7,986 research outputs found

    Process intensification of oxidative coupling of methane

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    A Decision Support System for Economic Viability and Environmental Impact Assessment of Vertical Farms

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    Vertical farming (VF) is the practice of growing crops or animals using the vertical dimension via multi-tier racks or vertically inclined surfaces. In this thesis, I focus on the emerging industry of plant-specific VF. Vertical plant farming (VPF) is a promising and relatively novel practice that can be conducted in buildings with environmental control and artificial lighting. However, the nascent sector has experienced challenges in economic viability, standardisation, and environmental sustainability. Practitioners and academics call for a comprehensive financial analysis of VPF, but efforts are stifled by a lack of valid and available data. A review of economic estimation and horticultural software identifies a need for a decision support system (DSS) that facilitates risk-empowered business planning for vertical farmers. This thesis proposes an open-source DSS framework to evaluate business sustainability through financial risk and environmental impact assessments. Data from the literature, alongside lessons learned from industry practitioners, would be centralised in the proposed DSS using imprecise data techniques. These techniques have been applied in engineering but are seldom used in financial forecasting. This could benefit complex sectors which only have scarce data to predict business viability. To begin the execution of the DSS framework, VPF practitioners were interviewed using a mixed-methods approach. Learnings from over 19 shuttered and operational VPF projects provide insights into the barriers inhibiting scalability and identifying risks to form a risk taxonomy. Labour was the most commonly reported top challenge. Therefore, research was conducted to explore lean principles to improve productivity. A probabilistic model representing a spectrum of variables and their associated uncertainty was built according to the DSS framework to evaluate the financial risk for VF projects. This enabled flexible computation without precise production or financial data to improve economic estimation accuracy. The model assessed two VPF cases (one in the UK and another in Japan), demonstrating the first risk and uncertainty quantification of VPF business models in the literature. The results highlighted measures to improve economic viability and the viability of the UK and Japan case. The environmental impact assessment model was developed, allowing VPF operators to evaluate their carbon footprint compared to traditional agriculture using life-cycle assessment. I explore strategies for net-zero carbon production through sensitivity analysis. Renewable energies, especially solar, geothermal, and tidal power, show promise for reducing the carbon emissions of indoor VPF. Results show that renewably-powered VPF can reduce carbon emissions compared to field-based agriculture when considering the land-use change. The drivers for DSS adoption have been researched, showing a pathway of compliance and design thinking to overcome the ‘problem of implementation’ and enable commercialisation. Further work is suggested to standardise VF equipment, collect benchmarking data, and characterise risks. This work will reduce risk and uncertainty and accelerate the sector’s emergence

    International Conference Shaping light for health and wellbeing in cities

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    The book collects contributions presented during the international conference “Shaping light for health and wellbeing in cities” organized in the framework of the H2020 ENLIGHTENme project. The conference has investigated the multifaceted consequences light has on life in cities, by adopting a multidisciplinary and integrated approach to explore the complexity of challenges urban lighting poses on health and wellbeing, urban realm and social life. Papers cover several disciplines such as clinical and biomedical sciences, ethics and Responsible Research & Innovation, urban planning and architecture, data accessibility and interoperability, as well as social sciences and economics, and provide multifaceted insights that inspire further explorations. Contributions represent a step towards the development of innovative policies for improving health and wellbeing in our cities, addressing indoor and outdoor lighting

    How to Be a God

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    When it comes to questions concerning the nature of Reality, Philosophers and Theologians have the answers. Philosophers have the answers that can’t be proven right. Theologians have the answers that can’t be proven wrong. Today’s designers of Massively-Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Games create realities for a living. They can’t spend centuries mulling over the issues: they have to face them head-on. Their practical experiences can indicate which theoretical proposals actually work in practice. That’s today’s designers. Tomorrow’s will have a whole new set of questions to answer. The designers of virtual worlds are the literal gods of those realities. Suppose Artificial Intelligence comes through and allows us to create non-player characters as smart as us. What are our responsibilities as gods? How should we, as gods, conduct ourselves? How should we be gods

    Chinese Benteng Women’s Participation in Local Development Affairs in Indonesia: Appropriate means for struggle and a pathway to claim citizen’ right?

