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In the past, there was a widely held belief that women lacked the aptitude for STEM careers, including engineering. Activities traditionally associated with women were perceived as less technical and rigorous than those associated with men. "Masculine" hobbies like woodworking and metalworking were seen as good preparation for engineering. In contrast, traditionally feminine hobbies like sewing, quilting, and knitting were considered preparation for homemaking. However, many traditionally feminine crafts require and develop mathematical knowledge and technical aptitudes, which are essential for success in engineering. This paper explores parallels between traditionally feminine crafts and technical aptitude. By analyzing information from various sources, including books and magazines related to these crafts, we demonstrate how these activities can develop technical aptitudes and explain this in the context of career theory, which is fundamental in comprehending how individuals navigate their professional paths. Childhood, early adult, and later experiences, such as engaging in craft and hobby activities, can significantly impact skill development that carries over into other phases of life. According to career construction theory, individuals actively shape their careers through various self-regulatory competencies. This theory posits that career adaptability, a key competency, can enhance job crafting behaviors, ultimately increasing work engagement. By understanding how these activities can enhance technical aptitudes, the engineering community can better identify and support individuals who may have a natural inclination for engineering, broadening our perception of what engineering aptitude looks like and encouraging individuals from diverse backgrounds, including a greater proportion of women, to pursue engineering careers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Juan Martínez Montañés was one of the most important sculptors and altarpiece architects of the Spanish Golden Age. The restoration of the Santa Clara church in Seville has presented a unique opportunity to study the main altarpiece, crafted by Montañés between 1621 and 1623. He was also in charge of the polychromy and gilding, believing that delegating these procedures to others would diminish the quality of his work. This conviction led to a well-known lawsuit with the renowned contemporary Spanish painter Francisco Pacheco. Ultimately, the painter and sculptor Baltasar Quintero performed the polychromy of this altarpiece, but under the strict conditions of Montañés. Various non-invasive analytical techniques, such as CT, UVF, XRF, and digital microscopy, were employed to study wood treatment and polychromy. Additionally, three samples were prepared as cross-sections and analysed by SEM-EDX. The results revealed Montañés’ meticulous woodwork, anticipating its long-term preservation. Consistent with Montañés’ commitment to maintaining the superior quality of his work, the analysis showed an absence of a ground layer in the flesh areas, while the gilding was executed with high-quality gold. The pigment palette corresponds to the treaties and documents of his time, and the extensive areas of later retouches were accurately located. These new data provide a deeper understanding of both the technique and the high standards of one of the most important and globally recognised sculptors.

AbstractThe do-it-yourself (DIY) and maker cultures have expanded into older adult communities and shown to bring a strong agency and well-being outcomes. Looking into well-established spaces, where older adults have engaged in making over a longer period, can provide an insight into the sustained motivations and benefits of making for older adults. Men’s sheds represent a great opportunity in this regard, as they are open, community spaces where retired, older men engage in woodworking, metalworking and other craft-based activities. We involved nine men’s shed members in a creative inquiry where a “probe kit” consisting of recycled timber and wooden materials was provided. The participants were asked to create an artifact from the kit for someone other than themselves. We interviewed them once they completed their projects and qualitatively analyzed their design process. Our findings show that older men’s involvement in making is driven by the ethos of “making for others” and can be seen across three themes: (1) creative expressions; (2) memories and social connections; and (3) practical needs. We unpack these themes in the paper and discuss factors that can play an important role when engaging with older adults. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Juan Martínez Montañés was one of the most important sculptors and altarpiece architects of the Spanish Golden Age. The restoration of the Santa Clara church in Seville has presented a unique opportunity to study the main altarpiece, crafted by Montañés between 1621 and 1623. He was also in charge of the polychromy and gilding, believing that delegating these procedures to others would diminish the quality of his work. This conviction led to a well-known lawsuit with the renowned contemporary Spanish painter Francisco Pacheco. Ultimately, the painter and sculptor Baltasar Quintero performed the polychromy of this altarpiece, but under the strict conditions of Montañés. Various non-invasive analytical techniques, such as CT, UVF, XRF, and digital microscopy, were employed to study wood treatment and polychromy. Additionally, three samples were prepared as cross-sections and analysed by SEM-EDX. The results revealed Montañés' meticulous woodwork, anticipating its long-term preservation. Consistent with Montañés' commitment to maintaining