Design of pedestrian network friendliness maps

This article introduces the concept of pedestrian, or walking friendliness, and presents a methodology for obtaining maps thereof. Walking friendliness is a quality of walking indicator, defined for any given origin in a city, which combines accessibility measures, based on impedance between that origin and destinations, with performance scores for the pedestrian infrastructure linking those origins and destinations. The methodology uses geographic information systems to obtain walking friendliness values and represent them in a map. The approach is demonstrated through a case study for the city of Coimbra, Portugal, for which friendliness maps were derived. The procedure and maps that were produced can be scaled to any size of city.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

From Christian Spirituality To Eco-Friendliness

Spirituality connotes praxis informed by religious or faith convictions. This can transform the individual and society at large. Christian spirituality is centered on how a person’s relationship with the God of Jesus Christ informs and directs one’s approach to existence and engagement with the world. The ecosystem concerns humanity and relationship with it is invariably influenced by faith or religious informed praxis. The reality of climate change is convincing many people that humankind’s common homeland needs to be treated with care and respect if created beings are to have a congenial habitat now and in the future. This article avers that Christian spirituality can contribute to eco-friendly behavior through re-formation of the behavior of people and emboldening their goodwill as regards the responsibility of all towards the care of the earth. Finally, this research proffers a three-fold model of eco-spirituality - scriptural, selfcontrol, and sacramental approaches to the earth – as a contribution towards stemming the tide of ecological assaults on creation. Textual analysis is the method used in this research

Active influence in dynamical models of structural balance in social networks

We consider a nonlinear dynamical system on a signed graph, which can be interpreted as a mathematical model of social networks in which the links can have both positive and negative connotations. In accordance with a concept from social psychology called structural balance, the negative links play a key role in both the structure and dynamics of the network. Recent research has shown that in a nonlinear dynamical system modeling the time evolution of "friendliness levels" in the network, two opposing factions emerge from almost any initial condition. Here we study active external influence in this dynamical model and show that any agent in the network can achieve any desired structurally balanced state from any initial condition by perturbing its own local friendliness levels. Based on this result, we also introduce a new network centrality measure for signed networks. The results are illustrated in an international relations network using United Nations voting record data from 1946 to 2008 to estimate friendliness levels amongst various countries.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figures, to appear in Europhysics Letters (http://www.epletters.net

Following the Money 2012: How the 50 States Rate in Providing Online Access to Government Spending Data

Assesses states' progress in offering comprehensive, one-stop access to searchable and downloadable databases of government spending via transparency 2.0 Web sites, including searchability, user-friendliness, breadth of data, and features such as mapping

Learning from AI : new trends in database technology

Recently some researchers in the areas of database data modelling and knowledge representations in artificial intelligence have recognized that they share many common goals. In this survey paper we show the relationship between database and artificial intelligence research. We show that there has been a tendency for data models to incorporate more modelling techniques developed for knowledge representations in artificial intelligence as the desire to incorporate more application oriented semantics, user friendliness, and flexibility has increased. Increasing the semantics of the representation is the key to capturing the "reality" of the database environment, increasing user friendliness, and facilitating the support of multiple, possibly conflicting, user views of the information contained in a database

Graph matching: relax or not?

We consider the problem of exact and inexact matching of weighted undirected graphs, in which a bijective correspondence is sought to minimize a quadratic weight disagreement. This computationally challenging problem is often relaxed as a convex quadratic program, in which the space of permutations is replaced by the space of doubly-stochastic matrices. However, the applicability of such a relaxation is poorly understood. We define a broad class of friendly graphs characterized by an easily verifiable spectral property. We prove that for friendly graphs, the convex relaxation is guaranteed to find the exact isomorphism or certify its inexistence. This result is further extended to approximately isomorphic graphs, for which we develop an explicit bound on the amount of weight disagreement under which the relaxation is guaranteed to find the globally optimal approximate isomorphism. We also show that in many cases, the graph matching problem can be further harmlessly relaxed to a convex quadratic program with only n separable linear equality constraints, which is substantially more efficient than the standard relaxation involving 2n equality and n^2 inequality constraints. Finally, we show that our results are still valid for unfriendly graphs if additional information in the form of seeds or attributes is allowed, with the latter satisfying an easy to verify spectral characteristic

Hypohydration and Mood State in Free-Living Males and Females

Previous research has shown that acute dehydration can result in changes in mood. These changes have been reported in less than a 1% loss in total body water. However, the effect of hypohydration (i.e., reflected through high urine concentration) on mood in free-living conditions has not been studied. PURPOSE: The present study was designed to determine if hydration status is associated with mood within the general population under free-living conditions. METHODS: A group of 103 apparently healthy subjects (49 male, 54 female, 41±14 y, 1.7±0.1 m, 76.1±16.9 kg) completed three visits separated by a week. Mood was assessed by the Profile of Mood States (POMS) questionnaire during each visit. Participants were familiarized to the POMS questionnaire on their first visit. Hydration was assessed via urine osmolality (uOsm), urine specific gravity (USG), and urine color (UC) done on both spot and twenty four hour (24-h) urine samples taken during the 2nd and 3rd visits. Urine indices and POMS data from the 2nd and 3rd visit were averaged to attain measurements for analyses. RESULTS: Overall USG displayed significance in predicting changes in Vigor/Acuity (P = 0.031). UOsm (P = 0.006) and USG (P = 0.012), as well as 24-h uOsm (P \u3c 0.001) and USG (P \u3c 0.001) showed significance in predicting Vigor/Acuity in females. 24-h uOsm (P = 0.012) and USG (P = 0.004) were a significant predictor of a female\u27s feelings of friendliness. No significant relationships were found for the male subjects. CONCLUSION: These data suggested that hydration status affects mood specifically in free-living females but not in males

Courseware evaluation by teachers: An implementation perspective

This study has investigated teachers' criteria for the use of courseware packages in the classroom. The starting point of the study was the assumption that it is the teacher who decides whether or not courseware will be used in the classroom. The integration of courseware into the curriculum is conceived as a complex innovation. The study is oriented towards the process of decision making by teachers. A positive decision to actual use of courseware is one of the first steps towards integration of courseware into the curriculum. Three determinants of quality and practicality of an innovation, viz. instrumentality, congruence and cost, formed the theoretical framework of the study. From the study it can be concluded that at the very first stage of the process leading to the integration of courseware into the curriculum, courseware should motivate students, realize educational objectives better than traditional methods and its content should be an operationalization of teacher's ideas and beliefs