LOCATIVE MEDIA, AUGMENTED REALITIES AND THE ORDINARY AMERICAN LANDSCAPE

This dissertation investigates the role of annotative locative media in mediating experiences of place. The overarching impetus motivating this research is the need to bring to bear the theoretical and substantive concerns of cultural landscape studies on the development of a methodological framework for interrogating the ways in which annotative locative media reconfigure experiences of urban landscapes. I take as my empirical cases i) Google Maps with its associated Street View and locational placemark interface, and ii) Layar, an augmented reality platform combining digital mapping and real-time locational augmentation. In the spirit of landscape studies’ longstanding and renewed interest in what may be termed “ordinary” residential landscapes, and reflecting the increasing imbrication of locative media technologies in everyday lives, the empirical research is based in Kenwick, a middleclass, urban residential neighborhood in Lexington, Kentucky. Overall, I present an argument about the need to consider the digital, code (i.e. software), and specifically locative media, in the intellectual context of critical geographies in general and cultural landscape studies in particular

City networks in cyberspace and time : using Google hyperlinks to measure global economic and environmental crises

Geographers and social scientists have long been interested in ranking and classifying the cities of the world. The cutting edge of this research is characterized by a recognition of the crucial importance of information and, specifically, ICTs to cities’ positions in the current Knowledge Economy. This chapter builds on recent “cyberspace” analyses of the global urban system by arguing for, and demonstrating empirically, the value of Web search engine data as a means of understanding cities as situated within, and constituted by, flows of digital information. To this end, we show how the Google search engine can be used to specify a dynamic, informational classification of North American cities based on both the production and the consumption of Web information about two prominent current issues global in scope: the global financial crisis, and global climate change

Hyporheic invertebrates as bioindicators of ecological health in temporary rivers: a meta-analysis

Worldwide, many rivers cease flow and dry either naturally or owing to human activities such as water extraction. However, even when surface water is absent, diverse assemblages of aquatic invertebrates inhabit the saturated sediments below the river bed (hyporheic zone). In the absence of surface water or flow, biota of this zone may be sampled as an alternative to surface water-based ecological assessments. The potential of hyporheic invertebrates as ecological indicators of river health, however, is largely unexplored. We analysed hyporheic taxa lists from the international literature on temporary rivers to assess compositional similarity among broad-scale regions and sampling conditions, including the presence or absence of surface waters and flow, and the regional effect of hydrological phase (dry channel, non-flowing waters, surface flow) on richness. We hypothesised that if consistent patterns were found, then effects of human disturbances in temporary rivers may be assessable using hyporheic bioindicators. Assemblages differed geographically and by climate, but hydrological phase did not have a strong effect at the global scale. However, hyporheic assemblage composition within regions varied along a gradient of higher richness during wetter phases

Early Warning Signals of Environmental Tipping Points

This thesis examines how early warning signals perform when tested on climate systems thought to exhibit future tipping point behaviour. A tipping point in a dynamical system is a large and sudden change to the state of the system, usually caused by changes in external forcing. This is due to the state the system occupies becoming unstable, causing the system to settle to a new stable state. In many cases, there is a degree of irreversibility once the tipping point has been passed, preventing the system from reverting back to its original state without a large reversal in forcing. Passing tipping points in climate systems, such as the Amazon rainforest or the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, is particularly dangerous as the effects of this will be globally felt. Fortunately there is potential for early warning signals, designed to warn that the system is approaching a tipping point. Generally, these early warning signals are based on analysis of the time series of the system, such as searching for ‘critical slowing down’, usually estimated by an increasing lag-1 autocorrelation (AR(1)). The idea here is that as a system’s state becomes less stable, it will start to react more sluggishly to short term perturbations. While early warning signals have been tested extensively in simple models and on palaeoclimate data, there has been very little research into how these behave in complex models and observed data. Here, early warning signals are tested on climate systems that show tipping point behaviour in general circulation models. Furthermore, it examines why early warning signals might fail in certain cases and provides prospect for more ‘system specific indicators’ based on properties of individual tipping elements. The thesis also examines how slowing down in a system might affect ecosystems that are being driven by it

