Urban transformation initiatives in Johannesburg and public space user perceptions

Urban transformation has long been a priority for South African cities seeking to overcome the legacy of spatial and social segregation. In post-apartheid Johannesburg, this transformation is central to addressing inequality and promoting urban sustainability. This study focuses on public spaces as key sites of transformation, investigating whether urban initiatives have redressed socio-spatial segregation and how co-produced public spaces are perceived by everyday users. Using a qualitative case study approach, the research examines three public spaces along Fox Street through interviews, observation, and multisensory walking. Findings reveal that temporary-use practices, such as street performances and pop-up markets, play a significant role in activating public spaces and fostering social interaction. However, their impact is often short-lived without institutional support. Public space users expressed mixed perceptions, shaped by personal experiences, safety concerns, and accessibility. A strong preference for privately managed spaces over government-led initiatives reflects broader mistrust in local governance. Despite visible improvements, spatial fragmentation and socio-economic exclusion persist. This study contributes to urban transformation literature by highlighting everyday user experiences and the challenges of co-production in a historically divided urban context

Beyond questions: leveraging ColBERT for keyphrase search

While question-like queries are gaining popularity, keyphrase search is still the cornerstone of web search and other specialised domains such as academic and professional search. However, current dense retrieval models often fail with keyphrase-like queries, primarily because they are mostly trained on question-like ones. This paper introduces a novel model that employs the ColBERT architecture to enhance document ranking for keyphrase queries. For that, given the lack of large keyphrase-based retrieval datasets, we first explore how Large Language Models can convert question-like queries into keyphrase format. Then, using those keyphrases, we train a keyphrase-based ColBERT ranker (ColBERTKP QD) to improve the performance when working with keyphrase queries. Furthermore, to make the model more flexible, allowing the use of both the question and keyphrase encoders depending on the query type, we investigate the feasibility of training only a keyphrase query encoder while keeping the document encoder weights static (ColBERTKP Q). We assess our proposals’ ranking performance using both automatically generated and manually annotated keyphrases. Our results reveal the potential of the late interaction architecture when working under the keyphrase search scenario. This study’s code and generated resources are available at https://github.com/JorgeGabin/ColBERTKP

Wild Research

No abstract available

Taming nature, creating the garden, c. 1899–1915

No abstract available

The seen and unseen facets of Dravet syndrome across the disease trajectory: insights from European ethnographic research

Background: We investigated the lived experiences of individuals within the ecosystem of Dravet syndrome (DS) (patients, families, healthcare professionals, patient representatives) to gain a holistic understanding of the reality of caring for an individual with DS. Methods and Results: Using ethnographic methodology, we interviewed and observed five families (seven parents) of children (aged 2–10 years) with DS, 21 healthcare professionals at five specialized epilepsy units, and 16 personnel working for patient organizations across France, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the UK, to explore aspects of daily life with DS. Observations from the study participants demonstrated that families are impacted by multiple factors within the DS ecosystem, in terms of position in society, daily life and environment, and family dynamics. Parents’ informational, logistical, economic, and psychological needs differ over the course of the disease (first seizure, quest for diagnosis, diagnosis, reconfiguration, trial and error, stabilization, adjustments, adolescence, adulthood) in response to practical and emotional challenges. A framework was developed to define how parents cope and manage the information provided to them and the choices they must negotiate as the DS journey evolves. Four key territories of opportunity were identified. Conclusions: Families of children with DS have complex and changing challenges related to different phases of their child’s development and disease progression. Our findings may assist those working with families to identify key challenges and provide support specific to individual needs. Our findings could help clinicians adapt their communication, ultimately improving the quality of care provided and the quality of life of the different stakeholders

The Empire of the Ants and Other Stories

No abstract available

Event and fault tree-based Bayesian network for probabilistic safety assessment of earthquake-induced fire and explosion hazard

In nuclear power plant engineering, probabilistic safety assessment (PSA) has been actively studied to evaluate risk due to earthquake events. Recently, the similar PSA framework has been proposed to calculate probability of shut-down of gas plants when earthquake occurred. However, in process plants, earthquakes can also trigger secondary hazards such as fires and explosions, which have been less addressed in seismic PSA despite their potentially catastrophic consequences. These cascading events would cause severe casualties, asset losses, and long-term health impacts by a leak of hazardous substances. To consider such multi-hazard impacts, i.e., earthquake-induced fires or explosions, this work proposes a Bayesian network (BN)-based framework, which is modelled by transforming from fault- and event-tree. For seismic risk, fault tree is constructed to represent the joint operation of constituting equipment, while the top event is defined as a shut-down by earthquake events. Then, the event tree is derived to represent an evolving process from release to final events (i.e., several types of fires and explosions). These constructed trees are transformed into BN, and this process can prevent causal errors when BN is modelled directly. By extending seismic PSA concepts with the traditional fire/explosion event-tree methodology in a unified BN framework, the intended contribution is to enable integrated multi-hazard risk assessment that can account for both seismic and post-seismic accident scenarios. The proposed framework is demonstrated by constructing BN model for earthquake-induced fire and explosion at a gas plant. Then, the inference of the BN model is presented. First, the risk of the multi-hazard on the system is quantified for different hazard levels of earthquake. Second, the contribution of each component to the system failure is evaluated with a retrofit strategy on crucial facilities. By analyzing various accident scenarios, it is showed that the proposed BN model can provide risk-informed decision-making for prioritizing repair and/or retrofitting of structures or equipment in the plant

Women, Wealth and Power in the Roman Republic

No abstract available