Sexual assaults on gay and bisexual men: Barriers to reporting to the police

Sexual assault is a matter of public concern that affects many individuals globally, regardless of their gender and sexual orientation. With many survivors of sexual assaults choosing not to report their victimisation to police, it appears that prevalence rates based on reports made to the police represent only a fraction of the actual occurrence of assaults. This is especially the case where assaults on gay and bisexual men are concerned. This study examined the barriers gay and bisexual male survivors of sexual assaults face in reporting their victimisation to the police. This study aimed to address a lack in New Zealand based research on the topic and develop an overall representation of the various barriers these survivors may encounter, as well as solutions for their reduction. This was achieved by conducting semi-structured interviews with six service providers functioning as key informants and four gay/bisexual male survivors of sexual assault. Interviews were recorded and transcribed for thematic analysis. The qualitative software NVivo was used to allow for the development and organisation of themes and subthemes from the interview data collected. Four themes were identified pertaining to barriers: personal, social, institutional, and abuse-specific. Personal and social barriers were more readily recognised than those within the institutional and abuse-specific themes. A fifth theme, the reduction theme, emerged in relation to suggestions for decreasing barriers. The following eight barrier areas were identified within the personal barrier theme: defence mechanisms, cognitive mindset, revisiting, knowledge, emotions, privacy/confidentiality, past experience, and mental health. The social theme consisted of nine barrier areas: family, queer community, support, culture and religion, homosexuality and gender, myths, judgement, homophobia and prejudice, and location and environment. Seven barrier areas were identified within the institutional theme: poor responses, services and counselling, cons to reporting, the law, court dynamics, limitations, and police. The abuse-specific barrier theme consisted of nine barrier areas: time, need for proof, victim-perpetrator relationship, age, drugs and alcohol, disclosure of details, consent issues, report scrutiny, and labelling and defining. Finally, six areas were identified pertaining to the reduction of barriers: services, youth, police, information, reporting process, and societal attitudes. Many of the suggestions for reduction methods, such as increasing police training and services offered within the queer community, were seen to be beneficial, yet they may still be subject to various difficulties in their implementation, such as funding concerns. Queer-specific barrier aspects were deemed important to account for in order to develop a comprehensive understanding of the topic. Various linkages between barriers also emerged, effectively making a decision to report to the police even harder for survivors. A case study based on one of the survivors interviewed helped to illustrate this complex weaving of barriers. Further research is needed to examine these barriers on deeper levels, particularly in terms of addressing any differences between youth and adult survivors. The results of this study serve as the first step in developing the foundation to bring information on this topic to the forefront of New Zealand research in the area

Case studies of environmental visualization

The performance gap between simulation and reality has been identified as a major challenge to achieving sustainability in the Built Environment. While Post-Occupancy Evaluation (POE) surveys are an integral part of better understanding building performance, and thus addressing this issue, the importance of POE remains relatively unacknowledged within the wider Built Environment community. A possible reason that has been highlighted is that POE survey data is not easily understood and utilizable by non-expert stakeholders, including designers. A potential method by which to address this is visualization, whose benefits in communicating big datasets are well-established. This paper presents two case studies where EnViz, a prototype software application developed for research purposes, was utilized and its effectiveness tested via a range of analysis tasks. The results are discussed and compared with those of previous work that utilized variations of the methods presented here. The paper concludes by presenting the lessons drawn from the five-year period of EnViz, emphasizing the potential of environmental visualization for decision support in environmental design and engineering for the built environment, and suggests directions for future development

Structural Performance of a novel Interlocking Glued Solid Timber system

Purpose This paper introduces a novel Mass Timber Construction (MTC) system and presents the results of an initial exploration of its structural performance. This system is called Interlocking Glued Solid Timber (IGST) and employs standard-sized solid timber joists, glued together in overlapping patterns. Diagonal cuts are utilised in order to bond adjoining elements. Methods For the purposes of the tests described in this paper, a total of 70 spruce joists were collected at a sawmill and categorised via dynamic modulus of elasticity measurements. Materials testing provided the compressive strength perpendicular to the grain and the shear strength parallel to the grain. Three different types of IGST prototypes were manufactured and tested to failure in a four-point bending test. An additional two series were tested, one of solid joists and one of a glued joist. Three-dimensional finite element models (FEM) were also developed to perform numerical analyses. Results The results demonstrated that the ultimate capacity of one type of IGST prototype was very similar to that of a solid joist of equal cross-section. Conclusions As the IGST prototype if scalable, it could allow for applications similar to other MTC systems. Finally, the FEMs were generally accurate in predicting the performance of the IGST assemblies, thus allowing them to be used to simulate performance

Development of a High-Resolution Wind Forecast System Based on the WRF Model and a Hybrid Kalman-Bayesian Filter

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Automatic code compliance with multi-dimensional data fitting in a BIM context

