Community Involvement in the Preservation of World Heritage Sites: The Case of the Ukrainian Carpathian Wooden Churches

Encouraging the participation of the local population in the preservation of World Heritage Sites is one of the mission’s of UNESCO’s World Heritage Centre. Community involvement is also critical in the planning process. This dissertation argues that community involvement should be part of the World Heritage List nomination process and long-term preservation of the sites and that mechanisms should be in place to ensure this as part of the nomination file. To support this argument, literature on community involvement and World Heritage Sites is reviewed. Part of this dissertation is to provide a framework for community involvement at World Heritage Sites. In order to accomplish this, the known potential socio-economic benefits of World Heritage designation are also reviewed. This provides a framework whereby communities can be consulted and involved in activities at World Heritage Sites with the goal of preservation of the site and achieving additional socio-economic benefits. This framework was used to explore the attitudes of eight Western Ukrainian communities on the use of their wooden churches that are nominated to the UNESCO World Heritage List to improve their socio-economic conditions as well as preserve the churches. Previous studies focused mostly on the effects of World Heritage Site designation to produce social and economic benefits. This dissertation takes a different approach by involving the community at the nomination stage to determine which of these benefits they support and develop a plan of action and guidelines focused on achieving the desired changes. A community survey was developed under the supervision of this dissertation committee and Dr. Bevz at the Department of Restoration and Reconstruction of Architectural Complexes at Lviv Polytechnic National University as part of a J. William Fulbright grant to Ukraine. The survey responses were analyzed using both summary and statistical analysis to develop guidelines and a plan of action to be implemented by Lviv Polytechnic. This dissertation provides much needed research into community involvement at World Heritage Sites for their preservation and to achieve socio-economic benefits for the surrounding communities. The framework laid out in this dissertation has implications not only for Western Ukraine, but cultural heritage sites throughout the world

Nordseefische schrumpfen wegen Klimawandel

STUDIE Zu wenig Energie zum Wachsen oder Fortpflanzen. Hering, Scholle, Seezunge betroffe

Vulnerable People in Microscopic Evacuation Modelling

Computational evacuation modelling as a part of approval procedures or design processes is sometimes concerned with vulnerable people requiring special attention. This vulnerability can be based on external circumstances or on individual characteristics. Microscopic methods are well suited to deal with such specific determinants by their ability to model individual movement and certain behavioural aspects. By reference to case studies the possibilities of up-to-date individual evacuation models to cover egress scenarios including vulnerable people are discussed. The selected examples demonstrate that the evacuation of vulnerable people often depends more on the modelling of individual behaviour rather than on a very detailed description of individual characteristics. Group formation and the guidance or assistance of other people will have a strong impact on the evacuation process and thus require special modelling techniques and respective calibration and validation efforts guided by empirical studies

Congestion in Computational Evacuation Modelling

The time-based analysis of egress scenarios is a long-standing and well-established method to evaluate occupant safety. It is based on the necessary condition that the required egress time is smaller than the available egress time. The former is derived by the application of evacuation models, the latter by calculation of smoke and heat spread in the case of a fire incident. In the calculation of required egress time the time-dependent development of occupant density and consequently the emergence of congestion often play a crucial role. There is a demand to evaluate the development of local occupant density and jam situations independent of the above time-based criterion. This is for example reflected in national guidelines and standards. It is however difficult to obtain general valid evaluation criteria for congestion due to the multitude of influencing parameter and the highly situation-dependent nature of the accompanying boundary conditions. In addition, prediction of localization and duration of congestion may differ from model to model if applied to equal scenarios. Furthermore, close inspection reveals the difficulty to define proper terms for a quantitative definition of congestion. This issue is further analysed in this paper based on three case studies

Connections on locally trivial quantum principal fibre bundles

Following the approach of Budzy\'nski and Kondracki, we define covariant differential algebras and connections on locally trivial quantum principal fibre bundles. We also consider covariant derivatives, connection forms and curvatures and explore the relations between these notions. As an example, a U(1) quantum principal bundle over a glued quantum sphere and a connection in this bundle is constructed. This connection may be interpreted as a q-deformed Dirac monopole.Comment: 42 page

Variable sequence of events during the past seven terminations in two deep-sea cores from the Southern Ocean

The relationships among internally consistent records of summer sea-surface temperature (SSST), winter sea ice (WSI), and diatomaceous stable isotopes were studied across seven terminations over the last 660 ka in sedimentary cores from ODP sites 1093 and 1094. The sequence of events at both sites indicates that SSST and WSI changes led the carbon and nitrogen isotopic changes in three Terminations (TI, TII and TVI) and followed them in the other four Terminations (TIII, TIV, TV and TVII). In both TIII and TIV, the leads and lags between the proxies were related to weak glacial mode, while in TV and TVII they were due to the influence of the mid-Pleistocene transition. We show that the sequence of events is not unique and does not follow the same pattern across terminations, implying that the processes that initiated climate change in the Southern Ocean has varied through time

Reward Sensitivity for a Palatable Food Reward Peaks During Pubertal Developmental in Rats

Puberty is a critical period for the initiation of drug use and abuse. Because early drug use onset often accounts for a more severe progression of addiction, it is of importance to understand the underlying mechanisms and neurodevelopmental changes during puberty that are contributing to enhanced reward processing in teenagers. The present study investigated the progression of reward sensitivity toward a natural food reward over the whole course of adolescence in male rats (postnatal days 30–90) by monitoring consummatory, motivational behavior and neurobiological correlates of reward. Using a limited-free intake paradigm, consumption of sweetened condensed milk (SCM) was measured repeatedly in adolescent and adult rats. Additionally, early- and mid-pubertal animals were tested in Progressive Ratio responding for SCM and c-fos protein expression in reward-associated brain structures was examined after odor conditioning for SCM. We found a transient increase in SCM consumption and motivational incentive for SCM during puberty. This increased reward sensitivity was most pronounced around mid-puberty. The behavioral findings are paralleled by enhanced c-fos staining in reward-related structures revealing an intensified neuronal response after reward-cue presentation, distinctive for pubertal animals. Taken together, these data indicate an increase in reward sensitivity during adolescence accompanied by enhanced responsiveness of reward-associated brain structures to incentive stimuli, and it seems that both is strongly pronounced around mid-puberty. Therefore, higher reward sensitivity during pubertal maturation might contribute to the enhanced vulnerability of teenagers for the initiation of experimental drug use

ModSelect: Automatic Modality Selection for Synthetic-to-Real Domain Generalization

Modality selection is an important step when designing multimodal systems, especially in the case of cross-domain activity recognition as certain modalities are more robust to domain shift than others. However, selecting only the modalities which have a positive contribution requires a systematic approach. We tackle this problem by proposing an unsupervised modality selection method (ModSelect), which does not require any ground-truth labels. We determine the correlation between the predictions of multiple unimodal classifiers and the domain discrepancy between their embeddings. Then, we systematically compute modality selection thresholds, which select only modalities with a high correlation and low domain discrepancy. We show in our experiments that our method ModSelect chooses only modalities with positive contributions and consistently improves the performance on a Synthetic-to-Real domain adaptation benchmark, narrowing the domain gap.Comment: 14 pages, 6 figures, Accepted at ECCV 2022 OOD worksho