4,936 research outputs found

    Urbanised forested landscape: Urbanisation, timber extraction and forest care on the Vișeu Valley, northern Romania

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    By looking at urbanisation processes from the vantage point of the forest, and the ways in which it both constitutes our living space while having been separated from the bounded space of the urban in modern history, the thesis asks: How can we (re)imagine urbanisation beyond the limits of the urban? How can a feminine line of thinking engage with the forest beyond the capitalist-colonial paradigm and its extractive project? and How can we “think with care” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) towards the forest as an inhabitant of our common world, instead of perpetuating the image of the forest as a space outside the delimited boundaries of the city? Through a case study research, introducing the Vișeu Valley in northern Romania as both a site engaged in the circulation of the global timber flow, a part of what Brenner and Schmid (2014) name “planetary urbanisation”, where the extractive logging operations beginning in the late XVIIIth century have constructed it as an extractive landscape, and a more than human landscape inhabited by a multitude of beings (animal, plant, and human) the thesis argues towards the importance of forest care and indigenous knowledge in landscape management understood as a trans-generational transmission of knowledge, that is interdependent with the persistence of the landscape as such. Having a trans-scalar approach, the thesis investigates the ways in which the extractive projects of the capitalist-colonial paradigm have and still are shaping forested landscapes across the globe in order to situate the case as part of a planetary forest landscape and the contemporary debates it is engaged in. By engaging with emerging paradigms within the fields of plant communication, forestry, legal scholarship and landscape urbanism that present trees and forests as intelligent beings, and look at urbanisation as a way of inhabiting the landscape in both indigenous and modern cultures, the thesis argues towards viewing forested landscapes as more than human living spaces. Thinking urbanisation through the case of the Vișeu Valley’s urbanised forested landscape, the thesis aligns with alternate ways of viewing urbanisation as co-habitation with more than human beings, particularly those emerging from interdisciplinary research in the Amazon river basin (Tavares 2017, Heckenberger 2012) and, in light of emerging discourses on the rights of nature, proposes an expanded concept of planetary citizenship, to include non-human personhood

    Interactive visualizations of unstructured oceanographic data

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    The newly founded company Oceanbox is creating a novel oceanographic forecasting system to provide oceanography as a service. These services use mathematical models that generate large hydrodynamic data sets as unstructured triangular grids with high-resolution model areas. Oceanbox makes the model results accessible in a web application. New visualizations are needed to accommodate land-masking and large data volumes. In this thesis, we propose using a k-d tree to spatially partition unstructured triangular grids to provide the look-up times needed for interactive visualizations. A k-d tree is implemented in F# called FsKDTree. This thesis also describes the implementation of dynamic tiling map layers to visualize current barbs, scalar fields, and particle streams. The current barb layer queries data from the data server with the help of the k-d tree and displays it in the browser. Scalar fields and particle streams are implemented using WebGL, which enables the rendering of triangular grids. Stream particle visualization effects are implemented as velocity advection computed on the GPU with textures. The new visualizations are used in Oceanbox's production systems, and spatial indexing has been integrated into Oceanbox's archive retrieval system. FsKDTree improves tree creation times by up to 4x over the C# equivalent and improves search times by up to 13x compared to the .NET C# implementation. Finally, the largest model areas can be viewed with current barbs, scalar fields, and particle stream visualizations at 60 FPS, even for the largest model areas provided by the service

    Endogenous measures for contextualising large-scale social phenomena: a corpus-based method for mediated public discourse

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    This work presents an interdisciplinary methodology for developing endogenous measures of group membership through analysis of pervasive linguistic patterns in public discourse. Focusing on political discourse, this work critiques the conventional approach to the study of political participation, which is premised on decontextualised, exogenous measures to characterise groups. Considering the theoretical and empirical weaknesses of decontextualised approaches to large-scale social phenomena, this work suggests that contextualisation using endogenous measures might provide a complementary perspective to mitigate such weaknesses. This work develops a sociomaterial perspective on political participation in mediated discourse as affiliatory action performed through language. While the affiliatory function of language is often performed consciously (such as statements of identity), this work is concerned with unconscious features (such as patterns in lexis and grammar). This work argues that pervasive patterns in such features that emerge through socialisation are resistant to change and manipulation, and thus might serve as endogenous measures of sociopolitical contexts, and thus of groups. In terms of method, the work takes a corpus-based approach to the analysis of data from the Twitter messaging service whereby patterns in users’ speech are examined statistically in order to trace potential community membership. The method is applied in the US state of Michigan during the second half of 2018—6 November having been the date of midterm (i.e. non-Presidential) elections in the United States. The corpus is assembled from the original posts of 5,889 users, who are nominally geolocalised to 417 municipalities. These users are clustered according to pervasive language features. Comparing the linguistic clusters according to the municipalities they represent finds that there are regular sociodemographic differentials across clusters. This is understood as an indication of social structure, suggesting that endogenous measures derived from pervasive patterns in language may indeed offer a complementary, contextualised perspective on large-scale social phenomena

