Health impact assessment of major collective events: an overview of the available experiences

Background: major sporting and cultural events are a sensitive political and social issue. The aim of this study was to perform a critical review of the international literature regarding health impact assessment (HIA) studies of major events to identify all the health indicators available in the literature. Methods: we drew up a review of available literature on HIAs pertaining to major sports and cultural events. The papers obtained were read and then assessed in relation to the inclusion criteria, and the health indicators used were listed and commented upon. Results: we found three published HIA reports. One is a full report, and the other two are a screening report and a rapid HIA report. Through a detailed analysis, it has been possible to develop a set of indicators that can be used for future HIAs on major sporting and cultural events. Conclusions: reports of HIAs for major events that are available online identify several health impacts. In the pre-event phase, negative effects are predominant; in the post-event period, positive impacts prevail. The characteristics of the different stakeholders involved in the events play an important role in the evaluation process

Glasgow 2014, the media and Scottish politics – the (post)imperial symbolism of the Commonwealth Games

This article critically examines print media discourses regarding the 2014 Glasgow Commonwealth Games. The forthcoming analysis considers the political symbolism of the Commonwealth Games with regards to the interlinkages between the British Empire, sport and the global political status of the UK, with specific consideration given to the UK’s declining global power as well as the interconnections between the 2014 Games and the Scottish independence referendum. Hechter’s (1975) ‘internal colonialism’ thesis, which portrays Scotland’s marginalised status within the UK, is drawn upon to critically explore the political symbolism of sport for Scottish nationalism, before discussion focuses upon the extent to which the modern Commonwealth is symptomatic of the UK’s declining status as a global power. Finally, the existence of these narrative tropes in print media coverage of the Commonwealth Games is examined, allowing for critical reflections on the continuing interconnections between the media, sport, nationalism and post-imperial global politics

“Waiting for Chronic”: Time, cannabis and counterculture in Hawai‘i

What does it mean not to wait? It is possible to live in ways which do not entail waiting? Through close examination of time and its articulations among a group of US 1960s-generation ‘hippies’ and younger ‘drop outs’ in a rural backwater of Hawai‘i, I argue in this paper that it is possible to live without waiting. Drawing on Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953) and Baba Ram Dass’ countercultural invocation to ‘remember, be here now’, I explore unexpected interruptions to anticipated temporal flows. Structured around three vignettes on failing to hitchhike, learning to do ethnographic fieldwork through stopping trying to do ethnographic fieldwork and an unexpected interruption in the supermarket, this paper builds up a picture of non-waiting in action. Located against a backdrop of waiting as temporal interruption and affective mode, I argue that this group sought to collectively disrupt the affective modes of indifference and/or frustration they grew up with in urban mainland America. Through new forms of affective engagement they became able to collectively reframe temporal interruption as existing within rather than without local temporal flows, interruptions ceased to be ruptures to temporal textures but part of their very fabric. Located within temporal flows, they did not force individuals out of a moral community of (time is money) efficient, productive citizens but reframed productivity itself in terms of producing sociality, positive affective experience and communitas. Out of a multitude of moments of not waiting, a temporal texture of American counterculture emerges

Sound-to-imagination: an exploratory study on cross-modal translation using diverse audiovisual data

The motivation of our research is to explore the possibilities of automatic sound-to-image (S2I) translation for enabling a human receiver to visually infer occurrences of sound-related events. We expect the computer to ‘imagine’ scenes from captured sounds, generating original images that depict the sound-emitting sources. Previous studies on similar topics opted for simplified approaches using data with low content diversity and/or supervision/self-supervision for training. In contrast, our approach involves performing S2I translation using thousands of distinct and unknown scenes, using sound class annotations solely for data preparation, just enough to ensure aural–visual semantic coherence. To model the translator, we employ an audio encoder and a conditional generative adversarial network (GAN) with a deep densely connected generator. Furthermore, we present a solution using informativity classifiers for quantitatively evaluating the generated images. This allows us to analyze the influence of network-bottleneck variation on the translation process, highlighting a potential trade-off between informativity and pixel space convergence. Despite the complexity of the specified S2I translation task, we were able to generalize the model enough to obtain more than 14%, on average, of interpretable and semantically coherent images translated from unknown sounds.The present work was supported in part by the Brazilian National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) under PhD grant 200884/2015-8. Also, the work was partly supported by the Spanish State Research Agency (AEI), project PID2019-107579RBI00/AEI/10.13039/501100011033.Peer ReviewedPostprint (published version

Feature interaction in composed systems. Proceedings. ECOOP 2001 Workshop #08 in association with the 15th European Conference on Object-Oriented Programming, Budapest, Hungary, June 18-22, 2001

Feature interaction is nothing new and not limited to computer science. The problem of undesirable feature interaction (feature interaction problem) has already been investigated in the telecommunication domain. Our goal is the investigation of feature interaction in componet-based systems beyond telecommunication. This Technical Report embraces all position papers accepted at the ECOOP 2001 workshop no. 08 on "Feature Interaction in Composed Systems". The workshop was held on June 18, 2001 at Budapest, Hungary

An analysis of The Oxford Guide to practical lexicography (Atkins and Rundell 2008)

Since at least a decade ago, the lexicographic community at large has been demanding that a modern textbook be designed - one that Would place corpora in the centre of the lexicographic enterprise. Written by two of the most respected practising lexicographers, this book has finally arrived, and delivers on very many levels. This review article presents a critical analysis of its features