30793 research outputs found
Sort by
An Online Survey Assessing the Accessibility Barriers Encountered by Users of Virtual and Augmented Reality
Get PDFThe social model of disability [14. T. Shakespeare. The Social Model of Disability. The Disability Studies Reader, 2:197–204, 2006.] stresses the role the physical environment plays in restricting one's access and capabilities. Immersive content can remove the barriers present in the physical world, as highlighted by one participant of our survey, “As my disability limits my mobility and changes the way and distance I can travel, using immersive content is a God send. And helps broaden my restricted world.” By removing these barriers, users with a disability have access to new experiences and opportunities. An awareness among designers of the basic principles of accessibility for immersive content is therefore paramount in avoiding the needless erection of new access barriers within the virtual environment.
The main aim of this paper is to report on a survey that examined the experience and expectations of users with disabilities regarding virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR). The online survey was completed by 101 individuals and specifically targeted users with one or more types of access needs, impairments, disabilities and/or long-term health conditions.This work was supported by the EPSRC (grants EP/S027432/1, EP/S02763711, EP/W02456X/1 and EP/W025698/1). We would also like to acknowledge the efforts of Tom Pokinko at Open Inclusion in facilitating the survey
Hear-Telling the Chauraasi Archive: Performing Testimony after Trauma
Get PDFIn 2014, 30 years after the anti-Sikh pogrom (Chauraasi) instigated by the Hindu Right destroyed Sikh lives in New Delhi, I listened to the survivors and witnesses of the 1984 pogrom chat casually about their memories of the violence. Several visited their former homes at the original site of the violence and undertook ‘walks’ to remember what they had experienced. As they did so, they talked, creating a record of where their autobiographical re-tellings of those events created communal memory. While sociological scholarship attends to the trauma of 1984 (Saluja 2015; Das 2006), there is yet to emerge a reckoning with the performance iterations of such event-narratives as the memory walks. Using frameworks of witnessing, describing, and walking, thinking with how a walk can ‘hear-tell’ memory, I ask in this article: how does one re-tell testimonies of trauma and rumour that the survivors of Chauraasi remembered to and with a non-survivor? In what ways does rumour operate officially and informally? How does the telling, description, and undertaking of the memory walk reproduce a crisis of witnessing, and how does the aural and embodied performance of the walk respond to this crisis? How does the aporia between the descriptions emerging on memory walks and the ineffability of traumatic memory conjure the epistemic limits of narration
Data-driven adaptive consensus for linear multi-agent systems: A scalable distributed protocol
No full textThis paper is concerned with the noiseless and noisy data-driven consensus problem of general linear multi-agent systems (MASs) with unknown agent dynamics. First, a data-driven adaptive scheme is designed to enable each edge to tune its weight in an on-line fashion. Subsequently, a distributed noiseless data-driven adaptive consensus (DDAC) protocol is established for the MASs so as to ensure guaranteed consensus. In this protocol, agents communicate with their neighbors through an undirected and connected graph. Importantly, this protocol is proven to be independent of both system model knowledge and be scalable with respect to the size of communication network. Moreover, to address the scenario of a directed communication graph, a modified node-based adaptive scheme, which relies solely on data, is introduced, along with a refined DDAC protocol. The conditions for achieving consensus are derived as semi-definite programs, and the corresponding feasibility is analyzed. Furthermore, the paper considers a noisy data scenario and tackles the consensus problem with a noisy data by employing a refined adaptive scheme and establishing a distributed noisy DDAC protocol. Compared to existing consensus protocols, our DDAC protocol offers high flexibility and scalability by eliminating the need for a system model and global network information. Finally, three examples are provided to verify the effectiveness of the proposed DDAC protocols.This work was supported in part by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grants 62173087, 62176056, 62233004, the Jiangsu Provincial Scientific Research Center of Applied Mathematics of China under Grant BK20233002, the Open Research Project of the State Key Laboratory of Industrial Control Technology of China under Grant ICT2024B36, the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities of China, the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation of Germany, and the Chung-Ying Tang
