Beaches, People, and Change: A Political Ecology of Rockaway Beach after Hurricane Sandy

This dissertation uses restoration practices of Rockaway beach post-Hurricane Sandy as a lens to investigate tensions between nature and society on urban coasts. By focusing on this New York City beach, this dissertation aims to examine the interaction between the beach, residents, city and federal agencies, and local environmental grassroots stewards in their response to coastal flooding and erosion. This is an ethnographic case study of Rockaway Beach during the two years (October 2012-October 2014) following Hurricane Sandy. This case study is based on secondary data analysis of interviews with 52 key informants, field-notes from participant observation at community and stewardship events, and archival research. This dissertation begins with a critical environmental history of Rockaway. From there, the dissertation examines the steward\u27s practices as a counterpoint to the federal and city agency official approaches in a time of increasing awareness and concern over sea-level rise and coastal erosion. The dissertation examines the conflicts that arise in this unique urban beach over expertise, property, nature, and development. And it concludes with considerations of procedural, distributive, and interactional justice and equity for urban beaches. The dissertation makes the case that beaches should not be managed as separate from people or nearby communities and that such management must be sensitive to issues of equity and power

An Approach to Complement Model-Based Vehicle Development by Implementing Future Scenarios

Today, vehicle development is already in a process of substantial transformation. Mobility trends can be derived from global megatrends and have a significant influence on the requirements of the developed vehicles. The sociological, technological, economic, ecological, and political developments can be determined by using the scenario technique. The results are recorded in the form of differently shaped scenarios; however, they are mainly document-based. In order to ensure a holistic approach in the sense of model-based systems engineering and to be able to trace the interrelationships of the fast-changing trends and requirements, it is necessary to implement future scenarios in the system model. For this purpose, a method is proposed that enables the consideration of future scenarios in model-based vehicle development. The procedure of the method is presented, and the location of the future scenarios within the system architectures is named. The method is applied and the resulting system views are derived based on the application example of an autonomous people mover. With the help of the described method, it is possible to show the effects of a change of scenario (e.g., best-case and worst-case) and the connections with the highest level of requirements: stakeholder need

Sustainable Stoke:Transitions to Sustainability in the Surfing World

What does sustainability mean in the surfing world? This question is answered by more than 40 of the most influential figures from the surf industry, academia, non-profit organisations, and the surfing community, exploring the cutting edge of the surfing world's transition to sustainability. High profile contributors include: 1) President of the International Surfing Association and founder of Reef, Fernando Aguerre, 2) 1978 World Champion and former CEO of the Association of Surfing Professionals Wayne Rabbit Bartholomew, 3) Professional Surfer, former Waterman of the Year and twice inducted into the Surfer s Hall of Fame Rob Machado, 4) President of the Surf Industry Manufacturers Association Doug Alladini, 5) Founder of Surfrider Foundation Glenn Hening, 6) Co-Founder of Surfers Against Sewage Chris Hines, 7) Fred Hemmings 1968 world champion, founder of the Pipeline Masters and the World Championship Tour, and former state senator, and 8) Bob McKnight former CEO and current chairman of the board at Quiksilver, and many more. Sustainable Stoke systematically explores how surfing culture and industry impacts on social, economic and environmental areas of life at both international and local levels. Innovations and initiatives are highlighted providing the foundations for technological transitions as well as social and environmental initiatives that are improving the lives of thousands of people all over the world

