Modeling the thermal behavior of biosphere 2 in a non-controlled environment using bond graphs

Biosphere 2 is a closed ecological system of high complexity built to deepen the understanding of ecological systems, to study the dynamics of closed ecologies, and to learn to control their behavior. The use of modeling and simulation is crucial in the achievement of these goals. Understanding a physical system is almost synonymous with possessing a model of its comportment. The main goal of this study is the development of a dynamic bond graph model that represents the thermal behavior of the complex ecological system under study, Biosphere 2. In this work, a first model that captures the behavior of the ecological system in a non-controlled environment is presented.Postprint (published version

On cycling risk and discomfort: urban safety mapping and bike route recommendations

Bike usage in Smart Cities is paramount for sustainable urban development: cycling promotes healthier lifestyles, lowers energy consumption, lowers carbon emissions, and reduces urban traffic. However, the expansion and increased use of bike infrastructure has been accompanied by a glut of bike accidents, a trend jeopardizing the urban bike movement. This paper leverages data from a diverse spectrum of sources to characterise geolocated bike accident severity and, ultimately, study cycling risk and discomfort. Kernel density estimation generates a continuous, empirical, spatial risk estimate which is mapped in a case study of Zürich city. The roles of weather, time, accident type, and severity are illustrated. A predominance of self-caused accidents motivates an open-source software artifact for personalized route recommendations. This software is used to collect open baseline route data that are compared with alternative routes minimizing risk and discomfort. These contributions have the potential to provide invaluable infrastructure improvement insights to urban planners, and may also improve the awareness of risk in the urban environment among experienced and novice cyclists alike

Traumatic Tympanic Bulla Fracture in a Cat With Severe Head Trauma

A nine-year-old male European shorthair cat was referred to our practice with severe head trauma after suffering a road traffic accident (RTA). The patient presented marked facial swelling and multiple skin wounds and bruising, inspiratory dyspnea, palpable mandibular and maxillary fractures, serosanguinolent oronasal discharge and right eye exophthalmos and buphthalmos with loss of menace and pupillary reflex. After stabilizing the patient, a CT scan was performed under general anesthesia and an oesophagostomy tube was placed. The scan revealed the presence of multiple right tympanic bulla fractures. Multiple mandibular, maxillary, and palatine fractures were also present. The cat underwent surgery. Mandibular symphyseal separation and maxillary fractures were stabilized using intraoral cerclage wire fixation reinforced with composite and the right eye was enucleated. The rest of the fractures were treated conservatively. A CT scan 4 months after the trauma was also performed. At this point, the maxillofacial fractures were healing properly, and a bone callus demonstrating fusion of fragments of the right tympanic bulla was evident. There was absence of abnormal content inside the right tympanic bulla. The patient recovered uneventfully with no neurological deficits. To the author''s knowledge this is the first case reporting a traumatic tympanic bulla fracture in the cat with case follow up, and the first case reported using CT as diagnostic imaging test

Effect of Winter Grazing Management of Stockpiled Native Pastures of Basaltic Soils of Uruguay on Daily Gains of Heifers

The effect of three grazing systems of fall stockpiled native pastures on the winter gains of 66 Hereford heifers (135 kg) was studied. Treatments were: continuos grazing (CG); (C7) the plot was divided in 12 and each was grazed for 7 days and (C28), the plot was divided in 3 and each were grazed for 28 days. Heifers were weighed every 14 days and grazing behaviour was recorded. Stockpiled HM was greater (P\u3c 0.05) in C7 and C28 than in CG (988, 912, and 604 kg DM/ha, respectively). Herbage allowance (HA) was greater (P\u3c 0.01) in CG followed by C28 and C7 (11.7, 6.6 and 5.9 kg DM/100 kg LW, respectively). Post-grazing HM was greater (P0.05) in all pastures (CP 10.2%, NDF 71.2%, ADF 41.3% and ash 14.4%). Final LW of heifers were similar (P\u3e 0.05) (167, 162 and 160 kg for CG, C7 and C28, respectively). A very mild winter favoured exceptional gains which tended to be higher in CG (0.353 kg/day) than in C7 (0.305 kg/day) and C28 (0.278 kg/day). Grazing time was greater (P\u3c 0.05) in CG and bite rate was lower in C28 than in C7 and CG heifers. Grazing management did not affect daily gains. Nevertheless, total remaining HM in C28 and more so in C7 more than doubled that in CG, where more animals could have grazed with increasing total productivity

Competitiveness and sustainability: can ‘smart city regionalism’ square the circle?

