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As part of a class, students read, discussed, and wrote about the book Strangers in Their Own Land: Anger and Mourning on the American Right by Arlie Hochschild. The following essay represents their collective thoughts and answers to three reflective prompts about empathy walls, one of the central themes of the book, and their role and importance in civil conversation.

Drought in the United Kingdom is a “hidden” pervasive risk, defined and perceived in different ways by diverse stakeholders and sectors. Scientists and water managers distinguish meteorological, agricultural, hydrological, and socio-economic drought. Historically triggers in drought risk management have been demarcated solely in specialist hydrological science terms using indices and critical thresholds. This paper explores “drought thresholds” as a bridging concept for interdisciplinary science-narrative enquiry. The Eden catchment, Scotland acts as an exemplar, in a maritime country perceived as wet. The research forms part of creative experimentation in science-narrative methods played out in seven United Kingdom case-study catchments on hydro-meteorological gradients in the Drought Risk and You (DRY) project, with the agricultural Eden the most northerly. DRY explored how science and stories might be brought together to support better decision-making in United Kingdom drought risk management. This involved comparing specialist catchment-scale modelling of drought risk with evidence gathered from local narratives of drought perceptions/experiences. We develop the concept of thresholds to include perceptual triggers of drought awareness and impact within and between various sectors in the catchment (agriculture, business, health and wellbeing, public/communities, and natural and built environments). This process involved developing a framework for science-narrative drought “threshold thinking” that utilizes consideration of severity and scale, spatial and temporal aspects, framing in terms of enhancing or reducing factors internal and external to the catchment and new graphical methods. The paper discusses how this extended sense of thresholds might contribute to research and practice, involving different ways of linking drought severity and perception. This has potential to improve assessment of sectoral vulnerabilities, development of adaptive strategies of different stakeholders, and more tailored drought communication and messaging. Our findings indicate that drought risk presents many complexities within the catchment, given its cross-sectoral nature, rich sources of available water, variable prior drought experience among stakeholders, and different quantitative and perceptual impact thresholds across and within sectors. Fuzziness in identification of drought thresholds was multi-faceted for varied reasons. Results suggest that a management paradigm that integrates both traditional and non-traditional “fuzzy” threshold concepts across sectors should be integrated into current and future policy frameworks for drought risk management.

There is a growing interest in different forms of participatory modeling that bring science and lay knowledge into the same space. This recognizes that, traditionally, the environmental science community has mostly seen stakeholder engagement as a ‘follow on’ activity to be undertaken once the key scientific research has been completed. By excluding communities from the scientific process, or at best approaching communities in one-way communication, scientists are missing out on the wealth of local community knowledge about the very facets of the environment which they seek to understand. The challenge, however, is in identifying, developing and adopting appropriate platforms for communication and co-creation to allow scientists and local communities to have effective dialogue, efficiently gather, interpret and evaluate lay knowledge, and develop relevant, scientifically robust, but widely comprehensible, results. DRY (Drought Risk and You) was a 4-year project, funded under the RCUK Drought and Water Scarcity Program, with the aim of developing an evidence-based resource to support better decision-making in United Kingdom drought risk management. In DRY, scientific data and multiple narrative approaches have been brought together to facilitate decision-making processes and improve community resilience. Creative experiments were designed by the DRY interdisciplinary team to engage local communities in using specialist science as a stimulus for storytelling at catchment level, but also to give scientists the insight required to develop meaningful scenarios of local change to explore potential drought impacts in a particular river catchment. One challenge of working with storytelling is that it is very often retrospective and linked to past experiences and memories. It can be seen as a backward-looking activity, learning principally from what has happened before. The participatory approaches applied in DRY demonstrated that storytelling can be also used to imagine, interrogate and plan for a future that communities might collectively wish to subscribe or adapt to. In particular, by co-designing and facilitating storyboarding workshops, the DRY team, together with local stakeholders, have been exploring the ‘scenario-ing’ of possible futures as a way of creating a story and visualizing a picture for the future of the community. By allowing the scientists, community and local stakeholders to develop model drought scenarios iteratively together using storytelling, these scenarios should not only be scientifically accurate, but should also reflect local interests and aspirations, as well as local drought mitigation practices. This process integrates valuable knowledge exchange and the building of mutual capital to support local risk decision-making - scaling up from the level of the individual to the collective.

