By-standing memories of curious observations: Children's storied landscapes of ecological encounter.

Founded in contemporary concerns that children are increasingly disconnected from nature, this article explores how children re-imagine their memories of childhood experiences within the landscape of a National Park. The concept of ‘re-connecting’ children with ‘nature’ has recrystalised around conceptualisations of ‘slow ecopedagogy’ as a form of ecological conscientisation.Through creative mapping with children from the Brecon Beacons National Park, Wales, this article questions whether exposure to such environments predisposes young people to an environmental consciousness. Examining children’s creative representations of childhood memories from nonhuman encounters, and building on Philo’s discussion of ‘childhood reverie’, we develop the concept of by-standing memories to articulate how children re-story their own memories, the landscapes in which they take place and the nonhumans they include. Something of a ‘child panic’ currently surrounds the disconnect between children and ecology. While some are concerned by this ‘child panic’, which positions children as ‘by-standers’ to adult affairs, we argue that by-standing is critical for how children tell stories of their dwellings in, and curious observations of, place. The re-telling of childhood memories stretches the conceptualisation of slow ecopedagogy beyond the place of encounter, to the creative spaces of storying and re-telling, which are equally critical for memory itself

Single-pulse classifier for the LOFAR Tied-Array All-sky Survey

Searches for millisecond-duration, dispersed single pulses have become a standard tool used during radio pulsar surveys in the last decade. They have enabled the discovery of two new classes of sources: rotating radio transients and fast radio bursts. However, we are now in a regime where the sensitivity to single pulses in radio surveys is often limited more by the strong background of radio frequency interference (RFI, which can greatly increase the false-positive rate) than by the sensitivity of the telescope itself. To mitigate this problem, we introduce the Single-pulse Searcher (SPS). This is a new machine-learning classifier designed to identify astrophysical signals in a strong RFI environment, and optimized to process the large data volumes produced by the new generation of aperture array telescopes. It has been specifically developed for the LOFAR Tied-Array All-Sky Survey (LOTAAS), an ongoing survey for pulsars and fast radio transients in the northern hemisphere. During its development, SPS discovered seven new pulsars and blindly identified ˜80 known sources. The modular design of the software offers the possibility to easily adapt it to other studies with different instruments and characteristics. Indeed, SPS has already been used in other projects, e.g. to identify pulses from the fast radio burst source FRB 121102. The software development is complete and SPS is now being used to re-process all LOTAAS data collected to date

Anthropogenic Open Land in Boreal Landscapes : Investigations into the Creation and Maintenance of Arable Fields on Swedish Farms

The human-induced open land (cropland, pasture) in the predominantly forested boreal landscapes relies on arable land use; it thus represents an active intervention to hold back forest regrowth. The thesis investigates the practical management decisions by landholders on discrete farms, which in Sweden often comprise both forest and arable lands. The theoretical framework utilizes the concepts timespace, landscape, orientation and commitment to understand how the farmer relates to the land. The study draws on farm cases in various parts of the country, and links land-cover continuity on arable fields and forest clearance with land-use decision-making as a temporally and spatially situated activity. Also when retiring from active land management (due to old age or farm-external income) farmers continue to maintain arable fields, a finding that is interpreted as deriving from the values perceived in the land and the importance of their reinforcement for the landholder identity. Locational fragmentation of managed arable land scattered in the landscape, the increasing of farm sizes following profitability concerns, and a local shortage of land together with other factors induce land clearance on contemporary farms, preferably near the farm centre and contiguous with already managed fields. This finding is understandable when considering time as a resource in farming, and suggests that contemporary boreal landscapes may contain areas that are subjected to an opening-up land-cover dynamics, against the prevailing trend of reforestation

Tartu Ülikooli toimetised. Tööd semiootika alalt. 1964-1992. 0259-4668

http://www.ester.ee/record=b1331700*es

Re-imagining eating spaces of an inner-urban university as pathways to sustainable outcomes

Current understandings and imaginations of eating spaces and related practices limit sustainability outcomes in food provisioning and consumption at urban universities. This is because most understandings and strategies are singular and/or siloed in their approaches and do not address the complex spatial and temporal aspects of eating practices. In addition, most strategies for change are confined to changing individual behaviours and attitudes. This thesis addresses these issues through the research question, how can eating spaces be (re)imagined at urban universities as pathways for sustainable outcomes? Social Practice Theories (SPT) and in particular Schatzki’s (2002)site ontology provide a conceptual framework in this thesis to examine and re-imagine eating spaces and students’ practices as relational. Further, that space is a production of these relations encompassing objective and existential timespaces. Drawing on these concepts, I reimagine university eating spaces as a variety of lived spaces where eating occurs. This approach broadens the notion of sustainability outcomes to explore these spaces and practices as sites for intervention. Moreover, the approach taken also reveals different modes of knowledge production for and at universities, positioning them as pathways for sustainable outcomes. I employed interpretive ethnography as a methodology to identify practices and material arrangements, with RMIT University’s city campus in Melbourne, Australia, as its case study. Using multiple spatially and temporally dispersed methods, I conducted: observations and attended events on campus over a period of two years; semi-structured interviews with a wide range of University and student representatives; focus groups with eighteen students in which students created food maps. I also established a private Facebook page for students to post ‘food selfies’ that captured their food practices on- and off-campus. I studied the eating spaces on campus by focusing on four types of ‘lived spaces’, each providing a distinctive account of and perspective on a lived space that may facilitate different food provisioning and sustainable outcomes. These were: 1) ethnographic spaces that enabled knowledge production that can themselves be sites for intervention 2 in patterns of eating associated with the campus; 2) third spaces of mobile fooddistribution that re-imagined eating spaces as hybrid, convivial and spatio-temporally flexible; 3) spaces of capability that enabled practices with sustainable outcomes on campus by connecting on-campus practices and material arrangements to students’ domestic practices; and 4) convenient eating-timespaces that added to conviviality, commensality and sociality in eating, which have been shown to have sustainable outcomes. In conclusion, I argue that eating spaces are best understood through the study of the multi-relationality of practices, material arrangements and their dynamics that produce lived spaces. This research approach provides insight into the kind of spaces produced and what kinds of sustainability outcomes are achieved or possible. It further establishes that lived spaces are important and innovative pathways toward sustainable outcomes. In this way, this study is a sociological inquiry into the geographies of practice that provides insights into inquiries of consumption and contributes to the inclusion of the spatial within sociological studies