Searching for cyberspace : the position of major cities in the information age

In this paper, we introduce an approach to identifying and ranking cities in the current Information Age. Mindful of Manuel Castells' call for a onew spatial logic,o we argue that the informational oflowo characteristics of contemporary inter-city connections has to be taken into account when measuring the (relative) oimportanceo of cities. While recent information-based studies on urban networks are valuable additions to the global urban-systems literature, we would argue that there remains a lack of up-to-date and updatable studies of information flows that acknowledge that these flows are intangible and not simply embodied in people (in the case of airline network analysis) or places (in the case of studies that focus on the physical, enabling infrastructure of electronic communications). In order to understand more about cities and their relative positions in the Information World, we should study not only tangible informational infrastructures and their associated material flows between places, but also the cyberspaces of cities in relation to digital information. To illustrate our approach, we introduce and argue that Web search engine databases comprise appropriate datasets for examining the growing importance of knowledge as a raison d'etre for a city's economic ranking on national, regional, and global scales. Based on a quantitative and qualitative hyperlink analysis using the leading and de facto standard Web search engine Google, we derive informational rankings of the world's 100 largest cities in respect to two prominent current issues that are global in scope: the global financial crisis and global climate change. Results include: that traditional, developed Western cities are most prominent in terms of the environmental measures while, in terms of the financial criteria, onewo Asian financial centers are ranked more highly. The paper concludes by outlining an agenda for further work on Web-based informational city rankings

Exercise Training to Target Gait Unsteadiness in People with Diabetes

Balance impairment and an associated high fall rate in people with diabetes is common, and a huge burden to quality of life and healthcare systems. Causes of impaired balance are commonly attributed to both sensory and motor deficits, which includes impaired muscle strength and function. This study investigated the effects of resistance exercise training on balance control during walking over level ground and on stairs. Ten DM people (age: 62 years, BMI: 29kg/m2, VPT: 9V) and 6 DM people with DPN (age: 59 years, BMI: 27kg/m2, VPT: 31V) performed a 16-week intervention of weekly resistance exercise training to increase ankle and knee extensor muscle strength. Six DM controls did not take part in the intervention (age: 50 years, BMI: 26kg/m2, VPT: 12V). Balance during gait was quantified before and after the intervention, by separation between the body centre-of-mass and centre-of-pressure under the feet during both level and stair walking. Knee and ankle extensor muscle strength was assessed using a dynamometer. The exercise intervention increased strength of ankle plantar flexors (22%) and knee extensors (30%). Despite the increases in lower limb muscle strength produced by the intervention, no improvements in balance were seen post training. However, gait speed did increase by 8%, which previous research has shown to be associated with quality of life. Controls showed no training effects in any variables. Although this exercise intervention had a positive effect on gait by increasing walking speed, there was no effect on the control of balance. Previous research has identified that medio-lateral (side-to-side) balance is impaired in people with DPN. The muscles exercised in the present study mainly control the major sagittal plane (forwards-backwards) movements that occur during gait. Interventions targeting the lateral stabilising muscles of the hip and trunk, may show greater potential efficacy in redressing the balance impairment of this population

The effects of river stage fluctuations on the hyporheic and parafluvial ecology of the Hunter River, New South Wales

The hyporheic zone is the area of saturated sediments underlying many gravel-bed rivers where channel water actively exchanges with interstitial water. Through a series of biological, physical, and chemical filtration processes, the hyporheic zone influences the water quality of the surface stream. Lateral to the hyporheic zone is the parafluvial zone, the saturated area below gravel bars, which can have a similar filtration role. The ability of the hyporheic and parafluvial zones to act as filters largely depends on surface discharge. Fluctuations in discharge are needed to prevent the clogging of sediment pore-spaces, and to vary the rate at which nutrients and oxygen are transported into the hyporheic zone. Sediment packing, porosity and size, the amount of microbial and invertebrate activity, and stream topographical profile are other factors that control hyporheic filtration. Filtration efficiency is a measure of the rate at which dissolved nutrients and physico-chemical variables of a parcel of water are transformed during a period of interstitial flow. It can be gauged by measuring gradients of nutrients and physico-chemical variables along subsurface flowpaths... This study is the first broad-scale investigation into the hyporheic zone of any large Australian regulated river. It uncovered a rich invertebrate fauna, an active microbial biota, and significantly improves our understanding of how environmental flows benefit the hyporheic zone. In streams with strong connections to the aquifer, such as the Hunter River, hyporheic biological processes can be maintained through environmental flow releases in the surface channel. Controlled manipulations in river stage may be a useful means of improving surface water and groundwater quality through hyporheic and parafluvial filtration