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Cross-sectoral impacts of the 2018–2019 Central European drought and climate resilience in the German part of the Elbe River basin
No full textThe 2018–2019 Central European drought was probably the most extreme in Germany since the early sixteenth century.
We assess the multiple consequences of the drought for natural systems, the economy and human health in the German
part of the Elbe River basin, an area of 97,175 km2
including the cities of Berlin and Hamburg and contributing about 18%
to the German GDP. We employ meteorological, hydrological and socio-economic data to build a comprehensive picture
of the drought severity, its multiple effects and cross-sectoral consequences in the basin. Time series of different drought
indices illustrate the severity of the 2018–2019 drought and how it progressed from meteorological water deficits via soil
water depletion towards low groundwater levels and river runoff, and losses in vegetation productivity. The event resulted
in severe production losses in agriculture (minus 20–40% for staple crops) and forestry (especially through forced logging
of damaged wood: 25.1 million tons in 2018–2020 compared to only 3.4 million tons in 2015–2017), while other economic
sectors remained largely unaffected. However, there is no guarantee that this socio-economic stability will be sustained in
future drought events; this is discussed in the light of 2022, another dry year holding the potential for a compound crisis.
Given the increased probability for more intense and long-lasting droughts in most parts of Europe, this example of actual
cross-sectoral drought impacts will be relevant for drought awareness and preparation planning in other regions
Experimental evaluation of phase and velocity control for a cyclorotor wave energy converter
No full textThe research presented in the paper is dedicated to the analysis of the 3D experimental testing results of a 1:20 scale prototype LiftWEC cyclorotor wave energy converter (WEC). The scaled prototype was built and tested in the Hydraulic and Offshore Engineering wave Tank (HOET) by Ecole Centrale Nantes (ECN) in 2022. The analysis is conducted using the analytical control-oriented point-vortex model. The presented research covers a range of tests, with particular focus on cases where positive mechanical power generation has been recorded. The analysis of such cases is important, in highlighting the conditions needed for optimum energy conversion, for future development of cyclorotor WEC technology. The study also reviews the results of tests where the rotor rotational speed is varied within each period of monochromatic waves. This is the first experimental test of such a control strategy for cyclorotor WECs
Landmark Distance Impacts the Overshadowing Effect in Spatial Learning Using a Virtual Water Maze Task with Healthy Adults
No full textCue competition is a key element of many associative theories of learning. Overshadowing, an important aspect of cue competition, is a phenomenon in which learning about a cue is reduced when it is accompanied by a second cue. Overshadowing has been observed across many domains, but there has been limited investigation of overshadowing in human spatial learning. This experiment explored overshadowing using two landmarks/cues (at different distances to the goal) in a virtual water maze task with young, healthy adult participants. Experiment 1 initially examined whether the cues used were equally salient. Results indicated that both gained equal control over performance. In experiment 2, overshadowing was examined using the two cues from experiment 1. Results indicated that overshadowing occurred during spatial learning and that the near cue controlled searching significantly more than the far cue. Furthermore, the far cue appeared to have been completely ignored, suggesting that learning strategies requiring the least amount of effort were employed by participants. Evidence supporting an associative account of human spatial navigation and the influence of proximal cues was discussed
Future prospects for backyard skating rinks look bleak in a warming climate
No full textEach winter, purpose‐built outdoor skating rinks are constructed in backyards and community parks across much of Canada and the northern United States. Past research projects that warmer winters will make it increasingly difficult to build outdoor rinks without artificial refrigeration. Here we build upon previous studies by mapping areas of North America where present average January temperatures are generally suitable each year for building outdoor rinks, and how this area will change by the 2050s and 2080s.Using projections from downscaled general circulation models, we show how undercurrent emissions pathways, average January temperatures will become too mild by the2050s to build outdoor rinks across much of eastern North America in most winters, and this area will expand by the 2080s to include most of the western United States. Under high emissions scenarios (RCP 8.5), unsuitably mild January temperatures expand to include densely populated areas of Canada's Prairie provinces by the 2080s. In short, many North Americans who build outdoor rinks every winter will, by mid‐century, be living in areas where temperatures are only cold enough to do so occasionally, creating a range of social, cultural, and health implications for people living in those regions
Strategic Assortment Decisions in Omnichannel Retailing: The Design and Evaluation of an Omnichannel Assortment Ontology for Consumer Confusion.
