Change of Urban Soundscape in Response to Climate Ecology

2012 ◽  
Vol 178-181 ◽  
pp. 318-321
Author(s):  
Fang Fang Liu ◽  
Ling Jiang Huang

The new technology causes new type of the soundscape urban environment. However, the present research is mainly about the physical parameter of urban sounds and the urban noise. There has been few studies regarding urban soundscape change in response of climate. This paper analyes the change of urban soundscape from the climate ecology, and the aim is to conclude the relationship between the urban soundscapes and climate, also to benefit the constructive opinion of the urban soundscape, climate and social change.

Urban History ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 130-136 ◽  
Author(s):  
DOROTHEE BRANTZ

In recent years, urban history has witnessed an expansion of actors. Historians have substantially and continuously extended their perspectives when it comes to examining the forces that drive urban developments. This expansion to an ever-broader range of human and increasingly also non-human actors (e.g. animals, technological systems and resources such as water) has opened up many new venues for investigations. It has also raised new questions about the role of cities in the history of social change. One of the most provocative ideas involves the claim that cities themselves should be considered agents and proprietors of change. Such notions of urban agency are premised on the assumption that, on the whole, cities are more than the sum of their parts. In this context, urbanization is not just viewed as the outcome of other determining societal forces, most notably capitalism. Instead, cities themselves are understood as determining entities and powerful enablers or preventers of material transformations. The investigative potential of such a perspective is tremendous, but the possible pitfalls should also not be underestimated. Exploring the explanatory prospects of urban agency requires, first of all, a critical engagement with both of the terms ‘agency’ and ‘the urban’. In my brief contribution to this roundtable, I would like to offer two points to the discussion: the first centres on the relationship between agency and intentionality/responsibilities, which is ultimately a political concern; the second aims to differentiate between the city as an entity and the urban as a process. Such a distinction, in turn, poses conceptual as well as methodological questions regarding the efficacy of agency as an urban concept.


1992 ◽  
Vol 8 ◽  
pp. 27-32
Author(s):  
David Russell

Modern technology has its own momentum. Our very seeing and experiencing of the world changes as a consequence of the techno-scientific innovations that have been so instrumental in shaping our culture. There is a risk that, given the pride of place that we have allotted to techno-science, we will be further seduced by the hubris inherent in our cultural beliefs about how humankind relates to Nature.Historically we have accepted a dominant role in the relationship with the environment, now our technology allows for a near absolute acting out of this role. Should we be won over by this seduction, then our exploration of the relationship between climate change and social change will be severely limited as will be our action to effect useful change.The development of instrumentation for experiment, embedded in a social milieu of optimism about cultural progress, revealed to us micro-worlds and macro-worlds that our forebears could only dream about. It has also generated and subsequently named the unexpected and unwanted problem of a threatening climate change.The rise of our technology-dominated culture has inevitably resulted in the quasi-religious belief that sees technology as socially salvific; for whatever problems we might have in society, there will be a new technological solution just around the corner that will save us from the threatening peril.It is important to demythologise this near absolute belief so as to break the vicious cycle of technology being the dominant vehicle for producing progress (and some unforeseen associated problems), and that in order to have progress, there will always be an acceptable cost. So often one hears the stated hope: “There will be new technology that will address these problems” - the belief being that the path of progress will only temporarily be thwarted.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fei Liu ◽  
Pengkun Wu ◽  
Xitong Guo