Increasingly, the widely established, globalisation-driven agenda of economic competitiveness meets a growing concern with sustainability. Yet, the practical and conceptual co-existence—or fusion—of these two agendas is not always easy. This includes finding and operationalising the ‘right’ scale of governance, an important question for the pursuit of the distinctly transscalar nature of these two policy fields. ‘New regionalism’ has increasingly been discussed as a pragmatic way of tackling the variable spatialities associated with these policy fields and their changing articulation. This paper introduces ‘smart (new) city-regionalism’, derived from the principles of smart growth and new regionalism, as a policy-shaping mechanism and analytical framework. It brings together the rationales, agreed principles and legitimacies of publicly negotiated polity with collaborative, network-based and policy-driven spatiality. The notion of ‘smartness’, as suggested here as central feature, goes beyond the implicit meaning of ‘smart’ as in ‘smart growth’. When introduced in the later 1990s the term embraced a focus on planning and transport. Since then, the adjective ‘smart’ has become used ever more widely, advocating innovativeness, participation, collaboration and co-ordination. The resulting ‘smart city regionalism’ is circumscribed by the interface between the sectorality and territoriality of policy-making processes. Using the examples of Vancouver and Seattle, the paper looks at the effects of the resulting specific local conditions on adopting ‘smartness’ in the scalar positioning of policy-making

Trust and privacy in distributed work groups

Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Social Computing, Behavioral Modeling and PredictionTrust plays an important role in both group cooperation and economic exchange. As new technologies emerge for communication and exchange, established mechanisms of trust are disrupted or distorted, which can lead to the breakdown of cooperation or to increasing fraud in exchange. This paper examines whether and how personal privacy information about members of distributed work groups influences individuals' cooperation and privacy behavior in the group. Specifically, we examine whether people use others' privacy settings as signals of trustworthiness that affect group cooperation. In addition, we examine how individual privacy preferences relate to trustworthy behavior. Understanding how people interact with others in online settings, in particular when they have limited information, has important implications for geographically distributed groups enabled through new information technologies. In addition, understanding how people might use information gleaned from technology usage, such as personal privacy settings, particularly in the absence of other information, has implications for understanding many potential situations that arise in pervasively networked environments.Preprin

Biodigital publics: personal genomes as digital media artifacts

The recent proliferation of personal genomics and direct-to-consumer (DTC) genomics has attracted much attention and publicity. Concern around these developments has mainly focused on issues of biomedical regulation and hinged on questions of how people understand genomic information as biomedical and what meaning they make of it. However, this publicity amplifies genome sequences which are also made as internet texts and, as such, they generate new reading publics. The practices around the generation, circulation and reading of genome scans do not just raise questions about biomedical regulation, they also provide the focus for an exploration of how contemporary public participation in genomics works. These issues around the public features of DTC genomic testing can be pursued through a close examination of the modes of one of the best known providers—23andMe. In fact, genome sequences circulate as digital artefacts and, hence, people are addressed by them. They are read as texts, annotated and written about in browsers, blogs and wikis. This activity also yields content for media coverage which addresses an indefinite public in line with Michael Warner’s conceptualisation of publics. Digital genomic texts promise empowerment, personalisation and community, but this promise may obscure the compliance and proscription associated with these forms. The kinds of interaction here can be compared to those analysed by Andrew Barry. Direct-to-consumer genetics companies are part of a network providing an infrastructure for genomic reading publics and this network can be mapped and examined to demonstrate the ways in which this formation both exacerbates inequalities and offers possibilities for participation in biodigital culture

Twitter: a useful tool for studying elections?

The 2015 General Election in the UK was the first to take place in the UK with Twitter as an important part of the social media landscape. This pilot project looked at 16 constituencies along England’s South Coast in order to investigate what impact, if any, Twitter had had on the campaign and the result and to investigate the efficacy, or otherwise, of using Twitter as a tool for studying election campaigns in terms of candidate and local party activism. On the basis of an analysis of almost half a million tweets the analysis concluded that there appeared to be a correlation between the rate at which parties and/or candidates responded to incoming tweets and their relative electoral performance but this was not demonstrable for all parties (it applied in particular to Labour and UKIP candidates). In addition, high rates of reply also appeared to have a positive impact on constituency turnout figures. The findings are not yet conclusive but suggest that Twitter could be a good indicator of general levels of local party activism. The research also sought to understand how candidates used Twitter differently and established a number of candidate ‘classifiers’. It also investigated the issues agenda that was dominating Twitter conversations during the campaign and found that Twitter’s agenda was closer to the public’s than was that of the national media. The research also monitored the regional and local media in the 16 constituencies and discovered that their issues agenda was closer still to the public’s. Overall it is difficult to conclude that Twitter had a major impact on the election campaign