Tag: space

  • How we designed a space where our students connect, collaborate, and flourish

    How we designed a space where our students connect, collaborate, and flourish

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    Our charter school, Westbrook Academy, has been serving middle and high school students in the South Los Angeles area for the past six years and stands as a beacon of opportunity for our community. With a student body comprising nearly 99 percent Black and Latinx individuals hailing from historically under-resourced communities, we confront the realities of poverty and the accompanying insecurities head-on.

    Despite the odds, our 400 students consistently demonstrate remarkable resilience and a profound capacity for excellence. Our institution is supported by generous donors and funding sources. Operated and managed by the education nonprofit LA Promise Fund, which provides students with academic and enrichment opportunities that support our mission to spark passion, empower leadership, and prepare them for their chosen college and career paths.

    At one point, our high school students were learning in a church because we didn’t have a traditional classroom set-up. We also lacked the equipment that a traditional high school might have. This changed when we moved into our forever home in South Gate, where an on-campus Empowerment Center serves as a modern, welcoming “student hub.”

    Designed and outfitted by MiEN and Meteor Education, the Empowerment Center is where kids go to hang out, collaborate, and/or participate in school club activities. The hub is also set up with two wellness rooms where students can go to debrief and disconnect from a long day or just the stresses of being a student. It’s there for the students’ use.

    Here are the steps we took to create a space that consistently makes jaws drop and impresses parents who never thought their children would have access to such a warm, welcoming communal space on campus:

    • Add some flexibility into the process. Our original goal was to open the Empowerment Center’s doors in time for the 2023-24 school year, but getting it done the right way would require a bit more time. Our partners were willing to listen to us in terms of what we wanted to create, but within the realistic timelines. That was really cool.
    • Acknowledge the financial limitations. We largely relied on fundraising for this project and knew that some things just weren’t going to be realistic. To other schools in similar situations, I’d recommend staying flexible enough to hit the timelines and get all of the bases covered while keeping student needs in mind. We can have all the bells and whistles, but at the end of the day, if the car runs, the car runs. We know we can always add a new paint job later.
    • Get the right partners onboard early. As we went through the steps of designing the Empowerment Center, we learned a lot about architecture, planning, and construction. Through it all, having the right partners in its corner helped the school achieve its goals within budget and on time. It was really great to have our design and furniture partners sharing their best practices and other insights with us. We knew what we wanted to do, and a lot of the ideas came from our families and students. We just needed them to show us how we could get those ideas as close to reality as possible.
    • Make it personal. Special features we wanted in our Empowerment Center included a huge, interactive flatscreen TV that students, teachers, and guest speakers use to interact and work together. There’s also a large selection of donated books, the latest technology tools, and artwork that was personally selected by an art curation team. They were able to secure artists from the LA community to create and share visuals that our students are really familiar with. For example, some of the artwork spotlights female empowerment (i.e., with photos of authors like Octavia Butler) and the importance of acknowledging indigenous people. Everything in the hub is meant to spark curiosity. 
    • Brace yourself for some jaw-dropping moments. At our ribbon-cutting ceremony last year, our parents’ jaws were on the floor. They just never thought these resources would be available to their kids. A lot of them grew with us being in the church and a co-located space, and then we asked them to trust us to deliver on our promise, and now we’re able to show that as the reward for supporting us. We feel really proud that our parents were just over the moon about it.

    Hitting it out of the park

    Reflecting on the process we put in place to get our modern student hub designed, built, and open for business, I can say that the end result is an engaging, collaborative space that can be used for hanging out, structured learning, or a little of both. I think we really hit the ball out of the park with this innovative space.

    Student, teacher, and family feedback on the Empowerment Center has been extremely positive. Everyone loves it, and students are always excited to come and spend time in the modern, comfortable space that’s equipped with the technology and tools they need to be able to learn and engage.

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  • Giving species the space they need

    Giving species the space they need

    In 1979, Patricia Majluf, then a biology student, started studying eared seals at San Juan. Two species coexist without competing for food on the peninsula: the South American fur seal (Arctocephalus australis) and sea lions (Otaria flavescens).

    A colony of South American fur seals resting at a beach. (Photo: Alfonso Silva-Santisteban)

    In Spanish, they are known as the “fine” and “common” sea lions (lobo fino y lobo chusco), because of their type of fur that led them to be hunted for clothing decades ago.

    Majluf is now one of the most respected marine biologists in the region, whose work led to the creation of a Punta San Juan Program. In 2009, the Peruvian government declared San Juan a natural protected area. Cárdenas arrived as Majluf’s student in 2004. Today, she is a professor at the Universidad Peruana Cayetano Heredia and directs the program.

    “You are the biologist behind the wall, you live and die there,” she said.

    A sea wall protects sea life.

    Kevin Farfán during a daily monitor round.

