Town Planning

From an accidental city without a plan, Sydney has become a city with many plans. Some would say too many, and there have been endless rounds of planning system reform since the 1980s. The central city and suburbs no longer grow âlike topsyâ but with the greater metropolitan area still being propelled by market forces towards a population of seven million by the mid twenty-first century, there are new sets of pressures around both old (development versus environment, local-state tensions, congestion) and new (affordability, social polarisation, impacts of climate change) problems which inescapably challenge the first Australian city and the one most connected to the global economy

The social sustainability of smart cities: A conceptual framework

The smart city concept has emerged as an attractive label to address pressing issues of global urbanization and combat the critical challenges to attain sustainable development. Sustainability is still often conceived through a green environmental lens, but any change in the built environment also has implications for the social environment. Social sustainability is a dynamic concept that combines design of the physical realm with design of the social world and promotes infrastructure to support social needs and concerns. While smart cities primarily aim at enhancing performance through innovative use of digital data and technology, a social sustainability perspective stresses the critical interconnections between people and place. Through a critical systematic literature review, this paper establishes a dialogue between the smart city and social sustainability. It evaluates the smart city concept through a social sustainability lens within a built environment paradigm. A multi-stage conceptual framework is advanced around notions of place, identification of core social sustainability themes and related factors, and sensitivity to broader policy and detailed implementation scales. The framework provides guidance for further studying both the social objectives and outcomes of smart city policies

The spectrometric analysis of Iron Age glass beads from Novo Mesto, Slovenia

This paper presents the results of spectrometric analysis of Iron Age glass from Novo Mesto, Lower Carniola, Slovenia. Several different glass types were detected in the assemblage. The results indicate that raw glass was imported to Novo Mesto from eastern Mediterranean centres and corroborate the existence of long-distance trade during the first millennium BCE

Composition, production and procurement of glass at San Vincenzo: an early medieval monastic complex in southern Italy

136 glasses from the ninth-century monastery of San Vincenzo and its workshops have been analysed by electron microprobe in order to situate the assemblage within the first millennium CE glass making tradition. The majority of the glass compositions can be paralleled by Roman glass from the first to third centuries, with very few samples consistent with later compositional groups. Colours for trailed decoration on vessels, for vessel bodies and for sheet glass for windows were largely produced by melting the glass tesserae from old Roman mosaics. Some weakly-coloured transparent glass was obtained by re-melting Roman window glass, while some was produced by melting and mixing of tesserae, excluding the strongly coloured cobalt blues. Our data suggest that to feed the needs of the glass workshop, the bulk of the glass was removed as tesserae and windows from a large Roman building. This is consistent with a historical account according to which the granite columns of the monastic church were spolia from a Roman temple in the region. The purported shortage of natron from Egypt does not appear to explain the dependency of San Vincenzo on old Roman glass. Rather, the absence of contemporary primary glass may reflect the downturn in long-distance trade in the later first millennium C.E., and the role of patronage in the “ritual economy” founded upon donations and gift-giving of the time

Triage, decision-making and follow-up of patients referred to a UK forensic service: validation of the DUNDRUM toolkit

BACKGROUND: Forensic medium secure services in the UK are a scarce but essential resource providing care for those in the criminal justice system with severe mental disorder. Appropriate allocation of beds to those most in need is essential to ensure efficient use of this resource. To improve decision-making processes in a UK forensic service, an admissions panel utilized the DUNDRUM 1&2 (D1 & D2) triage instruments. METHODS: Demographic, diagnostic and clinical information on a prospective sample of referrals to a UK adult forensic service was gathered (n = 195). D1 and D2 measures were scored by a panel of clinical managers considering referral information and clinician opinion in reaching their ratings; those not admitted were also followed up. RESULTS: Within the sample, D1 ratings were predictive of decisions to admit (AUC = .79) and also differentiated between levels of security (F(4) = 16.54, p < .001). Non-admission was not significantly associated with increased risk of offending at follow-up. Items relating to self-harm and institutional behaviour did not show a predictive relationship with the panel decision to admit. CONCLUSIONS: Use of a structured professional judgement tool showing good predictive validity has improved transparency of decisions and appears to be associated with more efficient use of resources, without increased risk to the public

Late Byzantine Mineral Soda High Alumina Glasses from Asia Minor: A New Primary Glass Production Group

The chemical characterisation of archaeological glass allows the discrimination between different glass groups and the identification of raw materials and technological traditions of their production. Several lines of evidence point towards the large-scale production of first millennium CE glass in a limited number of glass making factories from a mixture of Egyptian mineral soda and a locally available silica source. Fundamental changes in the manufacturing processes occurred from the eight/ninth century CE onwards, when Egyptian mineral soda was gradually replaced by soda-rich plant ash in Egypt as well as the Islamic Middle East. In order to elucidate the supply and consumption of glass during this transitional period, 31 glass samples from the assemblage found at Pergamon (Turkey) that date to the fourth to fourteenth centuries CE were analysed by electron microprobe analysis (EPMA) and by laser ablation-inductively coupled plasma-mass spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS). The statistical evaluation of the data revealed that the Byzantine glasses from Pergamon represent at least three different glass production technologies, one of which had not previously been recognised in the glass making traditions of the Mediterranean. While the chemical characteristics of the late antique and early medieval fragments confirm the current model of glass production and distribution at the time, the elemental make-up of the majority of the eighth- to fourteenth-century glasses from Pergamon indicate the existence of a late Byzantine glass type that is characterised by high alumina levels. Judging from the trace element patterns and elevated boron and lithium concentrations, these glasses were produced with a mineral soda different to the Egyptian natron from the Wadi Natrun, suggesting a possible regional Byzantine primary glass production in Asia Minor

A data-driven framework for neural field modeling

This paper presents a framework for creating neural field models from electrophysiological data. The Wilson and Cowan or Amari style neural field equations are used to form a parametric model, where the parameters are estimated from data. To illustrate the estimation framework, data is generated using the neural field equations incorporating modeled sensors enabling a comparison between the estimated and true parameters. To facilitate state and parameter estimation, we introduce a method to reduce the continuum neural field model using a basis function decomposition to form a finite-dimensional state-space model. Spatial frequency analysis methods are introduced that systematically specify the basis function configuration required to capture the dominant characteristics of the neural field. The estimation procedure consists of a two-stage iterative algorithm incorporating the unscented Rauch–Tung–Striebel smoother for state estimation and a least squares algorithm for parameter estimation. The results show that it is theoretically possible to reconstruct the neural field and estimate intracortical connectivity structure and synaptic dynamics with the proposed framework