An Extensive Collection of Evaluation Indicators to Assess Occupants' Health and Comfort in Indoor Environment

Today, the effects of the indoor environment on occupants' health and comfort represent a very important topic and requires a holistic approach in which the four main environmental factors (thermal comfort, air quality, acoustics, and lighting) should be simultaneously assessed. The present paper shows the results of a literature survey that aimed to collect the indicators for the evaluation of occupants' health and comfort in indoor environmental quality evaluations. A broad number of papers that propose the indicators of a specific environmental factor is available in the scientific literature, but a review that collects the indicators of all four factors is lacking. In this review paper, the difference between indicators for the evaluation of risk for human health and for comfort evaluation is clarified. For each environmental factor, the risk for human health indicators are proposed with the relative threshold values, and the human comfort indicators are grouped into categories according to the number of parameters included, or the specific field of application for which they are proposed. Furthermore, the differences between human health and comfort indicators are highlighted

Human brain distinctiveness based on EEG spectral coherence connectivity

The use of EEG biometrics, for the purpose of automatic people recognition, has received increasing attention in the recent years. Most of current analysis rely on the extraction of features characterizing the activity of single brain regions, like power-spectrum estimates, thus neglecting possible temporal dependencies between the generated EEG signals. However, important physiological information can be extracted from the way different brain regions are functionally coupled. In this study, we propose a novel approach that fuses spectral coherencebased connectivity between different brain regions as a possibly viable biometric feature. The proposed approach is tested on a large dataset of subjects (N=108) during eyes-closed (EC) and eyes-open (EO) resting state conditions. The obtained recognition performances show that using brain connectivity leads to higher distinctiveness with respect to power-spectrum measurements, in both the experimental conditions. Notably, a 100% recognition accuracy is obtained in EC and EO when integrating functional connectivity between regions in the frontal lobe, while a lower 97.41% is obtained in EC (96.26% in EO) when fusing power spectrum information from centro-parietal regions. Taken together, these results suggest that functional connectivity patterns represent effective features for improving EEG-based biometric systems.Comment: Key words: EEG, Resting state, Biometrics, Spectral coherence, Match score fusio

Higher-Order Permanent Scatterers Analysis

The permanent scatterers (PS) technique is a multi-interferogram algorithm for DInSAR analyses developed in the late nineties to overcome the difficulties related to the conventional approach, namely, phase decorrelation and atmospheric effects. The successful application of this technology to many geophysical studies is now pushing toward further improvements and optimizations. A possible strategy to increase the number of radar targets that can be exploited for surface deformation monitoring is the adoption of parametric super-resolution algorithms that can cope with multiple scattering centres within the same resolution cell. In fact, since a PS is usually modelled as a single pointwise scatterer dominating the background clutter, radar targets having cross-range dimension exceeding a few meters can be lost (at least in C-band datasets), due to geometrical decorrelation phenomena induced in the high normal baseline interferograms of the dataset. In this paper, the mathematical framework related to higher-order SAR interferometry is presented as well as preliminary results obtained on simulated and real data. It is shown how the PS density can be increased at the price of a higher computational load

A REPRODUTIBILIDADE TECNOLÓGICA DA IMAGEM

A imagem é uma das características sensíveis da "climatologia" contemporânea, forma típica de visualização do mundo e do conhecimento ontológico através do olhar. Atualmente, os nossos olhos são confrontados com a crescente presença de novas tecnologias e a transfiguração da imagem pela passagem do analógico para o digital. Isto afeta fortemente a cultura, a comunicação, oimaginário coletivo e a vida quotidiana, com um forte impacto sobre a maneira de pensar e representar visualmente o mundo social. Nossa intenção é colocar em perspectiva a evolução e o papel da imagem digital e a influência dos diversos dispositivos tecnológicos. Uma interrogação ao mesmo tempo epistemológica, culturológica e metodológica através de uma mudança de paradigma que se insere em uma dinâmica de pensamento visual para mostrar a força, a relevância e a implicação do olho, do olhar e da percepção no desvelamento do mundo social. &nbsp

Visual perception: digital imagination and sensitive experience of the social world

