Urban Gardening: Cultivating More Than Just Produce

Report: iv, 15 pp.; ill., digital fileThe two sustainable development goals of high-density development and urban gardening have conflicted with each other in recent decades. When land is available, particularly in the inner-city, a choice must often be made between using it for housing or other development and using it for community gardens. When viewed merely in economic terms, community gardens appear to have little value compared to residential development. When viewed in terms of educational, economic, social, health and ecological benefits, the multi-faceted, linked values of urban gardening become evident. Th is paper explores these benefits, the conflict between development and urban gardening, the validity of each argument and, finally, how the conflict can be resolved while still achieving more sustainable development.Institute of Urban Studie

Civil Society, Good Governance and the News Media: A case study of civil society inclusion in Winnipeg Free Press coverage of Lake Winnipeg nutrient loading

Governance and participatory democracy theory suggest that strong policy can stem from the inclusion of all societal voices in discussion of options, and that the public must have a strong base of information in order to participate fully in democracy. The news media can be an important vehicle for these voices and a central source of information. However, academic literature has recorded that “elite” sources, such as government, dominate news coverage to the disadvantage of “non-elite” sources, such as civil society groups and citizens, a situation that results in imbalanced information in the news. This thesis examines patterns of civil society inclusion in Winnipeg Free Press coverage of Lake Winnipeg water quality, and discusses the implications of findings for good governance. Three methods of inquiry are used: 1) a literature review, 2) a quantitative content analysis of newspaper articles published in the Winnipeg Free Press from August 1991 through December 2008, and 3) interviews with civil society members with an interest in Lake Winnipeg water quality. Content analysis findings indicate that civil society sources generally received less coverage than “elite” sources, were used less frequently, were given lower prominence within articles, had fewer chances to “define” coverage and were less often used in “hard” news compared to opinion sections. Interview findings challenge the dominant view within media literature that journalists are fully responsible for “elite” source dominance due to journalist bias in source selection, the “beat system” of journalism that focuses on governmental institutions, decisions made by editors and corporate or political preferences of news entities. While journalism practices are undoubtedly a factor, this study finds that there are also shortcomings within civil society organizations and the framework within which they operate that limit their engagement with the media. Four key factors are identified. Registered charities are often hesitant to speak with the media due to real and perceived legal restraints on their communications activities under Canada’s Income Tax Act. Many organizations are apprehensive about voicing concerns in the media for fear of losing funding. Few organizations have communications staff, or even staff members trained in media outreach, resulting in a passive approach to communications. And few organizations have the capacity to deal with media requests for information within journalism deadlines. In addition, the interview data indicate that those organizations actively pursuing media coverage are focusing attention on smaller newspapers, alternative media and self-published pieces, which suggests that the mainstream news media are perhaps of less importance to such organizations than in the past. Alternatively, it is possible that organizations are finding access to the mainstream media effectively cut off. Finally, recommendations are made to civil society organizations on how they can increase their prominence in the news and conquer their reluctance to deal with the media, and to the media on how to improve attention to civil society voices. For the latter, ideas are drawn from public journalism, a journalism movement which emphasizes citizens as sources

Future directions for the development of Virtual Reality within an automotive manufacturer

Virtual Reality (VR) can reduce time and costs, and lead to increases in quality, in the development of a product. Given the pressure on car companies to reduce time-to-market and to continually improve quality, the automotive industry has championed the use of VR across a number of applications, including design, manufacturing, and training. This paper describes interviews with 11 engineers and employees of allied disciplines from an automotive manufacturer about their current physical and virtual properties and processes. The results guided a review of research findings and scientific advances from the academic literature, which formed the basis of recommendations for future developments of VR technologies and applications. These include: develop a greater range of virtual contexts; use multi-sensory simulation; address perceived differences between virtual and real cars; improve motion capture capabilities; implement networked 3D technology; and use VR for market research

