8 research outputs found
Is Green Infrastructure a Game Changer for Sustainable Regional Development? A Scenario Approach for Stuttgart Region
There are numerous challenges for municipalities and regions: affordable housing, overburdened infrastructure, air quality, increasing pressure on open spaces, expansion of renewable energies, climate adaptation. Certainly, the list is not complete. Moreover, these issues ā as a typical characteristic of complex situations ā interact with one another in various ways. As one of Germanyās most dynamic and densely populated locations the Stuttgart Region is particularly affected by these challenges. Therefore, protecting and developing the landscape is a longstanding concern of its overall spatial planning strategy (e.g. development-axes, regional green corridors, landscape park, public transport policy). In view of the sheer number of tasks, the ongoing dynamics as well as strongsectoral policy instruments, the question can be raised as to how far green infrastructure can be a game changer for a substantive transformation towards sustainability. Against this background, a scenario-approach is carried out aiming for the integration of various knowledge-areas into a supra-sectoral and strategic view on regional transformation. Taking the example of the Stuttgart Region, the diversity and interdependencies of land use are taken into consideration and synthesised in form of a qualitative system analysis. The scenario development is part of the RAMONA-project, which is funded by the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) in the framework of the āStadt-Land-Plusā-measure. The project deals with the intervention regulation under the Nature Conservation Act1 (āEingriffsregelungā) and inherent opportunities for urban and regional development. The scenario based approach therefore starts with open-space-indicators such as ādegree of imperviousnessā, ācompensation measuresā as well as āgreen infrastructuresā and puts them into a wider perspective of socio-technical development (e. g. settlement structure, infrastructure, traffic volume, agriculture or health) in order to obtain comprehensive pictures of the Stuttgart Region in the year 2050
Business Model Development for a Mobile Context-aware Service
Mobile information services, preceded on tablet computers, smartphones or other mobile devices, are a significant source of information for people nowadays. By including context data, a new category of information services has been established. On the application side, a range of innovative services, providing the user with an added-value, could be observed in the previous years, boosted by the wide-spread adoption of smartphones in developed countries. For the application provider, the question how to configure the business model is crucial: several factors such as the service configuration, the revenue model and the configuration of the value creation network, which all can be seen as decisive factors for success or failure of a service. In this paper we present a context-aware service named \u27Digital Graffiti\u27 and describe the process of the business model development. As an outcome of this process, a specific business model, based on feasibility and future prospect, was chosen and further described
Evaluating the Efficacy of Implicit Authentication Under Realistic Operating Scenarios
Smartphones contain a wealth of personal and corporate data. Several surveys have reported that about half of the smartphone owners do not configure primary authentication mechanisms (such as PINs, passwords, and fingerprint- or facial-recognition systems) on their devices to protect data due to usability concerns. In addition, primary authentication mechanisms have been subject to operating system flaws, smudge attacks, and shoulder surfing attacks. These limitations have prompted researchers to develop implicit authentication (IA), which authenticates a user by using distinctive, measurable patterns of device use that are gathered from the device users without requiring deliberate actions. Researchers have claimed that IA has desirable security and usability properties and it seems a promising candidate to mitigate the security and usability issues of primary authentication mechanisms.
Our observation is that the existing evaluations of IA have a preoccupation with accuracy numbers and they have neglected the deployment, usability and security issues that are critical for its adoption. Furthermore, the existing evaluations have followed an ad-hoc approach based on synthetic datasets and weak adversarial models. To confirm our observations, we first identify a comprehensive set of evaluation criteria for IA schemes. We gather real-world datasets and evaluate diverse and prominent IA schemes to question the efficacy of existing IA schemes and to gain insight into the pitfalls of the contemporary evaluation approach to IA. Our evaluation confirms that under realistic operating conditions, several prominent IA schemes perform poorly across key evaluation metrics and thereby fail to provide adequate security.
We then examine the usability and security properties of IA by carefully evaluating promising IA schemes. Our usability evaluation shows that the users like the convenience offered by IA. However, it uncovers issues due to IA's transparent operation and false rejects, which are both inherent to IA. It also suggests that detection delay and false accepts are concerns to several users. In terms of security, our evaluation based on a realistic, stronger adversarial model shows the susceptibility of highly accurate, touch input-based IA schemes to shoulder surfing attacks and attacks that train an attacker by leveraging raw touch data of victims. These findings exemplify the significance of realistic adversarial models.