    Kevin Farfán during a daily monitor round. (Photo by Alfonso Silva-Santisteban)

    Kevin Farfán puts on his windbreaker, hangs up his binoculars and camera and begins his daily monitoring round at 6:30 a.m. He started as an intern seven years ago and now coordinates the station. He walks by San Juan’s 20 beaches, while Odeth Perez, who is on her way to an observation post, says hello from afar.

    All year round, at least two people at the station observe animal behavior, count species with drones and camera traps and monitor sea and air temperatures. Once a year, with the help of U.S. veterinarians, they capture and tag a sample of eared seals and penguins to attach transmitters and study their movements.

    “We have 40 years of data,” Cárdenas said.

    Since 2013, the team has crossed the wall separating the peninsula to connect with the residents of Marcona, a neighboring town founded in the 1950s after the discovery of an iron deposit.

    They began with guided tours. Since 2023, they have initiated a project called Natural Classrooms with students from local schools, serving a town with 15,000 inhabitants.

    Biologist Ximena Turcke is one of the guides. “It is important to reach the children, especially the younger ones,” Turcke said. On this day, she was leading a group of 30 students from Miguel Grau School to one of the viewpoints and later, to a neighboring beach for group work. “I’ve always liked people to identify with their place, wherever they go,” she said.

    Recovery and threats

    The most important thing to remember when walking in San Juan is not to disturb the animals. The eared seal breeding season starts in October and peaks between January and February.

    A group of 1,500 guanay cormorants arrived in October 2024. Before the avian flu in 2022, there were so many that they sometimes blocked the entrance to the team’s observation booth.

    Cárdenas said that there are few places where so many different animals with breeding colonies come together and that’s why the virus spread so quickly.

    Avian influenza AH5N1 is a subtype that affects birds and mammals, including humans in rare cases. The virus emerged in China in 1996 and has caused sporadic outbreaks. However, in 2020, a more transmissible variant of the virus passed from poultry to wild birds and began migrating worldwide. It reached North America in 2021 and South America in 2022. The flu spread from Peru to Chile, Argentina and Uruguay, affecting sea birds and mammals. There were no human cases.

    When Cárdenas arrived in San Juan, wildlife was recovering from the 1998 El Niño phenomenon and she saw how animals adapt to cycles when food is scarce. That’s why she remains optimistic about the repopulation of San Juan. But it will take several years and human activity must not alter the conditions for recovery.

    “There’s an incredible resilience,” she said.

    Limits on fishing

    One of the main threats is fishing. Industrial fishing takes almost 9 out of 10 anchovetas from the Peruvian sea to make fishmeal. Four tons of anchoveta produce one ton of fishmeal, which is mainly used to feed salmon, pigs or chickens in industrial farms around the world.

    Year after year, there are tensions between the fishing industry, the state and environmentalists over fishing quotas or minimum sizes of anchovies that can be caught. The Institute of the Peruvian Sea, the national scientific organization concerning the sustainability of marine resources, is part of the Ministry of Production.

    The conflict of interest is evident for Cárdenas, whose team has observed, by analyzing the feces of eared seals, that these are feeding more and more on smaller fish with less nutritional value. They are consuming what ecologists have called marine ecosystems’ junk food.

    In 2023, the state suspended the first industrial fishing season due to El Niño but reinstated the second one. It was too soon for Cárdenas and Farfán. They oppose the industry’s approach of expanding fishing almost indefinitely without consequences. “There have been no lessons learned from all this,” Cárdenas said. “It’s when these things happen that conservancy is most urgent.”

    Three questions to consider:

    1. How does fishing affect sea life?

    2. How are researchers working to help the sea life at Punta San Juan?

    3. What, if anything, can you do to help wildlife near you?

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  • Making space for commuter students

    Making space for commuter students

    Residential living at university has been prevalent since the 15th Century, originally as a way to instil discipline and promote a moral education amongst students.

    University College London’s founding in the 1820s as the first non-residential UK university disrupted this tradition. However, debates around the correct model of living have continued ever since.

    The Robbins Report in 1963 described the “educational and social advantages of living away from home” and it was often understood that the desire to live in halls was to emulate the “Oxbridge ideal.”

    The rise of 1960s plate glass universities, with new on-campus halls led the way for the expected “way of being” for university students.

    As recently as 2019 the Augar Report stated “leaving home to go to university is a deep-seated part of the English culture.”

    Clearly not much has changed.

    Across my time as a student and working in higher education, it was always apparent that space is crucial to the student experience for commuter students where they don’t have a residence on campus.

    Whilst the debate around commuter students has shifted in recent years with the introduction of commuters into the Equality of Opportunity Risk Register, more holistic support is needed.

    In fact, making space for commuter students is not just about their teaching and learning but it’s also about accommodating their extracurriculars and social lives.