Intuitive User Interfaces for Mobile Manipulation Tasks

This article describes interactive methods that can ease difficult manipulation tasks in Search & Rescue operations. We discuss the requirements that are necessary for a telemanipulation system to be successfully used. These include not just correctness of generated motion but also ergonomy, mobility and interactivity of the operator’s interface. We show that grippers with one or more degrees of freedom can be intuitively controlled by different interface mechanisms, supported by 3D vision systems. Tests are performed both in the simulation environment and with real grippers. A practical pipeline for a direct control and learning the system is also presented

Introducing modern robotics with ROS and Arduino, including case studies

This paper describes our experience with introducing modern robotics through Robot Operating System. ROS framework allows rapid robot prototyping and gives access to many state-of-the-art robotic solutions. It is however, software oriented and requires its users to understand well software development ideas and methods. While teaching undergraduate students ROS, we came up with some solutions how to introduce it to people without a deep background in computer science. The paper presents our Mymodel robot application that simplifies modeling of the robots using URDF format and some Arduino based programs. We have also reported results of students’ projects

Evaluation of Simple Microphone-based Mechanomyography (MMG) Probe Sets for Hand Stiffness Classification

We describe simple to build mechanomyography sensors, with one or two channels, based on electret microphones. We evaluate their application as a source of information about the operator’s hand stiffness, which can be used for changing a robot’s gripper stiffness during teleoperation. We explain a data acquisition procedure for further employment of a machine-learning. Finally, we present the results of three experiments and various machine learning algorithms. support vector classification, random forests, and neural-network architectures (fullyconnected articial neural networks, recurrent, convolutional) were compared in two experiments. In first and second, two probes were used with a single participant, with probes displaced during learning and testing to evaluate the influence of probe placement on classifcation. In the third experiment, a dataset was collected using two probes and seven participants. As a result of the singleprobe tests, we achieved a (binary) classification accuracy of 94 % during the multi-probe tests, large crossparticipant differences in classifcation accuracy were noted, even when normalizing per-participant

Immersion Therapy with Head-Mounted Display for Rehabilitation of the Upper Limb after Stroke—Review

Immersive virtual therapy technology is a new method that uses head-mounted displays for rehabilitation purposes. It offers a realistic experience that puts the user in a virtual reality. This new type of therapy is used in the rehabilitation of stroke patients. Many patients after this disease have complications related to the upper extremities that limit independence in their everyday life, which affects the functioning of society. Conventional neurological rehabilitation can be supplemented by the use of immersive virtual therapy. The system allows patients with upper limb dysfunction to perform a motor and task-oriented training in virtual reality that is individually tailored to their performance. The complete immersion therapy itself is researched and evaluated by medical teams to determine the suitability for rehabilitation of the upper limb after a stroke. The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the latest research (2019–2022) on immersive virtual reality with head-mounted displays using in rehabilitation of the upper extremities of stroke patients