the superior quality of his work, the analysis showed an absence of a ground layer in the flesh areas, while the gilding was executed with high-quality gold. The pigment palette corresponds to the treaties and documents of his time, and the extensive areas of later retouches were accurately located. These new data provide a deeper understanding of both the technique and the high standards of one of the most important and globally recognised sculptors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Yushan archaeological site is located in Zhenhai district, Ningbo city, Zhejiang Province, and it primarily consists of remains from the Hemudu culture and Shang and Zhou dynasties. During excavations conducted from 2013 to 2015, 58 wood samples were collected. The unearthed woods from the Yushan site were identified and belonged to 15 different genera or species, including Cupressus sp., Pinus sp., Castanopsis eyrei, Cyclobalanopsis sp. The research indicated that the early inhabitants of Yushan primarily utilized the surrounding tree resources. Pinus and Cyclobalanopsis wood played a crucial role in the daily lives of the early inhabitants and were widely used as construction materials and living woodwork. Cyclobalanopsis, representing the Fagaceae family of trees, might also provide nuts as a food resource in the early stages of the site and were protected by the early inhabitants. Additionally, Astanopsis eyrei was used to make wooden clogs; Zelkova, Diospyros, and Aphananthe wood were utilized in the construction of trestle bridges; Cyclobalanopsis and Castanopsis eyrei were applied to create wooden spinning tops. Ancient Pinus tree remnants were discovered in the site area, possibly indicating a manifestation of the early inhabitants' natural deity worship. The early inhabitants of Yushan demonstrated the practice of using local materials and making the most of available resources, providing valuable new materials for exploring the prehistoric utilization patterns of tree resources in the Ningbo-Shaoxing plain. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With more leisure time in the early to mid-twentieth century, more people in industrialized countries took up hobbies. One hobby—woodworking—became a favorite among men, especially homeowners. Beyond the familiar "do-it-yourselfers" there was an audience eager to learn about woodworking, and magazine publishers encouraged them to acquire new skills and home machinery. American publishers led the way, but workshop converts in English-speaking countries like Canada and the United Kingdom got the magazines and the message. The promise of creative leisure at home did not democratize the hobby. Monthly features and awards praising accomplished amateurs did not challenge social and economic norms but defined leisure success in conventional terms. Those with the income and space to maintain a hobby served as models for others whose circumstances were less ideal. Through its flagship publication, a machine manufacturer often acquiesced to the industrial-era pressures that hobbies sought to alleviate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This document is a personal account of Jerry Ericksen's family perspectives, as told by his daughter Lynn Cadmus and son Randy Ericksen. Lynn recalls fond memories of her father teaching her about nature, swimming, and making meal times fun. Randy reflects on their father's diverse range of interests, including mathematics, mechanics, smoking a pipe, watching television, and collecting various items. Both Lynn and Randy express admiration for their father's accomplishments and the impact he had on others in his field. [Extracted from the article]

Woodwork is involved in a variety of interactions with humans through physical contact, which may reveal valuable information if the tactile data can be unnoticeably extracted. In this work, an intelligent iontronic wood (iWood) device, along with its seamlessly integrated architecture into the woodwork, enabled by the iontronic sensing principle, is implemented. Notably, the tactile sensing structure is generated at the iontronic interface between ionic and conductive woods. In particular, the ionic wood is established by infusing an ionic liquid into the wood, followed by immobilizing it via chemical bonding, presenting both prominent ionic conductivity and excellent stability under pressure. By formatting the woods into identical strips, the high‐density tactile sensing array can be simply formed by a braiding process for a scalable interwoven structure. As a result, the iWood device has offered a high sensitivity over a broad detection of 0.5 MPa and an array of 40 × 90 units covering an area up to 3600 cm2. The iWood device is showcased as an interactive human interface, demonstrating its potential as a smart desktop capable of gesture and object recognition, a health‐tracking chair for real‐time ballistocardiograph monitoring, and an embedded intelligent floor for weight management and gait analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kemaliye Village, which is connected to Keles District of Bursa province, is located 11 km. south of the district center. Even in the oldest Ottoman chronicles, it is known that the inhabitants of the village mentioned were from Kızılkeçili nomads. The name of the village, which was known as Kızılkise until the Republican period, was changed to Kemaliye in 1922. There are ruined architectural remains from the Byzantine period in the village. The mosque in the center of the village XIX. it was built in the last quarter of the century and decorated within the framework of the art style of the period. The mosque and its decoration were last repaired by Bursa Metropolitan Municipality in 2010. There is also a mention of the existence of a dervish lodge in the village, which was told by the elderly and there is no certainty about when it was destroyed. The sanjak-ı şerîf and the beard-i şerîf, which are said to belong to the lodge, are preserved in the mosque. The mosque, which was built as a masonry and wooden skeleton system, consists of a narthex and a main aisle. The hand-drawn ornaments and woodwork that adorn the interior walls of the mosque are important in terms of bringing the artistic understanding of the period it was made to the present. