15,295 research outputs found

    On site challenges for the construction of 16-storey condominium: as observed by a young civil engineering technologist

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    The difference between an engineer and an engineering technologist is that, an engineer would mainly focus and produce structural designs based on engineering calculations, while the job of an engineering technologist is to execute the design in the real working environment by adopting flexible and critical technical ideas on-site. The challenges can be divided into two categories, namely design challenges faced by an engineer and the construction challenges faced by an engineering technologist. Thus, the job scope of an engineering technologist is relatively wider when compared to that of an engineer, as the engineering technologist would be dealing with the consultant, contractors and suppliers on site, while handling the in situ construction challenges. This requires basic understanding of engineering principles and technology, critical thinking and problem-solving skills, modern tools competency in software applications, designs and construction calculations, as well as communication and leadership skills all rolled into one. I have recorded my experience as a junior civil engineering technologist engaged in the construction works of a 16-storey condominium at Langkawi, Kedah. Included in the descriptions are in situ technical problems encountered, potentially unsafe working conditions, foundations, scheduling and housekeeping on site, among others. I hope that the information shared in this entry would make a good introduction and induction for juniors entering the work site, where my personal undertakings could serve as a guide and reminder for them

    Distance learning of foreign languages

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    doi: 10.1017/S0261444806003727This article provides a critical overview of the field of distance language learning, challenging the way in which the field is often narrowly conceptualised as the development of technology-mediated language learning opportunities. Early sections focus on issues of concept and definition and both theoretical and pedagogical perspectives on the field. Emphasis is placed on evident shifts from a concern with structural and organisational issues to a focus on transactional issues associated with teaching/learning opportunities within emerging paradigms for distance language learning. The next section reviews choices and challenges in incorporating technology into distance language learning environments, foregrounding decisions about technology made in particular sociocultural contexts, the contribution of ‘low-end’ technologies and research directions in developing new learning spaces and in using online technologies. The investigation of learner contributions to distance language learning is an important avenue of enquiry in the field, given the preoccupation with technology and virtual learning environments, and this is the subject of section six. The two final sections identify future research directions and provide a series of conclusions about research and practice in distance language learning as technology-mediated interactions increasingly come to influence the way we think about the processes of language learning and teaching

    A basis for learning with desktop virtual environments

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    Modeling for Spatial Memory

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    The purpose of this research is to help establish a framework of knowledge around people\u27s spatial gist capacities that can inform the creation and implementation of spatial memory aptitude tests. This research overlaps the fields of psychology, computer science, and urban design. The aim of this project is to create a versatile, 9-block, 3D-modeled cityscape that can be used as a tool in future research projects. The virtual cityscape will be designed by adhering to psychological principles of wayfinding which include five principles of urban design: districts, edges, paths, nodes, and landmarks (as prescribed by Kevin Lynch in the book Image of the City). This project will entail strategically embedding the five principles in the design of the model. In addition, principles from Design of Cities, by Ed Bacon, will be integrated to help establish an underlying organizational structure to the virtual cityscape. The software applications City Engine (ESRI), Rhinoceros 3D, and Unreal Engine will be used to create the model. First, the city structure and parameters will be created using City Engine. Next, detailed modeling elements will be created in Rhinoceros 3D. Finally, Unreal Engine will be used to establish the user interface. As a final deliverable, the cityscape model will be imported into a virtual reality platform where people can wear VR headsets and interact with the environment at a human scale. This model will be offered as a product that can be used by future researchers for human subject testing of wayfinding capabilities. As an accompaniment to the model, a written document will be provided describing the design principles by which the model was created and where they can be seen

