Mapping the coevolution of urban energy systems: pathways of change

Abstract. The interface of a long-standing movement for sustainability at the urban scale and the imperatives of the carbon-reduction agenda are driving change in urban energy systems. This paper seeks to address the nature of that change and, in particular, to consider how different pathways of change are emerging. To do this it draws on the coevolution and pathways literatures to interrogate a database of current urban energy initiatives within the UK. This analysis reveals the multiple pathways of change though which new modes of energy production and consumption are being developed to deliver carbon reductions through the reconfiguring of urban energy systems. The paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of these changes for urban governance and for carbon reductions

A multi-scalar perspective on health and urban housing: an umbrella review

With more than half the world’s population living in cities, understanding how the built environment impacts human health at different urban scales is crucial. To be able to shape cities for health, an understanding is needed of planetary health impacts, which encompass the human health impacts of human-caused disruptions on the Earth’s natural ecosystems. This umbrella review maps health evidence across the spatial scales of the built environment (building; neighbourhood; and wider system, including city, regional and planetary levels), with a specific focus on urban housing. Systematic reviews published in English between January 2011 and December 2020 were searched across 20 databases, with 1176 articles identified and 124 articles screened for inclusion. Findings suggests that most evidence reports on health determinants at the neighbourhood level, such as greenspace, physical and socio-economic conditions, transport infrastructure and access to local services. Physical health outcomes are also primarily reported, with an emerging interest in mental health outcomes. There is little evidence on planetary health outcomes and significant gaps in the research literature are identified. Based on these findings, three potential directions are identified for future research

Urinary Malondialdehyde (MDA) Concentrations in the General Population-A Systematic Literature Review and Meta-Analysis.

Oxidative stress has been associated with various inflammation-related human diseases. It is defined as an imbalance between the production and elimination of reactive oxygen species (ROS). ROS can oxidize proteins, lipids, and DNA, and some of these oxidized products are excreted in urine, such as malondialdehyde (MDA), which is considered a biomarker for oxidative damage of lipids. To interpret changes of this biomarker as a measure of oxidative species overproduction in humans, a background range for urinary MDA concentration in the general population is needed. We sought to establish urinary MDA concentration ranges for healthy adult populations based on reported values in the available scientific literature. We conducted a systematic review and meta-analysis using the standardized protocol registered in PROSPERO (CRD42020146623). EMBASE, PubMed, Web of Science, and Cochrane library databases were searched from journal inception up to October 2020. We included 35 studies (divided into 47 subgroups for the quantitative analysis). Only studies that measured creatinine-corrected urinary MDA with high-performance liquid chromatography (HPLC) with mass spectrometry (MS), fluorescence detection, or UV photometry were included. The geometric mean (GM) of urinary MDA concentration was 0.10 mg/g creatinine and 95% percentile confidence interval (CI) 0.07-0.12. Age, geographical location but not sex, and smoking status had a significant effect on urinary MDA concentrations. There was a significant increasing trend of urinary MDA concentrations with age. These urinary MDA values should be considered preliminary, as they are based on mostly moderate to some low-quality evidence studies. Although urinary MDA can reliably reflect excessive oxidative stress in a population, the influence of physiological parameters that affect its meaning needs to be addressed as well as harmonizing the chemical analytical methods

Climate action for health and wellbeing in cities: a protocol for the systematic development of a database of peer-reviewed studies using machine learning methods [version 1; peer review: awaiting peer review]

