Biowaste as fluid matter : Valuing biogas and biofertilisers as assets in the Finnish biogas sector

In this article, we examine the effort of turning biowaste into an asset in the everyday practices of Finnish biogas plants. Drawing from social scientific waste studies as well as new materialist and posthumanist approaches, we approach biowaste as unruly, fluid matter inclined to leak and spill over and capable of affecting the possibilities of valuing it. Our analysis shows how biowaste resists the efforts to turn it into completely homogenous mass; how this mass has to be taken care of over the production process; and how it is not always clear whether the practices produce valuable assets or problematic excess. We argue that to better understand the possibilities for a transition towards a circular economy, it is important to acknowledge that the processing and valuing of waste does not offer complete control over it, but also requires careful alignment with waste material that does not always act as wished.publishedVersionPeer reviewe

MULTI-MODAL TASK INSTRUCTIONS TO ROBOTS BY NAIVE USERS

This thesis presents a theoretical framework for the design of user-programmable robots. The objective of the work is to investigate multi-modal unconstrained natural instructions given to robots in order to design a learning robot. A corpus-centred approach is used to design an agent that can reason, learn and interact with a human in a natural unconstrained way. The corpus-centred design approach is formalised and developed in detail. It requires the developer to record a human during interaction and analyse the recordings to find instruction primitives. These are then implemented into a robot. The focus of this work has been on how to combine speech and gesture using rules extracted from the analysis of a corpus. A multi-modal integration algorithm is presented, that can use timing and semantics to group, match and unify gesture and language. The algorithm always achieves correct pairings on a corpus and initiates questions to the user in ambiguous cases or missing information. The domain of card games has been investigated, because of its variety of games which are rich in rules and contain sequences. A further focus of the work is on the translation of rule-based instructions. Most multi-modal interfaces to date have only considered sequential instructions. The combination of frame-based reasoning, a knowledge base organised as an ontology and a problem solver engine is used to store these rules. The understanding of rule instructions, which contain conditional and imaginary situations require an agent with complex reasoning capabilities. A test system of the agent implementation is also described. Tests to confirm the implementation by playing back the corpus are presented. Furthermore, deployment test results with the implemented agent and human subjects are presented and discussed. The tests showed that the rate of errors that are due to the sentences not being defined in the grammar does not decrease by an acceptable rate when new grammar is introduced. This was particularly the case for complex verbal rule instructions which have a large variety of being expressed

Population, Development, and Environment on the Yucatan Peninsula: From Ancient Maya to 2030

This volume is the third in a series of case studies on population, development, and environment interactions. In the style of the previous two studies, this report is divided into two parts. The first part is a set of studies of the history, culture, environment, and economy of the Yucatan peninsula. The chapters focus on issues ranging from the causes of the Mayan collapse in the tenth century to the performance of the Yucatan economy from 1970 to 1993. The second part builds on the first through the construction of a set of computer simulation models of population, development, and environment interactions. Taken together, the models deal with population growth by education, migration between the Yucatan and other parts of Mexico and within the peninsula itself, tourism, the quality of beaches, the congestion of historical sites, the fisheries of the Yucatan coast, and land use

Liveability analysis of gated and non-gated low middle income communities in kuala lumpur, Malaysia

The aim of this paper is to examine the liveability conditions in gated and non-gated low middle income communities in Kuala Lumpur where rapid urban growth has led to many disruptions in the urban living environment. Hence, a livability framework was developed with dimensions from housing condition, economic condition, functional environment, social relations and community safety towards achieving the research objectives of – a) to study the liveability level in gated and non-gated communities, b) to compare the level of liveability between gated and non-gated communities, and c) to determine the dimensions and indicators which influence the level of liveability in both communities. Residents’ views were collected through a questionnaire survey which consisted of twenty-four indicators of liveability belonging to five dimensions from three communities in Kuala Lumpur. Two communities belong to non-gated and one community had gated living status. The findings of the research revealed that gated community has a better living conditions compared to the non-gated community. Thus, this research can be used as a turning point to improve the living environment of both gated and non-gated communit

Bluegrass and Old-Time in Catalonia: An Ethnographic Case Study of Aesthetic Communitas

