Identifying Features of Pocket Parks that May Be Related to Health Promoting Use

Urban green spaces have been shown to promote health and well-being and recent research indicates that the two primary potentially health promoting uses of pocket parks are ‘rest and restitution’ and ‘socialising’. The aim of this study is to identify features in pocket parks that may support these uses. The relationship between the two types of use and the shape, size, noise level, greenness, as well as ‘elements’ (paved and unpaved trails, café, historical feature, table, other seating than benches, flowerbeds, view outside park, playground) in nine pocket parks in Copenhagen were analysed. The results show that ‘green features’ do not seem to be of crucial importance for ‘socialising’ whereas, as expected, features promoting gathering should be prioritised. For ‘rest and restitution’, the main results show that ‘green ground cover’ and ‘enclosed green niches’ are important, while ‘disturbing features’ (playground, view outside park) should be avoided. The results add knowledge about the features which support the health promoting use of pocket parks to the existing body of research.     

Comparative numerical studies of projectile impacts on plain and steel-fibre reinforced concrete

The enhanced energy absorption characteristics of fibre-reinforced concrete, compared to plain concrete, has in experimentally studies been shown to improve the projectile resistance and motivate its increased usage in protective structures. However, the high cost of undertaking experiments and the high parameter variation and dependency of the experimental setups and results, respectively, make it difficult to draw generic conclusions of how the addition and increased amount of fibres affects the local damage caused by projectile impact, which motivates the use of numerical simulations to study this. The numerical hydrocode AUTODYN was used in a qualitative study of how the addition of different amounts of fibres, modelled as different post-crack relations, influence the depth of penetration and crater formation on the front and rear face of a concrete target. Fibres added to the concrete mix had a minor influence on the depth of penetration while the crater size on both front and rear faces of the target decreases. The crack propagation beyond the crater on the front face was also reduced when fibres were added to the concrete. An increased amount of fibres in the concrete showed no effect on the size of the front-face crater, but led to further decreased size of the crater on the rear face of the concrete cylinder. It is concluded that the scabbing crater can be reduced in size and prevented by usage of fibre-reinforced concrete even if the depth of penetration is only slightly less than to penetration depth in plain concrete.     

Food selection associated with sense of coherence in adults

Background  

Favorable dietary habits promote health, whereas unfavorable habits link to various chronic diseases. An individual's "sense of coherence" (SOC) is reported to correlate with prevalence of some diseases to which dietary habits are linked. However, understanding what determines an individual's dietary preferences and how to change his/her behavior remains limited. The aim of the present study was to evaluate associations between dietary intake and SOC in adults.     

“They say this is a home”: the challenge of “home” in residential care settings for old and young

In this article, we want to bolster a critical discussion of how the “home” is used in research on residential care, and additionally make sense of young and old residents’ feelings of resistance, through the lens of a critical geography of home. We illustrate how the home ideal might be provocative and frustrating for the residents, although previous studies point out that the ideal is used by staff and in policy to reassure residents of a sense of belonging and mastery. Examples from interviews with young unaccompanied boys as well as older residents living in residential care have been used and the analysis resulted in two themes: “Residents’ conflicting experiences of space” (shared space, restricted space and regulated space, and “Residents’ feelings of homelessness” (transitional space and encroached space). How the residents themselves understand the space that is called their home and why their home can stir ambivalent or negative feelings of isolation, exclusion, and homelessness, is relevant in order to avoid romanticizing home. Residents’ understanding of home can be different from the staff, a reminder that home is a much more complex notion than the rosy ideal.

     

Adoption of carbon dioxide efficient technologies and practices: An analysis of sector-specific convergence trends among 12 nations

Carbon dioxide intensities in economic terms (GDP in PPP terms) in industrialized and developing countries have been shown to converge, and it has been argued that technology diffusion, leading to the use of similar technologies in all countries, is an important reason for this convergence. Indicators based on CO₂ per output in PPP terms, however, give in comparison to physical indicators limited understanding of the process of technology diffusion. In order to analyze the technology diffusion hypothesis in more detail, we therefore study the trend in carbon dioxide emissions in relation to the production output in four separate sectors: iron and steel; paper, board and pulp; coal fuelled power plants; and natural gas fuelled power plants, in each of 12 countries, between 1980 and 1998. The indicators converge in each sector, indicating that across countries, technologies with more similar carbon dioxide efficiencies are used today than 25 years ago. We also find that at least some developing countries with high energy prices use more efficient technologies than industrialized countries with low energy prices.     