BACKGROUND Service characteristic factors are verified as the determinants for influencing people’s use intention of mHealth. Exploration of the interactions among the service characteristics of users can play an important role in improving service adoption rate. mHealth service appears to be an emerging new technology that presents a new pattern of healthcare service; however, users have concerns that their personal information might be disclosed and used without permission. This concern hinders people’s adoption behavior of mHealth services. OBJECTIVE The objective of this study is to explore how service characteristics (service relevance and service accuracy) interact to influence individuals’ use intention of mHealth services. This study also investigates the moderating roles of innovativeness and privacy concern. METHODS To meet these objectives, six hypotheses thus developed were empirically validated using a survey to test the effects of service characteristics and personal traits on use intention of mHealth. RESULTS We confirm that service relevance and service accuracy positively and directly influence individuals’ use intention of mHealth services. In addition, innovativeness positively affects the relationship between service relevance and use intention. Privacy concern negatively influences the relationship between service relevance and use intention, but positively influences the relationship between service accuracy and use intention. CONCLUSIONS The present study provides new insights into the influencing factors of individuals’ usage behaviour toward mHealth services. Such insight could provide further understanding of how individuals adopt new information service or technologies, which contribute to both information system and health care research areas in a very promising way.


2016 ◽  
Vol 2016 ◽  
pp. 1-17 ◽  
Author(s):  
Songlin Yue ◽  
Yanyu Qiu ◽  
Pengxian Fan ◽  
Pin Zhang ◽  
Ning Zhang

Analogue material with appropriate properties is of great importance to the reliability of geomechanical model test, which is one of the mostly used approaches in field of geotechnical research. In this paper, a new type of analogue material is developed, which is composed of coarse aggregate (quartz sand and/or barite sand), fine aggregate (barite powder), and cementitious material (anhydrous sodium silicate). The components of each raw material are the key influencing factors, which significantly affect the physical and mechanical parameters of analogue materials. In order to establish the relationship between parameters and factors, the material properties including density, Young’s modulus, uniaxial compressive strength, and tensile strength were investigated by a series of orthogonal experiments with hundreds of samples. By orthogonal regression analysis, the regression equations of each parameter were obtained based on experimental data, which can predict the properties of the developed analogue materials according to proportions. The experiments and applications indicate that sodium metasilicate cemented analogue material is a type of low-strength and low-modulus material with designable density, which is insensitive to humidity and temperature and satisfies mechanical scaling criteria for weak rock or soft geological materials. Moreover, the developed material can be easily cast into structures with complex geometry shapes and simulate the deformation and failure processes of prototype rocks.


2012 ◽  
Vol 614-615 ◽  
pp. 64-68
Author(s):  
Tuo Wang ◽  
Feng Wu ◽  
Jin Hua Fei ◽  
Ming Fang Liu

Thermo-acoustic refrigerator is a new type of engine, which is based on the thermo-acoustic effect. A new model which expresses as an ellipse in pressure-volume diagram is established to investigate the thermodynamic performance of an actual thermo-acoustic refrigeration micro-cycle. The demarcation points of endothermic processes and exothermic processes in the actual micro-cycle are found. The analytic expressions of the dimensionless cooling load and the coefficient of performance (COP) are deduced. The relationship between the dimensionless cooling load and the COP are investigated by numerical examples. The results show that the dimensionless cooling load is a monotonically increasing function of the COP and the pressure amplitude.


2021 ◽  
Vol 28 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-39
Author(s):  
Débora De Castro Leal ◽  
Max Krüger ◽  
Vanessa Teles E. Teles ◽  
Carlos Antônio Teles E. Teles ◽  
Denise Machado Cardoso ◽  
...  

It is sometimes argued that there is hardly a place in the world in the 21st century left untouched by global capitalism [111, 112]. Even so, some places remain at the periphery, participating in this system without being fully absorbed by it. In this article, we take a detailed look at the economic life of such a “pericapitalist” [161] community in the Brazilian Amazon region. We detail how the community increasingly participates in global systems and supply chains, yet also organizes economic life around local and traditional values. We pay special attention to the role of digital technologies in the community, including mobile phones and internet. The contribution of the article is as follows: firstly, it provides a detailed analysis of the material practices of a community at the edge . Secondly, it draws attention to the heterogeneous nature of responses to global capitalism, formed from the relationship between specific material practices, new technology, and elements of cultural identity. Thirdly, it argues for an increased sensibility towards these different relations to capitalism when considering design implications. We argue that close attention to material practice goes some way towards resolving those tensions and, further, provides for an appeal to a more pluralistic views of culture and development [61].