No full textConsumer confusion is a phenomenon observed in retail settings where consumers feel irritation or frustration during the shopping journey. Consumers can be overwhelmed by assortment size, complex product variety, brand similarities, information inconsistencies or by intense stimuli from store atmospherics inducing information overload, leading to adverse reactions. Oftentimes, these experiences result in various negative short- and long-term consequences such as helplessness, purchase abandonment, dissatisfaction, or loss of trust or loyalty, thus representing a crucial challenge for retailers to prevent or mitigate. Consumer confusion has been studied extensively in a single-channel context, for instance, by investigating information overload phenomena in online shopping situations or examining increased choice sets resulting from large assortment sizes in physical stores. However, although omnichannel retailing has become the current state-of-the-art in the retail industry today, consumer confusion research from an omnichannel perspective is still very scarce. With the increased adoption of the omnichannel strategy by retailers that allow free switching behaviour for their customers during their shopping journeys, a new dimension to the consumer confusion phenomenon is observed. Customers are not only exposed to potential confusion at a specific retail situation in a single channel but are now confronted with potential new negative experiences while comparing products, prices, or information across channels. Particularly, when confronted with assortment inconsistencies across channels while switching channels, customers can experience irritation, frustration, or annoyance if the desired item is not to be found on the other channel, leading to adverse reactions that can potentially impact the retailer's financial performance. Prior literature has considered consumer confusion induced by assortment size, variety, or layout, but neglected its occurrence from assortment inconsistencies across channels from a channel switching perspective so far. This thesis focuses on the consumer confusion phenomenon resulting from assortment inconsistencies across channels from a channel-switching perspective in omnichannel retailing.
Strategic assortment decisions in omnichannel retailing involve the coordination of the assortment between channels. Retailers can decide to realise a “Full”, “Asymmetric”, or “No Integration” approach for their assortment across channels. These strategic assortment decisions are taken at the Marketing-Operations-Interface (MOI), an interface harmonizing oftentimes conflicting relationships between objectives of the marketing and operations
functions of the retailer. Although identical assortment across channels seems to be the desired solution to prevent consumer confusion (representing an objective from the marketing function), retailers oftentimes apply partial integration to benefit from channel-specific advantages such as the Long Tail effect (representing an objective from the operations function) which is detrimental to consumer confusion prevention. Retailers seem to neglect the significance of consumer confusion while making strategic assortment decisions at the MOI indicating that the phenomenon is not sufficiently explored or captured in an omnichannel context. Retailers appear to lack knowledge of the relevant concepts, dimensions, and consequences of the consumer confusion phenomenon. As a result, retailers are likely to fail in addressing and preventing the occurrence of the consumer confusion phenomenon in an omnichannel context.
Current studies on strategic assortment decisions and consumer confusion in omnichannel retailing are very scarce and primarily based on experimental studies with a strong lack of empirical contributions. More importantly, none of the studies considers channel switching behaviour in the context of consumer confusion although representing the primary condition for the phenomenon to occur. There is a need for the integration and alignment of knowledge capturing the domains for strategic assortment decisions, the consumer confusion concept, and its short- and long-term consequences from a channel switching behaviour perspective in order to inform strategic assortment decisions at the MOI.
Ontologies are explicit and formal specifications of shared conceptualisations that can structure and link information of specific domains and thus are a suitable technique for knowledge representation. Grounded on a Design Science project, this research designs and develops an ontology-based knowledge representation that captures and aligns domain knowledge on strategic assortment decisions, the consumer confusion concept and its consequences from a channel switching behaviour perspective in an omnichannel retailing context. The literature- and practitioner-informed Omnichannel Assortment Ontology for Consumer Confusion is able to integrate and represent relevant concepts and their relationships at the MOI in order to inform omnichannel retailers on the link between strategic assortment decisions and the consumer confusion phenomenon. The ontology is instantiated and evaluated through a System Dynamics model based on a case study that demonstrates successfully its ability to inform omnichannel retailers on strategic assortment decisions and the consumer confusion concept at the MOI.
