Enhancing E-Participation in Urban Planning Competitions

Planning competitions are used as a way to determine alternatives and promote innovative solutions in the early phase of urban planning. However, the traditional jury-based evaluation process is encountering significant opposition, as it does not consider the views of local residents. This chapter describes how web-based public participation tools are utilized in urban planning competitions to register public opinion alongside the expert view given by the jury. The research focus of this chapter is on studying how public participation can be arranged in competition processes, how the contestants use the information produced, and how it has been utilized in further planning of the area. Based on two Finnish case studies, this study indicates that web-based tools can augment public participation in the competition process. However, the results indicate that the impact of participation on selecting the winner is weak. Instead, in further planning of the area, the public opinions are valuable.

Architecture of the athlete

<p>Designers of sports facilities focus on physical aspects, like walls and tile angles to improve an athlete’s performance. However, from experience, the mental components of an athlete’s performance are overlooked; which is believed to have a greater impact on their overall performance. Using my experiences to produce a unique body of research, this thesis focusses on using the athlete’s perspective to design. This thesis investigates Sporting Facilities and Natatoriums are the focus. Using the skill of architects to create space and affect emotion, the thesis will investigate how they can be used to create an atmosphere that will allow an athlete to enter the optimal emotional state to achieve a successful sporting performance. The research will look the emotion and atmosphere of architecture, and the knowledge of sports psychology to understand how atmosphere can be used to challenge current design conventions. The approach will look at the relationship of facilities with and without local community involvement when they are not being used for competitions. This allows the needs of the community which has an effect upon the design, to be controlled. Which allows for an athlete’s perspective to drive the design. Using Natatoriums as the focus of the thesis, a series of design investigations will be conducted looking at how these spaces can be developed and arranged to optimise athlete performance. Objectives are to understand the arrangement of program and atmosphere required at each stage of an athlete’s pre-competition process, so a facility can be developed that is biased towards an athlete’s mental state versus other design factors.</p>

Design and Research on the Foul Detector of a Long Jump Jumping Line Based on a Vision Sensor

Long jump is one of the important events of modern track and field sports, and it is also one of the regular events of major events. Due to the complexity and technicality of the project, the determination of the results in a formal competition is also very complicated. It is easy for athletes to invalidate their results due to fouls by stepping on the jump line. Therefore, it is very necessary to detect fouls. This paper uses a visual sensor technology to design and develop a foul detector for the situation of athletes stepping on the jump line in a long jump, which can detect fouls well. In the formal competition process, because the long jump time is relatively short, the referee is interfered by many factors and it is easy to misread the movements of the athletes and cause misjudgment. Therefore, on this basis, in order to improve the fairness of the game and create a good competition environment, the design is designed. The long jump stepping line foul detector is studied, and the visual sensor technology is used, which can judge the long jump stepping fouls during the long jump based on the feedback data.

Architecture of the athlete

<p>Designers of sports facilities focus on physical aspects, like walls and tile angles to improve an athlete’s performance. However, from experience, the mental components of an athlete’s performance are overlooked; which is believed to have a greater impact on their overall performance. Using my experiences to produce a unique body of research, this thesis focusses on using the athlete’s perspective to design. This thesis investigates Sporting Facilities and Natatoriums are the focus. Using the skill of architects to create space and affect emotion, the thesis will investigate how they can be used to create an atmosphere that will allow an athlete to enter the optimal emotional state to achieve a successful sporting performance. The research will look the emotion and atmosphere of architecture, and the knowledge of sports psychology to understand how atmosphere can be used to challenge current design conventions. The approach will look at the relationship of facilities with and without local community involvement when they are not being used for competitions. This allows the needs of the community which has an effect upon the design, to be controlled. Which allows for an athlete’s perspective to drive the design. Using Natatoriums as the focus of the thesis, a series of design investigations will be conducted looking at how these spaces can be developed and arranged to optimise athlete performance. Objectives are to understand the arrangement of program and atmosphere required at each stage of an athlete’s pre-competition process, so a facility can be developed that is biased towards an athlete’s mental state versus other design factors.</p>

The effect of interference time in a predator–prey–nonprey system

In this paper, we propose a three-species model consisting of two competing (prey and nonprey) species and a predator species. Here, nonprey species are not included in the predator’s food choice. The competition process follows Holling type II competitive response to interference time. Basic results include the stability of the system. First, it is established that an increasing number of interference time stabilizes the system. Second, it is shown that the interference time has an impact on the predator equilibrium density. Third, we develop the criterion of persistence of all the species. It is also shown that the system may not be persistent when multiple steady states appear. We examine the global stability of the coexistence equilibrium point. Numerical experiments are carried out to understand the analytical outcomes.

