Cross-sectional associations between air pollution and chronic bronchitis: an ESCAPE meta-analysis across five cohorts

BACKGROUND: This study aimed to assess associations of outdoor air pollution on prevalence of chronic bronchitis symptoms in adults in five cohort studies (Asthma-E3N, ECRHS, NSHD, SALIA, SAPALDIA) participating in the European Study of Cohorts for Air Pollution Effects (ESCAPE) project. METHODS: Annual average particulate matter (PM10, PM2.5, PMabsorbance, PMcoarse), NO2, nitrogen oxides (NOx) and road traffic measures modelled from ESCAPE measurement campaigns 2008-2011 were assigned to home address at most recent assessments (1998-2011). Symptoms examined were chronic bronchitis (cough and phlegm for ≥3 months of the year for ≥2 years), chronic cough (with/without phlegm) and chronic phlegm (with/without cough). Cohort-specific cross-sectional multivariable logistic regression analyses were conducted using common confounder sets (age, sex, smoking, interview season, education), followed by meta-analysis. RESULTS: 15 279 and 10 537 participants respectively were included in the main NO2 and PM analyses at assessments in 1998-2011. Overall, there were no statistically significant associations with any air pollutant or traffic exposure. Sensitivity analyses including in asthmatics only, females only or using back-extrapolated NO2 and PM10 for assessments in 1985-2002 (ECRHS, NSHD, SALIA, SAPALDIA) did not alter conclusions. In never-smokers, all associations were positive, but reached statistical significance only for chronic phlegm with PMcoarse OR 1.31 (1.05 to 1.64) per 5 µg/m(3) increase and PM10 with similar effect size. Sensitivity analyses of older cohorts showed increased risk of chronic cough with PM2.5abs (black carbon) exposures. CONCLUSIONS: Results do not show consistent associations between chronic bronchitis symptoms and current traffic-related air pollution in adult European populations

Konzeptpapier für eine suffizienzorientierte Nachhaltigkeitsstrategie für Hamburg : Ziele & Indikatoren einer Suffizienzpolitik

Die Freie und Hansestadt Hamburg plant, eine Nachhaltigkeitsstrategie zu entwickeln. Das zivilgesellschaftliche Nachhaltigkeitsforum Hamburg (NFH) begleitet diesen Prozess mit der Vorlage eines Konzeptpapieres für eine suffizienzorientierte Nachhaltigkeitsstrategie. Ziel dieses Papiers ist es, einerseits Ziele für die Nachhaltigkeitsstrategie Hamburgs zu formulieren und andererseits suffizienzorientierte Indikatoren zu identifizieren, die für die Weiterentwicklung der Nachhaltigkeitsberichterstattung der Stadt relevant sind. Auf Basis dieser Überlegungen sollen im weiteren Prozess Empfehlungen für politische Entscheidungsträger*innen erarbeitet werden, die idealerweise in die zukünftige Nachhaltigkeitsstrategie der Stadt Hamburg einfließen. Mit der Erstellung des Konzeptpapiers wurde das Wuppertal Institut beauftragt

Sufficiency Initiatives and Municipalities: Opportunities and Limitations for Bringing People and Politics Together

This article examines the potential and challenges of sufficiency initiatives within the urban environment, focusing on their ability to bring people and politics together. Drawing on research from the EU-funded "FULFILL" project, which includes surveys, interviews and case studies in five EU Member States, this study explores the role of civil society initiatives in fostering sufficiency - a concept that advocates for meeting human needs within planetary boundaries by altering lifestyles, societal norms, and regulatory frameworks. Sufficiency initiatives find themselves in a precarious position against a backdrop of growth-oriented urban development and face barriers such as lack of resources, legal and regulatory challenges, measurement difficulties, and inertia of municipalities. However, the study also identifies examples of fruitful cooperation between municipalities and initiatives and identifies enablers for successful collaboration, including aligned goals, engaged individuals, and effective communication. By providing an outlook for short-, mid-, and long-term governance perspectives, this article argues for strategic niche management in the short term, development of metrics for sufficiency in the medium term, and a systemic shift in urban dynamics in the long term. As urban sufficiency initiatives offer services and infrastructure to promote sustainable living, they are critical players in guiding cities towards ecological and social resilience. This article contributes to the discourse on urban sustainability by highlighting the importance of municipalities in nurturing sufficiency initiatives that can drive social well-being and environmental stewardship