These critical security and usability challenges remained unidentified by the previous research efforts due to the passive involvement of human subjects (only as behavioural data sources). This emphasizes the need for rapid prototyping and deployment of IA for an active involvement of human subjects in IA research. To this end, we design, implement, evaluate and release in open source a framework, which reduces the re-engineering effort in IA research and enables deployment of IA on off-the-shelf Android devices.
The existing authentication schemes available on contemporary smartphones fail to provide both usability and security. Authenticating users based on their behaviour, as suggested by the literature on IA, is a promising idea. However, this thesis concludes that several results reported in the existing IA literature are misleading due to the unrealistic evaluation conditions and several critical challenges in the IA domain need yet to be resolved. This thesis identifies these challenges and provides necessary tools and design guidelines to establish the future viability of IA
Human Factors Design Standard for Acquisition of Commercial-off-the-Shelf Subsystems, Non-Developmental Items, and Developmental Systems
The Human Factors Design Standard (HFDS) provides reference information to assist in the selection, analysis, design, development, and evaluation of new and modified Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) systems and equipment. This document is based largely on the 1996 Human Factors Design Guide (HFDG) produced by the FAA in 1996. It converts the original guidelines document to a standard and incorporates updated information, including the newly revised chapters on automation and human-computer interface. The updated document includes extensive reorganization of material based on user feedback on how the document has been used in the past. Additional information has been also been added to help the users better understand tradeoffs involved with specific design criteria. This standard covers a broad range of human factors topics that pertain to automation, maintenance, displays and printers, controls and visual indicators, alarms, alerts and voice output, input devices, workplace design, system security, safety, the environment, and anthropometry documentation. This document also includes extensive human-computer interface information
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Daily publication of the U.S. Office of the Federal Register contains rules and regulations, proposed legislation and rule changes, and other notices, including "Presidential proclamations and Executive Orders, Federal agency documents having general applicability and legal effect, documents required to be published by act of Congress, and other Federal agency documents of public interest" (p. ii). Table of Contents starts on page iii
Housing quality and lost (public) space in Croatia
IN ENGLISH: In the post-socialist period and within the current social transition context, urban and rural Croatia has, just like other transition countries, experienced many changes in the social structure and space. One example is the housing quality which is a replica of the situation in the Croatian society and has also undergone some major changes. Socially oriented housing construction co-financed by the state and the cities is in an unfavourable position compared to private housing construction. In the last twenty years the amount of the social housing construction has been only a minor part of the total contruction work in the country. For instance, out of nine newly planned residential housing developments in Zagreb, the capital city, only three have been completed and the work on the rest of them has stopped and is unlikely to continue. Private construction work prevails especially on the edge of the city and is characterised by high density housing. This type of housing construction doesn't benefit the majority of citizens in search of accommodation (price per square meter is too high, low-quality building). There is also a big problem of the community facilities (primary and secondary infrastructure, schools, kindergartens, playgrounds, green areas, sidewalks, public transport etc.). The existing globalisation-transition circumstances of the Croatian society corroborate the fact which experts of various profiles often point out: ignoring the process of (urban) planning will irreparably damage the space. The city transformation shows the absence of comprehensive urban planning which results in an ever increasing number of random buildings which do not fit in the surroundings. This leads up to yet another important issue ā the shrinking and, in some cases, disappearance of public space which becomes the ālost spaceā. In recent years there has been a lot of building in the city core and on the edge which