Making sense of the city : representing the multi-modality of urban space

This project emerged from a previous multidisciplinary Designing for the 21st Century project - Design Imaging. The original project explored ways in which the full range of our senses would be exploited to assist with the design process. Discussions on multisensory and multimodal design led to a number of avenues being identified for further research. One in particular, that of representing urban space in multisensory manner was the subject of a successful second-round grant application from the Departments of Architecture and Design, Manufacture, and Engineering Management at the University of Strathclyde. The urban environment is experienced through each of our senses. Despite this, urban design practices and urban representation have focused their attention on the visual. This project posits the thesis that a fuller urban environment can be designed by attending multiple sensory modalities, by giving equal weight to the aural, the tactile, the olfactory, the gustatory, the haptic, the kinetic and the thermal

A 3-D RBF-FD solver for modeling the atmospheric global electric circuit with topography (GEC-RBFFD v1.0)

A numerical model based on radial basis functiongenerated finite differences (RBF-FD) is developed for simulating the global electric circuit (GEC) within the Earth's atmosphere, represented by a 3-D variable coefficient linearelliptic partial differential equation (PDE) in a sphericallyshaped volume with the lower boundary being the Earth's topography and the upper boundary a sphere at 60 km. To ourknowledge, this is (1) the first numerical model of the GECto combine the Earth's topography with directly approximating the differential operators in 3-D space and, related to this,(2) the first RBF-FD method to use irregular 3-D stencils fordiscretization to handle the topography. It benefits from themesh-free nature of RBF-FD, which is especially suitable formodeling high-dimensional problems with irregular boundaries. The RBF-FD elliptic solver proposed here makes nolimiting assumptions on the spatial variability of the coefficients in the PDE (i.e., the conductivity profile), the righthand side forcing term of the PDE (i.e., distribution of current sources) or the geometry of the lower boundary.This work was supported by NSF awards AGS-1135446 and DMS-094581. The National Center for Atmospheric Research is sponsored by the NSF.Publicad

Accretion and photodesorption of CO ice as a function of the incident angle of deposition

Non-thermal desorption of inter- and circum-stellar ice mantles on dust grains, in particular ultraviolet photon-induced desorption, has gained importance in recent years. These processes may account for the observed gas phase abundances of molecules like CO toward cold interstellar clouds. Ice mantle growth results from gas molecules impinging on the dust from all directions and incidence angles. Nevertheless, the effect of the incident angle for deposition on ice photo-desorption rate has not been studied. This work explores the impact on the accretion and photodesorption rates of the incidence angle of CO gas molecules with the cold surface during deposition of a CO ice layer. Infrared spectroscopy monitored CO ice upon deposition at different angles, ultraviolet-irradiation, and subsequent warm-up. Vacuum-ultraviolet spectroscopy and a Ni-mesh measured the emission of the ultraviolet lamp. Molecules ejected from the ice to the gas during irradiation or warm-up were characterized by a quadrupole mass spectrometer. The photodesorption rate of CO ice deposited at 11 K and different incident angles was rather stable between 0 and 45$^{\circ}$. A maximum in the CO photodesorption rate appeared around 70$^{\circ}$-incidence deposition angle. The same deposition angle leads to the maximum surface area of water ice. Although this study of the surface area could not be performed for CO ice, the similar angle dependence in the photodesorption and the ice surface area suggests that they are closely related. Further evidence for a dependence of CO ice morphology on deposition angle is provided by thermal desorption of CO ice experiments

The avatar will see you now: Support from a virtual human provides socio-emotional benefits

When people are in emotional distress, they often seek support. Virtual humans may provide unique and complementary benefits to human support provision, given that virtual humans are readily available and help sharers overcome socio-evaluative threats, thereby increasing willingness to disclose. Here, we examined whether talking to a virtual human elicits socio-emotional benefits, and whether this is moderated by the type of support provided. To examine the scope of the potential effect, we compared two key types of support (emotional and cognitive), across two emotions (anger and worry). Participants (N = 115) shared two personal emotional experiences with a virtual human, who provided either emotional or cognitive support via the Wizard-of-Oz method (i.e., a human-operated avatar). Results showed that participants felt better after talking to the virtual human, as evidenced by reduced intensity of the target emotion and generally improved affect. The emotional improvement was similar for emotional and cognitive support. Cognitive support was also experienced as equally effective as emotional support, and led to similar levels of experienced closeness and desire to interact with the virtual human again. These findings suggest that talking to a virtual human can be a valuable form of support at times of distress

