25813 research outputs found
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Miscele ghiaia ben gradata-gomma per la riduzione del rischio sismico di infrastrutture.
No full textI sistemi di isolamento geotecnico sismico (Geotechnical Seismic Isolation, GSI)
rappresentano una strategia innovativa per ridurre le accelerazioni trasmesse dal terreno alle strutture e alle infrastrutture in elevazione o in sotterraneo prevedendone il loro impiego tra il terreno
e la struttura/infrastruttura stessa. Tra i sistemi GSI appaiono promettenti le miscele terrenogomma (Soil-Rubber Mixtures, SRMs) grazie alle loro proprietà dinamiche, il loro basso costo e
la facilità di reperimento ed installazione. Esse sono ottenute, in genere, dall’unione di terreno a
grana grossa uniforme e granulato di gomma, derivante da Pneumatici Fuori Uso (PFU). La presente nota mostra i risultati della caratterizzazione meccanica di miscele innovative ottenute da
terreni con granulometria ben gradata e granulato di gomma (Well-Graded Gravel-Rubber Mixtures, wgGRMs) confezionate con un contenuto di gomma pari al 25%, 40% e 55%. I risultati
delle prove triassiali monotoniche e cicliche evidenziano buone caratteristiche di resistenza a taglio ed eccellenti capacità dissipative
Symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity-impulsivity, and executive dysfunction as a function of the menstrual cycle : results of a month-long daily report study.
No full textThis study explored associations between menstrual cycle phases and the expression of symptoms of inattention, hyperactivity-impulsivity, and executive dysfunction in females with and without attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). The primary research question examined whether different phases of the menstrual cycle were associated with variations in the intensity of reported symptoms. The secondary research question investigated whether individuals diagnosed with ADHD experienced more significant variation in the intensity of symptoms than those without ADHD.
This study analysed self-reported symptoms of inattention and hyperactivity, measured by the Adult ADHD Self-Report Scale (ASRS), and symptoms of executive dysfunction, measured by the Barkley Deficits in Executive Function Scale (BDEFS), each day for 30 days. A total of n = 139 participants completed the initial screening, met eligibility criteria and were progressed into the study. Sixty-seven completed the full 30-day study, resulting in n = 31 in the ADHD group and n = 36 in the non-ADHD group for analysis.
A repeated measures analysis of variance (ANOVA) conducted for each measure revealed that menstrual phases had a significant effect on self-report of symptoms on both the ASRS total score and the BDEFS total score. Symptom severity was highest in the early follicular and late luteal phases of the menstrual cycle. Further, individuals with ADHD reported significantly higher symptom severity than the non-ADHD individuals, on both the ASRS and BDEFS. The interaction effect between menstrual phase and group was not significant on the total score of ASRS or BDEFS, suggesting that the magnitude of variation in symptoms did not differ significantly between the ADHD and non-ADHD groups on total measures. Analysis of the BDEFS subscales revealed that individuals with ADHD experienced greater fluctuations in self-regulation of emotion across the menstrual cycle than individuals without ADHD.
The results of this study indicate that individuals with and without ADHD experience significant increases in symptom severity during the early follicular and late luteal phases of the menstrual cycle. Emotional regulation difficulties exhibited considerably more variability throughout the menstrual cycle in the ADHD group, aligning with existing research suggesting that emotional dysregulation is a significant feature of ADHD
Beyond recidivism : understanding the mechanisms that promote desistance from sexual offending.
No full textIn a collective endeavour to reduce sexual abuse, legislative, research, and clinical efforts have predominantly concentrated on the factors that reduce the risk of sexual recidivism. However, risk-focused policies and practices have inadvertently led to insufficient attention being paid to desistance, namely, how individuals cease to engage in sexual offending. Further, an unintended consequence of focusing on risk has been that, at times, access has been limited to the opportunities that research has shown to support desistance. Studies have shown that most individuals who commit sexual offences eventually desist, highlighting the need to understand and support the mechanisms that facilitate this process. Therefore, this thesis seeks to shift the perspective beyond recidivism to consider the mechanisms and processes that promote desistance from sexual offending.
In Study One, a systematic review was conducted to infer from empirical findings, using an inductive approach, the mechanisms contributing to desistance from sexual offending. Eight mechanisms were identified and broadly grouped into two domains: active and passive/avoidant mechanisms that conceptually aligned to established desistance theories. Active mechanisms represented intentional efforts to change cognition and behaviour to pursue value-driven prosocial pursuits. In contrast, passive/avoidant mechanisms primarily represented avoidance and grievance, often in response to challenges associated with reintegration into society after a sexual offence conviction.
Drawing on findings from Study One, Study Two involved developing a coding protocol to assess for the presence of the eight identified protective mechanisms and evaluate its interrater reliability. Participants were biologically born males (N = 16) who were living in the community after serving a prison sentence for a sexual offense conviction. The coding protocol was applied to interview and file information from data obtained as part of a prospective longitudinal protective factors study. Interviews were conducted six months apart and collateral data included 12 months of probation notes and relevant psychological reports. Findings supported the interrater reliability of the coding protocol, with obtained intraclass correlation coefficients in the good to excellent range.
