how their mother raised them. Similarly, mothers stated their expectations of good behavior from their children outside the home, often mentioning respect towards elders. On paper, respect for mothers in Cato Manor does not differ much from respect for elders in the community. It is in the intricacies of my participants’ answers where the fascinating substance lies: the different examples of disrespect, the conflicting opinions, the common themes, and how the features of Cato Manor influence it all

Transnational Education Systems In Morocco: How Language Of Instruction Shapes Identity

The North African country of Morocco boasts a rich history of linguistic diversity, which was further compounded with the introduction of the French language under the protectorate in 1912. Through a complicated mix of Fus’ha (Modern Standard Arabic), Darija (Moroccan Dialectical Arabic), French (historically the language of the protectorate), and most recently, the introduction of English, the system of education with respect to linguistic instruction is left in a bind. The divide between the public schools, private schools, traditional Arabic schools, and well-­‐ established French schools only grows, as the Moroccan Education system hurts for change. If language shapes education, and education shapes a person, then to what degree does the question of cultural identity factor into Morocco’s debate on language of education? In this paper, I seek to take a closer look at this issue and examine the common perceptions that fuel the debate on the Transnational and Multilingual Moroccan Identity, public schools, private schools, and where Moroccan education hopes to be going next. I approached the question of linguistic identity with a study of a select few private schools in Rabat, Morocco’s capital. My research included interviews, varying by age and academic background. Through a careful analysis of these interviews coupled with existing academic discourse, we find that through the evolution of Morocco’s deeply flawed education system, multilingualism is paving the way for a new, transnational Moroccan identity, and through an understanding of this cultural identity, the education system may find grounding for positive future change

Experiential Avoidance, Emotional Expression, and Psychopathology in Early and Late Adulthood

Experiential avoidance (EA) is an unwillingness to remain in contact with private and overt experiences, with higher EA associated with increased psychopathology. This study investigated relationships among EA, age, and the use of emotion words in positive and negative autobiographical narratives, as well as whether EA was associated with depression, anxiety, quality of life, and social support. Participants included younger (n=60) and older adults (n=60), who completed a positive and negative emotion narrative task along with measures of psychopathology. Results indicated that relative to younger adults, older adults spoke for longer time intervals in both narrative conditions. EA did not significantly affect narrative duration in either age cohort. However, despite longer narrative durations, older adults high in EA used fewer negative emotion words in the negative emotion narrative task compared to young adults high in EA. EA was positively associated with anxiety and depression and inversely related to quality of life and social support. Results are explained in the developmental context of the Socioemotional Selectivity Theory (Carstensen, 1991), which posits that young adults are more prone to communicate in situations that involve information attainment, whereas older adults verbal behaviors may be more a function of emotion regulation. Clinical implications are discussed

H-alpha Activity of Old M Dwarfs: Stellar Cycles and Mean Activity Levels For 93 Low-Mass Stars in the Solar Neighborhood

Through the McDonald Observatory M Dwarf Planet Search, we have acquired nearly 3,000 high-resolution spectra of 93 late-type (K5-M5) stars over more than a decade using HET/HRS. This sample provides a unique opportunity to investigate the occurrence of long-term stellar activity cycles for low-mass stars. In this paper, we examine the stellar activity of our targets as reflected in the H-alpha feature. We have identified periodic signals for 6 stars, with periods ranging from days to more than 10 years, and find long-term trends for 7 others. Stellar cycles with P > 1 year are present for at least 5% of our targets. Additionally, we present an analysis of the time-averaged activity levels of our sample, and search for correlations with other stellar properties. In particular, we find that more massive, earlier type (M0-M2) stars tend to be more active than later type dwarfs. Furthermore, high-metallicity stars tend to be more active at a given stellar mass. We also evaluate H-alpha variability as a tracer of activity-induced radial velocity (RV) variation. For the M dwarf GJ 1170, H-alpha variation reveals stellar activity patterns matching those seen in the RVs, mimicking the signal of a giant planet, and we find evidence that the previously identified stellar activity cycle of GJ 581 may be responsible for the recently retracted planet f (Vogt et al. 2012) in that system. In general, though, we find that H-alpha is not frequently correlated with RV at the precision (typically 6-7 m/s) of our measurements.Comment: Submitted to ApJ. Reflects comments from a positive refere