Indigenous Cultural Knowledge for Therapeutic Landscape Design

The meanings of place and the relationship between place and health have culturally specific dimensions. This is of particular importance for indigenous people and communities as often regarding landscape as part of a circle of life, establishing a holistic perspective about health and wellbeing. The indigenous Māori of Aotearoa/New Zealand contend that their relationship with the land shapes how the cultural, spiritual, emotional, physical, and social wellbeing of people and communities are expressed. Few studies have explored the influence of the cultural beliefs and values on health, in particular the intricate link between land and health. This chapter broadens the understanding of therapeutic landscapes through the exploration of specific cultural dimensions. It contributes to the expanding body of research focusing on the role of therapeutic landscapes and their role in shaping health, through the development of new research methods

A reliability aware protocol for cooperative communication in cognitive radio networks

One of the challenging tasks in cognitive radio (CR) networks is to agree on a common control channel to exchange control information. This paper presents a novel medium access control (MAC) protocol for CR network which efficiently and intelligently establishes a common control channel between CR nodes. The proposed protocol is the first CR MAC protocol which is hybrid in nature and lies between global common control channel (GCCC) and non-GCCC family of MAC protocols. The dynamic nature of the protocol makes the CR nodes converge on a newly found control channel quicker whenever the interference from a licensed user is sensed. The analytical results show that the dynamic, hybrid and adaptive nature of proposed protocol yields higher throughputs when compared with other CR MAC protocols