Effects of Auditory Stimuli on Beat-Synchronized Long Distance Walking: Part A - Energize on Country Music

In well documented studies, walking and music have independently shown substantial medical, health, productivity, and other human benefits. When music is combined with walking, and especially when the walking is done in synchrony to the beat, the music can stimulate faster walking without apparent awareness, the “velocity effect”. Some studies have reported that music that is either familiar, more enjoyable, and/or has higher “groove” tends to be more stimulating, and that some music can actually be sedating resulting in a slower speed relative to that of walking to a metronome at the same cadence. Research illuminating the velocity effect has mostly been conducted over relatively short stepping distances in a laboratory or similar outdoor setting. The current study examines walking on a real-world long distance outdoor track with a single genre of music that was at least somewhat familiar and somewhat enjoyable to the test subject. In this study, the test subject stepped in self-instructed synchrony with confirmed high accuracy to two types of auditory stimuli – either to the beat of a metronome (a presumed neutral source or what might be considered a most rudimentary form of music), or to the beat of a broad-spectrum of country music continuously over a 2-mile course. Nine metronome tempos and twenty-one country music tempos were examined in a walkable range of 90 to 130 beats per minute (BPM), and the effects of the music and metronome on walking performance were examined and quantified. Overall, the mix of country music was significantly more energizing than the metronome providing a relatively consistent 10% increase in step length and a resulting 10% increase in speed over the entire tempo/cadence range. Speed as a function of tempo was essentially linear in the beat range for both auditory stimuli with an apparent increase in speed relative to the trendlines occurring near 120 BPM, a preferred human response frequency reported in some prior investigations.

Solutions to conserve the vase life of Heliconia ‘Tropics’

ABSTRACT Heliconia ‘Tropics’ has high market acceptance and blooms year-round. Still, there is little information on solutions to prolong its vase life. The objective of this research was to assess pulse solutions to prolong the vase life of Heliconia ‘Tropics’ in three cutting stages. Floral stems in a closed, semi-open and commercial grown stages from three years old plants grown in an outdoor setting were evaluated. Three experiments were evaluated: sucrose at 10, 20 and 30% (w/v); Hydraflor® 100 at 0.25, 0.50 and 0.75 g L-1; and citric acid (CA) at 25, 50, 100, 150 and 200 ppm, and a control (tap water). The floral opening, fresh weight of the floral stems, solution consumption and vase life were measured every two days. Based on the best results of these experiments, the following combinations were assessed: 10% sucrose + 0.50 g L-1 Hydraflor® 100; 10% sucrose + 150 ppm CA; 10% sucrose + 0.50 g L-1 Hydraflor® 100 + 150 ppm CA; 0.50 g L-1 of Hydraflor® 100 + 150 ppm CA and a control. A 10% sucrose + 0.50 g L-1 of Hydraflor® 100 pulse for 24 h had a 22.8-day vase life and was superior to the floral stems in the control treatment (15.6 days) at the semi-open cut stage. This was associated with greater water consumption, lower fresh weight loss and greater floral opening.

Promotion of Children’s Cooperation and Physical Development in the Pre-School Outdoor Space

In order to follow advice of epidemiologists on measures for limiting the spread of COVID-19 in Latvia, employees of pre-school educational establishments are increasingly paying attention to ensuring the availability of a safe outdoor setting. Children’s transferrable skills and a healthy lifestyle are a topical matter within educational reform and the competency approach in pre-school. Observations by teachers indicate that children’s cooperation skills at the age of five and six years are insufficiently developed, and adults struggle to promote them, especially in the outdoor environment where it’s often associated with new challenges, and the work of organizing activities is more involved. Teachers have difficulties ensuring the availability of materials necessary for children’s cooperation and physical development and directing attention towards promoting dialogic speech and cognitive interests. To purposefully promote children’s cooperation in various outdoors activities, improve dialogic speech, and make examples of pedagogical work experiences more widely available to teachers, it would be important to promote the points recognized in the project “Teaching learning spaces competence from early childhood education” [TELESPA] (2018-1-RO01_KA201_049545, PVS_ID_3910), which was done in collaboration between Riga 275th pre-school “Austrina” and the EU education, learning, youth and sports program ERASMUS. We discovered during research that children of the oldest pre-school age group tend to be interested in determining characteristic traits of objects, looking for causality, and doing practical work. However, their abilities to come to an agreement, justify intentions, think critically, and ask questions are insufficiently developed. We have noticed that good pronunciation of sounds, learning of grammar, and broadening of vocabulary improve children’s relationships with peers and grown-ups, they also make it easier to enact cooperation and various physical education activities outdoors. Purposefully made sensory gardens in the pre-school outdoor setting, available thanks to the EU education, learning, youth and sports program ERASMUS+ project “TELESPA” achieving its goals, provide an opportunity to evaluate children’s cooperation and opportunities for physical development promotion, and determine teachers’ experience in evaluating children’s achievements. It is important to find out the given children’s needs, interests, and abilities during the planning stage of pedagogical work – points recognized during this project’s trial runs should help with this task.

Aerodynamics-assisted, efficient and scalable kirigami fog collectors

To address the global water shortage crisis, one of the promising solutions is to collect freshwater from the environmental resources such as fog. However, the efficiency of conventional fog collectors remains low due to the viscous drag of fog-laden wind deflected around the collecting surface. Here, we show that the three-dimensional and centimetric kirigami structures can control the wind flow, forming quasi-stable counter-rotating vortices. The vortices regulate the trajectories of incoming fog clusters and eject extensive droplets to the substrate. As the characteristic structural length is increased to the size of vortices, we greatly reduce the dependence of fog collection on the structural delicacy. Together with gravity-directed gathering by the folds, the kirigami fog collector yields a collection efficiency of 16.1% at a low wind speed of 0.8 m/s and is robust against surface characteristics. The collection efficiency is maintained even on a 1 m2 collector in an outdoor setting.