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    It had been more than two decades passing by aftermath the devastating Asia’s Financial Crisis in 1997, subsequently followed by Suharto’s step down from his presidential throne which he occupied for more than three decades. The financial turmoil turned to a political disaster furthermore has led to massive looting that severely impacted Indonesians of Chinese descendant, including unresolved mystery of the most atrocious sexual violation against women and covert killings of students and democracy activists in this country. Since then, precisely aftermath May 1998, which publicly known as “Reformasi”1, Indonesia underwent political reform that eventually corresponded positively to its macroeconomic growth. Twenty years later, in 2018, Indonesia captured worldwide attention because it has successfully hosted two internationally renowned events, namely the Asian Games 2018 – the most prestigious sport events in Asia – conducted in Jakarta and Palembang; and the IMF/World Bank Annual Meeting 2018 in Bali. Particularly in the IMF/World Bank Annual Meeting, this event has significantly elevated Indonesia’s credibility and international prestige in the global economic powerplay as one of the nations with promising growth and openness. However, the narrative about poverty and inequality, including increasing racial tension, religious conservatism, and sexual violation against women are superseded by friendly climate for foreign investment and eventually excessive glorification of the nation’s economic growth. By portraying the image of promising new economic power, as rhetorically promised by President Joko Widodo during his presidential terms, Indonesia has swept the growing inequality in this highly stratified society that historically compounded with religious and racial tension under the carpet of digital economy.Arte y Humanidade

    Industry 4.0: product digital twins for remanufacturing decision-making

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    Currently there is a desire to reduce natural resource consumption and expand circular business principles whilst Industry 4.0 (I4.0) is regarded as the evolutionary and potentially disruptive movement of technology, automation, digitalisation, and data manipulation into the industrial sector. The remanufacturing industry is recognised as being vital to the circular economy (CE) as it extends the in-use life of products, but its synergy with I4.0 has had little attention thus far. This thesis documents the first investigating into I4.0 in remanufacturing for a CE contributing a design and demonstration of a model that optimises remanufacturing planning using data from different instances in a product’s life cycle. The initial aim of this work was to identify the I4.0 technology that would enhance the stability in remanufacturing with a view to reducing resource consumption. As the project progressed it narrowed to focus on the development of a product digital twin (DT) model to support data-driven decision making for operations planning. The model’s architecture was derived using a bottom-up approach where requirements were extracted from the identified complications in production planning and control that differentiate remanufacturing from manufacturing. Simultaneously, the benefits of enabling visibility of an asset’s through-life health were obtained using a DT as the modus operandi. A product simulator and DT prototype was designed to use Internet of Things (IoT) components, a neural network for remaining life estimations and a search algorithm for operational planning optimisation. The DT was iteratively developed using case studies to validate and examine the real opportunities that exist in deploying a business model that harnesses, and commodifies, early life product data for end-of-life processing optimisation. Findings suggest that using intelligent programming networks and algorithms, a DT can enhance decision-making if it has visibility of the product and access to reliable remanufacturing process information, whilst existing IoT components provide rudimentary “smart” capabilities, but their integration is complex, and the durability of the systems over extended product life cycles needs to be further explored

    Assessing Agroecological Principles at the Intervale in Burlington, Vermont: A Case Study and Multimethod Research with a Participatory Approach in a Peri-Urban Socioecological System

