Solar energy and urban morphology: Scenarios for increasing the renewable energy potential of neighbourhoods in London

Amongst academics and practitioners working in the fields of urban planning and design, there has been an on-going discussion regarding the relationships between urban morphology and environmental sustainability. A main focus of analysis has been to investigate whether the form of cities and neighbourhoods can be related to their energy efficiency, especially regarding the energy intensity of buildings and transportation. However, to analyse the overall energy performance of urban systems, both the consumption and the generation of resources need to be assessed. In terms of urban environmental sustainability, the potential to generate renewable energy within the city boundaries is a research topic of growing interest, being solar energy one of the main resources available. This study uses neighbourhood-scale statistical models to explore the relationships between aggregated urban form descriptors and the potential to harvest solar energy within the city. Different possible scenarios of urban morphology in Greater London are analysed and variables of urban form are tested with the aim of increasing the solar energy potential of neighbourhoods. Results show that by optimising combinations of up to eight variables of urban form the solar irradiation of roofs could be increased by ca. 9%, while that of façades could increase by up to 45%. Furthermore, based on these results, a series of trade-offs needed for the optimisation of conflicting variables is unveiled. Finally, some recommendations for design strategies are offered with the aim of helping urban planners and designers improve the solar energy potential of new or existing urban areas.This is the final version of the article. It was first published in Renewable Energy here: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0960148114003681

Understanding the self in relation to others: Infants spontaneously map another's face to their own at 16–26 months

The current study probed whether infants understand themselves in relation to others. Infants aged 16-26 months (n = 102) saw their parent wearing a sticker on their forehead or cheek, depending on experimental condition, placed unwitnessed by the child. Infants then received a sticker themselves, and their spontaneous behavior was coded. Regardless of age, from 16 months, all infants who placed the sticker on their cheek or forehead, placed it on the location on their own face matching their parent's placement. This shows that infants as young as 16 months of age have an internal map of their face in relation to others that they can use to guide their behavior. Whether infants placed the sticker on the matching location was related to other measures associated with self-concept development (the use of their own name and mirror self-recognition), indicating that it may reflect a social aspect of children's developing self-concept, namely their understanding of themselves in relation and comparison to others. About half of the infants placed the sticker on themselves, while others put it elsewhere in the surrounding, indicating an additional motivational component to bring about on themselves the state, which they observed on their parent. Together, infants' placement of the sticker in our task suggests an ability to compare, and motivation to align, self and others

Extraversion and adaptive performance: Integrating trait activation and socioanalytic personality theories at work

This is the author accepted manuscript. The final version is available from the publisher via the DOI in this recordBoth trait activation and socioanalytic personality theories clarify the personality – performance relationship at work. We argue that extraversion needs to be interactively combined with both social competency (socioanalytic theory) and an activating context (trait activation theory) to demonstrate effects on a relevant type of work performance. Specifically, the aim of the present study was to examine extraversion's association with adaptive performance when combined with social competency and context (i.e., climate for personal initiative). Our results demonstrate that the three-way interaction (i.e., extraversion × social competency × climate for initiative) has a significant relationship with adaptive performance, such that the extraversion–performance association is strengthened when both social competency and climate for initiative are heightened. Our findings suggest that personality scholars should consider both socioanalytic and trait activation perspectives when investigating performance prediction. We discuss implications, strengths, limitations, and directions for future research

Traduzione settoriale e lingue speciali. La traduzione giuridica, la traduzione economico-finanziaria e la terminologia, tra alveo disciplinare e assi di ricerca

After a short introduction to LSPs and the interdisciplinary nature of specialized translation, this paper focuses, in two separate chapters, on the state of the art in two specializations: legal translation and economic and financial translation. After first underlining the importance of legal translation at a practical, didactic and research-oriented level, in the first of these chapters the interdisciplinary nature of this discipline is indicated as one of the main reasons for its importance. This is followed by an overview of the development of the state of the art in the extensive research carried out on legal translation through an analysis of publications from the very beginning to the present day, highlighting the main desiderata of research today. The second chapter of these chapters gives an overview of economic and financial translation, highlighting the interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary nature of this activity. Particular attention is paid to the discipline itself, the market and reference texts, with a focus on the distinction between buy-side and sell-side translation. Space is then given to the most promising directions of current and future research in this relatively young, little studied discipline. The problematic nature of selecting an unambiguous denomination for this domain, the wide-ranging mandate of the financial translator, who acts as a global communicator in the processes of internationalization of both markets and companies will be oulined. The final part of this paper is dedicated to the link between specialized translation and terminology, as well as to the fundamental distinctions between word and term, nomenclature and terminology. Finally, the key moments in this field, together with the various strands of research, will be outlined