BIM-based tools can contribute to addressing some of the challenges faced by structural engineering practitioners. A BIM-based framework for the development of components that deliver Automatic Code Compliance (ACC) is presented. The structural design problems that such components solve are categorised as simple, where ACC can be implemented directly, or complex, where more advanced approaches are needed. The mathematical process of Multi-Dimensional Data Fitting (MDDF) is introduced in order for the latter, enabling the compression of complex engineering calculations to a single equation that can be easily implemented into a BIM software engineering package. Proof-of-concept examples are given for both cases: offsite manufactured structural joists are utilised as a non-recursive example, implementing the results obtained in the manufacturer's literature; the axial capacity of metal fasteners in axially loaded timber-to-timber connections are utilised as an example of recursive problems. The MDDF analysis and the implementation in a BIM package of those problems are presented. Finally, the concept is generalised for non-structural aspects at a framework level, and the challenges, implications, and prospects of ACC in a BIM context are discussed

ifcOWL-DfMA a new ontology for the offsite construction domain

Architecture, Engineering and Construction (AEC) is a fragmented in-dustry dealing with heterogeneous data formats coming from different domains. Building Information Modelling (BIM) is one of the most important efforts to manage information collaboratively within the AEC industry. The Industry Foun-dation Classes (IFC) can be used as a data format to achieve data exchange be-tween diverse software applications in a BIM process. The advantage of using Semantic Web Technologies to overcome these challenges has been recognised by the AEC community and the ifcOWL ontology, which transforms the IFC schema to a Web Ontology Language (OWL) representation, is now a de facto standard. Even though the ifcOWL ontology is very extensive, there is a lack of detailed knowledge representation in terms of process and sub-processes explain-ing Design for Manufacturing and Assembly (DfMA) for offsite construction, and also a lack of knowledge on how product and productivity measurement such as production costs and durations are incurred, which is essential for evaluation of alternative DfMA design options. In this article we present a new ontology named ifcOWL-DfMA as a new domain specific module for ifcOWL with the aim of representing offsite construction domain terminology and relationships in a machine-interpretable format. This ontology will play the role of a core vocab-ulary for the DfMA design management and can be used in many scenarios such as life cycle cost estimation. To demonstrate the usage of ifcOWL-DfMA ontol-ogy a production line of wall panels is presented. We evaluate our approach by querying the wall panel production model about information such as activity se-quence, cost estimation per activity and also the direct material cost. This ulti-mately enable users to evaluate the overall product from the system

A composite approach to produce reference datasets for extratropical cyclone tracks: application to Mediterranean cyclones

Many cyclone detection and tracking methods (CDTMs) have been developed in the past to study the climatology of extratropical cyclones. However, all CDTMs have different approaches in defining and tracking cyclone centers. This naturally leads to cyclone track climatologies with inconsistent physical characteristics. More than that, it is typical for CDTMs to produce a non-negligible number of tracks of weak atmospheric features, which do not correspond to large-scale or mesoscale vortices and can differ significantly between CDTMs. Lack of consensus in CDTM outputs and the inclusion of significant numbers of uncertain tracks therein have long prohibited the production of a commonly accepted reference dataset of extratropical cyclone tracks. Such a dataset could allow comparable results on the analysis of storm track climatologies and could also contribute to the evaluation and improvement of CDTMs. To cover this gap, we present a new methodological approach that combines overlapping tracks from different CDTMs and produces composite tracks that concentrate the agreement of more than one CDTM. In this study we apply this methodology to the outputs of 10 well-established CDTMs which were originally applied to ERA5 reanalysis in the 42-year period of 1979-2020. We tested the sensitivity of our results to the spatiotemporal criteria that identify overlapping cyclone tracks, and for benchmarking reasons, we produced five reference datasets of subjectively tracked cyclones. Results show that climatological numbers of composite tracks are substantially lower than the ones of individual CDTMs, while benchmarking scores remain high (i.e., counting the number of subjectively tracked cyclones captured by the composite tracks). Our results show that composite tracks tend to describe more intense and longer-lasting cyclones with more distinguished early, mature and decay stages than the cyclone tracks produced by individual CDTMs. Ranking the composite tracks according to their confidence level (defined by the number of contributing CDTMs), it is shown that the higher the confidence level, the more intense and long-lasting cyclones are produced. Given the advantage of our methodology in producing cyclone tracks with physically meaningful and distinctive life stages, we propose composite tracks as reference datasets for climatological research in the Mediterranean. The Supplement provides the composite Mediterranean tracks for all confidence levels, and in the conclusion we discuss their adequate use for scientific research and applications

Assessing the coastal hazard of Medicane Ianos through ensemble modelling

On 18 September 2020, Medicane Ianos hit the western coast of Greece, resulting in flooding and severe damage at several coastal locations. In this work, we aim at evaluating its impact on sea conditions and the associated uncertainty through the use of an ensemble of numerical simulations. We applied a coupled wave–current model to an unstructured mesh, representing the whole Mediterranean Sea, with a grid resolution increasing in the Ionian Sea along the cyclone path and the landfall area. To investigate the uncertainty in modelling sea levels and waves for such an intense event, we performed an ensemble of ocean simulations using several coarse (10 km) and high-resolution (2 km) meteorological forcings from different mesoscale models. The performance of the ocean and wave models was evaluated against observations retrieved from fixed monitoring stations and satellites. All model runs emphasized the occurrence of severe sea conditions along the cyclone path and at the coast. Due to the rugged and complex coastline, extreme sea levels are localized at specific coastal sites. However, numerical results show a large spread of the simulated sea conditions for both the sea level and waves, highlighting the large uncertainty in simulating this kind of extreme event. The multi-model and multi-physics approach allows us to assess how the uncertainty propagates from meteorological to ocean variables and the subsequent coastal impact. The ensemble mean and standard deviation were combined to prove the hazard scenarios of the potential impact of such an extreme event to be used in a flood risk management plan.</p