Koncepcja układu syntezy mowy z tekstu opartego na modelu harmoniczne i szum

This is a proposal of concatenative text to speech synthesizer for the Polish language, based on diphones and ”Harmonics and Noise Model”(HNM). HNM has been successfully applied on a speech encoder and decoder, resulting in a high-quality of processed speech at low bit rate. Applying this model to speech synthesis system allows obtaining good quality of synthesized speech, and the small size of database parameters. The proposed project consists of two main modules. The Natural Language Processing (NLP) is used to analyse and convert the written text for phonemes and diphones using morphological rules. NLP discovers at the same time prosodic features for later modification of synthesized speech parameters in order to obtain the stress and voice intonation. The second section is a synthesis system, derived from speech decoder, preceded by a system of adapting the parameters of speech based on prosodic rules. The system of speech synthesis from the parameters is working in the frequency domain and uses the frequency spectrum envelope, which easily allows modifying the frequency, amplitude and duration of the signal when applying the prosodic rules. The algorithm of continuous phase designation at the speech frame borders allows concatenating portions of synthesized speech and diphones without phase distortion on the merger. Speech synthesizer operates on the diphone database, created applying fragmentation of recorded speech signal representing the pairs of phonemes. Sounds related to diphones are analyzed by speech encoder. It provides the parameters that described harmonic and noise components of speech, using the linear prediction filter LSF coefficients, resulting in a small size of diphone database.Artykuł przedstawia projekt konkatenacyjnego syntezatora mowy z tekstu dla języka polskiego, opartego na difonach i modelu Harmoniczne i Szum. Model Harmoniczne i Szum został z powodzeniem zastosowany w układzie kodera i dekodera mowy, dając w rezultacie dobrą jakość przetwarzanej mowy przy niskiej przepływności bitowej. Zastosowanie tego modelu do układu syntezy mowy pozwala na uzyskanie dobrej jako sci syntezowanej mowy, oraz niewielki rozmiar bazy parametrów. Układ składa się z dwóch głównych modułów. Moduł Naturalnego Przetwarzania Języka służy do analizy i zamiany tekstu pisanego na fonemy oraz difony, przy wykorzystaniu reguł morfologicznych. Procesor tekstu wyznacza jednocześnie warunki prozodii związane z późniejszą modyfikacją parametrów syntezowanego głosu w celu uzyskania akcentowania i intonacji. Drugim układem jest moduł syntezy, oparty na dekoderze mowy poprzedzonym systemem adaptacji parametrów mowy w oparciu o wyznaczone wcześniej reguły prozodyczne. Układ syntezy mowy z parametrw działa w dziedzinie czstotliwości i bazuje na obwiedni spektrum, co w prosty sposób pozwala na modyfikację czstotliwości, amplitudy i czasu trwania sygnału przy stosowaniu reguł prozodycznych. Algorytm wyznaczania ciągłej fazy na granicach ramek sygnału mowy pozwala na łączenie fragmentów syntezowanej mowy oraz poszczególnych difonów bez zniekształceń fazowych na połączeniu. Syntezator mowy operuje na bazie difonów, stworzonej na podstawie fragmentaryzacji nagranego sygnału mowy na części, reprezentujące połączenia par fonemów. Dźwięki odpowiadające difonom są analizowane przez moduł analizy mowy. Dostarcza on ciąg parametrów reprezentujących harmoniczne i szumowe komponenty sygnału mowy, opisane za pomocą filtrów liniowej predykcji i współczynników LSF, dając w rezultacie niewielkiej wielkości baze difonów

Objectivizing Measures of Post-Stroke Hand Rehabilitation through Multi-Disciplinary Scales

There is a wide variety of tools and measures for rehabilitation outcomes in post-stroke patients with impairments in the upper limb and hand, such as paralysis, paresis, flaccidity, and spasticity. However, there is a lack of general recommendations for selecting the most appropriate scales, tests, and instruments to objectively evaluate therapy outcomes. Reviews on upper limb and hand measurements reveal that clinicians’ choices of tools and methods are highly varied. Some clinicians and medical teams continue to employ non-standard and unverified metrics in their research and measurements. This review article aims to identify the key parameters, assessed by outcome measures and instruments, that play a crucial role in upper limb and hand rehabilitation for post-stroke patients, specifically focusing on the recovery of hand function. The review seeks to assist researchers and medical teams in selecting appropriate outcome measures when evaluating post-stroke patients. We analyze the measured factors and skills found in these outcome measures and highlight useful tools that diversify assessments and enhance result objectivity through graphical representation. The paper also describes trends and new possibilities in hand outcome measures. Clinicians frequently use proven devices, such as EMG, goniometers, and hand dynamometers. Still, there is a growing trend towards incorporating technologies, such as pose and position estimation, using artificial intelligence, or custom hand grip measurement devices. Researchers are increasingly adopting scales previously successful in orthopedic and surgical patients, recognizing their potential for objectivizing outcomes in neurological patients with post-stroke hand complications. The review included only adults over the age of 18. Outcome measures were tested for usefulness in the rehabilitation of stroke patients