    Acoustic modelling, data augmentation and feature extraction for in-pipe machine learning applications

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    Gathering measurements from infrastructure, private premises, and harsh environments can be difficult and expensive. From this perspective, the development of new machine learning algorithms is strongly affected by the availability of training and test data. We focus on audio archives for in-pipe events. Although several examples of pipe-related applications can be found in the literature, datasets of audio/vibration recordings are much scarcer, and the only references found relate to leakage detection and characterisation. Therefore, this work proposes a methodology to relieve the burden of data collection for acoustic events in deployed pipes. The aim is to maximise the yield of small sets of real recordings and demonstrate how to extract effective features for machine learning. The methodology developed requires the preliminary creation of a soundbank of audio samples gathered with simple weak annotations. For practical reasons, the case study is given by a range of appliances, fittings, and fixtures connected to pipes in domestic environments. The source recordings are low-reverberated audio signals enhanced through a bespoke spectral filter and containing the desired audio fingerprints. The soundbank is then processed to create an arbitrary number of synthetic augmented observations. The data augmentation improves the quality and the quantity of the metadata and automatically creates strong and accurate annotations that are both machine and human-readable. Besides, the implemented processing chain allows precise control of properties such as signal-to-noise ratio, duration of the events, and the number of overlapping events. The inter-class variability is expanded by recombining source audio blocks and adding simulated artificial reverberation obtained through an acoustic model developed for the purpose. Finally, the dataset is synthesised to guarantee separability and balance. A few signal representations are optimised to maximise the classification performance, and the results are reported as a benchmark for future developments. The contribution to the existing knowledge concerns several aspects of the processing chain implemented. A novel quasi-analytic acoustic model is introduced to simulate in-pipe reverberations, adopting a three-layer architecture particularly convenient for batch processing. The first layer includes two algorithms: one for the numerical calculation of the axial wavenumbers and one for the separation of the modes. The latter, in particular, provides a workaround for a problem not explicitly treated in the literature and related to the modal non-orthogonality given by the solid-liquid interface in the analysed domain. A set of results for different waveguides is reported to compare the dispersive behaviour against different mechanical configurations. Two more novel solutions are also included in the second layer of the model and concern the integration of the acoustic sources. Specifically, the amplitudes of the non-orthogonal modal potentials are obtained using either a distance minimisation objective function or by solving an analytical decoupling problem. In both cases, results show that sources sufficiently smooth can be approximated with a limited number of modes keeping the error below 1%. The last layer proposes a bespoke approach for the integration of the acoustic model into the synthesiser as a reverberation simulator. Additional elements of novelty relate to the other blocks of the audio synthesiser. The statistical spectral filter, for instance, is a batch-processing solution for the attenuation of the background noise of the source recordings. The signal-to-noise ratio analysis for both moderate and high noise levels indicates a clear improvement of several decibels against the closest filter example in the literature. The recombination of the audio blocks and the system of fully tracked annotations are also novel extensions of similar approaches recently adopted in other contexts. Moreover, a bespoke synthesis strategy is proposed to guarantee separable and balanced datasets. The last contribution concerns the extraction of convenient sets of audio features. Elements of novelty are introduced for the optimisation of the filter banks of the mel-frequency cepstral coefficients and the scattering wavelet transform. In particular, compared to the respective standard definitions, the average F-score performance of the optimised features is roughly 6% higher in the first case and 2.5% higher for the latter. Finally, the soundbank, the synthetic dataset, and the fundamental blocks of the software library developed are publicly available for further research

    Implementing Health Impact Assessment as a Required Component of Government Policymaking: A Multi-Level Exploration of the Determinants of Healthy Public Policy

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    It is widely understood that the public policies of ‘non-health’ government sectors have greater impacts on population health than those of the traditional healthcare realm. Health Impact Assessment (HIA) is a decision support tool that identifies and promotes the health benefits of policies while also mitigating their unintended negative consequences. Despite numerous calls to do so, the Ontario government has yet to implement HIA as a required component of policy development. This dissertation therefore sought to identify the contexts and factors that may both enable and impede HIA use at the sub-national (i.e., provincial, territorial, or state) government level. The three integrated articles of this dissertation provide insights into specific aspects of the policy process as they relate to HIA. Chapter one details a case study of purposive information-seeking among public servants within Ontario’s Ministry of Education (MOE). Situated within Ontario’s Ministry of Health (MOH), chapter two presents a case study of policy collaboration between health and ‘non-health’ ministries. Finally, chapter three details a framework analysis of the political factors supporting health impact tool use in two sub-national jurisdictions – namely, QuĂ©bec and South Australia. MOE respondents (N=9) identified four components of policymaking ‘due diligence’, including evidence retrieval, consultation and collaboration, referencing, and risk analysis. As prospective HIA users, they also confirmed that information is not routinely sought to mitigate the potential negative health impacts of education-based policies. MOH respondents (N=8) identified the bureaucratic hierarchy as the brokering mechanism for inter-ministerial policy development. As prospective HIA stewards, they also confirmed that the ministry does not proactively flag the potential negative health impacts of non-health sector policies. Finally, ‘lessons learned’ from case articles specific to QuĂ©bec (n=12) and South Australia (n=17) identified the political factors supporting tool use at different stages of the policy cycle, including agenda setting (‘policy elites’ and ‘political culture’), implementation (‘jurisdiction’), and sustained implementation (‘institutional power’). This work provides important insights into ‘real life’ policymaking. By highlighting existing facilitators of and barriers to HIA use, the findings offer a useful starting point from which proponents may tailor context-specific strategies to sustainably implement HIA at the sub-national government level