A Case Study of Ribeira Grande, Azores

Surf tourism has been growing in recent years, becoming a highly profitable activity and industry. Many coastal regions have developed due to surf tourism, including Portugal. Surf tourism has been seen as a new tourism product with the potential to develop regions and contribute to their competitiveness and sustainable growth. This dissertation aims to analyze the potential of surf tourism for the competitiveness and sustainable development of the destination Ribeira Grande, Azores. This destination has invested in surfing as a differentiating element, branding itself as the "Capital of Surf." It is a surf destination in the early stages of development, making it relevant to study in order to chart a sustainable and competitive path. Through a qualitative study, data was collected from various stakeholders affected or involved in surf tourism, including local surfers, surf tourists, residents, members of the business community, and members of the surf business community, as well as municipal government officials. The perceptions and involvement of stakeholders in tourism development are crucial elements considered pivotal for this study. Conclusions were reached regarding the development of surf tourism in Ribeira Grande, its potential and importance, its attributes as a surf destination, recommendations for improvements, and well as the relevance of the destination brand, and the contribution of this niche tourism to sustainable development. The results show that there is general support for the development of surf tourism from all stakeholders, who see it as a differentiating element with the capacity to develop the destination. However, since this is still in the early stages of development, there are weaknesses regarding some typical attributes of a surf destination, a lack of a surf culture and vibe, a dissonance between image and reality, and weak involvement of the local population in surfing, despite their support. The results also show some environmental weaknesses and that the destination brand is premature. With the support of all stakeholders and the belief in the potential of this tourism product, these weaknesses can be addressed, establishing the destination as a true and competitive surf destination.O turismo de surf tem vindo a crescer nos últimos anos, sendo uma actividade e sector bastante lucrativo. Muitas regiões costeiras têm se desenvolvido devido ao turismo de surf, incluindo em Portugal. O turismo de surf tem sido visto como um produto turístico com o potencial de desenvolver regiões, contribuindo para a sua competitividade e desenvolvimento sustentável. A presente dissertação tem como objectivo analisar o potencial do turismo de surf para a competitividade e desenvolvimento sustentável do destino Ribeira Grande, Açores, o qual tem apostado no surf como elemento diferenciador, tendo registado a sua marca de destino- Capital do Surf. É um destino que se encontra na primeiras fases de desenvolvimento e como tal é relevante estudá-lo a fim de traçar um caminho sustentável e competitivo. Através de um estudo qualitativo, foi realizada uma recolha de informação junto de vários stakeholders afectados ou envolvidos no turismo de surf, nomeadamente os surfistas locais, turistas de surf, residentes, membros da comunidade empresarial e membros da comunidade empresarial de surf, assim como membros do governo municipal. As percepções e envolvimento dos stakeholders no desenvolvimento do turismo é um elemento primordial e considerado fulcral para este estudo. Foi possível assim chegar a conclusões em relação ao desenvolvimento do turismo de surf na Ribeira Grande, ao seu potencial e importância, atributos e recomendações para melhorias, assim como à relevância da marca de destino e ao contributo deste turismo de nicho para o desenvolvimento sustentável. Os resultados mostram que há um apoio geral em relação ao desenvolvimento do turismo de surf por parte de todos os stakeholders, que o vêm como elemento diferenciador e com capacidade para desenvolver o destino. No entanto, estando este ainda nas primeiras fases de desenvolvimento, assiste-se a uma debilidade no que respeita a alguns dos atributos típicos de um destino de surf, à falta de um ambiente e cultura de surf, a uma dissonância entre imagem e realidade, e a um fraco envolvimento da população local no surf, apesar do seu apoio. Os resultados mostram também que existem debilidades a nível ambiental e que a marca de destino é prematura. Com o apoio de todos os stakeholders e com a crença no potencial deste produto turístico, estas debilidades podem ser revertidas, afirmando-se o destino como um verdadeiro e competitivo destino de surf

The urban underclass and post-authoritarian Johannesburg : train surfing (Soweto style) as an extreme spatial practice