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    The emerging field of urban agroecology promises to mend the prevalent unsustainable rupture between rural and urban/peri-urban agri-food endeavors since global industrial conglomerates took power. My research contributes to the efforts of mending this rupture by, first, advancing the academic discussion on how to fill an evidence-based gap on the use of the much theorized multidimensional and cross-disciplinary principles of agroecology to assess community-based agri-food systems beyond the farm level. To do so, my research uses the fifteen principles of agroecology proposed by the non-profit Coopération Internationale pour le Développement et la Solidarité (CIDSE, 2018). Second, my research expands the understanding of how these agroecological principles may be put into practice in different cases and scenarios, especially in urbanized environments. This investigation uses a single significant case study methodology to share a place-based experience as a possible example of urban agroecology. The case study is a 340-acre information-rich peri-urban organic agroecosystem in Burlington, Vermont, owned and managed by the Intervale Center. My research investigates how the Intervale, a non-profit organization and socioecological system, may be practicing agroecology and consider opportunities to strengthen such practices. My investigation involves a principles-focused and context-sensitive baseline assessment (inspired by Patton, 2018) using a qualitative multimethod framework and a participatory action research (PAR) approach. The multimethod framework triangulates a 'practical' PAR stream of inquiry for the co-creation of knowledge with a purposive sample of participants (semi-structured interviews with visual tools such as CIDSEs agroecological principles infographic, site mapping, and photovoicing) and a 'theoretical' stream where the researcher connects theory to practice (participatory observation, photo-documentation, and document analysis) for an integrated analysis. According to observations and participants' responses, the Intervale follows agroecological principles. The collective practices related to the agroecological principles of strengthening local food producers and community and nourishing biodiversity and soils are most prevalent at the Intervale. The organization also plays a noticeable role under the principle of enhancing the power of the local market and building on a social and solidarity economy. There are also some specific areas of intervention in the organizations operations to achieve higher levels of agroecological transformation, especially under the principles of fostering more diversity and solidarity, encouraging stronger participation of food producers, and promoting more farmer-to-farmer exchanges. Conclusively, this research reduces the evidence-based gap between the theory supporting a set of agroecological principles and their application beyond the farm level and in an urbanized setting. The comprehensive methodology and the results illuminate how the Intervale's placed-based practices could serve as an example to advance urban agroecology in North America and even other regions

    "Alien and Critical": The Modernist Satiric Practices of Djuna Barnes, Wyndham Lewis, and Virginia Woolf

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    This dissertation offers an extended analysis of the modernist satiric practices of authors Djuna Barnes, Wyndham Lewis, and Virginia Woolf in a selection of works spanning different genres published between 1913 and 1954. With these authors works as evidence, I suggest that satire undergoes a significant shift in the first half of the twentieth century as it departs from its premodern roots as a fixed genre or mode, instead becoming a diffuse element that intermittently shapes formal aspects and produces complex critiques. This shift partly results from new formulations of genderfrom altered understandings of masculinity and femininity to the emergence of what we now refer to as queer, nonbinary, and trans identitiesand the way in which what I call the instrumentality of satire enables a range of satiric attacks across different subject positions and a volatile political spectrum. Through a highly comparative approach, I draw upon formalist, feminist, and sociological theories to trace the different networks in which the texts of focus and their authors are embedded (networks of readers, artistic movements, political transformations, marketplaces, and discourses of gender and sexuality) to understand more thoroughly the satire that emerges from these texts. Each chapter pairs discrete investigations of works by each individual author, guided by an overarching topic (Chapter 1 explores networks of satire, Chapter 2 examines satiric method and the novel, and Chapter 3 considers satiric forms of life writing), and ends with a shorter section that compares the three authors works within a specific thematic framework (Chapter 1 with respect to the notion of authority, Chapter 2 through party scenes, and Chapter 3 concerning the portrait genre). My research reveals that the modernist satiric exchanges within these networks can be analyzed as, on the one hand, manifestations of the selected periods political dynamics and, on the other hand, cultural productions that altered how gender was discursively constructed within specific social environments of that period. In brief, the study illustrates how gender and its performance, aesthetics, and rhetoric become central to the production and function of satire in modernist art and literature

    The new age of fear: an analysis of crisis framing by right-wing populist parties in Greece and France