    The Future of Work and Digital Skills

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    The theme for the events was "The Future of Work and Digital Skills". The 4IR caused a hollowing out of middle-income jobs (Frey & Osborne, 2017) but COVID-19 exposed the digital gap as survival depended mainly on digital infrastructure and connectivity. Almost overnight, organizations that had not invested in a digital strategy suddenly realized the need for such a strategy and the associated digital skills. The effects have been profound for those who struggled to adapt, while those who stepped up have reaped quite the reward.Therefore, there are no longer certainties about what the world will look like in a few years from now. However, there are certain ways to anticipate the changes that are occurring and plan on how to continually adapt to an increasingly changing world. Certain jobs will soon be lost and will not come back; other new jobs will however be created. Using data science and other predictive sciences, it is possible to anticipate, to the extent possible, the rate at which certain jobs will be replaced and new jobs created in different industries. Accordingly, the collocated events sought to bring together government, international organizations, academia, industry, organized labour and civil society to deliberate on how these changes are occurring in South Africa, how fast they are occurring and what needs to change in order to prepare society for the changes.Deutsche Gesellschaft fĂŒr Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) British High Commission (BHC)School of Computin

    Photography and Aesthetics: a critical study on visual and textual narratives in the lifework of Sergio LarraĂ­n and its impact in 20th century Europe and Latin America

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    The main focus of this study is a theoretical exploration of critical approaches applicable to the work of the Chilean photographer Sergio LarraĂ­n (1931-2012). It presents analytical tools to contextualise and understand the importance and impact of his work in photographic studies and his portrayal of twentieth-century Latin American and European culture. It inspects in depth a large portion of his photo work, which is still only partially published and mostly reduced to his "active" period as a photojournalist, aside from the personal photographic exploration of his early and late career (C. Mena). This extended material creates a broader scope for understanding his photographs and him as a canonical photographer. This study analyses the photographer's trajectory as discourses of recollection of historical memory in time (Mauad) to trace LarraĂ­n's collective memory associated with his visual production. Such analysis helps decode his visual imagery and his projection and impact on the European and Latin American culture. This strategy helps solve a two fold problem: firstly, it generates an interpretive consistency to understand the Chilean's photographic practice; secondly, it explores the power of images as an aesthetic experience in the installation of nationalist ideologies and the creation of imaginaries (B. Anderson 163)

    Conscience and Consciousness: British Theatre and Human Rights.

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    This research project investigates a paradigm of human rights theatre. Through the lens of performance and theatre-making, this thesis explores how we came to represent, speak about, discuss, and own human rights in Britain. My framework of ‘human rights theatre’ proposes three distinctive features: firstly, such works dramatise real-world issues and highlights the role of the state in endangering its citizens; secondly, ethical ruptures are encountered within and without the drama, and finally, these performances characteristically aspire to produce an activist effect on the collective behaviours of the audience. This thesis interrogates the strategies theatre-makers use to articulate human rights concerns or to animate human rights intent. The selected case-studies for this investigation are ice&fire’s testimonial project, Actors for Human Rights; Badac Theatre; Jonathan Holmes’ work as director of Jericho House; Cardboard Citizens’ youth participation programme, ACT NOW; and Tony Cealy’s Black Men’s Consortium. Deliberately selecting companies and performance events that have received limited critical attention, my methodology constellates case-studies through original interviews, durational observation of creative working methods and proximate descriptions of practice. The thesis is interested in the experience of coming to ‘consciousness’ through human rights theatre, an awakening to the impacts of rights infringements and rights claiming. I explore consciousness as a processual, procedural, and durational happening in these performance events. I explore the ‘éffect’ of activist art and examine the ways in which makers of human rights theatre aim to amplify both affective and effective qualities in their work. My thesis also considers the articulation of activist purpose and the campaigning intent of the selected theatre-makers and explores how their activism is animated in their productions. Through the rich seam of discussion generated by the identification and exploration of the traits of a distinctive human rights theatre, I affirm the generative value of this typological enquiry
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