scholarly journals A Scalable Cloud Native Platform For Interactive Museum Exhibits

10.29007/6b3j ◽  
2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Cappaert ◽  
Alex Redei
Keyword(s):  
Low Cost ◽  
Simulated Data ◽  
Science Museums ◽  
Museum Exhibits ◽  
Museum Visitors ◽  
Software Frameworks ◽  
Interactive Exhibits ◽  
Hands On ◽  
User Data ◽  
Museum Experience

Science museums with hands-on and interactive exhibits are on the rise. As museums grow, the need arises to have an online platform to allow visitors to continue their ex- perience beyond a day visit. In this paper, we first provide a brief survey of techniques for building scalable cloud native software frameworks. In order to achieve low cost and persist user data, we built a django application using Heroku and postgres. This platform can be scaled horizontally on-demand to handle highly variant user traffic for augmenting the museum experience. With a focus on educational experiences, a participant’s progress on activities at the museum are saved through an API we built and can be viewed on a website. Different activities at the museum generate data for the API which can be viewed anywhere. Simulated data was loaded into our framework to validate the efficacy of our solution. Future testing is outlined in collaboration with the Fleischmann Planetarium through a trial experiment with museum visitors.

scholarly journals Comic Strips to Accompany Science Museum Exhibits

2016 ◽  
Vol 5 (4) ◽  
pp. 141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beom Sun Chung ◽  
Eun-mi Park ◽  
Sang-Hee Kim ◽  
Sook-kyoung Cho ◽  
Min Suk Chung
Keyword(s):  
Science Museum ◽  
Science Museums ◽  
Comic Strips ◽  
Museum Exhibits ◽  
Museum Visitors ◽  
Science Exhibitions ◽  
The Individual

<p>Science museums make the effort to create exhibits with amusing explanations. However, existing explanation signs with lengthy text are not appealing, and as such, visitors do not pay attention to them. In contrast, conspicuous comic strips composed of simple drawings and humors can attract science museum visitors. This study attempted to reveal whether comic strips contribute to science exhibitions. More than 20 comic strips were chosen that were associated with exhibits in a science museum. The individual episodes were printed out and placed beside the corresponding exhibits. A questionnaire was administered to museum visitors to evaluate the effects of the comic strips. Most visitors responded that the comic strips were helpful in understanding the exhibits and in familiarizing themselves with the science. Participants also described the comic strips’ deficiencies which will be considered for future revisions. Comic strips are likely to enhance interest in and comprehension of science exhibitions. Furthermore, these strips are expected to enrich science museums in various ways such as establishing their uniqueness.</p>

scholarly journals Synchronization of iPS-derived cardiomyocytes to visitor heartbeat in an interactive museum exhibit

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Juan A Perez-Bermejo ◽  
Samuel J Reisman ◽  
Joyce Ma ◽  
Christian Cerrito ◽  
Bruce R Conklin ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Science Education ◽  
Stem Cell ◽  
Informal Science Education ◽  
Heart Cells ◽  
Science Museums ◽  
Museum Exhibit ◽  
Museum Exhibits ◽  
Museum Visitors ◽  
The Public ◽  
Science Exhibit

Science museums play an important role in science education, both engaging the public with science concepts and building support for scientific research. Designing museum exhibits to meet increasing public interests in the life sciences is particularly important, yet remains challenging. In this report we describe Give Heart Cells a Beat, a permanent interactive science exhibit that allows museum visitors to synchronize the beating of live stem cell-derived cardiomyocytes to their own heart rate in real-time. Evaluation with museum visitors reveals that the exhibit engaged the public with the specimen and prompted curiosity in heart biology and, to a lesser degree, stem cells and electrophysiology. Give Heart Cells a Beat is the product of a close collaboration between a museum and a research laboratory, and, to our knowledge, the first example of the use of live human heart cells in an interactive exhibit. We hope this exhibit will serve as an example for the implementation of stem cell technology in the field of informal science education and encourage others to pursue close working relationships between academia and public science venues such as museums.

scholarly journals Stories, journeys and smart maps: an approach to universal access

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xi Wang ◽  
Danny Crookes ◽  
Sue-Ann Harding ◽  
David Johnston
Keyword(s):  
Universal Access ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Research Question ◽  
Emotional Engagement ◽  
New Approach ◽  
Reception Study ◽  
Audio Description ◽  
Museum Experience ◽  
Interactive Map ◽  
Partially Sighted

AbstractThis paper proposes a new approach to universal access based on the premise that humans have the universal capacity to engage emotionally with a story, whatever their ability. Our approach is to present the “story” of museum resources and knowledge as a journey, and then represent this journey physically as a smart map. The key research question is to assess the extent to which our “story” to journey to smart map’ (SJSM) approach provides emotional engagement as part of the museum experience. This approach is applied through the creation of a smart map for blind and partially sighted (BPS) visitors. Made in partnership with Titanic Belfast, a world-leading tourist attraction, the interactive map tells the story of Titanic’s maiden voyage. The smart map uses low-cost technologies such as laser-cut map features and software-controlled multi-function buttons for the audio description (AD). The AD is enhanced with background effects, dramatized personal stories and the ship’s last messages. The results of a reception study show that the approach enabled BPS participants to experience significant emotional engagement with museum resources. The smart model also gave BPS users a level of control over the AD which gave them a greater sense of empowerment and independence, which is particularly important for BPS visitors with varying sight conditions. We conclude that our SJSM approach has considerable potential as an approach to universal access, and to increase emotional engagement with museum collections. We also propose several developments which could further extend the approach and its implementation.

