Selective detection of microcracks under the surface of glass substrates by non-contact stress-induced light-scattering method with temperature variations

Demand for flexible electronics is increasing due to recent global movements related to IoT. In particular, the ultra-thin glass substrate can be bent, its use is expanding for various applications such as thin liquid crystal panels. On the other hand, fine-polishing techniques such as chemical mechanical polishing treatments, are important techniques in glass substrate manufacturing. However, these techniques may cause microcracks under the surface of glass substrates because they use mechanical friction. We propose a novel non-contact thermal stress-induced light-scattering method (N-SILSM) using a heating device for inspecting surfaces to detect polishing-induced microcracks. In this report, we carry out the selective detection of microcracks and tiny particles using a N-SILSM with temperature variation. Our results show that microcracks and tiny particles can be distinguished and measured by a N-SILSM utilizing temperature change, and that microcrack size can be estimated based on the change in light-scattering intensity.

The International Childbirth Initiative: An Applied Anthropologist’s Account of Developing Global Guidelines

This chapter describes my personal experiences as an applied anthropologist serving as the lead editor in the development of a set of international guidelines focused on improving quality of maternity care: the International Childbirth Initiative (ICI): 12 Steps to Safe and Respectful MotherBaby-Family Maternity Care (2018). The ICI’s purpose is to encourage global awareness and local implementation of the MotherBaby-Family Model of Care. This is a model based on women’s rights and humane, respectful, family-centered care. The ICI’s creation story is continuous with global movements to improve the quality of maternity care and with a deep history of birth activism by practitioners, public health advocates, and social scientists aimed at decreasing unnecessary medical intervention in childbirth. This narrative is widely relevant for understanding how to develop and implement global guidelines that can flexibly adapt to local contexts. The ICI was developed by the merging of the 2015 FIGO Guidelines to Mother-Baby Friendly Birthing Facilities with the pre-existing International MotherBaby Childbirth Initiative (IMBCI) in an intense and rewarding group process. The chapter discusses factors that contributed to the successful development of clear global guidelines for high-quality maternity care. These include attention to process, alignment with key values of the women’s health and midwifery movements, multilevel collaboration and networking around a clear vision, garnering input from many people with diverse voices and perspectives, and patience with and commitment to the tasks at hand.

Contagion and Psychiatric Disorders: The Social Epidemiology of Risk (Comment on “The Epidemic of Mental Disorders in Business”)

In their 2022 paper, Kensbock, Alkærsig, and Lomberg provide compelling evidence of an increased risk in treated depressive, anxiety, and stress-related disorders within workplaces, associated with the introduction of new hires who either have treated disorders themselves or are hired from workplaces with an increased prevalence of treated disorders. The authors interpret these findings as evidence of a “contagion” effect for psychiatric disorders, illustrative of workplace spread of disorder that may affect the mental health of employees. In this commentary, we contextualize these findings through psychiatric epidemiology. The evidence provided by Kensbock and colleagues is consistent with a long history of evidence in psychiatric and social epidemiology illustrating that many health outcomes are affected by those in our social networks and that psychiatric disorders, in particular, evidence spatial and temporal autocorrelation as well as social network spread that can be best conceptualized through well-known infectious disease principles. Thus, there is a large empirical literature that supports the findings of Kensbock, Alkærsig, and Lomberg. That said, the findings should not be overinterpreted; they fit some patterns of previous literature and known facts about psychiatric disorders, but not all. They also must be appropriately situated within the literature on workplace determinants of mental well-being more generally and, in particular, the global movements to situate the rights of workers with mental illness for employment protections and safe working conditions.

Real, Reel and the Anthropocene: Eco-trauma Testimonies in the Film Valiya Chirakulla Pakshikal

The paper attempts to read the Endosulfan disaster in Kerala as an instance of the Anthropocene wherein the unscientific use of a pesticide resulted in the persistent misery of a population and the ecology in which they struggle to survive. The suffering is further presented to a larger audience through the film Valiya Chirakulla Pakshikal (2015, Dir. Dr Biju) by assimilating the reel and the real to bear testimony to their struggles amidst the toxicity of the chemical. The film, as the paper argues, becomes a representative text in the eco-trauma genre that on the one hand displays the disaster while on the other offers a cultural resistance against the unchecked use of chemicals around us. The film situates the Endosulfan disaster amongst the global movements against the pesticides and emphasises the need of a healthy environment.