This is an ethnographic case study of a musical community in Catalonia centered around the performance of bluegrass and old-time music. By using Victor and Edith Turners’ ideas of normative communitas, this paper identifies an aesthetic communitas model which describes a community centered around a performative genre. Through participant observation in the 16th Annual Al Ras Bluegrass and Old Time Music Festival and interviews with local musicians, fans, venue owners, and luthiers, the ethnographic narrative details the characteristics of the aesthetic communitas in Catalonia and searches for associations of Appalachia that accompany the cross-cultural manifestation of bluegrass and old-time music in Catalonia. The conclusion examines the significance of the aesthetic communitas model and suggests further lines of research for this model

From Smartcity to the Food Parliament: an investigation into the urban consequences of food transparency

Over the centuries, there has been an undeniable symbiosis between urbanization and food production. The first part of the research, ‘Food +’ reassesses this relationship in an era of unrelenting urbanism and global food shortage, two interdependent phenomena that must reach a rapprochement to prevent an impending catastrophe that is human as much as environmental. ‘Food +’ consists of a series of investigations in which the extant cultural, legal, educational, medical, financial and employment frameworks of the city are reinterpreted through the medium of food and the spatial implications of how the city is governed. The research culminates in a speculative piece of polemic, the ‘Food Parliament’, a system of architectonic components that operate as a sustainable stratum over London. The discourse follows similar themes of sustainability and transformation of cities initiated in ‘Smartcities’, but looks at how the creation, storage and distribution of food has been and can again become a construct for the practice of everyday life. The Food Parliament, a provocation, is premised on the adoption of food as the local currency standard. Formally unorthodox, the components of the Parliament become metaphors for food immediacy, nutrition, health, job opportunities, green income sources and social cohesion, and simultaneously raise serious questions about the priorities of our governing bodies. Although the Food Parliament is a fantastical construct, the principles that underlie its premise and the justification for its existence, are both real and urgent

Templeton High School - Teacher Internship Program

This internship report addresses documentation required per quality criteria in secondary programs of agricultural education in California. The internship also included the development of instructional materials for a course now recognized as a UC/CSU approved Agriculture Biology course

Bayesian models for visual information retrieval

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2000.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 192-208).This thesis presents a unified solution to visual recognition and learning in the context of visual information retrieval. Realizing that the design of an effective recognition architecture requires careful consideration of the interplay between feature selection, feature representation, and similarity function, we start by searching for a performance criteria that can simultaneously guide the design of all three components. A natural solution is to formulate visual recognition as a decision theoretical problem, where the goal is to minimize the probability of retrieval error. This leads to a Bayesian architecture that is shown to generalize a significant number of previous recognition approaches, solving some of the most challenging problems faced by these: joint modeling of color and texture, objective guidelines for controlling the trade-off between feature transformation and feature representation, and unified support for local and global queries without requiring image segmentation. The new architecture is shown to perform well on color, texture, and generic image databases, providing a good trade-off between retrieval accuracy, invariance, perceptual relevance of similarity judgments, and complexity. Because all that is needed to perform optimal Bayesian decisions is the ability to evaluate beliefs on the different hypothesis under consideration, a Bayesian architecture is not restricted to visual recognition. On the contrary, it establishes a universal recognition language (the language of probabilities) that provides a computational basis for the integration of information from multiple content sources and modalities. In result, it becomes possible to build retrieval systems that can simultaneously account for text, audio, video, or any other content modalities. Since the ability to learn follows from the ability to integrate information over time, this language is also conducive to the design of learning algorithms. We show that learning is, indeed, an important asset for visual information retrieval by designing both short and long-term learning mechanisms. Over short time scales (within a retrieval session), learning is shown to assure faster convergence to the desired target images. Over long time scales (between retrieval sessions), it allows the retrieval system to tailor itself to the preferences of particular users. In both cases, all the necessary computations are carried out through Bayesian belief propagation algorithms that, although optimal in a decision-theoretic sense, are extremely simple, intuitive, and easy to implement.by Nuno Miguel Borges de Pinho Cruz de Vasconcelos.Ph.D