Developing Non‑Residential Building Stock Archetypes For LCI—A German Case Study Of Office And Administration Buildings

To accomplish the national and international climate goals, building renovation and optimisation of their energy and resource efficiency are essential. Thus, reliable information on the building stock (BS) is necessary. Most previous building typologies are focussing on residential buildings and the operational phase. This paper shows the development of a methodology for generating non-residential building (NRB) typologies for life cycle inventory analysis (LCI) of building constructions. Hereby, archetypes of office, administration and department (OAD) buildings are developed, exemplarily for the German NRB stock

Klima-Strategie der Stadt Speyer : Empfehlungen für die Stadtverwaltung ; Kernaussagen

Mit dem Beschluss der Stadt Speyer, dem kommunalen Klimapakt Rheinland-Pfalz beizutreten, hat sich die Stadt zu ambitionierten Zielen verpflichtet: Die Stadt leistet seinen kommunalen Beitrag zur Erreichung der Treibhausgasneutralität in einem Korridor zwischen 2035 und 2040 (Landesregierung Rheinland-Pfalz, 2021). Zudem verfolgen die Stadt und die Stadtwerke Speyer das Ziel, die Stromerzeugung bis 2030, die Wärmeversorgung bis 2040 komplett durch erneuerbare Energien zu erzeugen (bilanziell). Im Jahr 2019 hatte die Stadt bereits den Klima-Notstand ausgerufen. Von 2010 bis 2020 wurde das erste Klimaschutzkonzept der Stadt Speyer umgesetzt. Ab 2021 erfolgte die Weiterentwicklung hin zur Klima-Strategie, zusammen mit dem Wuppertal Institut. Die Klima-Strategie vereint die Stellschrauben der Verwaltung mit Handlungsempfehlungen auf Grundlage aktueller wissenschaftlicher Erkenntnisse. Dabei soll nicht allein das Zieljahr betrachtet werden, sondern die bis dahin ausgestoßene Menge an Treibhausgasen (THG), hier mit besonderem Fokus auf CO2 nach dem Budgetansatz des Sachverständigenrat für Umweltfragen (SRU, 2022). Je nach Ambitionslevel bleibt der Stadt Speyer demnach ein Restbudget zwischen 1,20 und 3,67 Mio. Tonnen THG, die noch emittiert werden dürfen. Für einen lokalen Beitrag zur wahrscheinlichen Erreichung (67 %) des 1,5-Grad-Ziels müsste sich die Stadt auf maximal 1,20 Mio. Tonnen CO2 verständigen. Die vorliegende Klima-Strategie zeigt die wesentlichen Leitplanken für kommunales Handeln in diesen Handlungsfeldern: Kommunale Verwaltung, Wirtschaft, Private Haushalte, Mobilität, Strom- und Wärmeerzeugung und Öffentliche Räume

Grounded Language Interpretation of Robotic Commands through Structured Learning

The presence of robots in everyday life is increasing day by day at a growing pace. Industrial and working environments, health-care assistance in public or domestic areas can benefit from robots' services to accomplish manifold tasks that are difficult and annoying for humans. In such scenarios, Natural Language interactions, enabling collaboration and robot control, are meant to be situated, in the sense that both the user and the robot access and make reference to the environment. Contextual knowledge may thus play a key role in solving inherent ambiguities of grounded language as, for example, the prepositional phrase attachment. In this work, we present a linguistic pipeline for semantic processing of robotic commands, that combines discriminative structured learning, distributional semantics and contextual evidence extracted from the working environment. The final goal is to make the interpretation process of linguistic exchanges depending on physical, cognitive and language-dependent aspects. We present, formalize and discuss an adaptive Spoken Language Understanding chain for robotic commands, that explicitly depends on the operational context during both the learning and processing stages. The resulting framework allows to model heterogeneous information concerning the environment (e.g., positional information about the objects and their properties) and to inject it in the learning process. Empirical results demonstrate a significant contribution of such additional dimensions, achieving up to a 25% of relative error reduction with respect to a pipeline that only exploits linguistic evidence