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mortice-tenons are the main structural forms of ancient buildings, furniture, and woodwork in China. They are the inheritance of China's craft and cultural spirit, follow the principles of mechanics and have strong practicability. However, mortice-tenons have gradually disappeared from modern life, mainly because they cannot meet the specific needs of users. The purpose of this study is to establish a set of mortice-tenons structure innovation and product design for modern people. By analyzing the types and structural characteristics of mortice-tenon structure, based on the user's needs, using modern creative design methods, and combining with practice, we can verify how to further improve the market acceptance of mortice-tenon structure innovation products, constantly explore the combination of modern technology and material experiments, and explore the emotional design of China traditional cultural creative products. Finally, it is proposed that further research is needed in this field to fully understand the user's behavior of using mortice-tenon structure innovation products, and at the same time, mortice-tenon structure innovation is applied to daily necessities and furniture products to meet the needs of a wider range of user scenarios. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Beijing University of Civil Engineering & Architecture is the property of Journal of Beijing University of Civil Engineering & Architecture Editorial Office and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The aim of this paper is to contribute to the concept of design literacy by exploring what it means to learn design literacy through making. To support my argumentation, I draw on a case study where I followed two student teachers of design and craft as they learned design literacy through woodworking. Due to Covid‐19, the learning environment was located at the students' homes rather than the design and craft studio at the university. Two research questions guide the case study: What stories does the student recall from learning woodworking and what do these stories provide that are relevant for learning design literacy? Three 'making' stories are presented from the case study: (1) Making with the unknown, (2) Making alone educationally, and (3) The affective and embodied making. These stories provide numerous making skills that are relevant when teaching and learning for design literacy, which is further discussed in the paper. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Supply chain security is a major prerequisite for China's successful industrial modernization, while the digital economy has significantly contributed to industrial transformation and upgrading. This study considers China's wooden furniture industry as its research object, constructing an evaluation index system of the digital economy and supply chain security of the wooden furniture industry. Then, it studies the impact of the digital economy on supply chain security through theoretical analysis and empirical methods using the two-way fixed model of provinces and time. The findings demonstrate that the digital economy effectively enhances the level of supply chain security in China's wooden furniture industry, further validating the digital economy's positive externality impact on the traditional real economy. The impact mechanism test shows that inventory turnover capacity is the focal point for the digital economy to improve the supply chain security of the wood furniture industry, specifying the starting point for that industry's digital transformation. The heterogeneity findings show that the role of the digital economy in improving the wood furniture industry's level of supply chain security is more significant in inland areas than in coastal areas. Additional analyses found a threshold effect of the digital economy's impact on supply chain security, indicating its limitations. This study explores the impact of the digital economy on the real economy from a traditional manufacturing industry, enriching research on the positive externalities of the digital economy as well as providing a reference for traditional manufacturing industries, such as that of wooden furniture, to probe the embedding points of the digital economy and appropriate digital transformation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A multi-objective optimization design method based on the MATLAB/ANSYS co-simulation non- dominated aorting genetic algorithm II (NSGA-II) was proposed and implemented in this paper. The method was used to complete the design of silencing slits for ultra-thin circular saw blades. Topology optimization was performed in Inspire software by using the variable density method to determine the design domain of the silencing slit. The location, angle, and width of the silencing slit were taken as the design variables. Maximum deformation, maximum equivalent force, and overall amplitude were taken as the design objectives. On this basis, a multi-objective optimization model was established. The optimized solution of the model was carried out by the strategy of MATLAB/ANSYS co-simulation in collaboration with NSGA-II. The results showed that all the four optimized solutions can effectively reduce the deformation and overall amplitude of the saw blade during sawing, which provided a wider range of choices for decision makers. The study provided a possible solution to the problem of multi-objective optimal design of silencing slits for circular saw blade. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ethnographic records show that wooden tools played a pivotal role in the daily lives of hunter-gatherers including food procurement tools used in hunting (e.g., spears, throwing sticks) and gathering (e.g. digging sticks, bark peelers), as well as, domestic tools (e.g., handles, vessels). However, wood rarely survives in the archeological record, especially in Pleistocene contexts and knowledge of prehistoric hunter-gatherer lifeways is strongly biased by the survivorship of more resilient materials such as lithics and bones. Consequently, very few Paleolithic sites have produced wooden artifacts and among them, the site of Schöningen stands out due to its number and variety of wooden tools. The recovery of complete wooden spears and throwing sticks at this 300,000-y-old site (MIS 9) led to a paradigm shift in the hunter vs. scavenger debate. For the first time and almost 30 y after their discovery, this study introduces the complete wooden assemblage from Schöningen 13 II-4 known as the Spear Horizon. In total, 187 wooden artifacts could be identified from the Spear Horizon demonstrating a broad spectrum of wood-working techniques, including the splitting technique. A minimum of 20 hunting weapons is now recognized and two newly identified artifact types comprise 35 tools made on split woods, which were likely used in domestic activities. Schöningen 13 II-4 represents the largest Pleistocene wooden artifact assemblage worldwide and demonstrates the key role woodworking had in human evolution. Finally, our results considerably change the interpretation of the Pleistocene lakeshore site of Schöningen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present TimberTool (TTool v2.1.1), a software designed for woodworking tasks assisted by augmented reality (AR), emphasizing its essential function of the real-time localization of a tool head's poses within camera frames. The localization process, a fundamental aspect of AR-assisted tool operations, enables informed integration with contextual tracking, facilitating the computation of meaningful feedback for guiding users during tasks on the target object. In the context of timber construction, where object pose tracking has been predominantly explored in additive processes, TTool addresses a noticeable gap by focusing on subtractive tasks with manual tools. The proposed methodology utilizes a machine learning (ML) classifier to detect tool heads, offering users the capability to input a global pose and utilizing an automatic pose refiner for final pose detection and model alignment. Notably, TTool boasts adaptability through a customizable platform tailored to specific tool sets, and its open accessibility encourages widespread utilization. To assess the effectiveness of TTool in AR-assisted woodworking, we conducted a preliminary experimental campaign using a set of tools commonly employed in timber carpentry. The findings suggest that TTool can effectively contribute to AR-assisted woodworking tasks by detecting the six-degrees-of-freedom (6DoF) pose of tool heads to a satisfactory level, with a millimetric positional error of 3.9 ± 1 mm with possible large room for improvement and 1.19 ± 0.6° for what concerns the angular accuracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Architectus is the property of Oficyna Wydawnicza Politechniki Wroclawskiej and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Background: Exposure to wood dust can cause respiratory symptoms, like cough, phlegm, breathlessness, and chest pain, reduce lung function. Objective: The objective of the study was to assess the prevalence of respiratory symptoms and associated factors among woodwork workers in Bahir-Dar city, Ethiopia. Methods: A comparative cross-sectional study was employed among 229 exposed and 228 unexposed groups. Participants for the study were selected using simple random sampling technique. The chronic respiratory symptoms were assessed using a questionnaire adopted from the American Thoracic Society. The data was entered using Epi-Data version 4.6 and export to SPSS version 22 for analysis. Poisson regression, Multivariate linear regression and multivariable logistic regression analysis were used to identify factors associated with woodworkers, general population and in pooled analysis. Result: The prevalence of having at least one chronic respiratory symptom was higher among exposed group (59.4%) than unexposed group (18.0%) with PR = 3.03(95%CI: 2.45, 4.45). In woodworker; Not taking health and safety training(5.15,95%(CI:1.93–13.76),primary educational(3.85,95%,CI:(1.1,13.47), not using Mask(6.38, 95%CI:(2.69–15.76) & number of families(3.05,95%,CI:1.04–9.028), In general population; Number of family members(2.75, 95%CI:1.1–7.19)& lower monthly income (3.3, 95%CI: (1.49–7.4), and In pooled analysis; wood dust exposure status 14.36 95%, CI:(7.6–27.00),primary education(2.93,95%CI:1.24–6.92), number of families(3.46,95%CI:1.8–6.64), lower monthly income(2.13,95%CI:1.19–3.81), & smoking (6.65, 95%CI:1.19–36.9) were associated with respiratory symptom. Conclusion: Prevalence of respiratory symptoms was higher among exposed group than unexposed group. Reduced wood dust exposure status, Provision of occupational safety and health training, use of respiratory protective devices is recommended to reduce respiratory symptoms among woodwork workers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]