Stochastic Effects in Retrotransposon Dynamics Revealed by Modeling under Competition for Cellular Resources

Transposons are genomic elements that can relocate within a host genome using a ‘cut’- or ‘copy-and-paste’ mechanism. They make up a significant part of many genomes, serve as a driving force for genome evolution, and are linked with Mendelian diseases and cancers. Interactions between two specific retrotransposon types, autonomous (e.g., LINE1/L1) and nonautonomous (e.g., Alu), may lead to fluctuations in the number of these transposons in the genome over multiple cell generations. We developed and examined a simple model of retrotransposon dynamics under conditions where transposon replication machinery competed for cellular resources: namely, free ribosomes and available energy (i.e., ATP molecules). Such competition is likely to occur in stress conditions that a malfunctioning cell may experience as a result of a malignant transformation. The modeling revealed that the number of actively replicating LINE1 and Alu elements in a cell decreases with the increasing competition for resources; however, stochastic effects interfere with this simple trend. We stochastically simulated the transposon dynamics in a cell population and showed that the population splits into pools with drastically different transposon behaviors. The early extinction of active Alu elements resulted in a larger number of LINE1 copies occurring in the first pool, as there was no competition between the two types of transposons in this pool. In the other pool, the competition process remained and the number of L1 copies was kept small. As the level of available resources reached a critical value, both types of dynamics demonstrated an increase in noise levels, and both the period and the amplitude of predator–prey oscillations rose in one of the cell pools. We hypothesized that the presented dynamical effects associated with the impact of the competition for cellular resources inflicted on the dynamics of retrotransposable elements could be used as a characteristic feature to assess a cell state, or to control the transposon activity.

Influence of Imagery Training on Adjusting the Pressure of Fin Swimmers, Improving Sports Performance and Stabilizing Psychological Quality

This study analyzed the effects of imagery training on athletes’ imagery ability, physical anxiety and athletic performance. This study employed a mixed research approach. Snowball sampling was used to select 55 fin swimmers with imagery training experience and formal competition participation. Basic statistics were obtained, and Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient (PPMCC) analysis was performed using IBM SPSS Statistics for Windows, Version 26.0, and the results were compared with the opinions of three experts and were tested using multivariate validation methods. The results revealed that although imagery training can help athletes improve their performance and significantly reduce their anxiety during the competition, athletes can still make mistakes due to internal and environmental factors and even have negative thoughts that lead to their reduced likelihood of competition participation. By strengthening strategic and technical imagery training, we can help our fin swimmers perform at a higher level, achieve their goals, and improve overall satisfaction with their competition process and performance.

Auditory word comprehension is less incremental in isolated words

Speech input is often understood to trigger rapid and automatic activation of successively higher-level representations for comprehension of words. Here we show evidence from magnetoencephalography that incremental processing of speech input is limited when words are heard in isolation as compared to continuous speech. This suggests a less unified and automatic process than is often assumed. We present evidence that neural effects of phoneme-by-phoneme lexical uncertainty, quantified by cohort entropy, occur in connected speech but not isolated words. In contrast, we find robust effects of phoneme probability, quantified by phoneme surprisal, during perception of both connected speech and isolated words. This dissociation rules out models of word recognition in which phoneme surprisal and cohort entropy are common indicators of a uniform process, even though these closely related information-theoretic measures both arise from the probability distribution of wordforms consistent with the input. We propose that phoneme surprisal effects reflect automatic access of a lower level of representation of the auditory input (e.g., wordforms) while cohort entropy effects are task-sensitive, driven by a competition process or a higher-level representation that is engaged late (or not at all) during the processing of single words.

Innovating Big Tech firms and competition policy: favoring dynamic over static competition

This paper gives a fresh account of competition in the digital economy. Economic analysis in the field of industrial organization remains largely focused on a sophisticated version of the Schumpeter–Arrow debate, which is unresolved and largely irrelevant. We posit the need to look at competition anew. Static models of monopoly firms and markets in equilibrium are often used to characterize Big Tech firms’ size and scope. We suggest that this characterization is inappropriate because the growth and diversification of many digital firms lead to a situation of broad-spectrum competition that cuts across markets. Current market positions do not reflect entrenched monopoly power but are vulnerable to competitive pressure of disequilibrating forces arising from the use of data-driven operating models, astute resource orchestration, and the exercise of dynamic capabilities. A few strategic errors by management in the handling of internal transitions and/or external challenges and they could be competitively impaired. The implications of a more dynamic understanding of the competition process in the tech sector are explored. We consider how big data and entrepreneurial management impacts firm performance. We also explore the nature of different types of rents (Schumpeterian, Ricardian, and monopoly rents) and suggest a modified long-term consumer welfare standard for competition policy. We formulate preliminary tests and predictors to assess dynamic competition. Our perspective advances a policy stance that favors innovation.

1. Competition policy and economics

This chapter provides an overview of competition law and its economic context. Section 2 describes the practices that competition laws attempt to control in order to protect the competition process. Section 3 examines the theory of competition and gives an introductory account of why the effective enforcement of competition law is thought to be beneficial. Section 4 considers the goals of competition law. Section 5 introduces two key economic concepts, market definition and market power, that are important to a better understanding of competition policy. The chapter concludes with a table of market share figures that are significant in the application of EU and UK competition law, while reminding the reader that market shares are only ever a proxy for market power and can never be determinative of market power in themselves.