Household Factors Influencing Participation in Bird Feeding Activity: A National Scale Analysis

Ameliorating pressures on the ecological condition of the wider landscape outside of protected areas is a key focus of conservation initiatives in the developed world. In highly urbanized nations, domestic gardens can play a significant role in maintaining biodiversity and facilitating human-wildlife interactions, which benefit personal and societal health and well-being. The extent to which sociodemographic and socioeconomic factors are associated with engagement in wildlife gardening activities remain largely unresolved. Using two household-level survey datasets gathered from across Britain, we determine whether and how the socioeconomic background of a household influences participation in food provision for wild birds, the most popular and widespread form of human-wildlife interaction. A majority of households feed birds (64% across rural and urban areas in England, and 53% within five British study cities). House type, household size and the age of the head of the household were all important predictors of bird feeding, whereas gross annual household income, the occupation of the head of the household, and whether the house is owned or rented were not. In both surveys, the prevalence of bird feeding rose as house type became more detached and as the age of the head of the household increased. A clear, consistent pattern between households of varying size was less evident. When regularity of food provision was examined in the study cities, just 29% of households provided food at least once a week. The proportion of households regularly feeding birds was positively related to the age of the head of the household, but declined with gross annual income. As concerns grow about the lack of engagement between people and the natural environment, such findings are important if conservation organizations are successfully to promote public participation in wildlife gardening specifically and environmentally beneficial behaviour in society more generally

Smart Clustering - Networking Smart Objects Based On Their Physical Relationships

We propose a new concept that facilitates networking of smart objects by creating topologies that reflect the physical environment. As the objects are clustered according to their physical relationships we obtain a self-organizing, scalable and fault-tolerant peer-to-peer like network. We present the ideas and benefits of this concept and our ongoing work that implements the detection of the relationships between a load-sensing table and sensor-augmented objects

Cooperative Artefacts - A Framework for Embedding Knowledge in Real World Objects

Abstract. In this position paper we introduce Cooperative Artefacts, physical objects that embed sensing, communication, computation and actuation in physical objects. In contrast to many other approaches, Cooperative Artefacts do not require any external infrastructure but cooperate by sharing knowledge. They are programmable with application rules abstracting from low level system aspects. We present an instance of our framework in connection with a scenario from the chemicals industry in which appropriate storage of chemicals is critical for safety reasons. We conclude this paper by discussing potential future research directions for Smart Object Systems

Self Organisation in Ad-Hoc Sensor Networks: An Empirical Study

Research in classifying and recognizing complex concepts has been directing its focus increasingly on distributed sensing using a large amount of sensors. The colossal amount of sensor data often obstructs traditional algorithms in centralized approaches, where all sensor data is directed to one central location to be processed. Spreading the processing of sensor data over the network seems to be a promising option, but distributed algorithms are harder to inspect and evaluate. Using self-sufficient sensor boards with short-range wireless communication capabilities, we are exploring approaches to achieve an emerging distributed perception of the sensed environment in real-time through clustering. Experiments in both simulation and real-world platforms indicate that this is a valid methodology, being especially promising for computation on many units with limited resources

Constraint-based Distance Estimation in Ad-hoc Wireless Sensor

We propose a lightweight localisation approach for supporting distance and range queries in ad hoc wireless sensor networks. In contrast to most previous localisation approaches we use a distance graph as spatial representation where edges between nodes are labelled with distance constraints. This approach has been carefully designed to satisfy the requirements of a concrete application scenario with respect to the spatial queries that need to be supported, the required accuracy of location information, and the capabilities of the target hardware. We show that this approach satisfies the accuracy requirements of the example application using simulations. We describe the implementation of the algorithms on wireless sensor nodes

Ubiquitous interaction:using surfaces in everyday environments as pointing devices

To augment everyday environments as interface to computing may lead to more accessible and inclusive user interfaces, exploiting affordances existing in the physical world for interaction with digital functionality. A major challenge for such interfaces is to preserve accustomed uses while providing unobtrusive access to new services. In this paper we discuss augmentation of common surfaces such as tables as generic pointing device. The basic concept is to sense the load, the load changes and the patterns of change observed on a surface using embedded load sensors. We describe the interaction model used to derive pointing actions from basic sensor observations, and detail the technical augmentation of two ordinary tables that we used for our experiments. The technology effectively emulates a serial mouse, and our implementation and use experience prove that it is unobtrusive, robust, and both intuitively and reliably usable

Context Acquisition Based on Load Sensing

Load sensing is a mature and robust technology widely applied in process control. In this paper we consider the use of load sensing in everyday environments as an approach to acquisition of contextual information in ubiquitous computing applications. Since weight is an intrinsic property of all physical objects, load sensing is an intriguing concept on the physical-virtual boundary, enabling the inclusive use of arbitrary objects in ubiquitous applications. In this paper we aim to demonstrate that load sensing is a versatile source of contextual information. Using a series of illustrative experiments we show that using load sensing techniques we can obtain not just weight information, but object position and interaction events on a given surface. We describe the incorporation of load-sensing in the furniture and the floor of a living laboratory environment, and report on a number of applications that use context information derived from load sensing