This article argues that Abbas Kiarostami uses documentaries and fiction films to examine the distinction between reality and fiction. Through the use of an arthouse style of filmmaking, the insertion of a surrogate director into the narrative and a recurring breakdown in technology, Kiarostami demonstrates that film’s ability to capture reality is a flawed, sometimes broken, endeavor.

Sit-stand desks are popular however many people have standing-induced low back pain (LBP). People with LBP have fewer standing weight shifts compared with back-healthy people. Participants were classified as standing-tolerant or intolerant. Participants were provided sit-stand desks for 12 weeks. Participants were assigned to intervention (graded standing exposure and exercise) or control (no instruction) conditions. Participants reported weekly sitting time and average/worst LBP. Standing weight shifts and LBP were re-assessed post-intervention. All groups decreased sitting time (range: 30–50%) over 12 weeks. Sitting time and average LBP were correlated in all standing-intolerant individuals, worst LBP and sitting time were correlated for intervention group only. All standing-intolerant individuals increased standing weight shifts and decreased LBP after 12-weeks. Standing-intolerant individuals benefitted from 12-weeks of sit-stand desk use regardless of intervention. Motivated individuals with standing-induced LBP may increase standing tolerance with sit-stand desk use. Additional benefits may exist when structured guidance is provided. Practitioner summary: Many people are standing-intolerant due to low back pain (LBP). This lab and field-based study showed some benefits from structured approaches to gradually progress standing time when transitioning to standing work. Using a sit-stand desk for 12 weeks resulted in decreased LBP and sitting time in standing-intolerant people. Abbreviations: LBP: low back pain; OSPAQ: Occupational Sitting and Physical Activity Questionnaire; VAS: visual analog scale; GRF: ground reaction force; WeekVASMAX: worst low back pain reported on visual analog scale for prior week; WeekVASAVE: average low back pain reported on visual analog scale for prior week; ICC: intraclass correlation coefficient; LabVASMAX: worst low back pain reported on visual analog scale during lab-based standing; LabVASAVE: average low back pain reported on visual analog scale during lab-based standing; FvR,L: vertical ground reaction force for right and left force plate; BWSSMALL: small (10-29% body weight) body weight shift; BWSLARGE: large (> 30% body weight) body weight shift; ActivPALSED: ActivePAL data for sedentary time; ActivPALSTND: ActivePAL data for standing time; ANOVA: analysis of variance; Standing Intolerant-INT: standing intolerant participants assigned to intervention condition; Standing Intolerant-CON: standing intolerant participants assigned to control condition; Standing Tolerant-INT: standing tolerant participants assigned to intervention condition; Standing Tolerant-CON: standing tolerant participants assigned to control condition; SI: standing intolerant; ST: standing tolerant; INT: intervention; CON: control [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With an incredible increase in the number of wireless devices and an ever-growing demand for high data rates, 5G needs to provide a solution to satisfy the demand for the next decade. Multiple-input multiple-output (MIMO) systems are seen as one of the primary solutions—allowing for spatial multiplexing and the use of millimeter-wave (mmWave) frequencies, which can provide much larger bandwidths and, thus, data rates. MIMO is very closely related to phased arrays, which have been used for radar for the past few decades and requires many antennas and transceivers—on the order of hundreds or thousands for massive MIMO. To make such systems affordable, low-cost, low-power, and low-complexity is required—inherently compromising other system characteristics, such as linearity. The main focus of this paper will be in summarizing the challenges, recent advances, and potential future breakthroughs concerning MIMO/digital array sensitivity to interferers and nonlinear distortion. Specifically, this paper gives an overview of MIMO/digital array architectures and different techniques currently researched for the characterization and mitigation of spatial and spectral interferers and nonlinearities, which can be used to extend the effective dynamic range of low-cost MIMO/digital array systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editors discuss various reports within the issue on topics including climate change, green technology, and intellectual property for such technological innovations.