scholarly journals Do land policies make a difference? A data-driven approach to trace effects on urban form in France and Germany

2021 ◽  
pp. 239980832199581
Author(s):  
Mathias Jehling ◽  
Robert Hecht
Keyword(s):  
Random Forest ◽  
Urban Form ◽  
Land Policy ◽  
Single Family ◽  
Residential Areas ◽  
Causal Relations ◽  
Urban Structures ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Land Readjustment ◽  
Land Policies

Against the backdrop of rapidly expanding urban structures, land policies in many countries have been adapted to contain and redirect growth to existing urban structures. However, obstacles remain to measure the effects of policies. In the meantime, geoinformation technologies have given rise to a wide range of approaches to measure and describe urban form. Nevertheless, its application for the assessment of land policy has a high, but not yet fully exploited, potential. It is thus the aim of this research to address and investigate the options of spatial analysis and machine learning in particular to analyse urban form from a land policy perspective. To do so, we develop urban metrics informed by urban planning and land readjustment policies of two countries describing urban form on different spatial levels. We therefore formulate hypotheses on causal relations between policy and form. Based on the metrics, we apply the random forest algorithm to classify the building stock of the region. We then extract the residential areas, those with single-family houses, as this is where the effects of the policy are considered most visible. In a next step, we use random forest to predict the nationality of a building. Through variable importance measures, we identify and discuss urban morphological differences between the two countries and test the hypotheses on effects of land policies. We develop and test the approach for the French-German city-region of Strasbourg using OpenStreetMap data. We identify significant differences in the building coverage ratios, which tend to be higher in Germany. This can be linked to differences in planning regulations. Furthermore, German residential areas appear to be more diverse in urban form. Differences in land readjustment policies have proven to be plausible here, as French policies favour strong actors that develop residential areas more uniformly. In Germany, policies favour fragmented ownership-oriented development of residential areas. The metrics and the applied algorithm for building classification have proven to be robust in terms of data heterogeneity and have shown high levels of accuracy. They could also be successfully used for tracing causal relations.

Registration of animal rabies in Krasnodar region

2020 ◽  
pp. 3-4
Author(s):  
Oleg Yu. Chernykh ◽  
◽  
Vadim A. Bobrov ◽  
Sergey N. Zabashta ◽  
Roman A. Krivonos ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Urban Form ◽  
Animal Species ◽  
Farm Animals ◽  
Natural Focus ◽  
Dead End ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Epizootic Process ◽  
Krasnodar Region ◽  
Spread Of Infection ◽  
Reporting Data

Rabies remains a constant threat to humanity in many parts of the world. At the same time, scientifically grounded antiepizootic measures should be based on the peculiarities of the regional epizootology of this zooanthroponosis. The authors studied the epizootological and statistical reporting data of the Kropotkin Regional Veterinary Laboratory, presented an analysis of the registration of rabies in animals in Krasnodar region. From the obtained data, it should be noted that despite the wide range of animals involved in the epizootic process of rabies infection in Krasnodar region, dogs, cats and foxes play a major role in the reservation and spread of infection, which account for 78.6. Of the total number of registered cases, 15.5% falls on foxes, that indicates the natural focus of the disease, along with the manifestation of the disease in an urban form. At the same time, stray and neglected dogs and cats, which occupy a significant place among the total number of sick animals, are also sources and spread of the infection. Thus farm animals (8.3% of the total number of infected animals) are a biological dead end for the infection. Isolated cases of the disease were noted in muskrat, donkey, raccoon, raccoon dog, marten, ferret and jackal. The authors also established the specific morbidity of various animal species with rabies infection, that is an important aspect in the development and implementation of antiepizootic measures complex

Gray-Level Co-occurrence Matrix and Random Forest Based Off-line Odia Handwritten Character Recognition

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 136-141 ◽  
Author(s):  
Abhisek Sethy ◽  
Prashanta Kumar Patra ◽  
Deepak Ranjan Nayak
Keyword(s):  
Feature Extraction ◽  
Random Forest ◽  
Character Recognition ◽  
Recognition Rate ◽  
Discrete Wavelet ◽  
Gray Level ◽  
Handwritten Character Recognition ◽  
Handwritten Character ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Occurrence Matrix

