A sustainable tourism development in Alacati, Turkey : (Re)invention of public space with clean energy

Although there is an increasing recognition of the impacts of climate change on communities, residents often resist changing their lifestyle to reduce the effects of the problem. By using a landscape architectural design medium, this paper argues that public space, when designed as an ecological system, has the capacity to create social and environmental change and to increase the quality of the human environment. At the same time, this ecological system can engage residents, enrich the local economy, and increase the social network. Through methods of design, research and case study analysis, an alternative master plan is proposed for a sustainable tourism development in Alacati, Turkey. Our master plan uses local geographical, economic and social information within a sustainable landscape architectural design scheme that addresses the key issues of ecology, employment, public space and community cohesion. A preliminary community empowerment model (CEM) is proposed to manage the designs. The designs address: the coexistence of local agricultural and sustainable energy generation; state of the art water management; and the functional and sustainable social and economic interrelationship of inhabitants, NGOs, and local government

Robust Incremental Neural Semantic Graph Parsing

Parsing sentences to linguistically-expressive semantic representations is a key goal of Natural Language Processing. Yet statistical parsing has focused almost exclusively on bilexical dependencies or domain-specific logical forms. We propose a neural encoder-decoder transition-based parser which is the first full-coverage semantic graph parser for Minimal Recursion Semantics (MRS). The model architecture uses stack-based embedding features, predicting graphs jointly with unlexicalized predicates and their token alignments. Our parser is more accurate than attention-based baselines on MRS, and on an additional Abstract Meaning Representation (AMR) benchmark, and GPU batch processing makes it an order of magnitude faster than a high-precision grammar-based parser. Further, the 86.69% Smatch score of our MRS parser is higher than the upper-bound on AMR parsing, making MRS an attractive choice as a semantic representation.Comment: 12 pages; ACL 201

Developing and evaluating a hybrid wind instrument

A hybrid wind instrument generates self-sustained sounds via a real-time interaction between a computed excitation model (such as the physical model of human lips interacting with a mouthpiece) and a real acoustic resonator. Attempts to produce a hybrid instrument have so far fallen short, in terms of both the accuracy and the variation in the sound produced. The principal reason for the failings of previous hybrid instruments is the actuator which, controlled by the excitation model, introduces a fluctuating component into the air flow injected into the resonator. In the present paper, the possibility of using a loudspeaker to supply the calculated excitation signal is evaluated. A theoretical study has facilitated the modeling of the loudspeaker-resonator system and the design of a feedback and feedforward filter to successfully compensate for the presence of the loudspeaker. The resulting self-sustained sounds are evaluated by a mapping of their sound descriptors to the input parameters of the physical model of the embouchure, both for sustained and attack sounds. Results are compared with simulations. The largely coherent functioning confirms the usefulness of the device in both musical and research contexts

Defining the Social Dimension of Triple Bottom Line for the Australian Dairy Industry: Challenges, Priorities and Opportunities

Understanding the social impact the dairy industry has on employees and local communities is part of Dairy Australia’s commitment to the Triple Bottom Line (TBL) framework, which emphasises that businesses have social, environmental and economic impacts and responsibilities. This social impact assessment project, currently underway, aims to identify and quantify the social value of the dairy industry, whilst proactively identifying areas for improvements. Through an online survey for employees and a random postal survey of 15,000 dairy community residents, the project investigates how Australians perceive the Dairy Industry, as well as their wellbeing, quality of life, community involvement and work experiences. This paper provides an overview of the study, outlining why developing quantifiable indicators for the social dimension of TBL that are designed to be as rigorous as current financial reporting is a business priority. Examples of how the findings will contribute to the identification and management of issues, measures of industry sustainability and future strategy are discussed

