6,805 research outputs found

    A Decision Support System for Economic Viability and Environmental Impact Assessment of Vertical Farms

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    Vertical farming (VF) is the practice of growing crops or animals using the vertical dimension via multi-tier racks or vertically inclined surfaces. In this thesis, I focus on the emerging industry of plant-specific VF. Vertical plant farming (VPF) is a promising and relatively novel practice that can be conducted in buildings with environmental control and artificial lighting. However, the nascent sector has experienced challenges in economic viability, standardisation, and environmental sustainability. Practitioners and academics call for a comprehensive financial analysis of VPF, but efforts are stifled by a lack of valid and available data. A review of economic estimation and horticultural software identifies a need for a decision support system (DSS) that facilitates risk-empowered business planning for vertical farmers. This thesis proposes an open-source DSS framework to evaluate business sustainability through financial risk and environmental impact assessments. Data from the literature, alongside lessons learned from industry practitioners, would be centralised in the proposed DSS using imprecise data techniques. These techniques have been applied in engineering but are seldom used in financial forecasting. This could benefit complex sectors which only have scarce data to predict business viability. To begin the execution of the DSS framework, VPF practitioners were interviewed using a mixed-methods approach. Learnings from over 19 shuttered and operational VPF projects provide insights into the barriers inhibiting scalability and identifying risks to form a risk taxonomy. Labour was the most commonly reported top challenge. Therefore, research was conducted to explore lean principles to improve productivity. A probabilistic model representing a spectrum of variables and their associated uncertainty was built according to the DSS framework to evaluate the financial risk for VF projects. This enabled flexible computation without precise production or financial data to improve economic estimation accuracy. The model assessed two VPF cases (one in the UK and another in Japan), demonstrating the first risk and uncertainty quantification of VPF business models in the literature. The results highlighted measures to improve economic viability and the viability of the UK and Japan case. The environmental impact assessment model was developed, allowing VPF operators to evaluate their carbon footprint compared to traditional agriculture using life-cycle assessment. I explore strategies for net-zero carbon production through sensitivity analysis. Renewable energies, especially solar, geothermal, and tidal power, show promise for reducing the carbon emissions of indoor VPF. Results show that renewably-powered VPF can reduce carbon emissions compared to field-based agriculture when considering the land-use change. The drivers for DSS adoption have been researched, showing a pathway of compliance and design thinking to overcome the ‘problem of implementation’ and enable commercialisation. Further work is suggested to standardise VF equipment, collect benchmarking data, and characterise risks. This work will reduce risk and uncertainty and accelerate the sector’s emergence

    Unlocking the potential for thermal energy storage in the UK

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    Rapid and deep energy system decarbonisation is essential to a safe future. Thermal energy storage may hold the key to significant carbon reduction of the heating, cooling and electricity sectors, but the UK remains largely locked in to a fossil-fuel based heating regime. Global urbanisation trends mean cities are crucial to the net-zero transition. This thesis provides a sociotechnical analysis of current and future thermal storage deployment, recognising that fundamental change is complex and involves individuals and companies, supply chains, infrastructures, markets, policy and regulation, norms and traditions. I explore this through the overarching research question: How can cities unlock the potential for thermal energy storage to support the UK’s net-zero transition? The work is presented through three empirical chapters. A pilot study used a survey, thematic analysis, and pre-existing sociotechnical frameworks to explore the current state of UK thermal storage deployment and how sociotechnical characteristics are shaping current and future deployment prospects. A case study of a particular storage approach known as geoexchange analyses the results of interviews with geoexchange practitioners using sociotechnical frameworks, and proposes a new critical success factors framework. Finally, a comparative case study of two UK cities explores the specific role of local authorities to use powers at their disposal within a common planning framework to support the deployment of urban shared ground heat exchange in residential and mixed-use developments. Based on this study, a framework for local policy, support and enforcement activities is proposed. Applied contributions are provided through new knowledge on sociotechnical factors shaping the prospects for TES to support the net-zero transition, the first sociotechnical analysis of UK geoexchange deployment, and policy and practice proposals to support city-based shared ground heat exchange. Theory is advanced through application, testing and development of several existing frameworks for understanding sociotechnical change. Based on empirical evidence, two novel frameworks are proposed to support deployment of geoexchange and shared ground heat exchange