scholarly journals Semi-Active Magnetic Levitation System for Education

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (12) ◽  
pp. 5330
Author(s):  
Gisela Pujol-Vázquez ◽  
Alessandro N. Vargas ◽  
Saleh Mobayen ◽  
Leonardo Acho
Keyword(s):  
Pid Control ◽  
Magnetic Levitation ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Control Scheme ◽  
Hands On ◽  
Levitation System ◽  
Magnetic Levitation System ◽  
And Control ◽  
Active Control Strategy ◽  
Cost Components

This paper describes how to construct a low-cost magnetic levitation system (MagLev). The MagLev has been intensively used in engineering education, allowing instructors and students to learn through hands-on experiences of essential concepts, such as electronics, electromagnetism, and control systems. Built from scratch, the MagLev depends only on simple, low-cost components readily available on the market. In addition to showing how to construct the MagLev, this paper presents a semi-active control strategy that seems novel when applied to the MagLev. Experiments performed in the laboratory provide comparisons of the proposed control scheme with the classical PID control. The corresponding real-time experiments illustrate both the effectiveness of the approach and the potential of the MagLev for education.

Lightweight Dynamic Redundancy Control with Adaptive Encoding for Server-based Storage

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 1-38
Author(s):  
Takayuki Fukatani ◽  
Hieu Hanh Le ◽  
Haruo Yokota
Keyword(s):  
Low Cost ◽  
Storage System ◽  
Erasure Coding ◽  
Performance Impact ◽  
Data Redundancy ◽  
Performance Improvements ◽  
Redundant Data ◽  
Redundancy Control ◽  
User Data ◽  
Capacity Efficiency

With the recent performance improvements in commodity hardware, low-cost commodity server-based storage has become a practical alternative to dedicated-storage appliances. Because of the high failure rate of commodity servers, data redundancy across multiple servers is required in a server-based storage system. However, the extra storage capacity for this redundancy significantly increases the system cost. Although erasure coding (EC) is a promising method to reduce the amount of redundant data, it requires distributing and encoding data among servers. There remains a need to reduce the performance impact of these processes involving much network traffic and processing overhead. Especially, the performance impact becomes significant for random-intensive applications. In this article, we propose a new lightweight redundancy control for server-based storage. Our proposed method uses a new local filesystem-based approach that avoids distributing data by adding data redundancy to locally stored user data. Our method switches the redundancy method of user data between replication and EC according to workloads to improve capacity efficiency while achieving higher performance. Our experiments show up to 230% better online-transaction-processing performance for our method compared with CephFS, a widely used alternative system. We also confirmed that our proposed method prevents unexpected performance degradation while achieving better capacity efficiency.

scholarly journals Collaboration for chemistry communication: Insights from a research-practice partnership

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (04) ◽  
pp. N01
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Kunz Kollmann ◽  
Marta Beyer ◽  
Emily Howell ◽  
Allison Anderson ◽  
Owen Weitzman ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Informal Education ◽  
Science Communication ◽  
Public Perceptions ◽  
Research Practice ◽  
Science Museums ◽  
Social Scientists ◽  
The Public ◽  
Hands On ◽  
Perceived Relevance ◽  
Data Collections

As several recent National Academies of Sciences reports have highlighted, greater science communication research is needed on 1) communicating chemistry, and 2) building research-practice partnerships to advance communication across science issues. Here we report our insights in both areas, gathered from a multi-year collaboration to advance our understanding of how to communicate about chemistry with the public. Researchers and practitioners from science museums across the U.S. partnered with academic social scientists in science communication to develop and conduct multi-strand data collections on chemistry communication and informal education. Our focus was on increasing interest in, the perceived relevance of, and self-efficacy concerning chemistry through hands-on activities and connecting chemistry to broader themes concerning everyday life and societal impacts. We outline challenges and benefits of the project that future collaborations can gain from and illustrate how our strands of work complemented each other to create a more complete picture of public perceptions of chemistry.

scholarly journals Development and application of a swine model for training ultrasonography-guided central venous access

2020 ◽  
Vol 47 ◽  
Author(s):  
JACKSON VINÍCIUS DE LIMA BERTUOL ◽  
NATASHA LURE BUENO CAMARGO ◽  
FERNANDO ANTONIO CAMPELO SPENCER NETTO ◽  
ANDRÉ PEREIRA WESTPHALEN
Keyword(s):  
Porcine Model ◽  
Low Cost ◽  
Central Venous Access ◽  
Training Session ◽  
Hospital Setting ◽  
Venous Access ◽  
Human Anatomy ◽  
Swine Model ◽  
Central Venous ◽  
Hands On

ABSTRACT Introduction: simulation based teaching is a powerful tool in medical education, allowing hands on practice under a controlled environment and with repeated maneuvers. Central venous access venipuncture is one of the most frequent procedures carried out in the hospital setting, due to its various clinical indications and, when performed with the help of ultrasonography, the risk of adverse events is minimized. Aim: to develop, to describe and to test a porcine model that simulates the central venous access puncture aided by ultrasonography. Method: a low cost porcine model was developed to train medical students and residents on central venous access guided by ultrasonography. Both students and medical residents underwent a theoretical training regarding the model, followed by a hands-on training session. Afterwards, the participants assessed the model by answering a questionnaire. Results: there were 51 participants. The average score regarding the similarity between the model and the human anatomy was 9.15. When the characteristics were separately assessed, the mean scores regarding the similarity of the vessels, anatomic disposition and ultrasonographic characteristics as well as the venipuncture were, respectively, 9.27; 9.31; 9.54 and 8.86. Conclusion: The model was approved and considered appropriate for the training of central venous venipuncture by all the participants. Furthermore, it is a low cost, simple and reproducible model, that presents high similarity with the human anatomy. Therefore, it may be used as an aid to train people on ultrasonography guided central venous access.

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