Background: In the past decades, handwritten character recognition has received considerable attention from researchers across the globe because of its wide range of applications in daily life. From the literature, it has been observed that there is limited study on various handwritten Indian scripts and Odia is one of them. We revised some of the patents relating to handwritten character recognition. Methods: This paper deals with the development of an automatic recognition system for offline handwritten Odia character recognition. In this case, prior to feature extraction from images, preprocessing has been done on the character images. For feature extraction, first the gray level co-occurrence matrix (GLCM) is computed from all the sub-bands of two-dimensional discrete wavelet transform (2D DWT) and thereafter, feature descriptors such as energy, entropy, correlation, homogeneity, and contrast are calculated from GLCMs which are termed as the primary feature vector. In order to further reduce the feature space and generate more relevant features, principal component analysis (PCA) has been employed. Because of the several salient features of random forest (RF) and K- nearest neighbor (K-NN), they have become a significant choice in pattern classification tasks and therefore, both RF and K-NN are separately applied in this study for segregation of character images. Results: All the experiments were performed on a system having specification as windows 8, 64-bit operating system, and Intel (R) i7 – 4770 CPU @ 3.40 GHz. Simulations were conducted through Matlab2014a on a standard database named as NIT Rourkela Odia Database. Conclusion: The proposed system has been validated on a standard database. The simulation results based on 10-fold cross-validation scenario demonstrate that the proposed system earns better accuracy than the existing methods while requiring least number of features. The recognition rate using RF and K-NN classifier is found to be 94.6% and 96.4% respectively.

scholarly journals Urban morphology as a tool for exploring the land use in residential areas: Example of New Belgrade

Spatium ◽  
2015 ◽  
pp. 76-83
Author(s):  
Ranka Gajic
Keyword(s):  
Land Use ◽  
Urban Morphology ◽  
Urban Land Use ◽  
Land Policy ◽  
Residential Areas ◽  
Private Interests ◽  
Research Findings ◽  
Morphogenetic Analysis ◽  
Morphological Patterns

The paper presents findings of research about the classification of New Belgrade?s super-blocks using the typomorphology approach and the morphogenetic analysis of urban morphology in relation to land use. The example of New Belgrade is particularly interesting given the fact that the morphological patterns of land use within its superblocks were created during the period of non-market economy in Socialism, and now it is possible to review the effect that the socio-political transition into Capitalism, which started in the 1990s, has had on its land use. As a result, a data base with the typology of residential super-blocks of New Belgrade is created: from the perspective of urban land use there are four main morphological types (with the subtypes) taking into account the morphology of the position of the buildings on the terrain, and traffic (cars-pedestrian) flows. The morphogenetic analysis reveals that after the 1990s there are processes pointing to powerful influence of land policy driven by private interests. Research findings suggest that nowadays there are negative trends of using the land in super-blocks in New Belgrade - e.g. percentage of land occupancy by buildings is getting bigger and almost 100% of the un-built soil in the newly developed super-blocks is covered /paved.

scholarly journals Practical Model Selection for Prospective Virtual Screening

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shengchao Liu ◽  
Moayad Alnammi ◽  
Spencer S. Ericksen ◽  
Andrew F. Voter ◽  
Gene E. Ananiev ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Random Forest ◽  
Virtual Screening ◽  
Protein Interactions ◽  
High Throughput Screening ◽  
Screening Methods ◽  
Protein Protein Interactions ◽  
Screening Algorithm ◽  
Screening Performance ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Public Datasets

AbstractVirtual (computational) high-throughput screening provides a strategy for prioritizing compounds for experimental screens, but the choice of virtual screening algorithm depends on the dataset and evaluation strategy. We consider a wide range of ligand-based machine learning and docking-based approaches for virtual screening on two protein-protein interactions, PriA-SSB and RMI-FANCM, and present a strategy for choosing which algorithm is best for prospective compound prioritization. Our workflow identifies a random forest as the best algorithm for these targets over more sophisticated neural network-based models. The top 250 predictions from our selected random forest recover 37 of the 54 active compounds from a library of 22,434 new molecules assayed on PriA-SSB. We show that virtual screening methods that perform well in public datasets and synthetic benchmarks, like multi-task neural networks, may not always translate to prospective screening performance on a specific assay of interest.

