Investigation of the relationship between CPTED principles and people's feeling of safety: a pilot study in the City of Adelaide

While CPTED concepts and principles have been incorporated into urban design policy from the federal level to that of local council, there is little research in Australia, or elsewhere, that evaluates and critiques CPTED principles in relation to urban design and people’s feelings of safety and comfort. This paper presents a pilot research project that explores the link between CPTED principles and people’s feelings of safety and comfort in an urban precinct of Adelaide, South Australia. The research combines a micro-scale analysis of the built environment using GIS mapping and a series of interviews and this paper will focus on the built environment survey methods and results. The research found that while many of the CPTED principles were identified in the urban fabric of this precinct, what makes people feel safe was not necessarily and foremost directly related to the built environment design. The main factors that contributed positively to people’s feelings about the area are the presence of activity, familiarity with the surroundings and maintenance of the area, building, or space. It is expected that the approach and methods implemented to conduct this pilot research can be adopted in a wider scale research in other parts of the City and elsewhere.Veronica Soebarto, Helen Bennetts, Susan Oakley, Paul Babi

Thermal personalities of older people in South Australia: A personas-based approach to develop thermal comfort guidelines

Published: 13 November 2020An important consideration for future age-friendly cities is that older people are able to live in housing appropriate for their needs. While thermal comfort in the home is vital for the health and well-being of older people, there are currently few guidelines about how to achieve this. This study is part of a research project that aims to improve the thermal environment of housing for older Australians by investigating the thermal comfort of older people living independently in South Australia and developing thermal comfort guidelines for people ageing-in-place. This paper describes the approach fundamental for developing the guidelines, using data from the study participants’ and the concept of personas to develop a number of discrete “thermal personalities”. Hierarchical Cluster Analysis (HCA) was implemented to analyse the features of research participants, resulting in six distinct clusters. Quantitative and qualitative data from earlier stages of the project were then used to develop the thermal personalities of each cluster. The thermal personalities represent different approaches to achieving thermal comfort, taking into account a wide range of factors including personal characteristics, ideas, beliefs and knowledge, house type, and location. Basing the guidelines on thermal personalities highlights the heterogeneity of older people and the context-dependent nature of thermal comfort in the home and will make the guidelines more user-friendly and useful.Helen Bennetts, Larissa Arakawa Martins, Joost van Hoof and Veronica Soebart

The association between childhood trauma and emotion recognition is reduced or eliminated when controlling for alexithymia and psychopathy traits

Data availability: The dataset generated and analysed during the current study and a fully programmed version of the experiment is available on Open Science Framework: (https://osf.io/vhwxj/?view_only=f6776204f42d4368b4a7a262d0fc8139).Emotion recognition shows large inter-individual variability, and is substantially affected by childhood trauma as well as modality, emotion portrayed, and intensity. While research suggests childhood trauma influences emotion recognition, it is unclear whether this effect is consistent when controlling for interrelated individual differences. Further, the universality of the effects has not been explored, most studies have not examined differing modalities or intensities. This study examined childhood trauma’s association with accuracy, when controlling for alexithymia and psychopathy traits, and if this varied across modality, emotion portrayed, and intensity. An adult sample (N = 122) completed childhood trauma, alexithymia, and psychopathy questionnaires and three emotion tasks: faces, voices, audio-visual. When investigating childhood trauma alone, there was a significant association with poorer accuracy when exploring modality, emotion portrayed, and intensity. When controlling for alexithymia and psychopathy, childhood trauma remained significant when exploring emotion portrayed, however, it was no longer significant when exploring modality and intensity. In fact, alexithymia was significant when exploring intensity. The effect sizes overall were small. Our findings suggest the importance of controlling for interrelated individual differences. Future research should explore more sensitive measures of emotion recognition, such as intensity ratings and sensitivity to intensity, to see if these follow accuracy findings.Partially funded by internal funding awarded to RB by Brunel University London (BRIEF award 1086)

A three-dimensional model of wave attenuation in the marginal ice zone

Extent: 17p.A three-dimensional model of wave scattering by a large array of floating thin elastic plates is used to predict the rate of ocean wave attenuation in the marginal ice zone in terms of the properties of the ice cover and the incoming wavefield. This is regarded as a small step toward assimilating interactions of ocean waves with areas of sea ice into oceanic general circulation models. Numerical results confirm previous findings that attenuation is predominantly affected by wave period and by the average thickness of the ice cover. It is found that the shape and distribution of the floes and the inclusion of an Archimedean draft has little impact on the attenuation produced. The model demonstrates a linear relationship between ice cover concentration and attenuation. An additional study is conducted into the directional evolvement of the wavefield, where collimation and spreading can both occur, depending on the physical circumstances. Finally, the attenuation predicted by the new three-dimensional model is compared with an existing two-dimensional model and with two sets of experimental data, with the latter producing convincing agreement.L. G. Bennetts, M. A. Peter, V. A. Squire, and M. H. Meyla

Living environment, heating-cooling behaviours and well-being: Survey of older South Australians

At a time when the population is ageing and most people choose to live in their own home for as long as possible, it is important to consider various aspects of supportive and comfortable environments for housing. This study, conducted in South Australia, aims to provide information about the links between the type of housing in which older people live, the weather and occupants’ heating and cooling behaviours as well as their health and wellbeing. The study used a Computer-Assisted Telephone Interviewing (CATI) system to survey 250 people aged 65 years and over who lived in their own home. The respondents were recruited from three regions representing the three climate zones in South Australia: semi-arid, warm temperate and temperate. The results show that while the majority of respondents reported being in good health, many lived in dwellings with minimal shading and no wall insulation and appeared to rely on the use of heaters and coolers to achieve thermally comfortable conditions. Concerns over the cost of heating and cooling were shared among the majority of respondents and particularly among people with low incomes. Findings from this study highlight the importance of providing information to older people, carers, designers and policy makers about the interrelationships between weather, housing design, heating and cooling behaviours, thermal comfort, energy use and health and well-being, in order to support older people to age in place independently and healthily.Veronica Soebarto, Helen Bennetts, Alana Hansen, Jian Zuo, Terence Williamson, Dino Pisaniello, Joost van Hoof, Renuka Visvanatha

