4,342 research outputs found

    Planetary Hinterlands:Extraction, Abandonment and Care

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    This open access book considers the concept of the hinterland as a crucial tool for understanding the global and planetary present as a time defined by the lasting legacies of colonialism, increasing labor precarity under late capitalist regimes, and looming climate disasters. Traditionally seen to serve a (colonial) port or market town, the hinterland here becomes a lens to attend to the times and spaces shaped and experienced across the received categories of the urban, rural, wilderness or nature. In straddling these categories, the concept of the hinterland foregrounds the human and more-than-human lively processes and forms of care that go on even in sites defined by capitalist extraction and political abandonment. Bringing together scholars from the humanities and social sciences, the book rethinks hinterland materialities, affectivities, and ecologies across places and cultural imaginations, Global North and South, urban and rural, and land and water

    LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volume

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    LIPIcs, Volume 251, ITCS 2023, Complete Volum

    Effects of municipal smoke-free ordinances on secondhand smoke exposure in the Republic of Korea

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    ObjectiveTo reduce premature deaths due to secondhand smoke (SHS) exposure among non-smokers, the Republic of Korea (ROK) adopted changes to the National Health Promotion Act, which allowed local governments to enact municipal ordinances to strengthen their authority to designate smoke-free areas and levy penalty fines. In this study, we examined national trends in SHS exposure after the introduction of these municipal ordinances at the city level in 2010.MethodsWe used interrupted time series analysis to assess whether the trends of SHS exposure in the workplace and at home, and the primary cigarette smoking rate changed following the policy adjustment in the national legislation in ROK. Population-standardized data for selected variables were retrieved from a nationally representative survey dataset and used to study the policy action’s effectiveness.ResultsFollowing the change in the legislation, SHS exposure in the workplace reversed course from an increasing (18% per year) trend prior to the introduction of these smoke-free ordinances to a decreasing (−10% per year) trend after adoption and enforcement of these laws (β2 = 0.18, p-value = 0.07; β3 = −0.10, p-value = 0.02). SHS exposure at home (β2 = 0.10, p-value = 0.09; β3 = −0.03, p-value = 0.14) and the primary cigarette smoking rate (β2 = 0.03, p-value = 0.10; β3 = 0.008, p-value = 0.15) showed no significant changes in the sampled period. Although analyses stratified by sex showed that the allowance of municipal ordinances resulted in reduced SHS exposure in the workplace for both males and females, they did not affect the primary cigarette smoking rate as much, especially among females.ConclusionStrengthening the role of local governments by giving them the authority to enact and enforce penalties on SHS exposure violation helped ROK to reduce SHS exposure in the workplace. However, smoking behaviors and related activities seemed to shift to less restrictive areas such as on the streets and in apartment hallways, negating some of the effects due to these ordinances. Future studies should investigate how smoke-free policies beyond public places can further reduce the SHS exposure in ROK

    Abstract Book of the II Congress of the Latin American Society for Vector Ecology

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    Recopilación de los resúmenes de las conferencias, simposios, paneles de discusión y "turbo talks" ofrecidos en el II Congreso de la Sociedad Latinoamericana de Ecología de Vectores (LA SOVE), realizado entre el 29 de octubre y el 3 de noviembre de 2022 en la ciudad de La Plata (Buenos Aires, Argentina).Sociedad Latinoamericana de Ecología de Vectores (LA SOVE

    The Mogadishu Effect: America\u27s Failure-Driven Foreign Policy

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    The October 1993 Battle of Mogadishu, commonly referred to as “Black Hawk Down,” transformed American foreign policy in its wake. One of the largest special operations missions in recent history, the failures in Somalia left not only the United States government and military in shock, but also the American people. After the nation’s most elite fighting forces suffered a nearly 50 percent casualty rate at the hands of Somali warlords during what many Americans thought was a humanitarian operation, Congress and the American people erupted in anger. Although the United States has continued to be seen as an overbearing global peacekeeping force in the thirty years since Somalia, the Battle of Mogadishu served as the turning point for a generational foreign policy shift that significantly limited future global intervention because of the overt publicization of battle’s aftermath in the media, domestic and international reactions, and a fear of repeating the same mistakes elsewhere. The first major American loss of life after the Cold War, the battle and the reaction that followed, known as the “Mogadishu effect,” forced President Clinton to rethink the United States’ role internationally. Clinton and his administration struggled to convince the American people that involvement overseas, especially global peacekeeping, was vital to international order after becoming the world’s sole superpower. Congressional hearings, presidential correspondence, government documents, poll results, and numerous media releases across Clinton’s presidency mark the distinct shift in American foreign policy that took place after Mogadishu. Although he inherited involvement in the United Nations mission in Somalia from George H.W. Bush, the failures in Somalia transformed Clinton’s humanitarian involvement in Haiti, Bosnia, and Rwanda, tarnishing the remainder of his presidency and shifting expectations of significant American involvement in international peacekeeping after the Cold War