Energy System Consequences When Installing an Advanced Delignification Process

In the pulp and paper industry, during major modernization projects the overall energy system consequences are often not estimated in detail, usually only local energy consequences are taken into account when evaluating possible projects. In this paper, the effects on the overall energy system when installing an advanced delignification process (i.e., a “state‐of‐the‐art” pulp digester and oxygen delignification process) will be presented. Also, the effect such an installation has on the potential for further energy integration is discussed. Furthermore, the CO₂ consequences for both installing such a system and integrating the mill further energy‐wise are presented.     

Supporting the use of guidelines and style guides in professional user interface design

The use of user-interface design knowledge such as general guidelines and environment-specific style guides can be valuable, and is increasingly required in professional user-interface design. However, conventional guidelines and style guides ( and ) in the form of documents are consistently found hard to use. We have earlier demonstrated knowledge-based critiquing to be a technically feasible way of delivering relevant and knowledge. The purpose of this study was to investigate the need and acceptability of such techniques for professional user-interface designers.

An experiment was carried out where four professional designers developed user-interface prototypes to a functional specification. The designs were evaluated using our and -based critiquing system, which identified a total of 17 deviations from style-guide requirements or design recommendations. Interviews were conducted with the designers to find the reasons for the deviations and to identify important requirements for a critiquing design-support tool. The deviation analysis points to an existing need for better ways of accessing and knowledge. The interviews indicate that the designers would find a critiquing tool valuable, provided that it leaves them in control of their work and indicates the severity of the detected deviations.     

Examination of the spatially heterogeneous electroactivity of boron-doped diamond microarray electrodes

Spatial variations in the electrical and electrochemical activity of microarray electrodes, fabricated entirely from diamond, have been investigated. The arrays contain approximately 50-mum-diameter boron-doped diamond (BDD) disks spaced 250 mum apart (center to center) in insulating intrinsic diamond supports, such that the BDD regions are coplanar with the intrinsic diamond. Atomic force microscopy (AFM) imaging of the surface reveals a roughness of no more than +/-10 nm over the array. Each BDD microdisk within the array contains polycrystalline BDD with a variety of different grains exposed. Using conducting-AFM, the conductivity of the different grains was found to vary within a BDD microdisk. Electrochemical imaging of the electroactivity of the microdisk electrodes using scanning electrochemical microscopy operating in substrate generation-tip collection mode revealed that, under apparently diffusion-limited steady-state conditions, there was a small variation in the response between electrodes. However, the majority of electrodes in the array appeared to show predominantly metallic behavior. For the electrodes that showed a lower activity, all grains within the microdisk supported electron transfer, albeit at different rates, as evidenced by studies on the electrodeposition of metallic silver, at potentials far negative of the flat band potential of oxygen-terminated polycrystalline diamond. The possibility of using these array electrodes for steady-state diffusion-limited measurements in electroanalytical applications is far-reaching. However, caution should be exercised in the kinetic analysis of voltammetric measurements, since wide variations in the electroactivity of individual grains are apparent when the potential is below the diffusion-limited value.     

The relation between perceived sensory dimensions of urban green space and stress restoration

Research indicates a relationship between sensory perception of natural environments and human health. Our hypothesis is that people perceive green spaces in terms of certain dimensions, where some dimensions are more important and preferred than others with respect to restoring people from stress.The aims are to: identify and describe the perceived dimensions in nature; identify which dimensions people in general prefer; identify the dimensions people reporting stress prefer; and identify a combination of the dimensions people reporting stress prefer.A total of 953 randomly selected informants from nine Swedish cities (representative of the Swedish population) answered a postal questionnaire with pre-coded questions. The questionnaire consisted of three parts: personal data, preferences for natural qualities and self-estimations of health status. The data were analyzed using factor analysis and regression analyses.The results identify and describe eight perceived sensory dimensions. People in general prefer the dimension Serene, followed by Space, Nature, Rich in Species, Refuge, Culture, Prospect and Social. The dimensions Refuge and Nature are most strongly correlated with stress, indicating a need to find the most restorative environments. A combination of Refuge, Nature and Rich in Species, and a low or no presence of Social, could be interpreted as the most restorative environment for stressed individuals.From a city planning perspective, the results indicate how urban green spaces can be viewed as elements of importance to public mental health. However, before the dimensions can be used by practitioners as tools to promote health through city planning, more research is needed.