This dissertation aims to position train surfing as a visual spectacle that is practised by Sowetan train surfers within the context of post-authoritarian Johannesburg. The author argues that train surfing is a visual and spatial phenomenon that is theoretically under-researched. As such, this study aims to decode seven train surfing videos to establish what train surfing looks like, where train surfing occurs and why individuals participate in such a high risk activity. This study, furthermore, aims to frame train surfing as a spectacle by investigating the similarities between train surfing and rites of passage (initiation rites). The author also regards train surfing as a very specific form of storytelling. The narratives conveyed in the seven videos are, therefore, interpreted to establish that train surfing is practised to ‘voice’ fatalistic feelings, societal as well as individual crises. After establishing the visual aspects of train surfing, the author focuses on the spatial context of train surfing. Johannesburg is described as both an authoritarian and post-authoritarian construct by tracing the spatial and political history of the city. When the discussion turns to the post-authoritarian city, townships and squatter settlements are analysed as being both marginal and hybrid spaces. It is argued that townships are marginal spaces due to their location, they are inhabited by the underclass and they are formed by processes of capitalism and urbanisation, and as a result of these factors, township residents might have fatalistic mindsets (Gulick 1989). The author, however, contends that township space is an ambivalent construct, and as such, it can also be read as hybrid space. Here, hybrid space is interpreted as a platform from which township residents can resist oppressing spatial and political ideologies. In this context, train surfing is regarded as one way in which train surfers use hybrid space to express tactics of resistance. After establishing the spatial context of train surfing, the socio-economic and material living conditions of train surfers are investigated. The discussion firstly, explores the underclass, as theorised by Jencks and Peterson (1990), and thereafter highlights why train surfers can be classified as being part of this sub-category. It is, furthermore, argued that Sowetan train surfers are part of a new lost generation due to high unemployment rates, the HIV/AIDS pandemic and bleak future outlooks. The author aims to establish that, as a result of their socio-economic status and material living conditions, train surfers are fatalistic, and practice an extreme activity to exert control over one area of their lives, namely their bodies. Lastly, the dissertation aims to explore train surfing as being both a risk-taking activity and a new spatial practice. The dynamics of adolescent risk-taking behaviour is explored by emphasising the psychological motivations behind high risk activities. The author argues that alienating space can be regarded as an additional factor that usher adolescents into risk-taking activities. As such, the place(s) and space(s) inhabited by train surfers, namely Johannesburg, Soweto and township train stations, are discussed as alienating spaces. Moreover, it is argued that alienating spaces create opportunities for resistance (following the power-resistance dialectic inherent to space), and as such, train surfing is interpreted as a de-alienating spatial practice that enables the marginalised train surfer to exert control over his surroundings.Dissertation (MA)--University of Pretoria, 2012.Visual Artsunrestricte

Learning on Graphs: Supervised and Unsupervised Methods

We study two methods for learning from network graph data. First, we present a novel method for the unsupervised learning problem of community detection. The proposed method is, to the best of our knowledge, the first enabling users to "zoom in" and "zoom out" on communities with varying levels of focus on network metadata. Second, we review Decagon, a system proposed by Zitnik et al. for the supervised learning task of link prediction. On a biomedical benchmark dataset, Decagon achieves state-of-the-art prediction accuracy. This work adds to the network scientist's machine learning toolkit, illustrating its power in a biomedical domain with significant public health impact.Bachelor of Scienc

Post-modern cowboys: The transformation of sport in the twentieth century

During the twentieth century, sports that evolved in the American West transformed the landscape of American sport. Driven by combinations of technology, media, and human personalities, sports such as surfing, skateboarding, and mountain biking redefined the meaning of sport and eliminated the traditional limits to the playing field. As surfing, skateboarding, and mountain biking evolved, wartime technologies accelerated their progress. Those technologies democratized access to contemporary sports in two ways. Materials such as polyurethane eased the physical requirements of carrying equipment and catching waves. Contemporary sports also expanded access because they focused on individualized competition and participation, eliminating the need for other players as a prerequisite to participation. As contemporary sports evolved in the West, they gradually eclipsed the participatory dominance of traditional team sports

Mustang Daily, February 21, 2002

Student newspaper of California Polytechnic State University, San Luis Obispo, CA.https://digitalcommons.calpoly.edu/studentnewspaper/6845/thumbnail.jp

Supervised and unsupervised methods for learning representations of linguistic units