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    From the 2009 Eurozone economic downturn, to the 2015 mass movement of forcibly displaced migrants and the current COVID-19 pandemic, crises have seemingly become a ‘new normal’ feature of European politics. During this decade, rolling crises generated a wave of public discontent that damaged the legitimacy of national governments and the European Union and heralded a renaissance of populism. The central message of populist parties, which helped them rise in popularity or enter parliament for the first time, is simple but very effective: democratic representation has been undermined by national and global elites. This has provoked a wealth of studies seeking to explain the rise or breakthrough of populist fringe parties, without adequate consideration of how crises transform, not only the demand side, but also the supply of populist arguments, which has received scarce attention. This thesis seeks to address this imbalance by synthesising insights from the crisis framing literature, which facilitates an understanding and operationalisation of populism as a style of discourse. To assess how far-right parties employ this discourse, and the implications of this for their electoral prospects, a comparative case-study design is employed, exploring the discourse of parties, the National Rally (NR) in France and Golden Dawn (GD) in Greece. Their ideologically similar profile but differential electoral performance, allows for a more nuanced analysis of their respective framing strategies. The thesis examines the discourse of the two parties MPs on month by month basis over a four year period, 2012-2015 for GD and 2012-2013 and 2016-2017 for NR, via the use of the NVivo software. Their respective discourses are quantified and broken down into four key areas associated with Foreign Policy, the Economy, the Political System and Society, analysing the content, frequency and salience of key crisis frames. Discourse analysis of excerpts adds a qualitative element to the analysis that showcases the substantial differences between the two case studies. The analysis demonstrates that references to ‘the people’ and anti-elitism were the centrepieces of each case study’s discourse with strong nativist and nationalist elements. The two parties were extremely similar in the diagnostic stage of their framing and the way which they attribute blame for the crises. However, their discursive strategies diverge regarding their proposed solutions to the crises. Golden Dawn remained a single issue party in terms of discourse, since it never presented a comprehensive plan for ending the crises. As a result, Golden Dawn’s discourse remained one-dimensional throughout its brief period of success, being centred solely on attributing blame and attacking its political opponents and the European Union. On the other hand, National Rally’s framing was more elaborate and ambitious both in terms of the variety of issues raised and, especially, the proposed solutions if advocated. This, it is argued, contributed to the evolution of RN into a mainstream competitor that is no longer dependent on a niche part of the electoral market, while the inability of GD to develop equally successful crisis frames offers a unique understanding as to why the party failed electorally and was unable to enter Parliament in the 2019 elections. The overall analysis produces a rich framework that maps out the key elements of populist crisis discourse by far-right parties, which has implications for electoral politics and for our understanding of populism, more broadly

    CRUSOE: A Toolset for Cyber Situational Awareness and Decision Support in Incident Handling

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    The growing size and complexity of today’s computer network make it hard to achieve and maintain so-called cyber situational awareness, i.e., the ability to perceive and comprehend the cyber environment and be able to project the situation in the near future. Namely, the personnel of cybersecurity incident response teams or security operation centers should be aware of the security situation in the network to effectively prevent or mitigate cyber attacks and avoid mistakes in the process. In this paper, we present a toolset for achieving cyber situational awareness in a large and heterogeneous environment. Our goal is to support cybersecurity teams in iterating through the OODA loop (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act). We designed tools to help the operator make informed decisions in incident handling and response for each phase of the cycle. The Observe phase builds on common tools for active and passive network monitoring and vulnerability assessment. In the Orient phase, the data on the network are structured and presented in a comprehensible and visually appealing manner. The Decide phase opens opportunities for decision-support systems, in our case, a recommender system that suggests the most resilient configuration of the critical infrastructure. Finally, the Act phase is supported by a service that orchestrates network security tools and allows for prompt mitigation actions. Finally, we present lessons learned from the deployment of the toolset in the campus network and the results of a user evaluation study
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