Paying for Our Periods: The Campaign to Tackle Period Poverty and End the Tampon Tax in the UK

Tampon tax and period poverty activist movements are growing in tandem worldwide. These movements are reshaping the way we think about menstruation and what governments can do to tackle period-based injustices. Through this Essay, two United Kingdom (UK) period activists will explore how these UK movements were erected, how they interact with the global movements, and how Brexit has impacted UK menstruation activism and law-making. Finally, they will look ahead to discuss what they believe the future of period activism might look like.

Language Relativity in Legacy Literature: A Systematic Review in Multiple Languages

Since the Olympic Agenda 2020, legacy has been widely used as a justification for hosting the Olympic Games, through which sustainable development can be achieved for both events and host cities. To date, no universal definition of legacy has been established, which presents challenges for legacy-related international knowledge transfer among host cities. To address this gap, a multilingual systematic review of the literature regarding the concept of legacy was conducted in French, Japanese, Chinese, and English. Using English literature as a baseline, points of convergence and divergence among the languages were identified. While all four languages value the concept of legacy as an important facet of mega-events, significant differences were found within each language. This finding highlights the importance of strategies that align different cultures when promoting sustainable development of some global movements such as the Olympic legacy. Sport management is replete with international topics, such as international events and sport for development, and each topic is studied simultaneously in several languages and with potentially differing frameworks and perspectives. Thus, literature reviews that examine the English literature, exclusively, are innately limited in scope. The development of partnerships and resources that facilitate cross-lingual and cross-cultural consultation and collaboration is an important research agenda. More research is needed on knowledge translation across languages.

Introduction to special issue: Learning assessments for sustainability? Exploring the interaction between two global movements

The aim of this special issue, “Learning Assessments for Sustainability?”, is to examine the interaction between the environmental and sustainability education (ESE) movement and the international large-scale assessments (ILSAs) movement. Both global educational movements emerged in the 1960s and their simultaneous work have affected each other since then. While the articles in this special issue highlight the potential benefits of ILSAs as a source of data for secondary analysis, they also demonstrate the limitations of ILSAs and their negative consequences to ESE. As such, we call for more research on the interaction between ESE and ILSAs and for a serious consideration of how test-based accountability practices might work against meaningful engagement with ESE. This introductory article includes three sections. The first section provides context about the movements. The second section presents an overview of the articles and alternative ways for reading them. The third section discusses lessons learned from the collection of articles. We conclude with a call for further research and reflection.

What makes a global movement? Analyzing the conditions for strong participation in the climate strike

The Fridays For Future movement and their global climate strikes put climate change on political agendas worldwide and created a new wave of climate activism. The emergence of a global movement is a rare and contingent phenomenon that promises insights for political sociology and globalization research. This study consists of a qualitative comparative analysis (QCA) of 17 democratic countries to analyze the conditions for strong mobilization of the third global climate strike. Four mechanisms are identified, showing that trust in environmental movements, the availability of resources through international nongovernmental organizations (INGOs) and information and communication technologies (ICT), and frame resonance are sufficient for explaining strong mobilization. These results illustrate that global movements depend on several equifinal mechanisms for mobilization on the nation-state level. Furthermore, the findings illustrate that the global features of a global movement are necessary but not sufficient for explaining its emergence.

Unveiling Mutation Effects on the Structural Dynamics of the Main Protease from SARS-CoV-2 with Hybrid Simulation Methods

In this article, we used a hybrid simulation method to sample the conformational space to characterize the structural dynamics and global motions of WT SARS-CoV-2 Mpro and 48 mutants, including several mutations that appear in P.1, B.1.1.7, B.1.351, B.1.525 and B.1.429+B.1.427 variants. Integrated Hybrid methods combining NMA and MD have been useful to study the correlation between the complex structural dynamics of macromolecules and their functioning mechanisms. Here, we applied this hybrid approach to elucidate the effects of mutation in the structural dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 Mpro, considering their flexibility, solvent accessible surface area analyses, global movements, and catalytic dyad distance. Furthermore, some mutants showed significant changes in their structural dynamics and conformation, which could lead to distinct functional properties.