    As rising numbers of commuter students challenge the historical ideas of what students should look like, how can institutions make space for commuters on campus?

    The rest of the student experience

    Arriving at university, it became clear I was one of two commuter students in my cohort of around 200 and that this was going to create problems for me.

    The extra curricular student experience was defined by student society socials and trips, socialising in halls and consuming alcohol on nights out.

    It was awkward when the first question I’d always get asked in first year was “what halls are you in?”

    Skip forward to my final year dissertation, I investigated the barriers to social engagement for commuter students at Leeds University.

    My research findings from six interviews with current commuter students found participation in social activities was difficult for many for financial, transport, religious and other reasons.

    We respectively think a lot about supporting commuter students’ experience of teaching and learning on and off campus but the student experience isn’t just limited to the classroom.

    Issues included last trains home being too early, spaces of engagement centred around halls, hidden costs to participate such as additional meals or transport and hygiene barriers (sleeping on sofas and not having their toiletries).

    Commuter students have often been invisible in the way institutions treated them, and we struggled to find each other due to the stigma, with constant questioning by peers “don’t you feel like you’re missing out?”

    Rush hour socials

    As a student, finding people to support the creation of the Leeds University Commuters’ Society was challenging.

    From my own experiences of imposter syndrome and othering, it was essential to create a society to address the needs of this group and advocate for further inclusion.

    I founded the Leeds University Commuters’ Society to find others with shared experiences, to share travel tips, support wellbeing and hold “rush hour” socials.

    Through my dissertation research, I also explored commuter students’ sense of belonging. I found commuter students who worked for the university in part-time roles, such as ambassadors, had a stronger sense of belonging and pride. The society also boosted feelings of belonging for the students, and some had found lifelong friends on their course who they didn’t realise were commuter students.

    Finding space

    The pandemic shifted working patterns for many staff, plus the opening of a new building on campus freed up space. The society campaigned for a common lounge for commuter students.

    The Student Ideas Fund granted us £5000 to create the lounge, originally on a two-year pilot basis. The lounge contains a refurbished social area with a games table, TV, kitchen, lockers and private study space.

    The kitchen offers students the opportunity to save money on lunches and evening meals, as students previously relied on eating out or consuming to feel comfortable in a cafe.

    The lounge is now a permanent feature of campus and is visited on campus tours and mentioned at open days.

    Where there’s space in residential halls, the University of Leeds team are consulting with commuter students about opening a commuter hotel, offering stays between 1-14 nights, at budget prices.

    Commuter students would then be able to participate in a range of activities like attending society socials, concerts, theatre, sports events, and staying the night before a morning exam.

    By giving commuter students a space, either a common room, lounge or even a temporary bed for a night in a hotel, it gives them autonomy and agency to fully participate in the wider student experience.

    They can participate in the things that make university enriching without being at a disadvantage.

    The narrative around commuter students has shifted significantly since the Robbins and Augar report with commuters being included in more Access and Participation Plans in England. However, cost of living pressures are pushing even more students to consider commuting and more still needs to be done.

    Making spaces on campus for commuter students is one way of enabling them to have a more enriching and wide-reaching student experience.

    Institutions could find spare spaces to give to commuter societies, advertise them as commuter lounges or utilise spare rooms to offer short stays for commuter students. Above all, listening to what commuter students want is the best way of including and further supporting this group.

     

    This blog is part of our series on commuter students. Click here to see the other articles in the series.

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  • Article 45 Defining Maxwells Equation in terms of the physical properties of space time

    Article 45 Defining Maxwells Equation in terms of the physical properties of space time

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    Einstein’s Explanation of the Unexplainable

    In Maxwell’s mathematical formulation of electromagnetism, he defined light as a propagating electromagnetic wave created by the interaction of its electric and magnetic fields

    While Einstein in his General Theory of Relativity defined the forces associated with gravity in terms of a geometric curvature or spatial displacement in space-time caused by its energy density.

    Additionally, he showed that it was directed along the radius of the curvature in the two-dimensional plane that was parallel to it.

    Therefore, to explain how Maxwells equations can be defined in terms of a space-time environment one must show how both the observable and mathematical properties of an electromagnetic: such as why its wave properties are created by the interaction of its electric and magnetic fields and why polarized light has a perpendicular orientation in terms of the geometry of space time.

    Additionally, one must also show why its electrical and magnetic components are in phase, it’s the only form of energy that can move at the speed of light along with the defining the reason why it always appears as a photon when observed or interacts with its environment in terms of that same geometry.

    As was just mentioned gravity’s force vector is along the radius of one of dimensional plains of three-dimensional space.  However, that does not mean the other two plains of three-dimensional space cannot contribute to energy content of space.