    Spatial Relations and Natural-Language Semantics for Indoor Scenes

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    Over the past 15 years, there have been increased efforts to represent and communicate spatial information about entities within indoor environments. Automated annotation of information about indoor environments is needed for natural-language processing tasks, such as spatially anchoring events, tracking objects in motion, scene descriptions, and interpretation of thematic places in relationship to confirmed locations. Descriptions of indoor scenes often require a fine granularity of spatial information about the meaning of natural-language spatial utterances to improve human-computer interactions and applications for the retrieval of spatial information. The development needs of these systems provide a rationale as to why—despite an extensive body of research in spatial cognition and spatial linguistics—it is still necessary to investigate basic understandings of how humans conceptualize and communicate about objects and structures in indoor space. This thesis investigates the alignment of conceptual spatial relations and naturallanguage (NL) semantics in the representation of indoor space. The foundation of this work is grounded in spatial information theory as well as spatial cognition and spatial linguistics. In order to better understand how to align computational models and NL expressions about indoor space, this dissertation used an existing dataset of indoor scene descriptions to investigate patterns in entity identification, spatial relations, and spatial preposition use within vista-scale indoor settings. Three human-subject experiments were designed and conducted within virtual indoor environments. These experiments investigate alignment of human-subject NL expressions for a sub-set of conceptual spatial relations (contact, disjoint, and partof) within a controlled virtual environment. Each scene was designed to focus participant attention on a single relation depicted in the scene and elicit a spatial preposition term(s) to describe the focal relationship. The major results of this study are the identification of object and structure categories, spatial relationships, and patterns of spatial preposition use in the indoor scene descriptions that were consistent across both open response, closed response and ranking type items. There appeared to be a strong preference for describing scene objects in relation to the structural objects that bound the room depicted in the indoor scenes. Furthermore, for each of the three relations (contact, disjoint, and partof), a small set of spatial prepositions emerged that were strongly preferred by participants at statistically significant levels based on the overall frequency of response, image sorting, and ranking judgments. The use of certain spatial prepositions to describe relations between room structures suggests there may be differences in how indoor vista-scale space is understood in relation to tabletop and geographic scales. Finally, an indoor scene description corpus was developed as a product of this work, which should provide researchers with new human-subject based datasets for training NL algorithms used to generate more accurate and intuitive NL descriptions of indoor scenes

    Investigating Spatial Memory and Navigation in Developmental Amnesia: Evidence from a Google Street View Paradigm, Mental Navigation Tasks, and Route Descriptions

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    This dissertation examined the integrity of spatial representations of extensively travelled environments in developmental amnesia, thereby elucidating the role of the hippocampus in forming and retrieving spatial memories that enable flexible navigation. Previous research using mental navigation tasks found that developmental amnesic case H.C., an individual with atypical hippocampal development, could accurately estimate distance and direction between landmarks, but her representation of her environment was fragmented, inflexible, and lacked detail (Rosenbaum, Cassidy, & Herdman, 2015). Study 1 of this dissertation examined H.C.s spatial memory of her home environment using an ecologically valid virtual reality paradigm based on Google Street View. H.C. and control participants virtually navigated routes of varying familiarity within their home environment. To examine whether flexible navigation requires the hippocampus, participants also navigated familiar routes that had been mirror-reversed. H.C. performed similarly to control participants on all route conditions, suggesting that spatial learning of frequently travelled environments can occur despite compromised hippocampal system function. H.C.s unexpected ability to successfully navigate mirror-reversed routes might reflect the accumulation of spatial knowledge of her environment over the 6 years since she was first tested with mental navigation tasks. As such, Study 2 investigated how spatial representations of extensively travelled environments change over time in developmental amnesia by re-testing H.C. on mental navigation tasks 8 years later. H.C. continued to draw sketch maps that lacked cohesiveness and detail and had difficulty sequencing landmarks and generating detours on a blocked route task, suggesting that her overall representation of the environment did not improve over 8 years. Study 3 thoroughly examined the integrity of H.C.s detailed representation of the environment using a route description task. H.C. accurately described perceptual features of landmarks along a known route, but provided inaccurate information regarding the spatial relations of landmarks, resulting in a fragmented mental representation of the route. Taken together, these results contribute meaningfully to our current understanding of the integrity of spatial representations of extensively travelled environments in developmental amnesia. Non-spatial factors that could influence performance on navigation and spatial memory tasks are discussed, as is the impact of these results on theories of hippocampal function

    The impact of sound in people's behaviour in outdoor settings: A study using virtual reality and eye-tracking