Home Browse Climate action for health and wellbeing in cities: a protocol for... ALL METRICS 99 VIEWS 11 DOWNLOADS Get PDF Get XML Cite Export Track Email Share ▬ STUDY PROTOCOL Climate action for health and wellbeing in cities: a protocol for the systematic development of a database of peer-reviewed studies using machine learning methods [version 1; peer review: awaiting peer review] Kristine Belesova https://orcid.org/0000-0002-6160-50411, Max Callaghan https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8292-87582, Jan C Minx https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2862-01782, Felix Creutzig2, Catalina Turcu https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2663-25863, Emma Hutchinson1, James Milner1, Melanie Crane https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3058-22114, Andy Haines https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8053-46051, Michael Davies5, Paul Wilkinson1 Author details 1 Department of Public Health, Environments and Society and Centre on Climate Change and Planetary Health, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, London, WC1H 9SH, UK 2 Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change, Berlin, 10829, Germany 3 Bartlett School of Planning, University College London, London, WC1H 0QB, UK 4 Charles Perkins Centre, Sydney School of Public Health, University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia 5 Bartlett School Environment, Energy & Resources, University College London, London, WC1H 0QB, UK Kristine Belesova Roles: Conceptualization, Data Curation, Investigation, Methodology, Supervision, Writing – Original Draft Preparation, Writing – Review & Editing Max Callaghan Roles: Data Curation, Investigation, Methodology, Software, Writing – Review & Editing Jan C Minx Roles: Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Software, Writing – Review & Editing Felix Creutzig Roles: Conceptualization, Investigation, Methodology, Software, Writing – Review & Editing Catalina Turcu Roles: Investigation, Methodology, Writing – Review & Editing Emma Hutchinson Roles: Investigation, Methodology, Writing – Review & Editing James Milner Roles: Methodology, Writing – Review & Editing Melanie Crane Roles: Methodology, Writing – Review & Editing Andy Haines Roles: Conceptualization, Funding Acquisition, Methodology, Supervision, Writing – Review & Editing Michael Davies Roles: Conceptualization, Funding Acquisition, Methodology, Writing – Review & Editing Paul Wilkinson Roles: Conceptualization, Funding Acquisition, Methodology, Supervision, Writing – Review & Editing Abstract Cities produce more than 70% of global greenhouse gas emissions. Action by cities is therefore crucial for climate change mitigation as well as for safeguarding the health and wellbeing of their populations under climate change. Many city governments have made ambitious commitments to climate change mitigation and adaptation and implemented a range of actions to address them. However, a systematic record and synthesis of the findings of evaluations of the effect of such actions on human health and wellbeing is currently lacking. This, in turn, impedes the development of robust knowledge on what constitutes high-impact climate actions of benefit to human health and wellbeing, which can inform future action plans, their implementation and scale-up. The development of a systematic record of studies reporting climate and health actions in cities is made challenging by the broad landscape of relevant literature scattered across many disciplines and sectors, which is challenging to effectively consolidate using traditional literature review methods. This protocol reports an innovative approach for the systematic development of a database of studies of climate change mitigation and adaptation actions implemented in cities, and their benefits (or disbenefits) for human health and wellbeing, derived from peer-reviewed academic literature. Our approach draws on extensive tailored search strategies and machine learning methods for article classification and tagging to generate a database for subsequent systematic reviews addressing questions of importance to urban decision-makers on climate actions in cities for human health and wellbeing

METABOLIC REACTIONS AND ANIMAL BODY DISEASES IN VARIOUS FORMS OF STRESS - GENERAL ADAPTATION SYNDROME

Animal bodies (mammalian and human body) show a great capacity for adaptation, both to the fluctuations of environmental factors and also regarding the nutrition, increasingly modified. General Adaptation Syndrome (GAS) of organisms, began to be studied in animals and also in humans. In human bodyes, GAS is studied because a number of  disease with great significance psychologically, physiological but especially medical, appeard. In both categories of bodies, GAS is investigated by the presence of markers that highlight heart or cardiovascular disease, kidney disorders, nutritional and metabolic disorders - diabetes mellitus, also others more. Specific markers for the assessment of GAS are endogenous particles (the best example being the body's own enzymes) but also exogenous (drugs, hormones, chemicals). The objective of this study is to analyze the activity of some enzymes, from human and animals blood samples, such as creatinphosphokinase CPK, lactatdehidrogenase LDH, alkaline phosphatase ALP and for glycosylated hemoglobin (human samples only)