Entrepreneurial motivation and growth orientation among micro-entrepreneurs in Southern Finland
No full textData availability:
The authors do not have permission to share data.Despite their importance for the economy, micro-enterprises remain under-researched. We also know little about entrepreneurial motivations in the growth phase of enterprises. Therefore, to increase our understanding of the motivations of micro-entrepreneurs who expect to grow their businesses, a qualitative case study followed 27 micro-entrepreneurs in Southern Finland. Drawing on expectancy theory, the study builds and applies a theoretical model of the six dimensions identified for the entrepreneurial motivation of growth-oriented micro-entrepreneurs. Furthermore, the study implies that the level of growth expectation and the entrepreneurial characteristics of gender, education level and entrepreneurial experience are combined with the drivers of motivation and further with performance. In conclusion, we describe a novel growth-oriented microentrepreneurial motivation profile. The findings offer valuable insights for regional actors for identifying and supporting micro-enterprises with growth potential. Further scholarship is recommended to test the theoretical model and explore differences in terms of growth expectations
Transverse emittance reduction in muon beams by ionization cooling
Get PDFData availability
The unprocessed and reconstructed data that support the findings of this study are publicly available on the GridPP computing grid53,54. Source data are provided with this paper. Publications using MICE data must contain the following statement: ‘We gratefully acknowledge the MICE collaboration for allowing us access to their data. Third-party results are not endorsed by the MICE collaboration’.Code availability:
The MAUS software that was used to reconstruct and analyse the MICE data is available at ref. 55. The analysis presented here used MAUS version 3.3.2.Change history:
30 July 2024A Correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41567-024-02616-8 .A preprint version of the article is available at arXiv:2310.05669v2 [physics.acc-ph], https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.05669 [v2] Fri, 13 Oct 2023 10:40:14 UTC (963 KB). Report number: STFC-P-2023-004. It has not been certified by peer review.Accelerated muon beams have been considered for the next-generation studies of high-energy lepton–antilepton collisions and neutrino oscillations. However, high-brightness muon beams have not yet been produced. The main challenge for muon acceleration and storage stems from the large phase-space volume occupied by the beam, derived from the production mechanism of muons through the decay of pions. The phase-space volume of the muon beam can be decreased through ionization cooling. Here we show that ionization cooling leads to a reduction in the transverse emittance of muon beams that traverse lithium hydride or liquid hydrogen absorbers in the Muon Ionization Cooling Experiment. Our results represent a substantial advance towards the realization of muon-based facilities that could operate at the energy and intensity frontiers.The work described here was made possible by grants from the Science and Technology Facilities Council (UK); the Department of Energy and the National Science Foundation (USA); the Istituto Nazionale di Fisica Nucleare (Italy); the European Union under the European Union’s Framework Programme 7 (AIDA project, grant agreement no. 262025; TIARA project, grant agreement no. 261905; and EuCARD); the Japan Society for the Promotion of Science; the National Research Foundation of Korea (no. NRF2016R1A5A1013277); the Ministry of Education, Science and Technological Development of the Republic of Serbia; the Institute of High Energy Physics/Chinese Academy of Sciences fund for collaboration between the People’s Republic of China and the USA; and the Swiss National Science Foundation in the framework of the SCOPES programme
A RAPID REVIEW ON RESEARCH LINKED TO CHEFS, GREENHOUSE GAS EMISSIONS AND THE FOOD SYSTEM
Get PDFA rapid review (RR) carried out in January 2024 explored peer-reviewed research linked to chefs, GHG emissions and the food system to develop an understanding of potential pathways chefs influence the food system and to map their position in it. RR found an increasing number of publications linked to chefs, food systems and GHG emissions. The synthesis of 25 peer-reviewed academic papers suggests that research has been carried out on different dimensions and that Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory could be applied as a framework. Some papers suggest that chefs have various forms of influence on changes in their immediate micro-food system and that these ripples if observed over longer periods, can be far-reaching and impact the wider food system. However, no clear connection between GHG emission reduction in the sector and chefs has been made in spite increasing interest of stakeholders to get chefs engaged in reducing food-associated GHG emissions
