Abstract: Mobile phones are one of the main tools for promoting the wellbeing of people and supporting the integration of communities on the margins such as refugees. Information and Communication Technology has the potential to contribute towards reducing isolation, loneliness, and to assist in improving interpersonal relations and fostering acculturation processes. Therefore, the use of mobile phones by refugees might contribute to their social connectedness. This paper aims to demonstrate how existing literature has shown how the use of mobile phones by refugees should engender social connectedness amongst the refugees. Data for the study are drawn from existing literature; we searched a number of electronic databases for papers published between 2010 and 2019. The main findings of the study relate to the use of mobile phones by refugees to (i) create a sense of belonging, (ii) maintain relationships, and (iii) advance the acculturation process. The analysis highlighted a gap in the research over refugees and social connectedness. In particular, further studies should consider evaluating the differences between those who have a refugee permit, those who are waiting for the refugee permit, and those whose request was denied.
Abstract: Networks are often presented as containing a “core”
and a “periphery.” The existence of a core suggests that some
vertices are central and form the skeleton of the network, to which
all other vertices are connected. An alternative view of graphs is
through communities. Multiple measures have been proposed for
dense communities in graphs, the most classical being k-cliques,
k-cores, and k-plexes, all presenting groups of tightly connected
vertices. We here show that the edge number thresholds for such
communities to emerge and for their percolation into a single dense
connectivity component are very close, in all networks studied. These
percolating cliques produce a natural core and periphery structure.
This result is generic and is tested in configuration models and in
real-world networks. This is also true for k-cores and k-plexes. Thus,
the emergence of this connectedness among communities leading to
a core is not dependent on some specific mechanism but a direct
result of the natural percolation of dense communities.
Abstract: New Zealand, an island nation, has an extensive coastline peppered with small communities of iconic buildings known as Bachs. Post WWII, these modest buildings were constructed by their owners as retreats and generally were small, low cost, often using recycled material and often they fell below current acceptable building standards. In the latter part of the 20th century, real estate prices in many of these communities remained low and these areas became permanent residences for people attracted to this affordable lifestyle choice. The Blueskin Resilient Communities Trust (BRCT) is an organisation that recognises the vulnerability of communities in low lying settlements as now being prone to increased flood threat brought about by climate change and sea level rise. Some of the inhabitants of Blueskin Bay, Otago, NZ have already found their properties to be un-insurable because of increased frequency of flood events and property values have slumped accordingly. Territorial authorities also acknowledge this increased risk and have created additional compliance measures for new buildings that are less than 2 m above tidal peaks. Community resilience becomes an additional concern where inhabitants are attracted to a lifestyle associated with a specific location and its people when this lifestyle is unable to be met in a suburban or city context. Traditional models of social housing fail to provide the sense of community connectedness and identity enjoyed by the current residents of Blueskin Bay. BRCT have partnered with the Otago Polytechnic Design School to design a new form of community housing that can react to this environmental change. It is a longitudinal project incorporating participatory approaches as a means of getting people ‘on board’, to understand complex systems and co-develop solutions. In the first period, they are seeking industry support and funding to develop a transportable and fully self-contained housing model that exploits current technologies. BRCT also hope that the building will become an educational tool to highlight climate change issues facing us today. This paper uses the Climate Safe House (CSH) as a case study for education in architectural sustainability through experiential learning offered as part of the Otago Polytechnics Bachelor of Design. Students engage with the project with research methodologies, including site surveys, resident interviews, data sourced from government agencies and physical modelling. The process involves collaboration across design disciplines including product and interior design but also includes connections with industry, both within the education institution and stakeholder industries introduced through BRCT. This project offers a rich learning environment where students become engaged through project based learning within a community of practice, including architecture, construction, energy and other related fields. The design outcomes are expressed in a series of public exhibitions and forums where community input is sought in a truly participatory process.
Abstract: Developing a responsible personal worldview is central to sustainable development, but achieving quality education to promote transformative learning for sustainability is thus far, poorly understood. Most programs involving education for sustainable development rely on changing behavior, rather than attitudes. The emphasis is on the scientific and utilitarian aspect of sustainability with negligible importance on the intrinsic value of nature. Campus sustainability projects include building sustainable gardens and implementing energy-efficient upgrades, instead of focusing on educating for sustainable development through exploration of students’ values and beliefs. Even though green technology adoption maybe the right thing to do, most schools are not targeting the root cause of the environmental crisis; they are just providing palliative measures. This study explores the under-examined factors that lead to pro-environmental behavior by investigating the environmental perceptions of both college business students and personnel of green organizations. A mixed research approach of qualitative, based on structured interviews, and quantitative instruments was developed including 30 college-level students’ interviews and 40 green organization staff members involved in sustainable activities. The interviews were tape-recorded and transcribed for analysis. Categorization of the responses to the open‐ended questions was conducted with the purpose of identifying the main types of factors influencing attitudes and correlating with behaviors. Overall the findings of this study indicated a lack of appreciation for nature, and inability to understand interconnectedness and apply critical thinking. The results of the survey conducted on undergraduate students indicated that the responses of business and liberal arts students by independent t-test were significantly different, with a p‐value of 0.03. While liberal arts students showed an understanding of human interdependence with nature and its delicate balance, business students seemed to believe that humans were meant to rule over the rest of nature. This result was quite intriguing from the perspective that business students will be defining markets, influencing society, controlling and managing businesses that supposedly, in the face of climate change, shall implement sustainable activities. These alarming results led to the focus on green businesses in order to better understand their motivation to engage in sustainable activities. Additionally, a probit model revealed that childhood exposure to nature has a significantly positive impact in pro-environmental attitudes to most of the New Ecological Paradigm scales. Based on these findings, this paper discusses educators including Socrates, John Dewey and Paulo Freire in the implementation of eco-pedagogy and transformative learning following a curriculum with emphasis on critical and systems thinking, which are deemed to be key ingredients in quality education for sustainable development.
