Designing on-site: Facilitating participatory contextual architecture with mobile phones

Some movements within modern architecture particularly emphasise the importance of matching buildings to their surroundings. However, practicing such “contextual architecture” is highly challenging and typically not something the future inhabitants of a building are well equipped for participating in. This paper explores the potentials of using mobile phone technology for facilitating such client participation in the parts of an architecture process that take place on the building site. For this we introduce ArchiLens, a mobile system for interactive on-site 3D visualisation of houses, and findings from a field study with 40 participants in the process of building or modifying their home. The study showed that using the system helped evoke people’s imagination of the look and feel of their future house, and envision it in context. This enabled them to participate more closely in the design process on-site by iteratively reviewing design alternatives and exploring, for example, other placements and materials.     

"I didn't do it:" Responsibility biases in open and closed groups.

Group members often take more responsibility for the group's outcomes than others give to them. Extending evidence that egocentrism can be muted when group members are individuated (the "unpacking effect"), the authors predicted that members of open groups would be less egocentric than members of closed groups. In open groups, the possibility of membership fluctuation reduces collectiveness, breaking the group into individuals, which in turn lessens egocentrism. The authors tested these predictions in a study of groups of students working on a task relevant to their academic success. Members claimed more personal responsibility when they worked in closed groups relative to open groups (egocentrism), and lack of cohesion mediated the open- versus closed-group link to responsibility allocations. Moreover, members of open groups did not take more responsibility after a success than a failure, whereas those in closed, successful groups claimed more credit than members of failure groups (self-serving bias). The discussion suggests that open groups, although often thought to create conflict as members compete, may contribute to a reduction in both egocentrism and self-serving responsibility allocations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Liberal and conservative political ideology, experiences of harassment, and perceptions of campus climate.

The purpose of this study was to examine the relations among racial-ethnic group membership, political ideology (i.e., conservative and liberal), and perceptions of general campus climate (GCC) and of campus climate for racial-ethnic minorities (RECC). One hundred and thirty-six (136) undergraduate, graduate, and professional students participated in this study at a large public Midwestern university. A series of multivariate analyses of variance, hierarchical regressions, and mediation analyses were conducted. Findings indicated that Whites endorsed more positive perceptions of campus climate, reported fewer experiences of racial-ethnic harassment, and endorsed less liberal political ideological beliefs than people of color. No racial differences in conservative ideology emerged. After controlling for racial-ethnic group membership, results showed that experiences of racial-ethnic harassment predicted both GCC and RECC, whereas conservative ideology only predicted RECC. Post hoc analyses demonstrated that experiences of racial-ethnic harassment fully mediated the relationship between racial-ethnic group membership and GCC, but only partially mediated the relationship between racial-ethnic group membership and RECC. Neither conservative nor liberal ideologies were significant mediators. Implications for future research and practice are provided. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Design and analysis of the commercialized drier processing using a combined unsymmetrical double-feed microwave and vacuum system (case study: tea leaves)

Combined microwave (MW) and vacuum drying of biomaterials has a promising potential for high-quality dehydrated products. A better knowledge of the drying kinetics of biomaterial products could improve the design and operation of efficient dehydration systems. The experiments were carried out on commercialized biomaterials drier using a combined unsymmetrical double-feed microwave and vacuum system. Three kilograms of tea leaves were applied with the microwave power of 800 (single-feed magnetron) and 1600 W (unsymmetrical double-feed magnetrons) operating at 2450 MHz frequency. Rotation rates of the rotary drum were held constant at 10 rpm. Vacuum pressure was controlled at the constant pressure of 385 Torr and 535 Torr, respectively. In this study, the system can be operated either in continuous or pulse mode in each experiments. Experiments show that in the case of high power level and continuous operating mode causes greater damage to the structure of tea leaves sample. Microwave drying with pulse operating mode at 385 Torr ensured the shortest drying time and the best overall quality of dried tea leaves, and thus was chosen as the most appropriate technique for tea leaves drying.     

