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1. Everyday STEAM Objects as Integrative Boundary Objects

   Tsurusaki, B. ( January 2020 , The Interdisciplinarity of the Learning Sciences, 14th International Conference of the Learning Sciences (ICLS) 2020)

   Gresalfi, M. and (Ed.)

   As STEAM has gained traction in informal education settings, it is important to support educators in learning about and developing STEAM learning experiences. We investigated what STEAM means to informal educators and how it relates to their everyday lives and identities by examining a STEAM objects activity. We found three themes in how the participants talked about the significance of the STEAM objects they shared: connection to land, historicity, and agency of materials. The STEAM objects served as boundary objects that connected communities of practice, showing the integrative nature of art and STEM, as well as bridging important aspects of their lives and STEAM. We discuss the importance of recognizing and leveraging the multiplicities of meaning and ways of knowing. 

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2. Objects of Collaboration: Roles of Objects in Spanning Knowledge Boundaries in a Design Company

   Brubaker, E.R. ; Sheppard, S.D. ; Hinds, P.D. ; Yang, M.C. ( January 2022 , ASME International Design Engineering Technical Conferences)

   Engineering designers often span knowledge boundaries when developing complex systems but doing so poses challenges because members of different knowledge groups must bridge their language, cognitions, and “thought worlds” to effectively broker, resituate, and make use of each other’s ideas. Objects— ranging from prototypes to kanban boards to value stream maps—are frequently used in cross-functional design practice, but the outcomes associated with such objects appear varied and dependent not only the objects’ characteristics but on how, when, and by whom they are used. This paper describes a two-year inductive ethnographic study within a turbomachinery design company to understand how cross-functional design teams span their knowledge boundaries to advance their designs and design processes. We collected observations of 70 cross-functional meetings and 52 interviews across functional groups during the development of complex turbomachinery products. Our findings include three roles of objects of collaboration: routinizing cross- boundary interaction, translating information across boundaries, and motivating joint negotiation or discovery. We found two prominent outcomes—co-discovery of a design risk, opportunity, or workflow bottleneck and co-design of a joint integrated solution— that appeared to follow from the latter two roles, respectively. These findings are significant because they clarify the roles of objects in cross-boundary design work and suggest ways for designers to more effectively use objects to span knowledge boundaries. 

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3. The SQUALO project (Star formation in QUiescent And Luminous Objects) I: clump-fed accretion mechanism in high-mass star-forming objects

   https://doi.org/10.1093/mnras/stad272  

   Traficante, A. ; Jones, B. M. ; Avison, A. ; Fuller, G. A. ; Benedettini, M. ; Elia, D. ; Molinari, S. ; Peretto, N. ; Pezzuto, S. ; Pillai, T. ; et al ( January 2023 , Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society)

   The formation mechanism of the most massive stars is far from completely understood. It is still unclear if the formation is core-fed or clump-fed, i.e. if the process is an extension of what happens in low-mass stars, or if the process is more dynamical such as a continuous, multiscale accretion from the gas at parsec (or even larger) scales. In this context, we introduce the SQUALO project, an ALMA 1.3 and 3 mm survey designed to investigate the properties of 13 massive clumps selected at various evolutionary stages, with the common feature that they all show evidence for accretion at the clump scale. In this work, we present the results obtained from the 1.3 mm continuum data. Our observations identify 55 objects with masses in the range 0.4 ≤ M ≤ 309 M⊙, with evidence that the youngest clumps already present some degree of fragmentation. The data show that physical properties such as mass and surface density of the fragments and their parent clumps are tightly correlated. The minimum distance between fragments decreases with evolution, suggesting a dynamical scenario in which massive clumps first fragment under the influence of non-thermal motions driven by the competition between turbulence and gravity. With time gravitational collapse takes over and the fragments organize themselves into more thermally supported objects while continuing to accrete from their parent clump. Finally, one source does not fragment, suggesting that the support of other mechanisms (such as magnetic fields) is crucial only in specific star-forming regions.

    

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4. Fantastic Breaks: A Dataset of Paired 3D Scans of Real-World Broken Objects and Their Complete Counterparts

   https://doi.org/10.1109/CVPR52729.2023.00454  

   Lamb, Nikolas ; Palmer, Cameron ; Molloy, Benjamin ; Banerjee, Sean ; Banerjee, Natasha Kholgade ( June 2023 , IEEE)
5. Tilt Assembly: Algorithms for Micro-factories That Build Objects with Uniform External Forces

   https://doi.org/10.1007/s00453-018-0483-9  

   Becker, Aaron T. ; Fekete, Sándor P. ; Keldenich, Phillip ; Krupke, Dominik ; Rieck, Christian ; Scheffer, Christian ; Schmidt, Arne ( August 2018 , Algorithmica)

   We present algorithmic results for the parallel assembly of many micro-scale objects in two and three dimensions from tiny particles, which has been proposed in the context of programmable matter and self-assembly for building high-yield micro-factories. The underlying model has particles moving under the influence of uniform external forces until they hit an obstacle. Particles bond when forced together with another appropriate particle. Due to the physical and geometric constraints, not all shapes can be built in this manner; this gives rise to the Tilt Assembly Problem (TAP) of deciding constructibility. For simply-connected polyominoes P in 2D consisting of N unit-squares (“tiles”), we prove that TAP can be decided in 𝑂(𝑁log𝑁) time. For the optimization variant MaxTAP (in which the objective is to construct a subshape of maximum possible size), we show polyAPX-hardness: unless P = NP, MaxTAP cannot be approximated within a factor of Ω(𝑁13) ; for tree-shaped structures, we give an Ω(𝑁12) -approximation algorithm. For the efficiency of the assembly process itself, we show that any constructible shape allows pipelined assembly, which produces copies of P in O(1) amortized time, i.e., N copies of P in O(N) time steps. These considerations can be extended to three-dimensional objects: For the class of polycubes P we prove that it is NP-hard to decide whether it is possible to construct a path between two points of P; it is also NP-hard to decide constructibility of a polycube P. Moreover, it is expAPX-hard to maximize a sequentially constructible path from a given start point. 

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