Parental stress and working situation during the COVID-19 shutdown - Effects on children's skill development.

OBJECTIVE: This study examines whether parental emotional distress during the first pandemic-related school shutdown in 2020 in Germany affected the development of primary school students' mathematical skills and investigates changes in parents' working conditions as triggers of cascading stress processes. BACKGROUND: The Family Stress Model (FSM) explains the mechanisms that mediate between families' structural conditions and children's developmental outcomes. Foundational works for this approach focus on historic events that instigate rapid structural changes which, in turn, undermine families' economic situation. The economic losses trigger stress processes. Research on the COVID-19 pandemic reports heightened levels of parental stress and negative impacts on children's cognitive and socioemotional development. This study examines the role of parental emotional distress during the COVID-19 shutdown on children's cognitive development. Expanding on the classical FSM, we hypothesize that changes in parents' working situation, rather than economic changes, may have triggered family stress processes during the shutdown, as federal support largely cushioned economic cutbacks in Germany. METHOD: For the German National Educational Panel Study (NEPS), interviews were conducted with parents, and primary school students in Starting Cohort 1 were tested after the first shutdown in 2020. The database provides rich information from survey waves prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, allowing a longitudinal analysis of a sample of 1512 primary school students with ordinary least squares regression. RESULTS: Parents' emotional distress during the pandemic had a robust negative effect on students' mathematical skills, even when controlling for prior parenting stress. Changes in parents' working conditions also had an effect on children's test scores, and the negative effect of working from home on the test scores was mediated by parents' emotional distress. CONCLUSION: The COVID-19 pandemic was a historic event which, at least in Germany, challenged the mental health of many parents and, in turn, impaired the skill development of primary school students. We introduce the role of changes in working conditions as triggers of such processes.

Nature 4.0: A networked sensor system for integrated biodiversity monitoring.

Ecosystem functions and services are severely threatened by unprecedented global loss in biodiversity. To counteract these trends, it is essential to develop systems to monitor changes in biodiversity for planning, evaluating, and implementing conservation and mitigation actions. However, the implementation of monitoring systems suffers from a trade-off between grain (i.e., the level of detail), extent (i.e., the number of study sites), and temporal repetition. Here, we present an applied and realized networked sensor system for integrated biodiversity monitoring in the Nature 4.0 project as a solution to these challenges, which considers plants and animals not only as targets of investigation, but also as parts of the modular sensor network by carrying sensors. Our networked sensor system consists of three main closely interlinked components with a modular structure: sensors, data transmission, and data storage, which are integrated into pipelines for automated biodiversity monitoring. We present our own real-world examples of applications, share our experiences in operating them, and provide our collected open data. Our flexible, low-cost, and open-source solutions can be applied for monitoring individual and multiple terrestrial plants and animals as well as their interactions. Ultimately, our system can also be applied to area-wide ecosystem mapping tasks, thereby providing an exemplary cost-efficient and powerful solution for biodiversity monitoring. Building upon our experiences in the Nature 4.0 project, we identified ten key challenges that need to be addressed to better understand and counteract the ongoing loss of biodiversity using networked sensor systems. To tackle these challenges, interdisciplinary collaboration, additional research, and practical solutions are necessary to enhance the capability and applicability of networked sensor systems for researchers and practitioners, ultimately further helping to ensure the sustainable management of ecosystems and the provision of ecosystem services.

A Novel Plenoptic Camera-Based Measurement System for the Investigation into Flight and Combustion Behavior of Refuse-Derived Fuel Particles.