    Science and corporeal religion: a feminist materialist reconsideration of gender/sex diversity in religiosity

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    This dissertation develops a feminist materialist interpretation of the role the neuroendocrine system plays in the development of gender/sex differences in religion. Data emerging from psychology, sociology, and cognitive science have continually indicated that women are more religious than men, in various senses of those contested terms, but the factors contributing to these findings are little understood and disciplinary perspectives are often unhelpfully siloed. Previous scholarship has tended to highlight socio-cultural factors while ignoring biological factors or to focus on biological factors while relying on problematic and unsubstantiated gender stereotypes. Addressing gender/sex difference is vital for understanding religion and how we study it. This dissertation interprets this difference by means of a multidisciplinary theoretical and methodological approach. This approach builds upon insights from the cognitive and evolutionary science of religion, affect theory and affective neuroscience, and social neuroendocrinology, and it is rooted in the foundational insights of feminist materialism, including that cultural and micro-sociological forces are inseparable from biological materiality. The dissertation shows how a better way of understanding gender/sex differences in religion emerges through focusing on the co-construction of biological materiality and cultural meanings. This includes deploying a gene-culture co-evolutionary explanation of ultrasociality and an understanding of the biology of performativity to argue that religious behavior and temperaments emerge from the enactment and hormonal underpinnings of six affective adaptive desires: the desires for (1) bonding and attachment, (2) communal mythos, (3) deliverance from suffering, (4) purpose, (5) understanding, and (6) reliable leadership. By hypothesizing the patterns of hormonal release and activation associated with ritualized affects—primarily considering oxytocin, testosterone, vasopressin, estrogen, dopamine, and serotonin—the dissertation theorizes four dimensions of religious temperament: (1) nurturant religiosity, (2) ecstatic religiosity, (3) protective/hierarchical religiosity, and (4) antagonistic religiosity. This dissertation conceptualizes hormones as chemical messengers that enable the diversity emerging from the imbrication of physical materiality and socio-cultural forces. In doing so, it demonstrates how hormonal aspects of gender/sex and culturally constructed aspects of gender/sex are always already intertwined in their influence on religiosity. This theoretical framework sheds light on both the diversity and the noticeable patterns observed in gender/sex differences in religious behaviors and affects. This problematizes the terms of the “women are more religious than men” while putting in place a more adequate framework for interpreting the variety of ways it appears in human lives

    Time- and value-continuous explainable affect estimation in-the-wild

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    Today, the relevance of Affective Computing, i.e., of making computers recognise and simulate human emotions, cannot be overstated. All technology giants (from manufacturers of laptops to mobile phones to smart speakers) are in a fierce competition to make their devices understand not only what is being said, but also how it is being said to recognise user’s emotions. The goals have evolved from predicting the basic emotions (e.g., happy, sad) to now the more nuanced affective states (e.g., relaxed, bored) real-time. The databases used in such research too have evolved, from earlier featuring the acted behaviours to now spontaneous behaviours. There is a more powerful shift lately, called in-the-wild affect recognition, i.e., taking the research out of the laboratory, into the uncontrolled real-world. This thesis discusses, for the very first time, affect recognition for two unique in-the-wild audiovisual databases, GRAS2 and SEWA. The GRAS2 is the only database till date with time- and value-continuous affect annotations for Labov effect-free affective behaviours, i.e., without the participant’s awareness of being recorded (which otherwise is known to affect the naturalness of one’s affective behaviour). The SEWA features participants from six different cultural backgrounds, conversing using a video-calling platform. Thus, SEWA features in-the-wild recordings further corrupted by unpredictable artifacts, such as the network-induced delays, frame-freezing and echoes. The two databases present a unique opportunity to study time- and value-continuous affect estimation that is truly in-the-wild. A novel ‘Evaluator Weighted Estimation’ formulation is proposed to generate a gold standard sequence from several annotations. An illustration is presented demonstrating that the moving bag-of-words (BoW) representation better preserves the temporal context of the features, yet remaining more robust against the outliers compared to other statistical summaries, e.g., moving average. A novel, data-independent randomised codebook is proposed for the BoW representation; especially useful for cross-corpus model generalisation testing when the feature-spaces of the databases differ drastically. Various deep learning models and support vector regressors are used to predict affect dimensions time- and value-continuously. Better generalisability of the models trained on GRAS2 , despite the smaller training size, makes a strong case for the collection and use of Labov effect-free data. A further foundational contribution is the discovery of the missing many-to-many mapping between the mean square error (MSE) and the concordance correlation coefficient (CCC), i.e., between two of the most popular utility functions till date. The newly invented cost function |MSE_{XY}/σ_{XY}| has been evaluated in the experiments aimed at demystifying the inner workings of a well-performing, simple, low-cost neural network effectively utilising the BoW text features. Also proposed herein is the shallowest-possible convolutional neural network (CNN) that uses the facial action unit (FAU) features. The CNN exploits sequential context, but unlike RNNs, also inherently allows data- and process-parallelism. Interestingly, for the most part, these white-box AI models have shown to utilise the provided features consistent with the human perception of emotion expression