does not quite fit in the existing urban structure, image or the skyline of the city. The current situation in the process of planning can be characterized as a conflict and imbalance between the powerful actors (mostly political and economic) and less powerful actors (mostly professional and civil). The actors who have the political power and influence and the ones who possess the capital are forming an āallianceā between two important layers of the social structure. The lack of civil and professional actors, ālost spatial actorsā, and therefore of civic aggregation is also present and that is also the cause of public space ādisappearanceā and undermined process of public participation. --------------- IN CROATIAN: U postsocijalistiÄkom razdoblju i trenutnom tranzicijskom kontekstu urbana i ruralna Hrvatska su, kao i ostale tranzicijske zemlje, doživjele mnoge promjene u druÅ”tvenoj strukturi i samom prostoru. Na primjeru kvalitete stanovanja kao replike stanja u hrvatskom druÅ”tvu mogu se vidjeti znaÄajne promjene. DruÅ”tveno usmjerena stambena izgradnja sufinancirana od strane države i gradova je stoga rjeÄa i u nepovoljnijoj je situaciji prema privatnoj stanogradnji. Zadnjih dvadeset godina udjel socijalne stambene gradnje je zanemariv u ukupnoj izgradnji na razini zemlje. Primjerice, od devet planiranih stambenih naselja izgraÄenih po modelu POS-a u Zagrebu samo su tri i zavrÅ”ena. Na ostalima je proces gradnje zastao i ne Äini se da Äe se privesti kraju. Privatna je gradnje prisutnija, posebno na rubovima grada, a obilježava je visoka gustoÄa gradnje. Ovakav tip gradnje ne odgovara veÄini stanovnika koji su u procesu potražnje stambene nekretnine (visoka cijena kvadratnog metra, a slaba kvaliteta gradnje). Postoji takoÄer i problem nedostatne opremljenosti susjedstva (primarna i sekundarna infrastruktura, Å”kole, vrtiÄi, igraliÅ”ta, zelene povrÅ”ine, pjeÅ”aÄke staze, javni transport itd.). Navedene globalizacijsko-tranzicijske okolnosti hrvatskog druÅ”tva potvrÄuju ono Å”to eksperti razliÄitih profila istiÄu, a to je da Äe ignoriranje procesa (urbanog) planiranja nepovratno uniÅ”titi prostor gradova. Ovakve transformacije pokazuju nedostatak sustavnog urbanog planiranja Å”to rezultira sve veÄim brojem zgrada koje se ne uklapaju u neposrednu okolinu. To nadalje dovodi do drugog važnog aspekta ā smanjivanja i u nekim sluÄajevima, nestanka javnog prostora koji postaje āizgubljeni prostorā. Posljednjih je godina izgraÄen velik broj zgrada, i u srediÅ”tu i na rubovima grada, koje se ne uklapaju u postojeÄu urbanu strukturu, izgled ili vizuru grada. Ovakvu situaciju obilježavaju sukob i neravnoteža izmeÄu moÄnijih druÅ”tvenih aktera (veÄinom politiÄkih i ekonomskih) i onih manje moÄnih (veÄinom profesionalnih i civilnih). PolitiÄki i ekonomski akteri se Äesto povezuju u āsavezā dvaju najjaÄih u druÅ”tvenoj strukturi. S druge strane nedostatak utjecaja civilnih i profesionalnih aktera kao āizgubljenih prostornih akteraā dovodi do ānestankaā javnih prostora te smanjenja važnosti procesa participacije (sudjelovanja javnosti)
Maritime expressions:a corpus based exploration of maritime metaphors
This study uses a purpose-built corpus to explore the linguistic legacy of Britainās maritime history found in the form of hundreds of specialised āMaritime Expressionsā (MEs), such as TAKEN ABACK, ANCHOR and ALOOF, that permeate modern English. Selecting just those expressions commencing with āAā, it analyses 61 MEs in detail and describes the processes by which these technical expressions, from a highly specialised occupational discourse community, have made their way into modern English. The Maritime Text Corpus (MTC) comprises 8.8 million words, encompassing a range of text types and registers, selected to provide a cross-section of āmaritimeā writing. It is analysed using WordSmith analytical software (Scott, 2010), with the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as a reference corpus. Using the MTC, a list of keywords of specific salience within the maritime discourse has been compiled and, using frequency data, concordances and collocations, these MEs are described in detail and their use and form in the MTC and the BNC is compared. The study examines the transformation from ME to figurative use in the general discourse, in terms of form and metaphoricity. MEs are classified according to their metaphorical strength and their transference from maritime usage into new registers and domains such as those of business, politics, sports and reportage etc. A revised model of metaphoricity is developed and a new category of figurative expression, the āresonatorā, is proposed. Additionally, developing the work of Lakov and Johnson, Kovesces and others on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), a number of Maritime Conceptual Metaphors are identified and their cultural significance is discussed