In the past several decades, refuse-derived fuels (RDFs) have been widely applied in industrial combustion processes, for instance, in cement production. Since RDF is composed of various waste fractions with complex shapes, its flight and combustion behaviors can be relatively complicated. In this paper, we present a novel plenoptic camera-based spatial measurement system that uses image processing approaches to determine the dwell time, the space-sliced velocity in the depth direction, and the ignition time of various applied RDF fractions based on the obtained images. The image processing approach follows the concept of tracking-by-detection and includes a novel combined detection method, a 2.5D multiple particle tracking algorithm, and a postprocessing framework to tackle the issues in the initial tracking results. The thereby obtained complete spatial fuel trajectories enable the analysis of the flight behaviors elaborated in the paper. The acquired particles' properties (duration, velocity, and ignition time) reversely prove the availability and applicability of the developed measurement system. The adequacy and accuracy of the proposed novel measurement system are validated by the experiments of detecting and tracking burning and nonburning fuel particles in a rotary kiln. This new measurement system and the provided experimental results can benefit a better understanding of the RDF's combustion for future research.

Carrying the Burden Into the Pandemic - Effects of Social Disparities on Elementary Students' Parents' Perception of Supporting Abilities and Emotional Stress During the COVID-19 Lockdown.

The COVID-19 pandemic has posed many challenges, especially for families. Both the public and the scientific community are currently discussing the extent to which school closings have worsened existing social differences, especially with regard to children's academic and socio-emotional development. At the same time, parents have had to manage childcare and home schooling alongside their jobs and personal burdens posed by the pandemic. Parents' possibilities for meeting these cognitive and emotional challenges might also depend on the different conditions in families. For this reason, the present paper investigates the structural and process characteristics of the family as well as children's and parents' psychological characteristics that predict how parents assess their ability to support their child's learning during homeschooling as well as parents' perceived emotional stress caused by school closure. The study analyses data of the Newborn Cohort Study of the German National Educational Panel Study. The two dependent variables (self-assessment of abilities, perceived stress) were measured during the COVID-19 pandemic after the first school closure in Germany, at a time when the children of this cohort were attending second grade. Besides a number of control variables (including the child's struggle with home schooling), families' structural characteristics [socioeconomic status (SES), education], process characteristics (home learning environment, HLE), parents' psychological characteristics (preceding psychological stress), and the child's psychological characteristics (self-regulation, school-related independence) from earlier waves were included as predictors. The results of structural equation models show that perceived stress was associated with structural factors and the preceding psychological stress of parents. Parents with higher preceding stress reported higher perceived stress. Interestingly, higher-educated parents also reported more stress than lower educated parents during the pandemic. The effect was the other way around for SES - parents with lower SES reported more stress than parents with higher SES. The self-reported abilities to support the learning of the child seemed to be mainly predicted by the parent's education as well as preceding psychological stress. To sum up, the results identify important aspects that determine how parents handle the challenges of the school closures. Especially, socially disadvantaged families carry their burden into the pandemic.

Kinetic modeling of rhamnolipid production by Pseudomonas aeruginosa PAO1 including cell density-dependent regulation.

The production of rhamnolipid biosurfactants by Pseudomonas aeruginosa is under complex control of a quorum sensing-dependent regulatory network. Due to a lack of understanding of the kinetics applicable to the process and relevant interrelations of variables, current processes for rhamnolipid production are based on heuristic approaches. To systematically establish a knowledge-based process for rhamnolipid production, a deeper understanding of the time-course and coupling of process variables is required. By combining reaction kinetics, stoichiometry, and experimental data, a process model for rhamnolipid production with P. aeruginosa PAO1 on sunflower oil was developed as a system of coupled ordinary differential equations (ODEs). In addition, cell density-based quorum sensing dynamics were included in the model. The model comprises a total of 36 parameters, 14 of which are yield coefficients and 7 of which are substrate affinity and inhibition constants. Of all 36 parameters, 30 were derived from dedicated experimental results, literature, and databases and 6 of them were used as fitting parameters. The model is able to describe data on biomass growth, substrates, and products obtained from a reference batch process and other validation scenarios. The model presented describes the time-course and interrelation of biomass, relevant substrates, and products on a process level while including a kinetic representation of cell density-dependent regulatory mechanisms.