    Metaverse: A Vision, Architectural Elements, and Future Directions for Scalable and Realtime Virtual Worlds

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    With the emergence of Cloud computing, Internet of Things-enabled Human-Computer Interfaces, Generative Artificial Intelligence, and high-accurate Machine and Deep-learning recognition and predictive models, along with the Post Covid-19 proliferation of social networking, and remote communications, the Metaverse gained a lot of popularity. Metaverse has the prospective to extend the physical world using virtual and augmented reality so the users can interact seamlessly with the real and virtual worlds using avatars and holograms. It has the potential to impact people in the way they interact on social media, collaborate in their work, perform marketing and business, teach, learn, and even access personalized healthcare. Several works in the literature examine Metaverse in terms of hardware wearable devices, and virtual reality gaming applications. However, the requirements of realizing the Metaverse in realtime and at a large-scale need yet to be examined for the technology to be usable. To address this limitation, this paper presents the temporal evolution of Metaverse definitions and captures its evolving requirements. Consequently, we provide insights into Metaverse requirements. In addition to enabling technologies, we lay out architectural elements for scalable, reliable, and efficient Metaverse systems, and a classification of existing Metaverse applications along with proposing required future research directions

    Tradition and Innovation in Construction Project Management

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    This book is a reprint of the Special Issue 'Tradition and Innovation in Construction Project Management' that was published in the journal Buildings

    A New Methodology to Manage FPGA Distributed Memory Content via Bitstream for Xilinx ZYNQ Devices

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    This paper proposes a methodology to access data and manage the content of distributed memories in FPGA designs through the configuration bitstream. Thanks to the methods proposed, it is possible to read and write the data content of registers without using the in/out ports of registers in a straightforward fashion. Hence, it offers the possibility of performing several operations, such as, to load, copy or compare the information stored in registers without the necessity of physical interconnections. This work includes two flows that simplify the designing process when using the proposed approach: while the first enables the protection or unprotection of writing on different partial regions through the bitstream, the second permits homogeneous instances of a design implemented in different reconfigurable regions to be obtained without losing efficiency. The approach is based and has been physically validated on the ZYNQ from Xilinx, and when using partially reconfigurable designs, it does not affect the hardware overhead nor the maximum operating frequency of the design.This work has been supported, within the fund for research groups of the Basque university system IT1440-22, by the Department of Education and, within PILAR ZE-2020/00022 and COMMUTE ZE-2021/00931 projects, by the Hazitek program, both of the Basque Government; the latter also by the Ministerio de Ciencia Innovación of Spain through the Centro para el Desarrollo Tecnológico Industrial (CDTI) within the projects IDI-20201264 and IDI-20220543, and through the Fondo Europeo de Desarrollo Regional 2014–2020 (FEDER funds)

    A Framework and Approach for Leveraging Unsteady Response in Turbocompressor Flowfields

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    Turbomachinery is an essential technology in the transfer of mechanical work to or from a fluid stream. Forming a cornerstone component in nearly all electrical energy production and air transportation propulsion systems, turbomachinery also accounts for significant en- ergy transfer due to its omnipresence in fluid handling, including water pumping and pro- cess machinery. As system designers look towards optimized arrangements that enhance system flexibility to highly variable conditions, increase the density of energy transfer, and reduce the amount of lost work, the performance and operability demands on turbomachin- ery components continue to increase. For turbocompressors, a turbomachinery subtype that transfer work to a fluid, the flowfield can be classified into two flow regimes, demarcated by a stability boundary representing an operational limit. For aerodynamic loadings above this stability limit, the flowfield is highly complex, exhibiting a broad range of temporal and spatial features, limiting work transfer and increasing entropy production. The blade- level instabilities, referred to as rotating stall, are the result of deleterious flowfield features, sensitive to perturbation, which have grown with aerodynamic loading. Based on the thesis that critical destabilizing flow structures exhibit coherent response to periodic excitation and can be usefully organized via tuned periodic forcing, the work presented herein emphasizes the dynamical behavior of a representative compressor flow- field under periodic transients and the difficulty in extracting useful information on flow- field response in the post-stall regime. A new analysis approach is developed that enables better understanding of the rotating stall process, providing guidance for the use of data- driven tools and new approaches for control development. Emerging decomposition and operator-based analysis approaches are borrowed from dynamical system modeling to aid in deducing the coherent structures, their unforced behaviors, and critical forcing frequen- cies. In this work, linear stability analysis and resolvent analysis are used to identify the underlying flow structures contributing to the onset of instability. Through a demonstrated surrogate model for compressor stability, a conceptual framework and practical approach are developed, such that the unsteady response of turbomachinery flows can be leveraged to achieve wider operability and enhance the transfer of usable work
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