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    This paper presents an analysis of space perception and how visual cues, such as landmarks and sound, are perceived and impact people's behaviour while exploring a given outdoor space. The primary goal of the research is to investigate how auditory sensations and visual stimuli influence people's behaviour in outdoor built environments. Our technique compares people's perception of the built environment in different conditions: the real world and a replicated virtual world. As a case study, a university campus was used, and four experimental conditions were designed. The study followed a between-subjects design, and the data collection included gaze data acquired from an eye-tracking device as well as self-reports. The study concludes that sound influences human behaviour in such settings. More specifically conclusions are that: i) human behaviour in virtual replications of the real space, including both visual and sound stimuli, is tendentially more similar to human behaviour in the real world than in simulations omitting sound; and ii) there is a difference in human behaviour when people explore the same virtually replicated outdoor space, by varying the presence of sound. This study is particularly useful for researchers working on the comparison between human behaviour in virtual and real environments, related to visual and sound stimuli.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

    Anchoring The Cognitive Map To The Visual World

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    To interact rapidly and effectively with the environment, the mammalian brain needs a representation of the spatial layout of the external world (or a “cognitive map”). A person might need to know where she is standing to find her way home, for instance, or might need to know where she is looking to reach for her out-of-sight keys. For many behaviors, however, simply possessing a map is not enough; in order for a map to be useful in a dynamic world, it must be anchored to stable environmental cues. The goal of the present research is to address this spatial anchoring problem in two different domains: navigation and vision. In the first part of the thesis, which comprises Chapters 1-3, we examine how navigators use perceptual information to re-anchor their cognitive map after becoming lost, a process known as spatial reorientation. Using a novel behavioral paradigm with rodents, in Chapter 2 we show that the cognitive map is reoriented by dissociable inputs for identifying where one is and recovering which way one is facing. The findings presented in Chapter 2 also highlight the importance of environmental boundaries, such as the walls of a room, for anchoring the cognitive map. We thus predicted that there might exist a brain region that is selectively involved in boundary perception during navigation. Accordingly, in Chapter 3, we combine transcranial magnetic stimulation and virtual-reality navigation to reveal the existence of such a boundary perception region in humans. In the second part of this thesis, Chapter 4, we explore whether the same mechanisms that support the cognitive map of navigational space also mediate a map of visual space (i.e., where one is looking). Using functional magnetic resonance imaging and eye tracking, we show that human entorhinal cortex supports a map-like representation of visual space that obeys the same principles of boundary-anchoring previously observed in rodent maps of navigational space. Together, this research elucidates how mental maps are anchored to the world, thus allowing the mammalian brain to form durable spatial representations across body and eye movements

    Evaluation of Multi-Level Cognitive Maps for Supporting Between-Floor Spatial Behavior in Complex Indoor Environments

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    People often become disoriented when navigating in complex, multi-level buildings. To efficiently find destinations located on different floors, navigators must refer to a globally coherent mental representation of the multi-level environment, which is termed a multi-level cognitive map. However, there is a surprising dearth of research into underlying theories of why integrating multi-level spatial knowledge into a multi-level cognitive map is so challenging and error-prone for humans. This overarching problem is the core motivation of this dissertation. We address this vexing problem in a two-pronged approach combining study of both basic and applied research questions. Of theoretical interest, we investigate questions about how multi-level built environments are learned and structured in memory. The concept of multi-level cognitive maps and a framework of multi-level cognitive map development are provided. We then conducted a set of empirical experiments to evaluate the effects of several environmental factors on users’ development of multi-level cognitive maps. The findings of these studies provide important design guidelines that can be used by architects and help to better understand the research question of why people get lost in buildings. Related to application, we investigate questions about how to design user-friendly visualization interfaces that augment users’ capability to form multi-level cognitive maps. An important finding of this dissertation is that increasing visual access with an X-ray-like visualization interface is effective for overcoming the disadvantage of limited visual access in built environments and assists the development of multi-level cognitive maps. These findings provide important human-computer interaction (HCI) guidelines for visualization techniques to be used in future indoor navigation systems. In sum, this dissertation adopts an interdisciplinary approach, combining theories from the fields of spatial cognition, information visualization, and HCI, addressing a long-standing and ubiquitous problem faced by anyone who navigates indoors: why do people get lost inside multi-level buildings. Results provide both theoretical and applied levels of knowledge generation and explanation, as well as contribute to the growing field of real-time indoor navigation systems
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