Recommending Learning Videos for MOOCs and Flipped Classrooms

[EN] New teaching approaches are emerging in higher education, such as flipped classrooms. In addition, academic institutions are offering new types of training like Massive Online Open Courses. Both of these new ways of education require high-quality learning objects for their success, with learning videos being the most common to provide theoretical concepts. This paper describes a hybrid learning recommender system based on content-based techniques, which is able to recommend useful videos to learners and teachers from a learning video repository. This hybrid technique has been successfully applied to a real scenario such as the central video repository of the Universitat Politècnica de València.This work was partially supported by MINECO/FEDER RTI2018-095390-B-C31 and TIN2017-89156-R projects of the Spanish government, and PROMETEO/2018/002 project of Generalitat Valenciana. J. Jordán and V. Botti are funded by UPV PAID-06-18 project. J. Jordán is also funded by grant APOSTD/2018/010 of Generalitat Valenciana - Fondo Social Europeo.Jordán, J.; Valero Cubas, S.; Turró, C.; Botti Navarro, VJ. (2020). Recommending Learning Videos for MOOCs and Flipped Classrooms. Springer. 146-157. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-49778-1_12S146157Blei, D.M., Ng, A.Y., Jordan, M.I.: Latent Dirichlet allocation. J. Mach. Learn. Res. 3, 993–1022 (2003)Bobadilla, J., Serradilla, F., Hernando, A.: Collaborative filtering adapted to recommender systems of e-learning. Knowl.-Based Syst. 22(4), 261–265 (2009)Burke, R.: Hybrid recommender systems: survey and experiments. User Model. User-Adap. Inter. 12(4), 331–370 (2002)Chen, W., Niu, Z., Zhao, X., Li, Y.: A hybrid recommendation algorithm adapted in e-learning environments. World Wide Web 17(2), 271–284 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11280-012-0187-zvan Dijck, J., Poell, T.: Higher education in a networked world: European responses to U.S. MOOCs. Int. J. Commun.: IJoC 9, 2674–2692 (2015)Dwivedi, P., Bharadwaj, K.K.: e-learning recommender system for a group of learners based on the unified learner profile approach. Expert Syst. 32(2), 264–276 (2015)Herlocker, J., Konstan, J., Terveen, L., Riedl, J.: Evaluating collaborative filtering recommender systems. ACM Trans. Inf. Syst. 22(1), 5–53 (2004)Institute and Committee of Electrical and Electronics Engineers: Learning Technology Standards: IEEE Standard for Learning Object Metadata. IEEE Standard 1484.12.1 (2002)Klašnja-Milićević, A., Ivanović, M., Nanopoulos, A.: Recommender systems in e-learning environments: a survey of the state-of-the-art and possible extensions. Artif. Intell. Rev. 44(4), 571–604 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10462-015-9440-zMaassen, P., Nerland, M., Yates, L. (eds.): Reconfiguring Knowledge in Higher Education. Higher Education Dynamics, vol. 50. Springer, Heidelberg (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72832-2MLLP research group, Universitat Politècnica de València: Tlp: The translectures-upv platform. http://www.mllp.upv.es/tlpO’Flaherty, J., Phillips, C.: The use of flipped classrooms in higher education: a scoping review. Internet High. Educ. 25, 85–95 (2015)Richardson, M., Dominowska, E., Ragno, R.: Predicting clicks: estimating the click-through rate for new ads. In: Proceedings of the 16th international conference on World Wide Web, pp. 521–530 (2007)Rodríguez, P., Heras, S., Palanca, J., Duque, N., Julián, V.: Argumentation-based hybrid recommender system for recommending learning objects. In: Rovatsos, M., Vouros, G., Julian, V. (eds.) EUMAS/AT -2015. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 9571, pp. 234–248. Springer, Cham (2016). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-33509-4_19Roehl, A., Reddy, S.L., Shannon, G.J.: The flipped classroom: an opportunity to engage millennial students through active learning strategies. J. Fam. Consum. Sci. 105, 44–49 (2013)Salton, G., Buckley, C.: Term-weighting approaches in automatic text retrieval. Inf. Process. Manag. 24(5), 513–523 (1988)Stoica, A.S., Heras, S., Palanca, J., Julian, V., Mihaescu, M.C.: A semi-supervised method to classify educational videos. In: Pérez García, H., Sánchez González, L., Castejón Limas, M., Quintián Pardo, H., Corchado Rodríguez, E. (eds.) HAIS 2019. LNCS (LNAI), vol. 11734, pp. 218–228. Springer, Cham (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-29859-3_19Tarus, J.K., Niu, Z., Yousif, A.: A hybrid knowledge-based recommender system for e-learning based on ontology and sequential pattern mining. Future Gener. Comput. Syst. 72, 37–48 (2017)Tucker, B.: The flipped classroom. Online instruction at home frees class time for learning. Educ. Next Winter 2012, 82–83 (2012)Turcu, G., Heras, S., Palanca, J., Julian, V., Mihaescu, M.C.: Towards a custom designed mechanism for indexing and retrieving video transcripts. 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Strong field physics and QED experiments with ELI-NP 2×10PW laser beams

