The greatest air quality experiment ever: Policy suggestions from the COVID-19 lockdown in twelve European cities

COVID-19 (Coronavirus disease 2019) hit Europe in January 2020. By March, Europe was the active centre of the pandemic. As a result, widespread "lockdown" measures were enforced across the various European countries, even if to a different extent. Such actions caused a dramatic reduction, especially in road traffic. This event can be considered the most significant experiment ever conducted in Europe to assess the impact of a massive switch-off of atmospheric pollutant sources. In this study, we focus on in situ concentration data of the main atmospheric pollutants measured in twelve European cities, characterized by different climatology, emission sources, and strengths. We propose a methodology for the fair comparison of the impact of lockdown measures considering the non-stationarity of meteorological conditions and emissions, which are progressively declining due to the adoption of stricter air quality measures. The analysis of these unmatched circumstances allowed us to estimate the impact of a nearly zero-emission urban transport scenario on air quality in 12 European cities. The clearest result, common to all the cities, is that a dramatic traffic reduction effectively reduces NO2 concentrations. In contrast, each city’s PM and ozone concentrations can respond differently to the same type of emission reduction measure. From the policy point of view, these findings suggest that measures targeting urban traffic alone may not be the only effective option for improving air quality in cities

Cinema-going trajectories in the digital age

The activity of cinema-going constantly evolves and gradually integrates the use of digital data and platforms to become more engaging for the audiences. Combining methods from the fields of Human Computer Interaction and Film Studies, we conducted two workshops seeking to understand cinema audiences’ digital practices and explore how the contemporary cinema-going experience is shaped in the digital age. Our findings suggest that going to the movies constitutes a trajectory during which cinemagoers interact with multiple digital platforms. At the same time, depending on their choices, they construct unique digital identities that represent a set of online behaviours and rituals that cinemagoers adopt before, while and after cinema-going. To inform the design of new, engaging cinemagoing experiences, this research establishes a preliminary map of contemporary cinema-going including digital data and platforms. We then discuss how audiences perceive the potential improvement of the experience and how that would lead to the construction of digital identities

Explaining Reurbanization: Empirical Evidence of Intraregional Migration as a Long-Term Mobility Decision from Germany

Following the discussion on reurbanization (changing intra-regional migration patterns), our research project treats transport-related consequences of this spatial development in German city regions. The hypothesis is that reurbanization bears potential to spread environmentally friendly ways of organizing daily mobility - but that the chance of those positive effects might be given away, if policy does not accompany the process adequately. The aim of this project is to assess the current impact of reurbanization on passenger transport in city regions and to find further potential to reduce motorized passenger kilometres in order to deduce first planning approaches. This paper focuses on the question whether a household decides to move or to stay in its current dwelling and also analyses how the results vary in time and space. After having deduced factors on the decision to move, a logistic regression is run on the SOEP-data. The analysis shows that observed differences in time are mainly due to difference in behaviour regarding the factors number of employed persons and the event birth whereas spatial variation is mainly due to structural differences

The degradation of collagen by a metalloproteinase from human leucocytes

Kohnert U, Oberhoff R, Fedrowitz J, Bergmann U, Rauterberg J, Tschesche H. The degradation of collagen by a metalloproteinase from human leucocytes. Adv Exp Med Biol. 1988;240

BUILD-IT : a planning tool for construction and design

It is time to go beyond the established approaches in humancomputer interaction. With the Augmented Reality (AR) design strategy humans are able to behave as much as possible in a natural way: behavior of humans in the real world with other humans and/or real world objects. Following the fundamental constraints of natural way of interacting we derive a set of recommendations for the next generation of user interfaces: the Natural User Interface (NUI). The concept of NUI is presented in form of a runnable demonstrator: a computer vision-based interaction technique for a planning tool for construction and design tasks

BUILD-IT : a planning tool for construction and design

It is time to go beyond the established approaches in humancomputer interaction. With the Augmented Reality (AR) design strategy humans are able to behave as much as possible in a natural way: behavior of humans in the real world with other humans and/or real world objects. Following the fundamental constraints of natural way of interacting we derive a set of recommendations for the next generation of user interfaces: the Natural User Interface (NUI). The concept of NUI is presented in form of a runnable demonstrator: a computer vision-based interaction technique for a planning tool for construction and design tasks