With every historical epoch comes a different way of thinking, a different way of seeing, capable of identifying the fundamental elements of a change of paradigm. Any discussion of ‘paradigm’ in relation to the contemporary world must include the development of the digital realm and its technological apparatus, which transform vision and influence how we perceive the world. Central to this development has been the emergence of myriad new forms of communication and a culture of sharing life, which characterize the process of seeing.Technology opens up new horizons in terms of how we expose our presence in the world: via digital photography and video, in every instant of everyday life we are in a position to expose our social world, the fragments of our existence. This cultural effect is not merely a consequence of ways of structuring existence, but also constitutes a change in the way we think about our relationship with the world. Every cultural and technical change brings together a variation of thought and perception, and this represents a basis on which to understand and interrogate the continual mutation of our social imaginary and the process of building, producing and transforming the Real

A constelação sensível do imaginário das ambiências urbanas

O artigo traz uma reflexão sobre como pensar a cidade contemporânea e seus espaços: seus fragmentos significativos e sensíveis. Para tanto, investiga-se “como” a cidade é e se apresenta, e de que maneira posicionamos nosso olhar em uma estratégia de ontologia do presente. O “como” acompanha o pensamento e a observação em profundidade, trata-se de um situacionismo metodológico que se opõe ao pensamento a priori. Desde uma perspectiva da ontologia da atualidade, a análise nos permite dizer o que se experimenta no aqui e agora da existência. Enfim, o imaginário das ambiências urbanas pode ser tido como um efeito de percepção da cidade, que não pode ser separada do real, pois dela fazem parte efeitos, partes e atmosferas

Ambiências climatológicas urbanas: pensar a cidade pós-moderna

Aplicaremos a hipótese kuhniana da revolução científica à cidade. Mostraremos assim que é preciso ficarmos atentos à constante evolução das formas e maneiras de experienciar os espaços citadinos. A cidade já não pode ser pensada numa óptica rudimentar, de ordem funcionalista, típica do modernismo. Antes pelo contrário, pretendemos, à semelhança dos pós-modernistas, exprimir as oscilações do clima urbano e das ambiências quotidianas. A noção de climatologia afigura-se, de forma similar à dos meteorologistas, como sendo necessária para determinar o clima do presente nos lugares da paisagem urbana

El poder de las imágenes como simbolismo de las estructuras del imaginario sociopolítico

¿La expresión visual puede concebirse como un medio de protesta? ¿En qué consiste la dimensión política de la imagen? El surgimiento de las actuales revueltas muestra la eficacia de los signos y mensajes visuales en su poder de circulación, en tanto símbolos que utilizan soportes específicos (muros, monumentos, edificios patrimoniales) para hacer tangibles las demandas de los grupos sociales. En la actualidad, los mensajes visuales reflejan un vitalismo societal, la escritura y los grafitis en los muros de nuestras metrópolis cuestionan la relación entre el espacio público y la ciudadanía; la intervención estética sobre la ciudad es forma expresiva de interpelación política. Los mensajes visuales de protesta son narraciones que contribuyen al relato social sobre el patrimonio, expresado a través de un imaginario de índole identitario donde confluye lo emocional y lo sensible

Performance and requirements of GEO SAR systems in the presence of Radio Frequency Interferences

Geosynchronous Synthetic Aperture Radar (GEO SAR) is a possible next generation SAR system, which has the excellent performance of less than one-day revisit and hundreds of kilometres coverage. However, Radio Frequency Interference (RFI) is a serious problem, because the specified primary allocation frequencies are shared by the increasing number of microwave devices. More seriously, as the high orbit of GEO SAR makes the system have a very large imaging swath, the RFI signals all over the illuminated continent will interfere and deteriorate the GEO SAR signal. Aimed at the RFI impact in GEO SAR case, this paper focuses on the performance evaluation and the system design requirement of GEO SAR in the presence of RFI impact. Under the RFI impact, Signal-to-Interference-plus-Noise Ratio (SINR) and the required power are theoretically deduced both for the ground RFI and the bistatic scattering RFI cases. Based on the theoretical analysis, performance evaluations of the GEO SAR design examples in the presence of RFI are conducted. The results show that higher RFI intensity and lower working frequency will make the GEO SAR have a higher power requirement for compensating the RFI impact. Moreover, specular RFI bistatic scattering will give rise to the extremely serious impact on GEO SAR, which needs incredible power requirements for compensations. At last, real RFI signal behaviours and statistical analyses based on the SMOS satellite, Beidou-2 navigation satellite and Sentinel-1 A data have been given in the appendix