Enhancing the Performance of a Model to Predict Driving Distraction with the Random Forest Classifier

2021 ◽  
pp. 036119812110186
Author(s):  
Samira Ahangari ◽  
Mansoureh Jeihani ◽  
Anam Ardeshiri ◽  
Md Mahmudur Rahman ◽  
Abdollah Dehzangi
Keyword(s):  
Random Forest ◽  
Driving Simulator ◽  
Situational Awareness ◽  
True Positive Rate ◽  
The United States ◽  
Driving Performance ◽  
Lane Changing ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Positive Rate ◽  
Better Than

Distracted driving is known to be one of the main causes of crashes in the United States, accounting for about 40% of all crashes. Drivers’ situational awareness, decision-making, and driving performance are impaired as a result of temporarily diverting their attention from the primary task of driving to other unrelated tasks. Detecting driver distraction would help in adapting the most effective countermeasures. To tackle this problem, we employed a random forest (RF) classifier, one of the best classifiers that has attained promising results for a wide range of problems. Here, we trained RF using the data collected from a driving simulator, in which 92 participants drove under six different distraction scenarios of handheld calling, hands-free calling, texting, voice command, clothing, and eating/drinking on four different road classes (rural collector, freeway, urban arterial, and local road in a school zone). Various driving performance measures such as speed, acceleration, throttle, lane changing, brake, collision, and offset from the lane center were investigated. Using the RF method, we achieved 76.5% prediction accuracy on the independent test set, which is over 8.2% better than results reported in previous studies. We also obtained a 76.6% true positive rate, which is 14% better than those reported in previous studies. Such results demonstrate the preference of RF over other machine learning methods to identify driving distractions.

AN OVERVIEW OF HYMENOPTERAN COCOONS AS A TOOL TO INTERPRET ICHNOSPECIES OF FICTOVICHNUS (PALLICHNIDAE) AND OTHER FOSSIL COCOONS OF WASPS

Palaios ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (11) ◽  
pp. 562-574
Author(s):  
LAURA C. SARZETTI ◽  
JORGE F. GENISE ◽  
PABLO DINGHI ◽  
M. ALEJANDRA MOLINA
Keyword(s):  
Phylogenetic Signal ◽  
Character State ◽  
Complex Structures ◽  
Single Family ◽  
Accurate Identification ◽  
Texture Surface ◽  
Equatorial Diameter ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Preservation Potential ◽  
Surface Morphologies

ABSTRACT Hymenopteran cocoons are complex structures constructed from silk by larvae and exhibit a wide range of morphologies, compositions, and textures. The recognition of the most relevant characters of modern cocoons is important for the accurate identification of trace fossils attributed to wasps, which are included in the ichnogenus Fictovichnus. Characters assessed in this study are length, equatorial diameter, diameters near the extremes, shape, color, texture, surface morphology, and occurrence (isolated or clustered). We mapped these characters onto a hymenopteran phylogeny, revealing that the distribution of most of them has no evident phylogenetic signal. In many cases, there is more than one character state in a single family, whereas others appear distributed among several groups. Ellipsoidal and ovoid cocoons, showing membranous texture are the most basal and common characters. Bilobated, subconical and fusiform shapes, clustering, nipple and pores seem to be autapomorphies for certain groups. Crabronidae, Pompilidae, Scolioidea and Thynnoidea construct hard coriaceous cocoons, which may show distinctive surface morphologies and would have the highest preservation potential in paleosols. Data presented herein show that both Fictovichnus sciuttoi and Fictovichnus aragon were correctly attributed to Crabronidae or Pompilidae, although Scolioidea and Thynnoidea cannot be ruled out because of the shape and coriaceous texture of their cocoons. According to the low phylogenetic signal of Hymenoptera cocoons found herein, it would be impossible to refine the affinities of these ichnospecies to particular taxa. The simple morphology of Fictovichnus gobiensis precludes a definitive attribution, either to wasps or to coleopterans, even after the new data presented herein.

scholarly journals Adjusting for non-response in the Finnish Drinking Habits Survey

2019 ◽  
Vol 47 (4) ◽  
pp. 469-473 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hanna Tolonen ◽  
Miika Honkala ◽  
Jaakko Reinikainen ◽  
Tommi Härkänen ◽  
Pia Mäkelä
Keyword(s):  
Logistic Regression ◽  
Random Forest ◽  
Alcohol Use ◽  
Population Level ◽  
Added Value ◽  
Drinking Habits ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Random Forest Models ◽  
Survey Estimates ◽  
Design Weights