Precision atomic gravimeter based on Bragg diffraction

We present a precision gravimeter based on coherent Bragg diffraction of freely falling cold atoms. Traditionally, atomic gravimeters have used stimulated Raman transitions to separate clouds in momentum space by driving transitions between two internal atomic states. Bragg interferometers utilize only a single internal state, and can therefore be less susceptible to environmental perturbations. Here we show that atoms extracted from a magneto-optical trap using an accelerating optical lattice are a suitable source for a Bragg atom interferometer, allowing efficient beamsplitting and subsequent separation of momentum states for detection. Despite the inherently multi-state nature of atom diffraction, we are able to build a Mach-Zehnder interferometer using Bragg scattering which achieves a sensitivity to the gravitational acceleration of $\Delta g/g = 2.7\times10^{-9}$ with an integration time of 1000s. The device can also be converted to a gravity gradiometer by a simple modification of the light pulse sequence.Comment: 13 pages, 11 figure

The Thermal Environment of Housing and Its Implications for the Health of Older People in South Australia: A Mixed-Methods Study

Published: 8 January 2022Older people are often over-represented in morbidity and mortality statistics associated with hot and cold weather, despite remaining mostly indoors. The study “Improving thermal environment of housing for older Australians” focused on assessing the relationships between the indoor environment, building characteristics, thermal comfort and perceived health/wellbeing of older South Australians over a study period that included the warmest summer on record. Our findings showed that indoor temperatures in some of the houses reached above 35 °C. With concerns about energy costs, occupants often use adaptive behaviours to achieve thermal comfort instead of using cooling (or heating), although feeling less satisfied with the thermal environment and perceiving health/wellbeing to worsen at above 28 °C (and below 15 °C). Symptoms experienced during hot weather included tiredness, shortness of breath, sleeplessness and dizziness, with coughs and colds, painful joints, shortness of breath and influenza experienced during cold weather. To express the influence of temperature and humidity on perceived health/wellbeing, a Temperature Humidity Health Index (THHI) was developed for this cohort. A health/wellbeing perception of “very good” is achieved between an 18.4 °C and 24.3 °C indoor operative temperature and a 55% relative humidity. The evidence from this research is used to inform guidelines about maintaining home environments to be conducive to the health/wellbeing of older people.Alana Hansen, TerenceWilliamson, Dino Pisaniello, Helen Bennetts, Joost van Hoof, Larissa Arakawa Martins, Renuka Visvanathan, Jian Zuo and Veronica Soebart

Applied screening tests for the detection of superior face recognition.

In recent years there has been growing interest in the identification of people with superior face recognition skills, for both theoretical and applied investigations. These individuals have mostly been identified via their performance on a single attempt at a tightly controlled test of face memory-the long form of the Cambridge Face Memory Test (CFMT+). The consistency of their skills over a range of tests, particularly those replicating more applied policing scenarios, has yet to be examined systematically. The current investigation screened 200 people who believed they have superior face recognition skills, using the CFMT+ and three new, more applied tests (measuring face memory, face matching and composite-face identification in a crowd). Of the sample, 59.5% showed at least some consistency in superior face recognition performance, although only five individuals outperformed controls on overall indices of target-present and target-absent trials. Only one participant outperformed controls on the Crowds test, suggesting that some applied face recognition tasks require very specific skills. In conclusion, future screening protocols need to be suitably thorough to test for consistency in performance, and to allow different types of superior performer to be detected from the outset. Screening for optimal performers may sometimes need to directly replicate the task in question, taking into account target-present and target-absent performance. Self-selection alone is not a reliable means of identifying those at the top end of the face recognition spectrum

Deletion of the Chd6 exon 12 affects motor coordination

Members of the CHD protein family play key roles in gene regulation through ATP-dependent chromatin remodeling. This is facilitated by chromodomains that bind histone tails, and by the SWI2/SNF2-like ATPase/helicase domain that remodels chromatin by moving histones. Chd6 is ubiquitously expressed in both mouse and human, with the highest levels of expression in the brain. The Chd6 gene contains 37 exons, of which exons 12-19 encode the highly conserved ATPase domain. To determine the biological role of Chd6, we generated mouse lines with a deletion of exon 12. Chd6 without exon 12 is expressed at normal levels in mice, and Chd6 Exon 12 −/− mice are viable, fertile, and exhibit no obvious morphological or pathological phenotype. Chd6 Exon 12 −/− mice lack coordination as revealed by sensorimotor analysis. Further behavioral testing revealed that the coordination impairment was not due to muscle weakness or bradykinesia. Histological analysis of brain morphology revealed no differences between Chd6 Exon 12 −/− mice and wild-type (WT) controls. The location of CHD6 on human chromosome 20q12 is overlapped by the linkage map regions of several human ataxias, including autosomal recessive infantile cerebellar ataxia (SCAR6), a nonprogressive cerebrospinal ataxia. The genomic location, expression pattern, and ataxic phenotype of Chd6 Exon 12 −/− mice indicate that mutations within CHD6 may be responsible for one of these ataxias