Towards inclusive planning:establishing citizens’ ‘the right to the city’ through participatory urban planning approaches in Oulu and Jhenaidah

Abstract. Urbanization is reconstructing the way people live and the built environment in which they thrive. While different countries are transforming in their unprecedented rates, the final goal is to provide their inhabitants with better quality of life and services in the newly planned cities. Inclusive planning which takes into account participatory approaches is crucial to make new developments sustainable. Participation values inclusiveness and social integration in all aspects of city life. New Urban Agenda 2030 sets a global fundamental where the concept of inclusiveness has been emphasized eminently with special attention to vulnerable participants whose involvement is often left unaccounted for. While a lot of countries have successfully incorporated participation in their planning practices, many others are still challenged by the inequality of power dynamics. For cities to be sustainable, its requires to provide the people with their rights to the city by making urban opportunities accessible for all. People acquiring their rights to the city are empowered to pursue their aspiring quality of life and at the same time generate a sense of belonging to their urban space. This research aims to establish this relationship and how participatory urban planning approaches can induce people to pursue their rights to the city by actively engaging in the process. Through a comparative analysis of two case studies, each from the context of Bangladesh and Finland, the research explores the effectiveness of different participatory strategies on establishing people’s ‘Right to the City’. Taking two divergent perspectives into account and the universal principles set by New Urban Agenda 2030, the study sets a comprehensive understanding of inclusive urban planning, its contribution to social sustainability and the roles architects are playing to support this collective paradigm

A Central Partition of Molecular Conformational Space.III. Combinatorial Determination of the Volume Spanned by a Molecular System

In the first work of this series [physics/0204035] it was shown that the conformational space of a molecule could be described to a fair degree of accuracy by means of a central hyperplane arrangement. The hyperplanes divide the espace into a hierarchical set of cells that can be encoded by the face lattice poset of the arrangement. The model however, lacked explicit rotational symmetry which made impossible to distinguish rotated structures in conformational space. This problem was solved in a second work [physics/0404052] by sorting the elementary 3D components of the molecular system into a set of morphological classes that can be properly oriented in a standard 3D reference frame. This also made possible to find a solution to the problem that is being adressed in the present work: for a molecular system immersed in a heat bath we want to enumerate the subset of cells in conformational space that are visited by the molecule in its thermal wandering. If each visited cell is a vertex on a graph with edges to the adjacent cells, here it is explained how such graph can be built

Graph Based Disambiguation of Named Entities using Linked Data

Identifying entities such as people, organizations, songs, or places in natural language texts is needful for semantic search, machine translation, and information extraction. A key challenge is the ambiguity of entity names, requiring robust methods to disambiguate names to the entities registered in a knowledge base. Several approaches aim to tackle this problem, they still achieve poor accuracy. We address this drawback by presenting a novel knowledge-base-agnostic approach for named entity disambiguation. Our approach includes the HITS algorithm combined with label expansion strategies and string similarity measure like the n-gram similarity. Based on this combination, we can efficiently detect the correct URIs for a given set of named entities within an input text

Perceptual 3D rendering based on principles of analytical cubism

Cataloged from PDF version of article.Cubism, pioneered by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque, was a breakthrough in art, influencing artists to abandon existing traditions. In this paper, we present a novel approach for cubist rendering of 3D synthetic environments. Rather than merely imitating cubist paintings, we apply the main principles of analytical cubism to 3D graphics rendering. In this respect, we develop a new cubist camera providing an extended view, and a perceptually based spatial imprecision technique that keeps the important regions of the scene within a certain area of the output. Additionally, several methods to provide a painterly style are applied. We demonstrate the effectiveness of our extending view method by comparing the visible face counts in the images rendered by the cubist camera model and the traditional perspective camera. Besides, we give an overall discussion of final results and apply user tests in which users compare our results very well with analytical cubist paintings but not synthetic cubist paintings. (c) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved

A decision theoretic approach to motion saliency in computer animations

We describe a model to calculate saliency of objects due to their motions. In a decision-theoretic fashion, perceptually significant objects inside a scene are detected. The work is based on psychological studies and findings on motion perception. By considering motion cues and attributes, we define six motion states. For each object in a scene, an individual saliency value is calculated considering its current motion state and the inhibition of return principle. Furthermore, a global saliency value is considered for each object by covering their relationships with each other and equivalence of their saliency value. The position of the object with highest attention value is predicted as a possible gaze point for each frame in the animation. We conducted several eye-tracking experiments to practically observe the motion-attention related principles in psychology literature. We also performed some final user studies to evaluate our model and its effectiveness. © 2011 Springer-Verlag

A clustering-based method to estimate saliency in 3D animated meshes

We present a model to determine the perceptually significant elements in animated 3D scenes using a motion-saliency method. Our model clusters vertices with similar motion-related behaviors. To find these similarities, for each frame of an animated mesh sequence, vertices' motion properties are analyzed and clustered using a Gestalt approach. Each cluster is analyzed as a single unit and representative vertices of each cluster are used to extract the motion-saliency values of each group. We evaluate our method by performing an eye-tracker-based user study in which we analyze observers' reactions to vertices with high and low saliencies. The experiment results verify that our proposed model correctly detects the regions of interest in each frame of an animated mesh. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd

A conditional Smg6 mutant mouse model reveals circadian clock regulation through the nonsense-mediated mRNA decay pathway.

Nonsense-mediated messenger RNA (mRNA) decay (NMD) has been intensively studied as a surveillance pathway that degrades erroneous transcripts arising from mutations or RNA processing errors. While additional roles in physiological control of mRNA stability have emerged, possible functions in mammalian physiology in vivo remain unclear. Here, we created a conditional mouse allele that allows converting the NMD effector nuclease SMG6 from wild-type to nuclease domain-mutant protein. We find that NMD down-regulation affects the function of the circadian clock, a system known to require rapid mRNA turnover. Specifically, we uncover strong lengthening of free-running circadian periods for liver and fibroblast clocks and direct NMD regulation of Cry2 mRNA, encoding a key transcriptional repressor within the rhythm-generating feedback loop. Transcriptome-wide changes in daily mRNA accumulation patterns in the entrained liver, as well as an altered response to food entrainment, expand the known scope of NMD regulation in mammalian gene expression and physiology

A novel Smg6 mouse model reveals regulation of circadian period and daily CRY2 accumulation through the nonsense-mediated mRNA decay pathway

Nonsense-mediated mRNA decay (NMD) has been intensively studied as a surveillance pathway that degrades erroneous transcripts arising from mutations or RNA processing errors. While additional roles in controlling regular mRNA stability have emerged, possible functions in mammalian physiology in vivo have remained unclear. Here, we report a novel conditional mouse allele that allows converting the NMD effector nuclease SMG6 from wild-type to nuclease domain-mutant protein. We analyzed how NMD downregulation affects the function of the circadian clock, a system known to require rapid mRNA turnover. We uncover strong lengthening of free-running circadian periods for liver and fibroblast clocks, and direct NMD regulation of Cry2 mRNA, encoding a key transcriptional repressor within the rhythm-generating feedback loop. In the entrained livers of Smg6 mutant animals we reveal transcriptome-wide alterations in daily mRNA accumulation patterns, altogether expanding the known scope of NMD regulation in mammalian gene expression and physiology