Cure-induced residual stresses and viscoelastic effects in repaired wind turbine blades: Analytical-numerical investigation
Get PDFData availability:
Data will be made available on request.During scarf repair of wind turbine blades, the difference in coefficients of thermal expansion and chemical shrinkage between the original part and the repair patch leads to the development of residual stresses. These residual stresses are detrimental when the repaired composite structures are subjected to operational cyclic loads and affect their post-repair lifetime. This paper uses a hybrid analytical-numerical model to evaluate the residual stresses in a scarf-repaired composite panel. A Prony series-based viscoelastic model is used to describe the material behaviour of the composite undergoing cure to replicate real-life effects more closely. Experiments on the repaired composite samples and numerical simulations on a model of the same are performed to study the post-repair mechanical behaviour. It is found that the damage initiates at the adhesive interface between the scarf patch and the base composite. The resulting debonding and damage to the base composite leads to the failure of the repaired section.The authors acknowledge the financial support of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Denmark via Danida grant 19-M02-DTU "Maintenance and repair strategy for wind energy development" (maintainergy.dk). LM is grateful to the Velux Foundation for its support of the project PREMISE "PREventing MIcroplastics pollution in SEa water from offshore wind" (https://premise.dtu.dk/)
Beach nourishment for coastal aquifers impacted by climate change and population growth using machine learning approaches
Get PDFAvailability of data and material: Upon request.Code availability: Upon request.Groundwater in coastal regions is threatened by saltwater intrusion (SWI). Beach nourishment is used in this study to manage SWI in the Biscayne aquifer, Florida, USA, using a 3D SEAWAT model nourishment considering the future sea level rise and freshwater over-pumping. The present study focused on the development and comparative evaluation of seven machine learning (ML) models, i.e., additive regression (AR), support vector machine (SVM), reduced error pruning tree (REPTree), Bagging, random subspace (RSS), random forest (RF), artificial neural network (ANN) to predict the SWI using beach nourishment. The performance of ML models was assessed using statistical indicators such as coefficient of determination (R2), Nash–Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE), means absolute error (MAE), root mean square error (RMSE), and root relative squared error (RRSE) along with the graphical inspection (i.e., Radar and Taylor diagram). The findings indicate that applying SVM, Bagging, RSS, and RF models has great potential in predicting the SWI values with limited data in the study area. The RF model emerged as the best fit and closely matched observed values; it obtained R2 (0.999), NSE (0.999), MAE (0.324), RRSE (0.209), and RMSE (0.416) during the testing process. The present study concludes that the RF model could be a valuable tool for accurate predictions of SWI and effective water management in coastal areas.This study did not receive any funding
Sustainability in Blockchain Development: A BERT-Based Analysis of Ethereum Developer Discussions
Get PDFShort paperBlockchain technology faces significant challenges related to sustainability, including issues with optimisation, as well as high energy and gas consumption—factors that developers may sometimes neglect. We introduce a methodology to analyse the key sustainability topics discussed by Go-Ethereum developers, using thematic analysis of their issues and comments from Github. Our approach uses the BERT model to conduct an in-depth topic analysis, enabling us to study the underlying themes and trends in developer’s conversations regarding energy use and sustainability. We assess the sustainability of the identified topics using the five dimensions outlined in the Sustainability Awareness Framework (SusAF): economic, social, individual, environmental, and technical. Our goal is to shed light on how much attention developers pay to sustainability and energy consumption issues. The findings from this qualitative analysis aim to encourage technologists to incorporate these considerations into their future projects, in order to achieve better outcomes in terms of sustainability and reduced consumption.Ministero dellðUniversità e della Ricerc
Data sources:
Access Repository Dashboard
Do you manage Open Research Online? Become a CORE Member to access insider analytics, issue reports and manage access to outputs from your repository in the CORE Repository Dashboard! 👇