305,832 research outputs found

    From ocean sprawl to blue-green infrastructure:A UK perspective on an issue of global significance

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    Artificial structures are proliferating in the marine environment, resulting in ‘ocean sprawl’. In light of the potential environmental impacts of this, such as habitat loss and alteration, it is becoming increasingly important to incorporate ecologically-sensitive design into artificial marine structures. The principles of eco-engineering and green infrastructure are embedded in urban planning practice for terrestrial and freshwater development projects. In marine planning, however, eco-engineering of blue-green infrastructure remains an emerging concept. This note provides a UK perspective on the progress towards uptake of eco-engineering approaches for enhancing biodiversity on artificial marine structures. We emphasise that, despite a clear ‘policy pull’ to incorporate biodiversity enhancements in marine structures, a range of proof-of-concept evidence that it is possible to achieve, and strong cross-sectoral stakeholder support, there are still few examples of truly and purposefullydesigned blue-green artificial structures in the UK. We discuss the barriers that remain and propose a strategy towards effective implementation. Our strategy outlines a step-wise approach to: (1) strengthening the evidence base for what enhancements can be achieved in different scenarios; (2) improving clarity on the predicted benefits and associated costs of enhancements; (3) packaging the evidence in a useful form to support planning and decision-making; and (4) encouraging implementation as routine practice. Given that ocean sprawl is a growing problem globally, the perspective presented here provides valuable insight and lessons for other nations at their various states of progress towards this same goal

    Good gamers, good managers? A proof-of-concept study with Sid Meier’s Civilization

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    Human resource professionals increasingly enhance their assessment tools with game elements—a process typically referred to as “gamification”—to make them more interesting and engaging for candidates, and they design and use “serious games” that can support skill assessment and development. However, commercial, off-the-shelf video games are not or are only rarely used to screen or test candidates, even though there is increasing evidence that they are indicative of various skills that are professionally valuable. Using the strategy game Civilization, this proof-of-concept study explores if strategy video games are indicative of managerial skills and, if so, of what managerial skills. Under controlled laboratory conditions, we asked forty business students to play the Civilization game and to participate in a series of assessment exercises. We find that students who had high scores in the game had better skills related to problem-solving and organizing and planning than the students who had low scores. In addition, a preliminary analysis of in-game data, including players’ interactions and chat messages, suggests that strategy games such as Civilization may be used for more precise and holistic “stealth assessments,” including personality assessments

    Improving Students’ Creativity In The Proving The Validity Of Arguments Through Learning Strategy ”What’s Another Way”

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    The purpose of this study was to describe the enhancing creativity of students in proving the validity of arguments through learning strategy "what's another way". This research was an action research with qualitative descriptive approach. The subjects were students of mathematics education UNIROW Tuban. The study was conducted in three cycles, Cycle I: Proof of Validity Arguments Directly, Cycle II: Proof of Validity Arguments Indirectly, and Cycle III: Validity Evidence Arguments Containing Kuantor. This research results in the following: In general, the learning strategy "what's another way" to improve the creativity of students in proving the validity of the argument. The main difficulty in proving the validity of the argument is as follows: a) the use of evidentiary rules of argument, and b) the idea of proof plan. Key Words: creativity, proving, argument, validity, and ”what’s another way

    The Adapting city. Resilience through water design in Rotterdam

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    The Netherlands is a fragile and vulnerable land; spatial planning is very important, just as important is the resilience of the system and its adaptation to climate change. Rotterdam is a delta city and, in a period of heavy climate change, it will experiment more extreme weather conditions, such as heavier rainstorms, longer periods of drought and more heat waves, as well as higher water levels in the river Meuse; so is important to know that it is a deep vulnerable city and need right strategies to overcome the problem and to be adapted to conseguences of climate change. The results presented in these manuscript were developed through some academic course at TUDelft; the main aim is to arrive at shared ambitions for climate proof urban development and to make specific concrete agreements about this defining a strategy able to enforce urban beauty and absorb excess rainwater and improve urban resilience through the implementation of some adaptive measures linking this strategy to the whole urban governante of the city. There is the need to implement a conscious and smart urban governance and to undertake urban awareness actions that aim at the awareness of the communities, which becomes an active part in promoting urban resilience policies and in creating the sustainable city. The strategy is characterized by some main innovation that could be recreated in other countries, such as the inclusion of resilience’s theme in all levels of government and in all urban planning instruments and in spatial and strategic development policies; the deep cooperation between all stakeholders and public administrations; and the role of urban design that is able to create a waterproof city, enhancing the quality of public space

    How Dutch Institutions Enhance the Adaptive Capacity of Society

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    This report examines the adaptive capacity of the institutional framework of the Netherlands to cope with the impacts of climate change. Historically, institutions have evolved incrementally to deal with existing social problems. They provide norms and rules for collective action and create continuity rather than change. However, the nature of societal problems is changing as a result of the processes of globalization and development. With the progress made in the natural sciences, we are able to predict in advance, to a certain extent, the potential environmental impacts of various human actions on society, for example, climate change. This raises some key questions: Are our institutions capable of dealing with this new knowledge about future impacts and, more importantly, with the impacts themselves? Are our institutions capable of dealing with the inherent uncertainty of the predictions

    Searching for a Solution to Program Verification=Equation Solving in CCS

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    International audienceUnder non-exponential discounting, we develop a dynamic theory for stopping problems in continuous time. Our framework covers discount functions that induce decreasing impatience. Due to the inherent time inconsistency, we look for equilibrium stopping policies, formulated as fixed points of an operator. Under appropriate conditions, fixed-point iterations converge to equilibrium stopping policies. This iterative approach corresponds to the hierarchy of strategic reasoning in game theory and provides “agent-specific” results: it assigns one specific equilibrium stopping policy to each agent according to her initial behavior. In particular, it leads to a precise mathematical connection between the naive behavior and the sophisticated one. Our theory is illustrated in a real options model

    Towards a theory of heuristic and optimal planning for sequential information search

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