Study Three then applied the coding protocol developed in Study Two to a larger subset of participants from the same longitudinal study (N = 99). The study aimed to explore relationships between the mechanisms, risk and protective factor ratings, and desistance outcomes. Desistance outcomes were measured by aggregated official recidivism data and self-reporting offending. Findings indicated that the active mechanisms were highly correlated with established protective factors for sexual offending. Further, several active mechanisms reflecting processes, such as self-regulation, agency, and stability, were assessed as more present for participants desisting from sexual offending compared with non-desisting participants. In contrast, one passive/avoidant mechanism, reflecting deterrence, avoidance, and hypervigilant processes, was associated with nondesistance. Additionally, the active mechanisms demonstrated some utility alongside empirically validated protective factors when predicting desistance from sexual offending.
Overall, the findings proffer support for a shift in focus from risk to consider protective mechanisms associated with desistance from sexual offending. The identified mechanisms and their empirical relationships with desistance outcomes provide some insight into the processes that result in desistance from sexual offending. The potential implications for therapy, case supervision, and further research are discussed
Children’s rights or settler sovereignty? Rights declarations, curriculum policy, and settler colonial governance.
No full textThis paper interrogates the coloniality of (human) rights and inclusion by tracing their function within Aotearoa New Zealand’s education policy. Beginning from the global frame of Gaza, where human rights instruments are mobilised to obscure rather than prevent mass violence, the analysis demonstrates that rights frameworks are never neutral. In settler-colonial contexts, they operate as technologies of governance that both promise protection and reproduce dispossession. In Aotearoa, curricular and policy discourses of diversity, biculturalism, and inclusion similarly depoliticise the foundational violence of colonisation. By collapsing the distinct realities of Māori, Pasifika, refugee, and immigrant communities into state-managed categories, the education system sustains the hierarchies it claims to redress. For immigrant children, rights are extended only conditionally, tied to neoliberal benchmarks of economic utility and assimilation, while Māori rights remain constrained within Crown-defined parameters. Drawing on Wolfe’s theorisation of settler colonialism as a structure of elimination and decolonial theory, the paper argues that both Māori dispossession and immigrant conditionality are relational components of a single settler-colonial project. Education, rights, and inclusion thus function less as emancipatory frameworks than as instruments for managing populations and consolidating white settler sovereignty
Soft Skills in Software Engineering: Insights from the Trenches
No full textContext: Soft skills (e.g., communication skills, em pathy, team skills) impact software project success. Objective: We
aim to understand (1) how soft skills are defined and perceived in
the software industry, (2) what soft skills are required in software
development roles, (3) how soft skills are trained, and (4) how
soft skills are assessed in the software industry. Method: We conducted
18 semi-structured interviews with software professionals
in different roles. We manually analyzed transcripts following
a general inductive approach. Results: There is ambiguity in
soft skills definition, but agreement on their importance. The
most critical soft skills were communication, leadership, and
teamwork skills, but we also identified less frequently discussed
skills: resilience and self-awareness. Further, we find that soft
skills are not systematically assessed, likely due to difficulties
in their assessment. A theme emerged on the importance of
ongoing soft skills training as well as tailoring training to software
professionals’ needs. Conclusions: Our research supports past
research on the importance of soft skills in software engineering
and suggests that further emphasis is needed on soft skills
assessment and training. We discuss implications for software
professionals, those in leadership roles, and companies
Generating quest narrative assets using LLMs.
No full textContemporary role-playing games (RPGs) demand vast quantities of narrative
content, a need that game developers have struggled to meet without sacrificing
quality. Large Language Models (LLMs) offer a promising solution, but they
introduce a critical tension between automated creativity and the designer’s
need for authorship and control.
This thesis addresses this challenge through the development and evaluation
of a structured workflow for generating quest assets, using a two-phase,
mixed-methods approach. First, a proof-of-concept player study (N = 11) in
Minecraft: Java Edition examined how model size and authoring source (that
is, LLM vs. human) shape player perceptions. Second, insights from this study
informed the iterative co-design of a prototype designer tool with professional
game developers.
The findings reveal a nuanced relationship between generation quality and
player experience. Larger models produced text often indistinguishable from
human writing, yet players’ sense of agency and diversity was more strongly
influenced by the underlying quest structure than by the authoring source, indicating
that text quality alone cannot compensate for a linear design. The
co-design phase established that maintaining designer agency requires (a) prioritising
authorial intent, (b) positioning the tool as a co-creative partner, and
(c) balancing designer freedom with necessary scaffolding through a Trait system.
This research contributes (1) a validated, in-game methodology for evaluating
LLM-generated narrative assets; (2) empirical findings on the impact of LLM
model size that highlight the critical importance of quest structure over raw text
quality; (3) the design of a novel designer tool featuring a flexible, Trait-based
data model for controllable narrative generation; and (4) key principles for the
construction of LLM-supported narrative design tools. It concludes that the
most effective role for LLMs in game development is not to replace designers,
but to augment human creativity within flexible and controllable systems
Traffic sign detection and recognition.