3D shape estimation in video sequences provides high precision evaluation of facial expressions

Person independent and pose invariant estimations of facial expressions and action unit (AU) intensity estimation are important for situation analysis and for automated video annotation. We evaluated raw 2D shape data of the CK+ database, used Procrustes transformation and the multi-class SVM leave-one-out method for classification. We found close to 100% performance demonstrating the relevance and the strength of details of the shape. Precise 3D shape information was computed by means of constrained local models (CLM) on video sequences. Such sequences offer the opportunity to compute a time-averaged ‘3D personal mean shape’ (PMS) from the estimated CLM shapes, which – upon subtraction – gives rise to person independent emotion estimation. On CK+ data PMS showed significant improvements over AU0 normalization; performance reached and sometimes surpassed state-of-the-art results on emotion classification and on AU intensity estimation. 3D PMS from 3D CLM offers pose invariant emotion estimation that we studied by rendering a 3D emotional database for different poses and different subjects from the BU 4DFE database. Frontal shapes derived from CLM fits of the 3D shape were evaluated. Results demonstrate that shape estimation alone can be used for robust, high quality pose invariant emotion classification and AU intensity estimation.     

Teaching and learning literate epistemologies.

Relationships between teacher epistemology, classroom interactions, and related student epistemologies and identities were studied in 4 cases, detailing the links between teachers' epistemological stances and those of their students by interview data and classroom discourse analysis. Classroom discourse, orchestrated by the teacher, likely mediates many of the associations between teacher and student epistemologies documented here. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Analyzing campus climate studies: Seeking to define and understand.

The term campus climate has become commonplace within higher education. However, there is little consensus on how best to define and measure it. Our study is a qualitative content analysis of 118 campus climate studies. Guided by the conceptual understanding of campus climate put forth by Peterson and Spencer (1990), we explore the nature of campus climate research based upon studies found in a clearinghouse database of faculty campus climate studies. We found that those conducting studies are most often institutional employees. There was no standardization of design or instrumentation in these studies. Studies did not rely on a single definition of campus climate or on any set of best practices for assessing campus climate. Additionally, studies explored various aspects and constituents of the campus--both in and out of the classroom, and for the working environment for faculty and students and occasionally staff and administrators. Implications and specific recommendations for conducting campus climate research based upon extant literature and on findings from the study are included. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Current Status of Intelligent Space

Latest advances in network sensor technology and state of the art of mobile robotics and artificial intelligence research can be applied to develop autonomous and distributed monitoring systems.intelligent Space(iSpace)is an environmental system,which is able to support hnunan in informative and physical ways.iSpace observing the space with distributed sensors,extracts useful information firm the obtained data and provides various services to users.Tlus means that essential functions of iSpace are"observation","recognition" and "actuation."In this paper,we focus.the observation function ofiSpace.And we describe observation systems to get information of both human and mobile agents in the space to show new results.     

Nafion modified with simple bases and amino acid derivatives: Survey of physical properties and search for effective pervaporation membranes

Nafion, a solid perfluorinated polymeric sulfonic acid, reacts readily with bases and can thus be converted to a tremendous number of individual modifications. A survey of spectral, mechanical, thermal, and pervaporation characteristics of Nafion modified with simple inorganic and organic bases and with the derivatives of amino acids is thus reported. The spectral characteristics, thermal stability, and T_g changed pronouncedly for Nafion modified with the stronger bases, such as ammonium or tris(hydroxymethyl)aminomethane, while minor changes were observed for Nafion modified with the derivatives of amino acids. Permeability and selectivity of Nafion observed for the pervaporation of methanol–dimethyl carbonate and methanol–methyl acetate mixtures were mainly influenced by the modification with amines bearing hydroxyl and, most pronouncedly, sulfo groups. Importantly, the pervaporation membrane from Nafion modified with taurine appeared similarly permeable and hygroscopic but more methanol-selective than that from pure Nafion.     

Investigation of Energy Transfer Mechanism and Photoluminescence Properties of Ce3+/Dy3+ and Ce3+/Sm3+ Co-Doped Barium Borate Glasses for w-LED Applications

Glass Physics and Chemistry - Ce3+/Dy3+ (CDBB) and Ce3+/Sm3+ (CSBB) co-doped barium borate glasses were prepared by melt quenching technique. These glasses are made of B2O3 as a glass former and...