Strategies and Tools to Raise Energy Awareness Collectively

Providing smart meters and technology for feedback on energy consumption have been considered strategic in current energy policies as part of the battle against climate change. However, feedback alone does not always lead to energy savings. Beyond information on their own consumption and generic advices, people usually still need more specific guidance on how to change their behaviour in an effective and sustainable way. This research considers electricity consumption feedback as a learning element for collective knowledge building, and relies mainly on dialogue and collaboration to engage people with energy conservation as a social issue. To this end, a set of artefacts for triggering and mediating discussions on energy consumption within social groups was developed and evaluated with community leaders in the UK. In a series of 3 workshops, participants discussed how this approach and tools could help them in their mission of disseminating the energy conservation message to the community. Our results show that developing knowledge within a social group is an effective approach in raising awareness, and suggest that tangible artefacts can have an important role in engaging people. Also, initiatives aiming at engaging a wide range of the public must consider different degrees of familiarity with technology, as well as the different perceptions people may have relating energy consumption and environmental protection

Semantic browsing of digital collections

Visiting museums is an increasingly popular pastime. Studies have shown that visitors can draw on their museum experience, long after their visit, to learn new things in practical situations. Rather than viewing a visit as a single learning event, we are interested in ways of extending the experience to allow visitors to access online resources tailored to their interests. Museums typically have extensive archives that can be made available online, the challenge is to match these resources to the visitor’s interests and present them in a manner that facilitates exploration and engages the visitor. We propose the use of knowledge level resource descriptions to identify relevant resources and create structured presentations. A system that embodies this approach, which is in use in a UK museum, is presented and the applicability of the approach to the broader semantic web is discussed

A new energy consumption technique for mobile ad hoc networks

A dynamic temporary network is created through wireless mobile nodes without the need for considerable infrastructure as well as a central manager. In a mobile ad hoc network, routing protocols allow a mobile for transmission and receiving packets. In the last decade, many variants have come up for the AODV. A minimum number of hop counts are chosen for enhancing routing protocols to include additional factors that can have an impact on path selections. As the distance between each node grows, the transmission power also rises accordingly. Hence, this impacts the network’s entire performance and the most important feature is the quality of service. Most of the traditional routing protocols include energy consumption levels of the nodes and various parameters, like residual battery power, consumption of energy per packet and energy needed per transmission. A new technique is proposed in this paper to enhance the routing efficiency by making use of lion optimization algorithm after identifying all possible paths in the network. This technique not only enhances the energy efficiency of each node but also the performance metrics

Prospecting Socially-Aware Concepts and Artefacts for Designing for Community Resilience

Defining flexible and consistent methods and artefacts to design for social impact is a current challenge for HCI. The ephemeral and vulnerable conditions of people living as refugees add even more questions about the suitability of design methods to the complexity of real — and many times tough — life . In this position paper we briefly introduce two concepts embraced by the Socially-aware Design Approach, the Semiotic Onion and the Basic Block of Culture. We then reflect about the potential contributions of applying these concepts and artefacts to inform design for boosting community resilience of people living as refugees

Investigating the causes of roads deterioration in the form of potholes using non-destructive testing

Potholes are one of the public’s main local concerns as they cost a lot to the economy in terms of repair bills, delays while repairs are carried out and vehicle wear-and-tear. According to the Annual Local Authority Road Maintenance (ALARM) survey, eliminating the pothole backlog in England and Wales would cost £9.8bn and take a decade to complete despite increased local roads investment. The aim of this study is to research why potholes occur in the first place using non-destructive testing (NDT) and potential remedies in terms of the development of effective design and innovative materials to prevent their formation in future. To investigate the causes of potholes formation, in-situ use of NDT methods such as groundpenetrating radar (GPR) has proven effectiveness as roads remain in continuous use. Analysis of GPR data can provide information on layer depths, material condition, moisture, voiding, reinforcement and location of other features [1, 2, 3]. Through our results, we will test two hypothesis; (i) shallow potholes are formed on loss of adhesion of the surface course, (ii) deep potholes are formed due to the loss of bearing capacity or settlement of the subgrade. Poor drainage in combination of heavy loads trigger shallow potholes while extreme wetting-drying cycles as a result of climate change decayed subgrade conditions of the pavement. Results presented in this abstract are part of a PhD project funded by the University of West London

Prevalence and type of monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance in an apparently healthy Nigerian population: a cross sectional study