Topological representations of matroid maps

The Topological Representation Theorem for (oriented) matroids states that every (oriented) matroid can be realized as the intersection lattice of an arrangement of codimension one homotopy spheres on a homotopy sphere. In this paper, we use a construction of Engstr\"om to show that structure-preserving maps between matroids induce topological mappings between their representations; a result previously known only in the oriented case. Specifically, we show that weak maps induce continuous maps and that the process is a functor from the category of matroids with weak maps to the homotopy category of topological spaces. We also give a new and conceptual proof of a result regarding the Whitney numbers of the first kind of a matroid.Comment: Final version, 21 pages, 8 figures; Journal of Algebraic Combinatorics, 201

High CIP2A levels correlate with an antiapoptotic phenotype that can be overcome by targeting BCL-XL in chronic myeloid leukemia.

Cancerous inhibitor of protein phosphatase 2A (CIP2A) is a predictive biomarker of disease progression in many malignancies, including imatinib-treated chronic myeloid leukemia (CML). Although high CIP2A levels correlate with disease progression in CML, the underlying molecular mechanisms remain elusive. In a screen of diagnostic chronic phase samples from patients with high and low CIP2A protein levels, high CIP2A levels correlate with an antiapoptotic phenotype, characterized by downregulation of proapoptotic BCL-2 family members, including BIM, PUMA and HRK, and upregulation of the antiapoptotic protein BCL-XL. These results suggest that the poor prognosis of patients with high CIP2A levels is due to an antiapoptotic phenotype. Disrupting this antiapoptotic phenotype by inhibition of BCL-XL via RNA interference or A-1331852, a novel, potent and BCL-XL-selective inhibitor, resulted in extensive apoptosis either alone or in combination with imatinib, dasatinib or nilotinib, both in cell lines and in primary CD34(+) cells from patients with high levels of CIP2A. These results demonstrate that BCL-XL is the major antiapoptotic survival protein and may be a novel therapeutic target in CML

Excess executive compensation and corporate governance in the United Kingdom and Spain: a comparative analysis

Literature on executive compensation has relatively neglected the impact of institutional governance contexts. Regarding filling this gap, this study examines the influence of governance mechanisms on excess executive compensation comparing a set of listed UK and Spanish firms on an 8-year panel data. Findings indicate that Spanish firms are characterized by higher excess executive compensation than UK firms because of the less effectiveness of ownership structure and board of directors. Differences in concentration and structure of ownership as well as in composition and size of boards result in more aligned executive compensation design in the UK firms.Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidade

The Tsunami’s CSR Effect: MNEs and Philanthropic Responses to the Disaster

This paper contributes to the literature on CSR and International Business by linking firm internationalization to corporate philanthropy. Considering the 2004 Tsunami disaster as a highly relevant case of an international societal issue, we analyze the characteristics of the corporate response to the disaster among Fortune Global 500 firms. We find that home region, degree of internationalization, firm size and profitability most strongly influenced the propensity of firms to donate as well as the value of their donations

Los juegos deportivos y su influencia en la gestión emocional en universitarios

Los objetivos de este estudio fueron identicar las intensidades emocionales (positivas, negativas y ambiguas) durante la práctica de jue- gos deportivos de oposición con y sin competición y comprobar la relación existente con el historial deportivo de los participantes. Participaron 147 estudiantes universitarios, los cuales cumplimentaron el cuestionario GES (Game and Emotions Scale) desarrollado y validado por Lavega, March y Filella (2013). Las ecuaciones de estimación generalizadas mostraron di- ferencias signicativas (p < .001) en las variables tipo de emoción, tipo de resultado y huella deportiva del participante. Las emociones positivas se vi- vieron con mayor intensidad en los juegos, mientras que las emociones nega- tivas y ambiguas fueron más bajas que las positivas. La huella deportiva fue determinante para las variaciones emocionales experimentadas, mostrando los jugadores con mayor experiencia y nivel competitivo puntuaciones me- nores en las emociones suscitadas durante la práctica de juegos deportivos de oposición. Los resultados contribuyen a orientar las intervenciones de futuros profesionales gracias a las experiencias prácticas vivenciadas.