    Dispositiv-Erkundungen | Exploring Dispositifs

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    Will man die Linien eines Dispositivs entwirren, so muss man in jedem Fall eine Karte anfertigen, man muss kartographieren, unbekannte LĂ€nder ausmessen - eben das, was er [Foucault] als 'Arbeit im GelĂ€nde' bezeichnet hat", formulierte Gilles Deleuze 1988. Mit der vorliegenden Publikation soll ein kartographierendes Aus- und Vermessen eines komplexen, verzweigten, unĂŒbersichtlichen, zum Teil auch uneinsichtigen und ĂŒbercodierten GelĂ€ndes geleistet werden. Als Effekt könn(t)en fortgesetzte KlĂ€rungen von Begriffen, Konzepten und Operationsweisen dessen stattfinden, was als Kunst bezeichnet wird. 18 Autor*innen nehmen ihre Dispositiv-Erkundungen vor, so dass eine Anthologie von ausgewĂ€hlten Stimmen entsteht. Die Autor*innen und ihre Texte erkunden multiperspektivisch, disparat, forensisch und komplexierend, in verschiedenen Sprachen, in ihren Entstehungskontexten und Entstehungszeiten, mit ihren stilistischen Mitteln und in einigen FĂ€llen eng mit ihren frĂŒheren PublikationszusammenhĂ€ngen verbunden. Sie sind damit im besten Fall in der Lage, je eigene DenkrĂ€ume aufzufalten, die ermöglichen, Einzelbestandteile der beschriebenen oder analysierten Dispositive -- und dabei kann es sich offenbar um Einzeloperationen, Prozesse, Prozeduren, Blicke, LĂŒcken, Aufspaltungen, Implikationen, Vorbedingungen etc. handeln -- zu unterscheiden und in einem nĂ€chsten Schritt strategische Formationen dieser heterogenen Ensembles zu diagnostizieren. DarĂŒber hinaus ermöglichen die zusammengestellten Texte, unterschiedliche Varianten, Ausgangs-, Ansatz- und Schwerpunkte wie auch Stile von Dispositiv-Erkundungen nachvollziehen zu können. As Gilles Deleuze has argued in 1988, “[u]ntangling these lines within a social apparatus [dispositif] is, in each case, like drawing up a map, doing cartography, surveying unknown landscapes, and this is what he [Foucault] calls ‘working on the ground.’” This publication intends to provide a cartographic mapping of a complex, multi-branched, often obscure, sometimes inaccessible and overly encoded terrain. Such a mapping could and can lead to a further clarification of terms, concepts and modes of operation of that which is called art. This volume comprises 18 authors whose explorations of the dispositif have generated an anthology of select, distinct voices. Their texts are marked by multiple perspectives, they are disparate, forensic and complex, they are written in different languages, stem from different contexts and points in time, are endowed with different styles and, in some cases, also stand in close relationship with other, earlier publication contexts. This means that they are ideally positioned to unfold diverse spaces of thought, allowing them to differentiate between individual components of the dispositifs they discuss or dissect -- this may include individual operations, processes, procedures, glances, lacunae, splits, implications, preconditions, et cetera -- and allowing them, in a next step, to diagnose the strategic formations such heterogeneous ensembles might take. Beyond that, the texts assembled here allow us to discern the different variations, starting points, approaches and emphases as well as different styles of dispositif exploration. BeitrĂ€ge von / Contributions by: Elke Bippus, Luis Camnitzer, Ibou Coulibaly Diop, Thomas Oberender, Andrea Fraser, erwin GeheimRat, Siri Hustvedt, Silvia Jonas, Birte Kleine-Benne, Michael Lingner, Lucy Lippard, Adelheid Mers, Brian O’Doherty, Julia Pelta Feldman, Adrian Piper, Stefan Römer, Thorsten Schneider, Ruth Sonderegge

