The impact of the Iowa Children\u27s Water Festival on the children\u27s attitudes and behaviors toward the environment

As a result of the growing concern about environmental issues, many countries have developed mechanisms and regulations directed at protection and conservation of the environment. As a part of this movement, many governmental and nongovernmental organizations (NGO) have launched a variety of environmental education programs, in an attempt to promote awareness of environmental issues. The Iowa Children’s Water Festival (ICWF) is an annual half-day environmental education program in Iowa. The goal of the ICWF is to provide educational opportunities throughout the state to K-5 children and to educate customers of tomorrow on the importance of safe, reliable drinking water (ICWF, 2004). The purpose of this study was to investigate the impact of the Iowa Children’s Water Festival on selected Iowa fifth graders’ attitudes toward the environment. The researcher evaluated fifth graders’ attitudinal/behavioral changes toward the environment before and after their participation in the 2003 Iowa Children’s Water Festival. Of the total number of 38 schools participating in the ICWF, 12 schools (participants n = 274) that completed both the pre/posttest Children’s Attitudes Toward the Environment Scale (CATES) were assigned to the experimental group. Three of 12 schools (participants n = 42) that did not participate in the ICWF and returned the pretest CATES were assigned to the control group. Participants (n = 274) were compared to non-participants (n = 42) to determine whether there were substantial differences in the general attitudes toward the environment based on several factors (e.g., pre/posttest, gender, locale, and school type). A one-page survey instrument (CATES) was administered two times (pre/posttest) in a three week period for both groups. Descriptive, inferential statistics were used to investigate whether children who participated in the ICWF improved their attitudes toward the environment compared to children who did not participate in the educational event. An analysis of covariance was employed to test the hypothesis. ANCOVA (regression fashion) indicated that there was no difference in posttest CATES scores between those children who attended the ICWF compared to those who did not attend. To explore the long-term impacts of the participants’ attitudinal/ behavioral changes, a qualitative follow-up interview was conducted six months after the children’s attendance at the 2003 ICWF. Six students from a central, rural elementary school that completed both the pre/posttest CATES were interviewed employing open-ended interview questions. Responses for the major questions indicated that knowledge gain, new behavioral changes, and retaining specific information occurred after children’s participation in the ICWF. The results also suggested that not only are such factors as knowledge gain and behavioral changes critical in the continuum of behavioral change, but factors like family involvement, teacher’s enthusiasm and role-modeling, student’s internal locus of control on environmental issues, and a curriculum that is hands-on are also essential for reaching the ultimate goals of forming environmentally responsible behaviors in younger children

Balanced Spherical Grid for Egocentric View Synthesis

We present EgoNeRF, a practical solution to reconstruct large-scale real-world environments for VR assets. Given a few seconds of casually captured 360 video, EgoNeRF can efficiently build neural radiance fields which enable high-quality rendering from novel viewpoints. Motivated by the recent acceleration of NeRF using feature grids, we adopt spherical coordinate instead of conventional Cartesian coordinate. Cartesian feature grid is inefficient to represent large-scale unbounded scenes because it has a spatially uniform resolution, regardless of distance from viewers. The spherical parameterization better aligns with the rays of egocentric images, and yet enables factorization for performance enhancement. However, the na\"ive spherical grid suffers from irregularities at two poles, and also cannot represent unbounded scenes. To avoid singularities near poles, we combine two balanced grids, which results in a quasi-uniform angular grid. We also partition the radial grid exponentially and place an environment map at infinity to represent unbounded scenes. Furthermore, with our resampling technique for grid-based methods, we can increase the number of valid samples to train NeRF volume. We extensively evaluate our method in our newly introduced synthetic and real-world egocentric 360 video datasets, and it consistently achieves state-of-the-art performance.Comment: Accepted to CVPR 202

Asymmetric-valued Spectrum Auction and Competition in Wireless Broadband Services

We study bidding and pricing competition between two spiteful mobile network operators (MNOs) with considering their existing spectrum holdings. Given asymmetric-valued spectrum blocks are auctioned off to them via a first-price sealed-bid auction, we investigate the interactions between two spiteful MNOs and users as a three-stage dynamic game and characterize the dynamic game's equilibria. We show an asymmetric pricing structure and different market share between two spiteful MNOs. Perhaps counter-intuitively, our results show that the MNO who acquires the less-valued spectrum block always lowers his service price despite providing double-speed LTE service to users. We also show that the MNO who acquires the high-valued spectrum block, despite charing a higher price, still achieves more market share than the other MNO. We further show that the competition between two MNOs leads to some loss of their revenues. By investigating a cross-over point at which the MNOs' profits are switched, it serves as the benchmark of practical auction designs

Gender-related Factors Associated with Upper Extremity Function in Workers

Objectives: This study aimed to find gender distinctions in terms of the sociology of the population; to determine work-related factors; to analyze gender differences in daily living, work, sports, and art performances; and to identify gender-related factors that limited performance of daily living and work activities.Methods: A questionnaire was designed that included disabilities of the arm, shoulder, and hand (DASH), accident history, disease history, work duration at current workplace, marital status, job satisfaction, job autonomy, and physical demands of the job. Out of 1,853 workers surveyed, 1,173 questionnaires (63.3%; 987 males, 186 females) included responses to DASH disability and DASH optional work and were judged acceptable for analysis.Results: Upper extremity functional limitation during work and daily living was higher for females than males. The limitations for males increased according to their household work time, accident history, work duration, job satisfaction, physical demand, and job autonomy. Meanwhile, female workers' upper extremity discomfort was influenced by their disease history, job satisfaction, and physical demands. In addition, the size of the company affected male workers’ upper extremity function, while marriage and hobbies influenced that of female workers.Conclusion: This study addressed sociodemographic factors and work-related factors that affect each gender’s upper extremity function during daily living and working activities. Each factor had a different influence. Further studies are needed to identify the effect that role changes, not being influenced by risks at work, have on musculoskeletal disorders