Adolescent’s cultural identity and neighbourhood environment

Objective: this study aims to find out how adolescents in Australia identify themselves culturally, and how adolescents from different cultural groups differ in their assessments of their neighbourhood environments. Methods: one hundred and sixty-six adolescents in Sydney completed a self-administered questionnaire, which collected information of their neighbourhood environments and their cultural backgrounds. Results: adolescents reported a great variety (67) of different cultural backgrounds, clustered into three cultural groups: Australian cultural identity group, Heritage cultural group, and Biculturalism group. Although no significant difference was found on most neighbourhood environment factors between the cultural groups, adolescents from Heritage cultural group scored significantly lower on the factor Vegetation & Facilities. Conclusions: The results of this study suggest that the overall neighbourhood environments for adolescents from different cultural groups are satisfactory. However, ethnic minority adolecents live in neighbourhoods with less vegetation and facilities, which suggest that spatial inequity related to ethnic backgrounds still exist in Australia

Urban ecologies at the edge : a case study

This paper discusses some central theoretical and methodological constructs in the field of urban ecologies, identifies research gaps in the field, and uses the Victoria Laboratory of Urban Ecologies (VALUE) as a case study illustrating possible directions of future urban ecologies research. It begins by tracing the theoretical roots of urban ecologies before reviewing contemporary urban ecologies studies throughout the world. Two critical gaps in urban ecologies research are identified, suggesting opportunities for future studies. The paper then introduces the research teams and projects of VALUE – a research centre hosted by the School of Architecture and Building at Deakin University. The paper concludes that the research activities in VALUE are at the edge of urban ecologies research due to the interdisciplinary nature of collaboration in and between project teams, which have thus been able to address gaps in urban ecologies research and make important contributions to the field

Mapping landscape features and values in coastal Australia

Places encompass the physical setting, as well as human experience and interpretation. Although sense of place definition nominally includes the physical environment, most research has emphasized the social construction of sense of place and neglect the important contribution of the physical environment to place meanings and attachment. On the other side, theoretical and technological developments during the past decades resulted in significant sophistication and power of analysis, display, and interpretation of spatial information applied in landscape analysis. This development, however, remains disconnected from the socio-political realities of the communities and regions which are the subject of these studies. There is a research need to integrate public perceptions and attitudes with the type of information typically found in a landscape assessment. A challenge of GIS is whether or not Cartesian space can be adapted to incorporate a more humanistic sense and understanding of distance, direction, and position

Using peoplemap technique to elicit and broadcast sense of place

The population in Geelong Region is expected to keep growing. In order to work towards a better future of the region, it is essential to understand the feelings and needs of local communities and empower them in the community affairs. This study used an innovative technique – peoplemap – to investigate local communities’ sense of place. The primary objective of the investigations was to reveal the sense of place of Geelong Region. Local residents (N=166) in Geelong Region were interviewed face-to-face about how they identify themselves, what they love, what they want, and how empowered they feel. This paper reports the sense of place of three areas of Geelong Region: Ocean Grove, Bannockburn and Teesdale, and Corio-Norlane. Thematic analyses revealed the sense of place of these three areas, and identified their similarities and differences. The results of this study have several implications for government policy makers, planners and designers. This study contributes to the sense of place research, in that civic action was found to be a valid dimension of sense of place

Receding horizon control (RHC) on a Lidar based preview controller design for the active wind turbine pitch system

In this paper, we present a design of a 2DOF (Degree Of Freedom) RHC/FB (FeedBack) control method for the pitch system of wind turbines based on the preview wind speed measurement by a Lidar system

SoccerDB: A Large-Scale Database for Comprehensive Video Understanding

Soccer videos can serve as a perfect research object for video understanding because soccer games are played under well-defined rules while complex and intriguing enough for researchers to study. In this paper, we propose a new soccer video database named SoccerDB, comprising 171,191 video segments from 346 high-quality soccer games. The database contains 702,096 bounding boxes, 37,709 essential event labels with time boundary and 17,115 highlight annotations for object detection, action recognition, temporal action localization, and highlight detection tasks. To our knowledge, it is the largest database for comprehensive sports video understanding on various aspects. We further survey a collection of strong baselines on SoccerDB, which have demonstrated state-of-the-art performances on independent tasks. Our evaluation suggests that we can benefit significantly when jointly considering the inner correlations among those tasks. We believe the release of SoccerDB will tremendously advance researches around comprehensive video understanding. {\itshape Our dataset and code published on https://github.com/newsdata/SoccerDB.}Comment: accepted by MM2020 sports worksho

The Characteristics of Mechanical Grinding on Kaolinite Structure and Thermal Behavior

AbstractThe relationship between kaolinite structure and the temperature of thermal transformation of phase was discussed in this paper through grinding and heating treatment. The results show that the structure of kaolinite is destroyed rapidly with increasing mechanical grinding time, and the kaolinite structure collapses completely after 1h grinding. The temperature of thermal transformation of phase decreases with the destruction of kaolinite structure. This result has a great significance for the utilization of kaolinite associated with coal measures in China

Diabetes Cognitive Impairments and the Effect of Traditional Chinese Herbs

The problem of cognitive impairment resulting from diabetes is gaining more acceptance and attention. Both type 1 and type 2 diabetes mellitus have been proved to be associated with reduced performance on numerous domains of cognitive function. Although the exact mechanisms of cognitive impairments in diabetes have not been completely understood, hyperglycemia and insulin resistance seem to play significant roles. And other possible risk factors such as hypoglycemia, insulin deficiency, vascular risk factors, hyperactive HPA axis, depression, and altered neurotransmitters will also be examined. In the meanwhile, this review analyzed the role of the active ingredient of Chinese herbal medicine in the treatment of diabetes cognitive impairments

LES/FGM investigation of ignition and flame structure in a gasoline partially premixed combustion engine

This paper presents a joint numerical and experimental study of the ignition process and flame structures in a gasoline partially premixed combustion (PPC) engine. The numerical simulation is based on a five-dimension Flamelet-Generated Manifold (5D-FGM) tabulation approach and large eddy simulation (LES). The spray and combustion process in an optical PPC engine fueled with a primary reference fuel (70% iso-octane, 30% n-heptane by volume) are investigated using the combustion model along with laser diagnostic experiments. Different combustion modes, as well as the dominant chemical species and elementary reactions involved in the PPC engines, are identified and visualized using Chemical Explosive Mode Analysis (CEMA). The results from the LES-FGM model agree well with the experiments regarding the onset of ignition, peak heat release rate and in-cylinder pressure. The LES-FGM model performs even better than a finite-rate chemistry model that integrates the full-set of chemical kinetic mechanism in the simulation, given that the FGM model is computationally more efficient. The results show that the ignition mode plays a dominant role in the entire combustion process. The diffusion flame mode is identified in a thin layer between the ultra fuel-lean unburned mixture and the hot burned gas region that contains combustion intermediates such as CO. The diffusion flame mode contributes to a maximum of 27% of the total heat release in the later stage of combustion, and it becomes vital for the oxidation of relatively fuel-lean mixtures