Variable geometries of connection: Urban digital divides and the uses of Information Technology

This paper proposes a new way of conceptualising urban ‘digital divides’. It focuses on the ways in which Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) unevenly affect the pace of life within the urban environment. Based on a detailed case study of how ICT s are being used in an affluent and a marginalised neighbourhood in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, the paper suggests that urban digital divides need to be understood as more than uneven patterns of access. They emerge in this work as more than the presence or absence of specific technological artefacts. Rather, it is argued that different styles and speeds of technologically mediated life now work to define urban socio-spatial inequalities. The paper distinguishes between two such key styles and speeds. First, the paper argues that affluent and professional groups now use new media technologies pervasively and continuously as the ‘background’ infrastructure to sustain privileged and intensely distanciated, but time-stressed, lifestyles. Second, more marginalised neighbourhoods tend to be characterised by instrumental and episodic ICT usage patterns which are often collectively organised through strong neighbourhood ties. For the former, mediated networks help orchestrate neighbourhood ties; for the latter it is those neighbourhood ties that enable online access

X-Fields: Implicit Neural View-, Light- and Time-Image Interpolation

We suggest to represent an X-Field -a set of 2D images taken across different view, time or illumination conditions, i.e., video, light field, reflectance fields or combinations thereof-by learning a neural network (NN) to map their view, time or light coordinates to 2D images. Executing this NN at new coordinates results in joint view, time or light interpolation. The key idea to make this workable is a NN that already knows the "basic tricks" of graphics (lighting, 3D projection, occlusion) in a hard-coded and differentiable form. The NN represents the input to that rendering as an implicit map, that for any view, time, or light coordinate and for any pixel can quantify how it will move if view, time or light coordinates change (Jacobian of pixel position with respect to view, time, illumination, etc.). Our X-Field representation is trained for one scene within minutes, leading to a compact set of trainable parameters and hence real-time navigation in view, time and illumination

Mobility on the move: Examining urban daily mobility practices in Santiago de Chile.

The 'mobility turn' in social sciences (Cresswell 2006; Hannam, Sheller et al. 2006; Sheller and Urry 2006) is based on the inevitable impacts all types of mobility currently have on contemporary living and "examines how social relations necessitate the intermittent and intersecting movement of people, objects, information and images across distance" (Urry 2007: 54 ). Mobility studies include research on migration, tourism, residential mobility and urban daily mobility - the latter is the central interest of this thesis. Urban daily mobility refers to all the ways people relate experientially to change of place on a daily basis, which means that it encompasses more than the sum of journeys made or the time it takes to make them. This understanding of mobility as a social practice requires methodological access to the social meaning invested in movement, whether that movement is physical, imaginative, virtual, or a combination of these. How do practices of urban daily mobility shape the way urban living is experienced in contemporary cities. This thesis addresses mobility as a social practice and uses an ethnographic approach to explore the way mobility is experienced daily by selected individuals in Santiago de Chile. It argues that an urban daily mobility approach captures an ontological shift in the way the urban spaces are experienced. This shift has implications for the way urban relations and urban structures are observed; that is, from fixed physical entities to moving and dynamic relations. Moreover, this shift has significant implications in various areas of urban analysis, each of which is examined by this thesis. First, it requires adopting methodologies that can reveal daily mobility experiences and find adequate ways of representing these experiences. Second, it incorporates mobility into the notion of place, by introducing the concepts of mobile places and transient places it discusses the possibility of mobile place making. Third, it questions the static way of analysing urban inequality and expands the notion of urban social exclusion to incorporate differentiated mobility as another one of its causes, consequences and manifestations. Fourth, it provides a way of looking at spatial relations in the city by understanding the implications of urban daily mobility in terms of place confinement and enlargement. Finally, it affects the way urban policy interventions are understood, analysed here in terms of the implementation of the Transantiago transport system. Mobility in these terms becomes not only a practice through which daily living can be observed, it may also be a locus for encounter, conflict, negotiation and transformation, thus requiring further research as a space of socialisation