Team:SBS SH 112144/Human Practices

Human Practice Overview

The Human Practice part of our project is of great concern and can be divided into two major components: interaction with the public which would influence our experimental design as well as how our device would change the current social situation. The former component could be further categorized into five different areas: expert interviews, social research, safety device, public outreach, and collaboration. Through all these activities, we attempt to inform people of the cyanobacteria’s negative influence on environment as well as society. Meanwhile, we want to prove our product’s practical value and its applicability in the real aquatic environment. The public outreach is crucial to us, because it eventually shifts our focus from eradicating the cyanobacteria in the lakes to successfully degrading the salvaged cyanobacteria into usable commercial components. The our comprehensive design and achievements are presented in details later.

Integrated Human Practice

Field trip at Lake Taihu

Scientific research need empathy, and our team was shocked to learn through background research that due to the lack of regulation on factories dumping nitrogen and phosphorus waste into the water, the Taihu lake and its complex ecosystem has been threatened by cyanobacteria since the beginning of 21st century. Thus, we visited the Taihu Laboratory for Lake Ecosystem Research affiliated to Chinese Academy of Sciences to learn more about the background information on the current situation of cyanobacteria outbreak in China, governmental control, and practical ways to deal with them. The formal academic discussion with the researchers and the station supervisor was of great help. We learned that the current solutions could not eradicate cyanobacteria completely and backfire secondary problems such as leaving the salvaged cyanobacteria unprocessed. Comparatively, our approach of using the cyanophage lysozyme should be both cost-effective and environmental friendly. Later that day, we also collected water samples from Lake Taihu in order to gain more insights into the problem of cyanobacterial bloom.

Offline research

We designed the offline research as the preliminary investigation of a more detailed online research. Therefore, this research aims to provide us with a general idea about public’s view on cyanobacteria pollution in China. We went to central Wuxi, where the citizens have been suffering from cyanobacteria in the Taihu Lake, to conduct our offline research. We have received response from 91 questionnaires covering different genders and age groups. Based on analysis of these questionnaires, we were able to learn the public understanding of the cyanobacteria problem, such problem’s influence on people’s daily life, and public willingness to support our program.

The results and analysis are stated below :

1. About the age group

The effective number is 91 in total. Among all the interviewees, 28.5 percent of them are high school or primary school students; 31.9 percent of them study in college; and the rest 29.7 percent of them are already working.

2. To what degree are people aware of the cyanobacteria problem

The effective number is 91 in total. Among all these interviewees, 9 percent of them are well informed of the cyanobacteria problem; 68 percent of them are partially informed; 14 percent of them are not quite informed,; and the rest are not informed at all.

3. Whether the cyanobacteria in the Lake Taihu should be taken care of

The effective number is 91 in total. Among all these interviewees, 69 percent of them are for the treatment; 30 percent of them remain neutral; and only 1 percent is against the treatment.