Word representations, also called word embeddings, are generic representations, often high-dimensional vectors. They map the discrete space of words into a continuous vector space, which allows us to handle rare or even unseen events, e.g. by considering the nearest neighbors. Many Natural Language Processing tasks can be improved by word representations if we extend the task specific training data by the general knowledge incorporated in the word representations. The first publication investigates a supervised, graph-based method to create word representations. This method leads to a graph-theoretic similarity measure, CoSimRank, with equivalent formalizations that show CoSimRank’s close relationship to Personalized Page-Rank and SimRank. The new formalization is efficient because it can use the graph-based word representation to compute a single node similarity without having to compute the similarities of the entire graph. We also show how we can take advantage of fast matrix multiplication algorithms. In the second publication, we use existing unsupervised methods for word representation learning and combine these with semantic resources by learning representations for non-word objects like synsets and entities. We also investigate improved word representations which incorporate the semantic information from the resource. The method is flexible in that it can take any word representations as input and does not need an additional training corpus. A sparse tensor formalization guarantees efficiency and parallelizability. In the third publication, we introduce a method that learns an orthogonal transformation of the word representation space that focuses the information relevant for a task in an ultradense subspace of a dimensionality that is smaller by a factor of 100 than the original space. We use ultradense representations for a Lexicon Creation task in which words are annotated with three types of lexical information – sentiment, concreteness and frequency. The final publication introduces a new calculus for the interpretable ultradense subspaces, including polarity, concreteness, frequency and part-of-speech (POS). The calculus supports operations like “−1 × hate = love” and “give me a neutral word for greasy” (i.e., oleaginous) and extends existing analogy computations like “king − man + woman = queen”.Wortrepräsentationen, sogenannte Word Embeddings, sind generische Repräsentationen, meist hochdimensionale Vektoren. Sie bilden den diskreten Raum der Wörter in einen stetigen Vektorraum ab und erlauben uns, seltene oder ungesehene Ereignisse zu behandeln -- zum Beispiel durch die Betrachtung der nächsten Nachbarn. Viele Probleme der Computerlinguistik können durch Wortrepräsentationen gelöst werden, indem wir spezifische Trainingsdaten um die allgemeinen Informationen erweitern, welche in den Wortrepräsentationen enthalten sind. In der ersten Publikation untersuchen wir überwachte, graphenbasierte Methodenn um Wortrepräsentationen zu erzeugen. Diese Methoden führen zu einem graphenbasierten Ähnlichkeitsmaß, CoSimRank, für welches zwei äquivalente Formulierungen existieren, die sowohl die enge Beziehung zum personalisierten PageRank als auch zum SimRank zeigen. Die neue Formulierung kann einzelne Knotenähnlichkeiten effektiv berechnen, da graphenbasierte Wortrepräsentationen benutzt werden können. In der zweiten Publikation verwenden wir existierende Wortrepräsentationen und kombinieren diese mit semantischen Ressourcen, indem wir Repräsentationen für Objekte lernen, welche keine Wörter sind, wie zum Beispiel Synsets und Entitäten. Die Flexibilität unserer Methode zeichnet sich dadurch aus, dass wir beliebige Wortrepräsentationen als Eingabe verwenden können und keinen zusätzlichen Trainingskorpus benötigen. In der dritten Publikation stellen wir eine Methode vor, die eine Orthogonaltransformation des Vektorraums der Wortrepräsentationen lernt. Diese Transformation fokussiert relevante Informationen in einen ultra-kompakten Untervektorraum. Wir benutzen die ultra-kompakten Repräsentationen zur Erstellung von Wörterbüchern mit drei verschiedene Angaben -- Stimmung, Konkretheit und Häufigkeit. Die letzte Publikation präsentiert eine neue Rechenmethode für die interpretierbaren ultra-kompakten Untervektorräume -- Stimmung, Konkretheit, Häufigkeit und Wortart. Diese Rechenmethode beinhaltet Operationen wie ”−1 × Hass = Liebe” und ”neutrales Wort für Winkeladvokat” (d.h., Anwalt) und erweitert existierende Rechenmethoden, wie ”Onkel − Mann + Frau = Tante”