Altercentric bias in preverbal infants memory

Human infants would seem to face a daunting challenge in selecting what they should attend, encode and remember. We investigated whether early in life, infants might use others’ attention as an exploitable source of information filtering, by prioritizing the encoding of events that are co-witnessed with someone else over events witnessed alone. In a series of studies (n=255), we show that infants who can otherwise remember an object’s location, misremembered the object where another agent had seen it, even if infants themselves had subsequently seen the object move somewhere else. With further exploratory analyses, we also found that infants’ attention to the agent rather than the object seems to drive their memory for the object’s location. This series points to an initial encoding bias that likely facilitates information selection but which can, under some circumstances, lead to predictable memory errors

Longitudinal evidence for 4-year-olds’ but not 2- and 3-year-olds’ false belief-related action anticipation

Recently, infants younger than 2 years have been shown to display correct expectations of the actions of an agent with a false belief. The developmental trajectory of these early-developing abilities and their robustness, however, remain a matter of debate. Here, we tested children longitudinally from 2 to 4 years of age with an established anticipatory looking false belief task, and found a significant developmental change between the ages of 3 and 4 years. Children anticipated correctly only by the age of 4 years, and performed at chance at the ages of 2 and 3 years. Moreover, we found correct anticipation only when the agent falsely believed an object to be in its last rather than a previous location. These findings point towards the fragility of early belief-related action anticipation before the age of 4 years, when children start passing traditional false belief tasks