    The fact that light is polarized supports that assumption because it allows one to understand the mechanism responsible for its perpendicular orientation in terms light waves moving on the different dimensional plains that are perpendicular to each other.

    However, one ALSO allow one to explain both the observations and Maxwell equations in terms of the dimensional prosperity of space if one assumes the electrical and magnetic are components of light are propagated by spatial displacements created by an energy wave moving on the surface of one of those two-dimensional plains.

    (This assumption is supported by Einstein suggestion that spatial displacements in one of the three-dimensional plains of three-dimensional space is responsible for gravitational energy.

    One can understand the mechanism responsible by using the analogy of how a wave on the two-dimensional surface of water causes a point on that surface to become displaced or rise above or below the equilibrium point that existed before the wave was present.

    The science of wave mechanics tells us a force would be developed by those displacements which would result in the elevated and depressed portions of the water moving towards or becoming “attracted” to each other and the surface of the water.

    Similarly, an energy wave on the “surface” on one of the two spatial dimensions that are perpendicular to the axis of gravitational forces would cause a point on that “surface” to become displaced or rise above and below the equilibrium point that existed before the wave was present.

    Therefore, classical wave mechanics, if extrapolated to the properties of two of the three spatial dimensions of our universe that are perpendicular the one responsible for gravity tells us a force will be developed by the differential displacements of energy wave which will result in its elevated and depressed portions moving towards or become “attracted” to each other as the wave moves through space.

    This would define the causality of the attractive electrical fields associated with an electromagnetic wave in terms of a force caused by the alternating displacements of a wave moving with respect to time on a “surface” of the two spatial dimensions which are perpendicular to the axis of gravitational forces.

    However, it also provides a classical mechanism for understanding why similar electrical fields repel each other.  This is because observations of waves show there is a direct relationship between the magnitude of a displacement in its “surface” to the magnitude of the force resisting that displacement.

    Similarly, the magnitude of multiple displacements in a “surface” of a two-dimensional plain in space-time will be greater than that caused by a single one.  Therefore, they will repel each other because the magnitude of the force resisting the displacement will be greater than it would be for a single one.

    One can also derive the magnetic component of an electromagnetic wave in terms of the horizontal force developed along the axis that is perpendicular to the displacement caused by its peaks and troughs associated with the electric fields.

    This would be analogous to how the perpendicular displacement of a mountain generates a horizontal force on the surface of the earth, which pulls matter horizontally towards the apex of that displacement.

    This also explain why the electrical and magnetic fields of an electromagnetic wave are in phase or maximum at the same time in terms of the geometric properties of space time defined by Einstein

    However, it also provides an explanation for why electromagnetic waves can transmit energy through space at the speed of light.

    The observations and the science of wave mechanics tell us waves move energy through water, causing it to move in a circular motion therefore it does not actually travel with waves.  In other words, waves transmit energy, not water, across the ocean and if not obstructed by anything, they have the potential to travel across an entire ocean basin.

    Similarly, an electromagnetic wave will cause the geometry of space time to move in a circular motion and therefore the geometric components of space Einstein associated with mass do not move with respect to its velocity vector.  Additionally, if not obstructed by anything, they have the potential to travel across an entire universe to the velocity of light.

    As was just shown the speed of a wave on water is defined in part by the rate at which its particles interact.

    Therefore, the speed of light would depend on the rate at which the electrical and magnetic components interact.

    Therefore, its velocity is constant in free space with no obstacles to its motion because the rate at which its electrical and magnetic components interact is constant.

    However, to understand how and why an electromagnetic wave evolves into photon one must connect its evolution to that environment.

    One can accomplish this by using the science of wave mechanics and the properties of space-time as define by Einstein.

    For example, an electromagnetic wave is observed to move continuously through space and time unless it is prevented from doing so by someone or something interacting with it.  This would result in its energy being confined to three-dimensional space.  The science of wave mechanics tells us the three-dimensional “walls” of this confinement will result in its energy being reflected back on itself thereby creating a resonant or standing wave in three-dimensional space.  This would cause its wave energy to be concentrated at the point in space were a particle would be found.

    Additionally, wave mechanics also tells us the energy of a resonant system, such as a standing wave can only take on the discrete or quantized values associated with its fundamental or a harmonic of its fundamental frequency.

    This explains why an electromagnetic wave if it is prevented from moving through space-time either by being observed or encountering an object is reduced or “Collapses” to a form a standing wave that would define the quantized energy Quantum Mechanics associates with a particle.

    However, this also provides a Classical mechanism in terms of Einstein theories for defining one of the core principals Quantum Mechanics in that when field properties light and all other forms of energy are prevented from moving through space either by being observed or encountering an object that energy will become quantized in the form of a particle.

    This shows how one can define all of the mathematical of Maxwells equation in terms of the physical properties of space time

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