This study contributes to theory and practice in various ways. From a theoretical perspective, this is the first study to link strategic assortment decisions with the consumer
confusion concept from a channel switching behaviour perspective. The solution design embodies novel design knowledge on the construction of an ontology-based knowledge representation. Moreover, the study enhances the fields of omnichannel assortment, consumer confusion, and channel switching behaviour research by introducing novel concepts, tools, and an improved understanding of the domains and their interplay with each other. From a managerial perspective, the ontology effectively serves as a knowledge reference that is able to guide strategic decision-making in assortment integration for omnichannel retailers at the MOI. This allows omnichannel retailers to identify and mitigate potential adverse consumer reactions induced by consumer confusion, thus eventually preventing financial impact on their retail performance
Assessing the Function Acquisition Speed Test (FAST) as a novel implicit measure of salient emotional experiences.
No full textThe purpose of this thesis is to address one of the final outstanding questions from the basic research program into the Function Acquisition Speed Test (FAST), and to contribute to the knowledge on the FAST using the same ground-up approach taken by the developers of the method. This research investigated the utility of the FAST, a novel behaviour-analytic “implicit” test as a measure of stimulus relatedness as a function of stimulus salience. The impact of experimental setting on data quality was also explored. Following a critique of the widely used Implicit Association Test (IAT), the empirical development of the FAST method is outlined. Data for Experiment 1 (n=62) were collected remotely. An evaluative conditioning procedure attempted to establish positive and negative emotional functions for two neutral stimulus classes across three conditions, differentiated by Unconditioned Stimulus (US) salience. Explicit evaluations of the Conditioned Stimulus (CS) were recorded post-conditioning. A FAST, employing the CS and novel evaluative words, was then administered to assess the relatedness of the CSs to the positive and negative evaluative terms. The FAST proved sensitive to the conditioning contingency (i.e., performances reflected the intended evaluative associations), but did not vary as a function of the salience of the US employed during the conditioning phase. Due to unacceptably high attrition levels, Experiment 2 (n=217) replicated Experiment 1 with a larger, remunerated sample of participants. Again, the FAST proved sensitive to conditioning contingencies. An interaction between block fluency scores and CS salience was also observed. Experiment 3 (n=56) aimed to replicate these results with a smaller, supervised and non-renumerated sample. Main effects were again found, but interaction effects were not. Analysis of attrition rates across samples demonstrated that the paid, online sample in Experiment 2 produced the highest quality data, resulting in the lowest levels of attrition. Challenges, including poor data quality, low sample sizes, and methodological issues that may have compromised stimulus control are discussed in depth. These issues notwithstanding, this study provides in-principle evidence for the FASTs ability to measure the occurrence and intensity of emotional/evaluative learning experiences
Dense Visual Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping in Collaborative and Outdoor Scenarios
No full textDense visual simultaneous localisation and mapping (SLAM) systems can produce 3D
reconstructions that are digital facsimiles of the physical space they describe. Systems that
can produce dense maps with this level of fidelity in real time provide foundational spatial
reasoning capabilities for many downstream tasks in autonomous robotics. Over the past
15 years, mapping small scale, indoor environments, such as desks and buildings, with a
single slow moving, hand-held sensor has been one of the central focuses of dense visual
SLAM research.
However, most dense visual SLAM systems exhibit a number of limitations which
mean they cannot be directly applied in collaborative or outdoors settings. The contribution
of this thesis is to address these limitations with the development of new systems and
algorithms for collaborative dense mapping, efficient dense alternation and outdoors
operation with fast camera motion and wide field of view (FOV) cameras. We use
ElasticFusion, a state-of-the-art dense SLAM system, as our starting point where each of
these contributions is implemented as a novel extension to the system.
We first present a collaborative dense SLAM system that allows a number of
cameras starting with unknown initial relative positions to maintain local maps with the
original ElasticFusion algorithm. Visual place recognition across local maps results in
constraints that allow maps to be aligned into a common global reference frame, facilitating
collaborative mapping and tracking of multiple cameras within a shared map.
Within dense alternation based SLAM systems, the standard approach is to fuse
every frame into the dense model without considering whether the information contained
within the frame is already captured by the dense map and therefore redundant. As the
number of cameras or the scale of the map increases, this approach becomes inefficient. In
our second contribution, we address this inefficiency by introducing a novel information
theoretic approach to keyframe selection that allows the system to avoid processing
redundant information. We implement the procedure within ElasticFusion, demonstrating
a marked reduction in the number of frames required by the system to estimate an accurate,
denoised surface reconstruction.