Aim: We aim to compare four different weighting methods to adjust for non-response in a survey on drinking habits and to examine whether the problem of under-coverage of survey estimates of alcohol use could be remedied by these methods in comparison to sales statistics. Method: The data from a general population survey of Finns aged 15–79 years in 2016 ( n=2285, response rate 60%) were used. Outcome measures were the annual volume of drinking and prevalence of hazardous drinking. A wide range of sociodemographic and regional variables from registers were available to model the non-response. Response propensities were modelled using logistic regression and random forest models to derive two sets of refined weights in addition to design weights and basic post-stratification weights. Results: Estimated annual consumption changed from 2.43 litres of 100% alcohol using design weights to 2.36–2.44 when using the other three weights and the estimated prevalence of hazardous drinkers changed from 11.4% to 11.4–11.8%, correspondingly. The use of weights derived by the random forest method generally provided smaller estimates than use of the logistic regression-based weights. Conclusions: The use of complex non-response weights derived from the logistic regression model or random forest are not likely to provide much added value over more simple weights in surveys on alcohol use. Surveys may not catch heavy drinkers and therefore are prone for under-reporting of alcohol use at the population level. Also, factors other than sociodemographic characteristics are likely to influence participation decisions.

Favelas and Politics in Brazil, 1890–1960

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brodwyn Fischer
Keyword(s):  
Urban Form ◽  
Urban Politics ◽  
Urban Landscape ◽  
Political Actors ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
National Capital ◽  
The Public Sphere ◽  
Regional Capital ◽  
The City ◽  
Rights To The City

All cities are forged by politics. But Brazil’s “informal” neighborhoods—and especially the favelas that now shape every Brazilian urban landscape—have an especially raw link to the political world. Favelas and other informal settlements are vital to Brazil’s cityscapes; they are also spaces historically defined by weak formal regulation and tenuous urban citizenship. In the informal city, property tenancy, city services, and basic civil protections were historically defined as privileges rather than rights. This was not for lack of claims-making; favela residents demanded urban belonging and engaged in intense legal battles over issues of property and regulation long before Brazil’s “rights to the city” movements gained international recognition. But Brazilian institutions proved mostly unwilling to recognize those claims, forcing informal residents to rely on a wide range of political strategies to achieve some modicum of permanence, citizenship, and rights to the city. Urban informality and urban politics thus developed in tandem in Brazil before 1960, as favelas successfully rooted themselves in Brazil’s most significantly “informal” cities: Rio de Janeiro (Brazil’s national capital until 1960 and the birthplace of the term “favela”) and Recife (the Northeast’s regional capital, long Brazil’s third largest city, and a hothouse for the politics of informality). In both places, informal politics involved grassroots mobilization, symbolic contestations in the public sphere, and engagement with a remarkably diverse tangle of activists, patrons, bureaucrats, entrepreneurs, politicians, intellectuals, artists, policymakers, and politicians. Informal residents were agile and effective political actors, who managed collectively and incrementally to establish favela residents’ de facto right to occupy Brazilian cityscapes. At the same time, the contradictions of favela politics made it difficult to convert de facto permanence into juridically enforceable rights to the city. The outcome was a politics of permanence rather than a politics of equality, the results of which are still all too apparent in Brazil’s contemporary urban form.

scholarly journals Land policy in France and its consequence for the farmers

2012 ◽  
Vol 49 (No. 4) ◽  
pp. 166-172
Author(s):  
Boinon JP
Keyword(s):  
Agricultural Sector ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Land Policy ◽  
World War ◽  
Institutional Determinants ◽  
The Right ◽  
Land Policies ◽  
Second World ◽  
Tenant Farming ◽  
Fast Evolution

This paper is related to the application of the land policies implemented in France in 2nd half of the 20th century, and their consequences on the economy of the agricultural sector and the operation of the farms. Starting from a framework of historical and institutional analysis, the object of this research is to analyse the economic and institutional determinants of these land policies. In France of small landowners, the existence of the right of ownership is considered as an obstacle for a fast evolution of the structures of farms which are sufficient size to implement technological progress allowing the profits of productivity. The aim of the land policy followed in France since the end of the Second World War was to encourage the development of such farms. The main measures were the statute of the tenant farming, the control of the structures and the control of the land market by the SAFER. This policy is implemented at a departmental level by the representatives of the Farmers Unions and generally supports the access to the land for young farmers or the middle-sized farmers.

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