No full textThe Traffic Sign Detection (TSD) and Traffic Sign Recognition (TSR) are well-studied topics, as they play a crucial role in driver assistance systems, automatic driving, and safe driving systems. Usually the TSD task and the TSR task are considered as two separate tasks. The TSD task is to locate the presence and position of traffic signs within an image or video frame, and the TSR task is to classify the detected potential traffic sign (Oza, 2021). In this research project, TSD task and TSR task were solved by convolutional neural network models.
The YOLO (You Only Look Once) algorithm is a real-time object detection system to predict bounding boxes and class probabilities (AI Rabbani Alif, 2024). This algorithm was implemented for the TSD model, and transfer learning was used to set the initial weights of the YOLO backbone of the model to deal with the fact that the size of the GTSDB dataset is not large enough. A 6-layer-3-block convolution neural network was built from scratch as the TSR model.
The German Traffic Sign Detection Benchmark (GTSDB) dataset and the German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark (GTSRB) data set are used for training the two models respectively. Based on the models created for TSD and TSR tasks, further research, such as hyper-parameter tuning, transfer learning, and dataset expansion were carried out, and their results were analyzed. For hyper parameter tuning research, the selection for batch size, epoch number, network size, dropout layer number, dropout rate and others were analyzed. For transfer learning, the Modified National Institute of Standard and Technology (MNIST) data set was used, and the transfer learning research was carried out between MNIST and GTSRB to test the performance difference between transferred models and models trained from scratch.
With the TSD model and the TSR model, a computational pipeline was built in order to take images or videos as its inputs, make predictions about how many traffic signs were there in the image/frame, where they were located and what class they belonged to. In order to solve the gaps between the coverage of the GTSDB dataset and the coverage of the GTSRB dataset, a manual expansion was made on the GTSRB dataset in this research, and it helped the model trained by expanded GTSRB to be able to recognize “Unknown” traffic sign types. Trackers were built for video processing in order to make the displayed result more stable. Three types of trackers were built, including Naive tracker, Kalman filter tracker and Unscented Kalman filter tracker. Their performance on videos were compared.
The machine learning-based pipeline was built based on an existing innovation project owned by Verizon Connect. With this pipeline, data captured from truck-based cameras would be used as the input, and the type of traffic sign and its geo-information would be the output
“Liberated but not free” Navigating the impacts of post-war British polices on the provision of aid, rehabilitation, and repatriation of Jewish DPs in Bergen-Belsen DP Camp, 1945-47.
No full textOn April 15, 1945, British forces entered the Bergen-Belsen concentration camp in Germany and declared to those within that they were liberated. Many may assume that the story ends here. This, however, was not the case. ‘Liberation’ and ‘freedom’ are often synonymous with one another, but for many of the surviving European Jewish population, such was not the case. Following the end of the Second World War, Europe found itself confronted by a large-scale refugee crisis of individuals who had fled persecution, conflict zones, or been forcibly removed from their homes under the Nazi Regime. These people became known as Displaced Persons (DPs). Bergen-Belsen became one of many DP camps established around Europe as a short-term solution to address the refugee crisis. Yet, neither the Jewish DPs who remained in the British Zone of Occupied Germany, nor the British Administration itself seemed to anticipate the difficulties they would face in the lengthy rehabilitation and repatriation process. Utilising official documents, reports, and photographic evidence, this paper analyses and critiques Britain’s management of the Jewish DPs under their care, shedding light on the important role aid workers undertook in bridging the gap between theoretical policy and the physical reality of everyday life for Jewish DPs in the Bergen-Belsen DP camp. It also challenges perceptions of Jewish DPs as passive and argues that they, too, played an active role in advocating for themselves, demanding the liberation and freedom that had been taken from them for so long
Experiences in the NCAA as a NZ international student-athlete : an investigation of expected and perceived impact on athletic development.
No full textThe sporting pathway offered in the United States of America through the National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) has become increasingly viewed as a viable option for athletic development by international student athletes. Despite growing interest, no research has focussed on the Kiwi student athlete experience. This research endeavours to provide an understanding of Kiwi student-athlete perceptions of the NCAA prior to arriving on campus in comparison with their lived experiences. A qualitative surveying method is utilised to facilitate exploration of this new area of study amongst Kiwi student-athletes.
The two primary reasons for choosing to participate in the NCAA were the amount of financial support available and the ability to simultaneously continue athletics alongside academic studies. Four key themes emerged that had an impact on athletic development during the NCAA experience: exposure to high-level athletics, the coach-athlete relationship, training demands, and balancing student-athlete life. Overall, participants reported that their lived experience matched what they perceived prior to arriving on campus at an average rate of 69%. The findings suggest that there are consistent draw factors for Kiwi student-athletes to move and participate in the NCAA however, they are not fully aware of what the NCAA experience will be like before choosing to move. Differences in training demand/intensity, injury occurrences and experiences of homesickness/culture shock contributed to this discrepancy. Despite challenges, most participants reported their decision was the best for athletic development and that they would make the same decision again. This insight into the experiences of Kiwi student-athletes participating in the NCAA highlights potential areas of improvement regarding support programs and resources specifically crafted for young NZ athletes opting to migrate to the NCAA system