Abstract: The increasing interconnectedness and complexity of production processes raise the susceptibility of production systems to failure. Therefore, the ability to respond quickly to failures is increasingly becoming a competitive factor. The research project
"Sustainable failure management in manufacturing SMEs" is developing a methodology to identify failures in the production and select preventive and reactive measures in order to correct failures and to establish sustainable failure management systems.
Abstract: Estimating the reliability of a computer network has been a subject of great interest. It is a well known fact that this problem is NP-hard. In this paper we present a very efficient combinatorial approach for Monte Carlo reliability estimation of a network with unreliable nodes and unreliable edges. Its core is the computation of some network combinatorial invariants. These invariants, once computed, directly provide pure and simple framework for computation of network reliability. As a specific case of this approach we obtain tight lower and upper bounds for distributed network reliability (the so called residual connectedness reliability). We also present some simulation results.
Abstract: This paper simulates the ad-hoc mesh network in rural areas, where such networks receive great attention due to their cost, since installing the infrastructure for regular networks in these areas is not possible due to the high cost. The distance between the communicating nodes is the most obstacles that the ad-hoc mesh network will face. For example, in Terranet technology, two nodes can communicate if they are only one kilometer far from each other. However, if the distance between them is more than one kilometer, then each node in the ad-hoc mesh networks has to act as a router that forwards the data it receives to other nodes. In this paper, we try to find the critical number of nodes which makes the network fully connected in a particular area, and then propose a method to enhance the intermediate node to accept to be a router to forward the data from the sender to the receiver. Much work was done on technological changes on peer to peer networks, but the focus of this paper will be on another feature which is to find the minimum number of nodes needed for a particular area to be fully connected and then to enhance the users to switch on their phones and accept to work as a router for other nodes. Our method raises the successful calls to 81.5% out of 100% attempt calls.
Abstract: In this study, a minimal submaximal element of LIT(X) (the lattice of all intuitionistic topologies for X, ordered by inclusion) is determined. Afterwards, a new contractive property, intuitionistic mega-connectedness, is defined. We show that the submaximality and mega-connectedness are not complementary intuitionistic topological invariants by identifying those members of LIT(X) which are intuitionistic mega-connected.
Abstract: In this paper, we propose an approach of unsupervised
segmentation with fuzzy connectedness. Valid seeds are first specified
by an unsupervised method based on scale space theory. A region is
then extracted for each seed with a relative object extraction method of
fuzzy connectedness. Afterwards, regions are merged according to the
values between them of an introduced measure. Some theorems and
propositions are also provided to show the reasonableness of the
measure for doing mergence. Experiment results on a synthetic image,
a color image and a large amount of MR images of our method are
reported.
Abstract: The reliability of distributed systems and computer
networks have been modeled by a probabilistic network or a graph G.
Computing the residual connectedness reliability (RCR), denoted by
R(G), under the node fault model is very useful, but is an NP-hard
problem. Since it may need exponential time of the network size to
compute the exact value of R(G), it is important to calculate its tight
approximate value, especially its lower bound, at a moderate
calculation time. In this paper, we propose an efficient algorithm for
reliability lower bound of distributed systems with unreliable nodes.
We also applied our algorithm to several typical classes of networks
to evaluate the lower bounds and show the effectiveness of our
algorithm.
Abstract: Quantitative measurements of tumor in general and tumor volume in particular, become more realistic with the use of Magnetic Resonance imaging, especially when the tumor morphological changes become irregular and difficult to assess by clinical examination. However, tumor volume estimation strongly depends on the image segmentation, which is fuzzy by nature. In this paper a fuzzy approach is presented for tumor volume segmentation based on the fuzzy connectedness algorithm. The fuzzy affinity matrix resulting from segmentation is then used to estimate a fuzzy volume based on a certainty parameter, an Alpha Cut, defined by the user. The proposed method was shown to highly affect treatment decisions. A statistical analysis was performed in this study to validate the results based on a manual method for volume estimation and the importance of using the Alpha Cut is further explained.