A Detailed Analysis of a New 3D Spatial Feature Vector for Indoor Scene Classification

Swadzba A, Wachsmuth S. A Detailed Analysis of a New 3D Spatial Feature Vector for Indoor Scene Classification. Robotics and Autonomous Systems. 2014;62(5):646-662.Enhancing perception of the local environment with semantic information like the room type is an important ability for agents acting in their environment. Such high-level knowledge can reduce the effort needed for, for example, object detection. This paper shows how to extract the room label from a small amount of room percepts taken from a certain view point (like the door frame when entering the room). Such functionality is similar to the human ability to get a scene impression from a quick glance. We propose a new three-dimensional (3D) spatial feature vector that captures the layout of a scene from extracted planar surfaces. The trained models emulate the human brain sensitivity to the 3D geometry of a room. Further, we show that our descriptor complements the information encoded by the Gist feature vector — a first attempt to model the mentioned brain area. The global scene properties are extracted from edge information in 2D depictions of the scene. Both features can be fused, resulting in a system that follows our goal to combine psychological insights on human scene perception with physical properties of environments. This paper provides detailed insights into the nature of our spatial descriptor

An investigation of hybrid maps for mobile robots

Autonomous robots typically rely on internal representations of the environment, or maps, to plan and execute their tasks. Several types of maps have been proposed in the literature, and there is general consensus that different types have different advantages and limitations, and that each type is more suited to certain tasks and less to others. Because of these reasons, it is becoming common wisdom in the field of mobile robotics to use hybrid maps that integrate several representations, usually of different types. Hybrid maps provide scalability and multiple views, allowing for instance to combine robot-centered and human-centered representations. There is, however, little understanding of the general principles that can be used to combine different maps into a hybrid one, and to make it something more than the sum of its parts. There is no systematic analysis of the different ways in which different maps can be combined, and how they can be made to cooperate. This makes it difficult to evaluate and compare different systems, and precludes us from getting a clear understanding of how a hybrid map can be designed or improved. The investigation presented in this thesis aims to contribute to fill this foundational gap, and to get a clearer understanding of the nature of hybrid maps. To help in this investigation, we develop two tools: The first one is a conceptual tool, an analytical framework in which the main ingredients of a hybrid map are described; the second one is an empirical tool, a new hybrid map that allows us to experimentally verify our claims and hypotheses. While these tools are themselves important contributions of this thesis, our investigation has resulted in the following additional outcomes: • A set of concepts that allow us to better understand the structure and operation of hybrid maps, and that help us to design them, compare them, identify their problems, and possibly improve them; • The identification of the notion of synergy as the fundamental way in which component maps inside a hybrid map cooperate. To assess the significance of these outcomes, we make and validate the following claims: 1. Our framework allows us to classify and describe existing maps in a uniform way. This claim is validated constructively by making a thorough classification of the hybrid maps reported in the literature. 2. Our framework also allows us to enhance an existing hybrid map by identifying spots for improvement. This claim is verified experimentally by modifying an existing map and evaluating its performance against the original one. 3. The notion of synergy plays an important role in hybrid maps. This claim is verified experimentally by testing the performance of a hybrid map with and without synergy

Model-View-Presenter auf dem Desktop mit Embedded Browser und Java-Presenter

HTML, CSS und die modernen Browser werden immer leistungsfähiger. Um hiervon zu profitieren wird ein Rahmenwerk entwickelt, das die Erstellung von grafischen Benutzer-Oberflächen in Java-Desktop-Anwendungen mit eingebettetem Browser ermöglicht. Hierzu wird das DOM (Document Object Model) des eingebetteten Browsers der Java-Anwendung über eine DOM-Bridge zur Verfügung gestellt. Zur Evaluation des Rahmenwerks wird ein Prototyp erstellt. Dabei wird das Model-View-Presenter-Muster angewandt, um die Unabhängigkeit der in Java implementierten Präsentationslogik von der Oberflächen-Technologie zu gewährleisten