Road network upgrading and overland trade expansion in Sub-Saharan Africa

Recent research suggests that isolation from regional and international markets has contributed significantly to poverty in many Sub-Saharan African countries. Numerous empirical studies identify poor transport infrastructure and border restrictions as significant deterrents to trade expansion. In response, the African Development Bank has proposed an integrated network of functional roads for the subcontinent. Drawing on new econometric results, the authors quantify the trade-expansion potential and costs of such a network. They use spatial network analysis techniques to identify a network of primary roads connecting allSub-Saharan capitals and other cities with populations over 500,000. The authors estimate current overland trade flows in the network using econometrically-estimated gravity model parameters, road transport quality indicators, actual road distances, and estimates of economic scale for cities in the network. Then they simulate the effect of feasible continental upgrading by setting network transport quality at a level that is functional, but less highly developed than existing roads in countries like South Africa and Botswana. The authors assess the costs of upgrading with econometric evidence from a large World Bank database of road project costs in Africa. Using a standard approach to forecast error estimation, they derive a range of potential benefits and costs. Their baseline results indicate that continental network upgrading would expand overland trade by about $250 billion over 15 years, with major direct and indirect benefits for the rural poor. Financing the program would require about$20 billion for initial upgrading and $1 billion annually for maintenance. The authors conclude with a discussion of supporting institutional arrangements and the potential cost of implementing them.Transport Economics Policy&Planning,Common Carriers Industry,Rural Roads&Transport,Transport and Trade Logistics,Economic Theory&Research

The impact of curriculum content in fostering inclusive engineering: data from a national evaluation of the use of EWB projects in first year engineering

The year of Humanitarian Engineering draws our attention to the need to develop engineers who are not just technically competent but who can effectively address the needs of communities, maintain their ethical responsibilities, and take sustainability into consideration. This is what we understand by inclusive engineering. One approach to introducing such considerations into the curriculum has been the widespread use of Engineers Without Borders (EWB) projects in development settings as first year learning opportunities. We are evaluating different uses of these projects in 13 universities around Australia and New Zealand using a program logic data gathering methodology and a critical realist analytic approach to answer the research question 'what works for whom under what circumstances?' In this paper we will concentrate mainly on one of these sites The University of Queensland. Data reveals that the EWB projects have great potential for raising issues of community involvement, ethics and sustainability but that the content of projects alone cannot guarantee that such objectives are addressed. Contextual factors, including: the focus of the course (e.g. professional development versus design), the attitudes of staff, and the pedagogy used all contribute to the successful pursuit of non-technical objectives. Projects with little obvious humanitarian or inclusive content such as one for long-wall supports in mining were found to foster context-sensitive approaches. In addition to project content, educators who are seeking to develop humanitarian and inclusive engineers need to pay attention to consistently expressed goals and values amongst the teaching team and the alignment of assessment (in style and weighting) with clearly stated learning goals

Quantifying the rural-urban gradient in Latin America and the Caribbean

This paper addresses the deceptively simple question: What is the rural population of Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)? It argues that rurality is a gradient, not a dichotomy, and nominates two dimensions to that gradient: population density and remoteness from large metropolitan areas. It uses geographically referenced population data (from the Gridded Population of the World, version 3) to tabulate the distribution of populations in Latin America and in individual countries by population density and by remoteness. It finds that the popular perception of Latin America as a 75 percent urban continent is misleading. Official census criteria, though inconsistent between countries, tend to classify as"urban"small settlements of less than 2,000 people. Many of these settlements are however embedded in an agriculturally based countryside. The paper finds that about 13 percent of Latin America populations live at ultra-low densities of less than 20 per square kilometer. Essentially these people are more than an hour's distance from a large city, and more than half live more than four hours'distance. A quarter of the population of Latin America is estimated to live at densities below 50, again essentially all of them more than an hour's distance from a large city. Almost half (46 pecent) of Latin America live at population densities below 150 (a conventional threshold for urban areas), and more than 90 percent of this group is at least an hour's distance from a city; about one-third of them (18 percent of the total) are more than four hours distance from a large city.Agricultural Research,Demographics,Health Indicators,,Health Information&Communications Technologies