MAPPING OF 3D EYE-TRACKING IN URBAN OUTDOOR ENVIRONMENTS

New geospatial technologies and ubiquitous sensing allow new insights into people’s spatial practices and experiences of public spaces. These tools offer new data streams for analysis and interpretation of social phenomena. Mobile augmented reality tools such as smartphones and wearables merge the experience of entangled online and offline spaces in citizen’s daily life. This paper demonstrates a concept that combines eye-tracking tools with innovative mapping in order to enhance the interpretability of real outdoor environmental experiences. Through videogrammetry, a participants’ head posture can be reconstructed. Subsequently the fixations measured through eye-tracking are projected onto a 3D point cloud of the surrounding environment. The presented methodological approach is implemented in the interdisciplinary project DigitAS – The Digital, Affects and Space – which investigates the perception of public places as spaces of recreation, security or fear. The project’s Mixed Methods approach combined qualitative, mobile, in-situ and reconstructive methods with eye-tracking in an outdoor setting. Potentials of the geospatial mapping concept for social science research is discussed.

Recovering Walking Trajectories from Local Measurements and Inertia Data

Capturing walking trajectories is useful for motion planning and various location-based services. Traditionally, it is a challenging task because it is expensive to install infrastructures, especially in an outdoor setting. As another choice, the reconstructed walking trajectories suffer from the drifting problem from captured inertia data. In this work, we study the biped walking motion and propose a method to recover walking trajectories by introducing local measurements between the feet to the system, in combination with the orientation from inertia data. We design a few local measurements which can be passively captured. After analyzing these measurements, the walking trajectory is progressively recovered by solving a set of small-scale optimization problems. By comparing with the trajectories extracted from optical motion capture systems, we tested our method on different subjects, and the quality of the recovered walking trajectory is evaluated.

Where Sounds Occur Matters: Context Effects Influence Processing of Salient Vocalisations

The social context in which a salient human vocalisation is heard shapes the affective information it conveys. However, few studies have investigated how visual contextual cues lead to differential processing of such vocalisations. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is implicated in processing of contextual information and evaluation of saliency of vocalisations. Using functional Near-Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS), we investigated PFC responses of young adults (N = 18) to emotive infant and adult vocalisations while they passively viewed the scenes of two categories of environmental contexts: a domestic environment (DE) and an outdoors environment (OE). Compared to a home setting (DE) which is associated with a fixed mental representation (e.g., expect seeing a living room in a typical house), the outdoor setting (OE) is more variable and less predictable, thus might demand greater processing effort. From our previous study in Azhari et al. (2018) that employed the same experimental paradigm, the OE context was found to elicit greater physiological arousal compared to the DE context. Similarly, we hypothesised that greater PFC activation will be observed when salient vocalisations are paired with the OE compared to the DE condition. Our finding supported this hypothesis: the left rostrolateral PFC, an area of the brain that facilitates relational integration, exhibited greater activation in the OE than DE condition which suggests that greater cognitive resources are required to process outdoor situational information together with salient vocalisations. The result from this study bears relevance in deepening our understanding of how contextual information differentially modulates the processing of salient vocalisations.

Evaluating Temperature Measurements of the iMET-XQ, in the Field, under Varying Atmospheric Conditions

Temperature measurements of InterMET Inc. aluminum-coated iMET-XQ sensors were tested in an outdoor setting under a variety of solar radiation and wind speed conditions. Twelve unshielded sensors were mounted side-by-side on the tower of a South Alabama Mesonet weather station next to a reference sensor on the tower. The iMET-XQ temperatures were most precise and accurate in solar radiation values that were close to zero, regardless of wind speed. Under overcast conditions, wind speeds of 2 m s−1 were sufficient to obtain precise and accurate temperature measurements. During the day-time, aspiration of wind speeds higher than or equal to 3 m s−1 is sufficient. An iMET-XQ was placed in a radiation shield next to the tower reference sensor to test the need for a radiation shield. A second iMET-XQ was placed unshielded on the tower. The iMET-XQ sensors with aluminum coating do not need to be shielded, but they do need to be aspirated. It is recommended that, when taking temperature measurements using unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) with iMET-XQ sensors, the UAV either fly at 3 m s−1, be embedded in winds of those speeds, or to use the propeller wash of the UAV to aspirate the sensors.

Exercise Spaces in Parks for Older Adults: A Qualitative Investigation

In response to demographic changes in recent years, an increasing number of parks have established exercise spaces for older adults. However, limited research has been conducted to investigate how older adults utilize, experience, and perceive these spaces. This study aims to explore their experiences of using these spaces and their perspectives on these spaces by using a qualitative descriptive research design. In-depth interviews were conducted with 32 users in three Hong Kong parks with low, medium, and high area-based socioeconomic statuses. The findings highlight that exercise spaces in parks can cultivate a positive environment allowing older adults with varying physical abilities and health statuses to remain active together as well as to support each other socially and emotionally in a natural outdoor setting. The participants’ perspectives on the exercise space discussed in this study suggest that future plans for constructing such spaces in parks might benefit from a co-design approach.