    Good Issues and bad tidying: what GitHub can tell us about agency in project-based group modelling work for higher education

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    Collaborative project work in technology-enabled environments at university is essential for learners to become ready for an increasingly global, complex, and virtualised workplace. Research on effective pedagogical and technical design for computer supported collaborative learning in higher education (CSCL) has often taken place in synchronous contexts, using specialised technology platforms. However, large-scale changes to work and education resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic necessitate the development of pedagogical and research approaches that support students working asynchronously, in distributed teams, using collaboration platforms that extend beyond institutional infrastructure. Within the field of CSCL, knowledge building research has shown collaboration to be a complex systems phenomenon, involving the intersection of individual and collective efforts to actively advance the group’s shared knowledge, but studies analysing interaction data have been resource-intensive to conduct. Contemporary workplace platforms such as professional knowledge environments have multiple design affordances consistent with knowledge building principles, as well as the capacity to generate rich data about user activity. However, we have little understanding to date as to how these environments can support knowledge building pedagogies and facilitate associated research. This study uses a case study approach and thematic analysis to investigate the activity of three university groups engaged in a collaborative modelling task over time. It investigates how agency emerges during project work in professional knowledge environments, and how the system interaction data can extend our understanding of effective collaboration processes. The results show that the GitHub platform can support knowledge building pedagogical designs in facilitating individual and collective agency in higher education group work, and provide insights into epistemic, regulative and relational aspects of learner behaviour at individual and group levels. These findings extend our understanding of effective learning design to novel environments of a type likely to be used by our students in the workplace, and make design and methodological contributions to research on computer-supported collaborative learning

    A correlation between tellurite resistance and nitric oxide detoxification in Salmonella Typhimurium

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    Salmonella are important enteric pathogens that are responsible for causing various diseases from gastroenteritis to systemic typhoid fever. Salmonella are a major contributor to morbidity and mortality worldwide. Crucial to their pathogenesis is the survival in harmful conditions elicited by the host immune system, one of these being reactive oxygen and nitrogen species (ROS/RNS). These are produced by macrophages and neutrophils in an attempt to eliminate pathogens. Salmonella, have the unique ability to colonise macrophages and have dedicated nitric oxide (NO) detoxification systems. There are three prominent metalloenzymes (HmpA, NorVW and NrfA) heavily researched in the literature for NO detoxification. Previous work suggested that more proteins are responsible for the nitrosative stress response with these being regulated by the nitric oxide sensitive transcriptional repressor, NsrR. This study demonstrates a relationship between three putative tellurite resistance proteins regulated by NsrR (STM1808, YeaR and TehB) and NO detoxification. A Functional redundancy between these proteins was observed for anaerobic protection against NO and tellurite. Furthermore, this study identified that proteins responsible in NO protection such as HmpA and YtfE also provide resistance to tellurite during aerobic and anaerobic conditions, respectively. Tellurite resistant Salmonella strains were evolved by continued passage in this study that consequently had altered H2O2 resistance profiles and increased sensitivity to antibiotics. However, these strains were not significantly attenuated during macrophage survival or during the presence of NO in vitro. Additionally, the hypothetical protein YgbA, which has predicted roles in NO detoxification, was found to be important to Salmonella survival in macrophages. However, in vitro NO exposure with the NO donor deta NONOate only showed a role for anaerobic protection
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