Before dense SLAM techniques can be applied in outdoor scenarios we must
first address their reliance on active depth cameras, and their lack of suitability to fast
camera motion. In our third contribution we present an outdoor dense SLAM system. The system overcomes the need for an active sensor by employing neural network-based depth
inference to predict the geometry of the scene as it appears in each image. To address the
issue of camera tracking during fast motion we employ a hybrid architecture, combining
elements of both dense and sparse SLAM systems to perform camera tracking and to
achieve globally consistent dense mapping.
Automotive applications present a particularly important setting for dense visual
SLAM systems. Such applications are characterised by their use of wide FOV cameras and
are therefore not accurately modelled by the standard pinhole camera model. The fourth
contribution of this thesis is to extend the above hybrid sparse-dense monocular SLAM
system to cater for large FOV fisheye imagery. This is achieved by reformulating the
mapping pipeline in terms of the Kannala-Brandt fisheye camera model. To estimate depth,
we introduce a new version of the PackNet depth estimation neural network (Guizilini et
al., 2020) adapted for fisheye inputs.
To demonstrate the effectiveness of our contributions, we present experimental
results, computed by processing the synthetic ICL-NUIM dataset of Handa et al. (2014) as
well as the real-world TUM-RGBD dataset of Sturm et al. (2012). For outdoor SLAM we
show the results of our system processing the autonomous driving KITTI and KITTI-360
datasets of Geiger et al. (2012a) and Liao et al. (2021) respectively
Promoting Collections using Digital Engagement at MU Library (Poster)
No full textPoster Presentation at the CONUL Conference 2023, 24-25th May 2023, Cork.
This poster will outline the innovative ways we use digital engagement tools to promote the collections of Maynooth University Library and St Patricks Pontifical University. Utilising virtual and stop motion software, we have created the first virtual experiences including tours, exhibitions, a collections-based advent calendar and a Claymation cat for engagement on social media. There is potential to review data of these platforms to inform future planning and guidelines for making the Library more accessible. This poster will outline the forms of digital engagement that were undertaken in the last 12 months and evaluate their
impact on enhanced collection sustainability
Investigating trait antecedents of normative and deceptive Like-seeking on Instagram
No full textOn Instagram, individuals proactively seek Likes for posts, as the number of Likes received is a social currency,
signalling popularity and status. However, digital status-seeking behaviours, such as Like-seeking, are also
associated with negative outcomes including health-risk behaviours. Yet little is known about traits that drive
Like-seeking. Proposing Like-seeking as a form of conspicuous consumption, we investigate materialism,
vulnerable narcissism, and self-monitoring-traits associated with conspicuous consumption-as antecedents of
Like-seeking on Instagram, distinguishing between normative Like-seeking and deceptive Like-seeking. We
explore the mediating role of Instagram intensity in the relationship between these traits and the two forms of
Like-seeking. Using a cross-sectional non-experimental design, data from a sample of 436 Instagram users in the
United States were analysed using partial least squares structural equation modeling. Results show that the traits
are directly associated with deceptive Like-seeking. Findings reveal new insights into users' Instagram intensity
as a mediating variable between materialism and self-monitoring, and both Like-seeking behaviour
Using Collaborative self-study to support professional learning in initial teacher education: developing pedagogy through Meaningful Physical Education
No full textCollaborative self-study provides teacher educators with opportunities
to enhance professional learning. This paper explores how
three teacher educators used this approach to support their learning
while introducing the pedagogy of Meaningful Physical
Education (MPE) to pre-service teachers (PSTs). Thematic analysis
of reflections, critical friend feedback and online conversations
were used to generate three themes: Collaborative Self-study
helped us to learn about our practice; learn how to support student
learning; and learn how to introduce pedagogical innovation.
Collaboration reinforced resolve and sustained change through
sharing experiences, content, resources, and outcomes. While the
context for this study was PE, we believe the findings are relevant
for all initial teacher educators seeking to develop their practice.
Further research into collaborative self-study practice of pedagogical
innovation across varied curricular areas could enhance teacher
and student learning