2021 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dimitra Dritsa ◽  
Nimish Biloria

PurposeThis paper presents a critical review of studies which map the urban environment using continuous physiological data collection. A conceptual model is consequently presented for mitigating urban stress at the city and the user level.Design/methodology/approachThe study reviews relevant publications, examining the tools used for data collection and the methods used for data analysis and data fusion. The relationship between urban features and physiological responses is also examined.FindingsThe review showed that the continuous monitoring of physiological data in the urban environment can be used for location-aware stress detection and urban emotion mapping. The combination of physiological and contextual data helps researchers understand how the urban environment affects the human body. The review indicated a relationship between some urban features (green, land use, traffic, isovist parameters) and physiological responses, though more research is needed to solidify the existence of the identified links. The review also identified many theoretical, methodological and practical issues which hinder further research in this area.Originality/valueWhile there is large potential in this field, there has been no review of studies which map continuously physiological data in the urban environment. This study covers this gap and introduces a novel conceptual model for mitigating urban stress.


2008 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 155-159 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vilmantė Kumpikaitė ◽  
Ramunė Čiarnienė

There is emerging evidence that new technologies are related to improvements in productivity. Nevertheless, in considering the relationship between new technology and productivity, it is vital to consider human resource management and development issues due to their mediating effects on the relationship between new technology and productivity. This paper focuses on training technologies, especially e‐learning. The increasing use of new technologies to deliver training and to store and communicate knowledge means that trainers must be technologically literate. That is, they must understand the strengths and weaknesses of new technologies and implementation issues such as overcoming users’ resistance to change. The paper reports the findings of a study of 724 Lithuanian employees, which revealed relatively weak usage of new technologies and e‐learning in human resource development processes.


Author(s):  
Paul Nemitz

Given the foreseeable pervasiveness of artificial intelligence (AI) in modern societies, it is legitimate and necessary to ask the question how this new technology must be shaped to support the maintenance and strengthening of constitutional democracy. This paper first describes the four core elements of today's digital power concentration, which need to be seen in cumulation and which, seen together, are both a threat to democracy and to functioning markets. It then recalls the experience with the lawless Internet and the relationship between technology and the law as it has developed in the Internet economy and the experience with GDPR before it moves on to the key question for AI in democracy, namely which of the challenges of AI can be safely and with good conscience left to ethics, and which challenges of AI need to be addressed by rules which are enforceable and encompass the legitimacy of democratic process, thus laws. The paper closes with a call for a new culture of incorporating the principles of democracy, rule of law and human rights by design in AI and a three-level technological impact assessment for new technologies like AI as a practical way forward for this purpose. This article is part of a theme issue ‘Governing artificial intelligence: ethical, legal, and technical opportunities and challenges’.


2017 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 117-131 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veronika Bocsi ◽  
Hajnalka Fényes ◽  
Valéria Markos

In this article, the motives for voluntary work and work values in higher education contexts are examined in a cross-border region in Central Eastern Europe. Our goal is to find out what kind of relationship exists between different types of volunteering and work values among young people. In the theoretical section, we deal with the definition of volunteering in the education system, the types of and motives for students’ volunteering, and finally, the relationship between the work values and voluntary work of students. In the empirical section, we created cluster groups based on students’ motives for volunteering, and we examined differences among countries. Then we revealed the factor structure of the work values of students and analyzed the relationship between cluster groups and factors with variance analysis. Five cluster groups were identified: “careerists with postmodern features,” “unmotivated,” “highly motivated,” “volunteers in an anti-volunteering climate,” and a “helping new type volunteers” group. There were only slight differences among countries, as most respondents are characterized by mixed motivations. An interesting result is that the most frequent group is “the volunteers in an anti-volunteering climate” in all the countries examined, especially in Ukraine, so the culture of volunteering is not popular enough in this region of Central Eastern Europe. Regarding the relationship between work values and volunteering, we have found that these two fields (work values and volunteering) are closely related.


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