The ELI-NP facility will focus a 10 PW pulsed laser beam at intensities of ∼10 23 W/cm 2 for the first time, enabling investigation of the new physical phenomena at the interfaces of plasma, nuclear and particle physics. The electric field in the laser focus has a maximum value of ∼10 15 V/m at such laser intensities. In the ELI-NP Experimental Area E6, we propose the study of Radiation Reaction, Strong Field Quantum Electrodynamics (QED) effects and resulting production of Ultra-bright Sources of Gamma-rays which could be used for nuclear activation. Two powerful, synchronized 10 PW laser beams will be focused in the E6 Interaction Chamber on either gas or solid targets. One 10 PW beam is the Pump-beam and the other is the Probe-beam. The focused Pump beam accelerates the electrons to relativistic energies. The accelerated electron bunches interact with the very high electro-magnetic field of the focused Probe beam. The layout of the experimental area E6 will be presented with several options for the experimental configurations

739 observed NEAs and new 2-4m survey statistics within the EURONEAR network

We report follow-up observations of 477 program Near-Earth Asteroids (NEAs) using nine telescopes of the EURONEAR network having apertures between 0.3 and 4.2 m. Adding these NEAs to our previous results we now count 739 program NEAs followed-up by the EURONEAR network since 2006. The targets were selected using EURONEAR planning tools focusing on high priority objects. Analyzing the resulting orbital improvements suggests astrometric follow-up is most important days to weeks after discovery, with recovery at a new opposition also valuable. Additionally we observed 40 survey fields spanning three nights covering 11 sq. degrees near opposition, using the Wide Field Camera on the 2.5m Isaac Newton Telescope (INT), resulting in 104 discovered main belt asteroids (MBAs) and another 626 unknown one-night objects. These fields, plus program NEA fields from the INT and from the wide field MOSAIC II camera on the Blanco 4m telescope, generated around 12,000 observations of 2,000 minor planets (mostly MBAs) observed in 34 square degrees. We identify Near Earth Object (NEO) candidates among the unknown (single night) objects using three selection criteria. Testing these criteria on the (known) program NEAs shows the best selection methods are our epsilon-miu model which checks solar elongation and sky motion and the MPC's NEO rating tool. Our new data show that on average 0.5 NEO candidates per square degree should be observable in a 2m-class survey (in agreement with past results), while an average of 2.7 NEO candidates per square degree should be observable in a 4m-class survey (although our Blanco statistics were affected by clouds). At opposition just over 100 MBAs (1.6 unknown to every 1 known) per square degree are detectable to R=22 in a 2m survey based on the INT data, while our two best ecliptic Blanco fields away from opposition lead to 135 MBAs (2 unknown to every 1 known) to R=23.Comment: Published in Planetary and Space Sciences (Sep 2013