Background The prevalence of monoclonal gammopathy of undetermined significance (MGUS), a premalignant plasma-cell disorder has not been determined in our geographic area Nigeria. Methods A cross sectional survey was carried on apparently healthy Nigerians selected by multistage sampling technique from the cosmopolitan city of Lagos, Nigeria. Subjects enrolled into the study had 2-step screening for the presence, type and concentration of monoclonal band. Agarose-gel electrophoresis was performed on all serum samples, and any serum sample with a discrete band of monoclonal protein or thought to have a localized band was subjected to Immunofixation. Subjects were also evaluated for Bence jones proteinuria, haematological and biochemical parameters. Results Four hundred and ten subjects with a mean age of 45.68 ± 10.3 years, a median of 45.00 years and a range of 20 to 80 years were enrolled into the study. MGUS was identified in only one (0.24 percent) of the 410 study subject. This subject was demonstrated to have a double monoclonal gammopathy; IgGλ at 16.9 g/L and IgAκ at 8.5 g/L. None of them including the sole subject with MGUS had a monoclonal urinary light chain. Conclusion Among residents of Lagos, Nigeria, MGUS was found in only 0.24% percent of apparently normal persons with a median age of 45 years. This suggests that MGUS which represents the earliest stage of monoclonal plasma/lymphoid cell proliferation is not a common finding in the relatively young population of Nigeria. Future epidemiologic studies dealing with plasma cell disorders in older people are required to carefully examine the relationship between environmental factors and prevalence of MGUS and its ultimate progression to MM

Intranasal administration of endometrial mesenchymal stem cells as a suitable approach for Parkinson�s disease therapy

This study aimed to investigate the therapeutic effects of intranasal administration of human endometrium-derived stem cells (HEDSCs) in the mouse model of Parkinson�s disease (PD). Thirty days after intrastriatal injection of 6-OHDA, HEDSCs were administrated intranasally in three doses (104, 5 � 104 and 105 cells µl�1). During 120 days after stem cell administration, behavioral tests were examined. Then the mice were sacrificed and the fresh section of the substantia nigra pars compacta (SNpc) was used for detection of HEDSCs-GFP labeled by fluorescence microscopy method. In addition, immunohistochemistry was used to assay GFP, human neural Nestin, and tyrosine hydroxylase (TH) markers in the fixed brain tissue at the SNpc. Our data revealed that behavioral parameters were significantly improved after cell therapy. Fluorescence microscopy assay in fresh tissue and GFP analysis in fixed tissue were showed that the HEDSCs-GFP labeled migrated to SNpc. The data from immunohistochemistry revealed that the Nestin as a differential neuronal biomarker was expressed in SNpc. Also, TH as a dopaminergic neuron marker significantly increased after HEDSCs therapy in an optimized dose 5 � 104 cells µl�1. Our results suggest that intranasal administration of HEDSCs improve the PD symptoms in the mouse model of PD dose-dependent manner as a noninvasive method. © 2019, Springer Nature B.V

Talking Climate Change via Social Media: Communication, Engagement and Behaviour

While individual behaviour change is considered a central strategy to mitigate climate change, public engagement is still limited. Aiming to raise awareness, and to promote behaviour change, governments and organisations are conducting multiple pro-environmental campaigns, particularly via social media. However, to the best of our knowledge, these campaigns are neither based on, nor do they take advantage of, the existing theories and studies of behaviour change, to better target and inform users. In this paper we propose an approach for analysing user behaviour towards climate change based on the 5 Doors Theory of behaviour change. Our approach automatically identifies five behavioural stages in which users are based on their social media contributions. This approach has been applied to analyse the online behaviour of participants of the Earth Hour 2015 and COP21 Twitter movements. Results of our analysis are used to provide guidelines on how to improve communication via these campaigns

Evaluating the semantic web: a task-based approach

The increased availability of online knowledge has led to the design of several algorithms that solve a variety of tasks by harvesting the Semantic Web, i.e. by dynamically selecting and exploring a multitude of online ontologies. Our hypothesis is that the performance of such novel algorithms implicity provides an insight into the quality of the used ontologies and thus opens the way to a task-based evaluation of the Semantic Web. We have investigated this hypothesis by studying the lessons learnt about online ontologies when used to solve three tasks: ontology matching, folksonomy enrichment, and word sense disambiguation. Our analysis leads to a suit of conclusions about the status of the Semantic Web, which highlight a number of strengths and weaknesses of the semantic information available online and complement the findings of other analysis of the Semantic Web landscape