Improving the benefits of multicast prioritization algorithms

The final publication is available at Springer via http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11227-014-1087-zPrioritized atomic multicast consists in delivering messages in total order while ensuring that the priorities of the messages are considered; i.e., messages with higher priorities are delivered first. That service can be used in multiple applications. An example is the usage of prioritization algorithms for reducing the transaction abort rates in applications that use a replicated database system. To this end, transaction messages get priorities according to their probability of violating the existing integrity constraints. This paper evaluates how that abort reduction may be improved varying the message sending rate and the bounds set on the length of the priority reordering queue being used by those multicast algorithms.This work has been partially supported by EU FEDER and Spanish MICINN under research Grants TIN2009-14460-C03-01 and TIN2010-17193.Miedes De Elías, EP.; Muñoz Escoí, FD. (2014). Improving the benefits of multicast prioritization algorithms. Journal of Supercomputing. 68(3):1280-1301. doi:10.1007/s11227-014-1087-zS12801301683Amir Y, Danilov C, Stanton JR (2000) A low latency, loss tolerant architecture and protocol for wide area group communication. In: International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks (DSN), IEEE-CS, Washington, DC, USA, pp 327–336Chockler G, Keidar I, Vitenberg R (2001) Group communication specifications: a comprehensive study. ACM Comput Surv 33(4):427–469CiA (2001) About CAN in Automation (CiA). http://www.can-cia.org/index.php?id=aboutciaDéfago X, Schiper A, Urbán P (2004) Total order broadcast and multicast algorithms: taxonomy and survey. ACM Comput Surv 36(4):372–421Dolev D, Dwork C, Stockmeyer L (1987) On the minimal synchronism needed for distributed consensus. J ACM 34(1):77–97International Organization for Standardization (ISO) (1993) Road vehicles—interchange of digital information—controller area network (CAN) for high-speed communication. Revised by ISO 11898-1:2003JBoss (2011) The Netty project 3.2 user guide. http://docs.jboss.org/netty/3.2/guide/html/Kaashoek MF, Tanenbaum AS (1996) An evaluation of the Amoeba group communication system. In: International conference on distributed computing system (ICDCS), IEEE-CS, Washington, DC, USA, pp 436–448Miedes E, Muñoz-Escoí FD (2008) Managing priorities in atomic multicast protocols. In: International conference on availability, reliability and security (ARES), Barcelona, Spain, pp 514–519Miedes E, Muñoz-Escoí FD (2010) Dynamic switching of total-order broadcast protocols. In: International conference on parallel and distributed processing techniques and applications (PDPTA), CSREA Press, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA, pp 457–463Miedes E, Muñoz-Escoí FD, Decker H (2008) Reducing transaction abort rates with prioritized atomic multicast protocols. In: International European conference on parallel and distributed computing (Euro-Par), Springer, Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Spain, Lecture notes in computer science, vol 5168, pp 394–403Mocito J, Rodrigues L (2006) Run-time switching between total order algorithms. In: International European conference on parallel and distributed computing (Euro-Par), Springer, Dresden, Germany, Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 4128, pp 582–591Moser LE, Melliar-Smith PM, Agarwal DA, Budhia R, Lingley-Papadopoulos C (1996) Totem: a fault-tolerant multicast group communication system. Commun ACM 39(4):54–63Nakamura A, Takizawa M (1992) Priority-based total and semi-total ordering broadcast protocols. In: International conference on distributed computing systems (ICDCS), Yokohama, Japan, pp 178–185Nakamura A, Takizawa M (1993) Starvation-prevented priority based total ordering broadcast protocol on high-speed single channel network. In: 2nd International symposium on high performance distributed computing (HPDC), pp 281–288Rodrigues L, Veríssimo P, Casimiro A (1995) Priority-based totally ordered multicast. In: Workshop on algorithms and architectures for real-time control (AARTC), Ostend, BelgiumRütti O, Wojciechowski P, Schiper A (2006) Structural and algorithmic issues of dynamic protocol update. In: 20th International parallel and distributed processing symposium (IPDPS), IEEE-CS Press, Rhodes Island, GreeceTindell K, Clark J (1994) Holistic schedulability analysis for distributed hard real-time systems. Microprocess Microprogr 40(2–3):117–134Tully A, Shrivastava SK (1990) Preventing state divergence in replicated distributed programs. In: International symposium on reliable distributed systems (SRDS), Huntsville, Alabama, USA, pp 104–113Wiesmann M, Schiper A (2005) Comparison of database replication techniques based on total order broadcast. IEEE Trans Knowl Data Eng 17(4):551–56

Parallel Evolutionary Algorithms for Optimizing Data{based Generated Fuzzy Systems

Abstract. In the eld of data{based fuzzy modeling, the complexity of applications and the amount of data to be processed have grown continuously. Thus, the computational eort for solving these applications has also increased drastically. In order to meet this challenge, parallel computing approaches are applied. The task here is the optimization of data{based generated fuzzy rule bases. For this kind of application the tness evaluation of an individual is very time consuming. Here, a parallel genetic algorithm is applied to solve the optimization problem in an acceptable amount of time. Furthermore, it will be analyzed how the quality of the results changes with the use of multi{population models or neighborhood models. This will be illustrated by two example applications

Morphological characterization of Achai cattle in sedentary and transhumant systems in Pakistan

Achai is an as yet undocumented but well-adapted cattle breed of the Hindu Kush Mountains of northern Pakistan, which is reared under sedentary farming system (SFS) and transhumant farming system (TFS). This paper compares the morphological (physical and morphometric) characteristics of this cattle breed under both farming systems to know the effect of these styles of management. Data were collected from 108 adult females and 108 males in SFS and 108 females and 36 males in TFS on physical characteristics (colour of the coat, horns, eyelashes, muzzle, hoof, switch) and morphometric measurements - i.e. heart girth, body length, height at withers, height at hipbone, face length, horn length, horn circumference, ear (length and width), neck length, dewlap length, chine length, loin length, rump (length and width), length below knee, hoof circumference, tail and switch length. Results showed that farming systems significantly affect most of the morphological characteristics of both sexes, particularly the morphometric measurements with tall and leggy conformation for TFS cows and bulls. This indicates an adaptation to long distance transhumance and mountain terrain grazing. It can be concluded that the Achai has the potential to adapt to the requirements of specific farming systems. There is hence a need for the conservation of its adaptive traits in both farming system