Based on the upcoming 2010 World Expo of Shanghai. According to 'moving out' policy of Shanghai government, a large percentage of residents from Shanghai's old downtown area are being moved out to a district on the outskirts of the municipality. In the context of moving out policy and shifting community space of 'Longtang' residents, my research explores how water can be used to forge a new typology for the Xinji residential area in developing Shanghai. The new typology of residential area is defined by a new type of community space. Water, edge and corridor are examined as three main concepts to create this kind of new community space, where residents can be provided with diverse spatial experience and various spatial effects through spatial transformations in and between private and public and diverse programs in a residential area. 'Longtang' is one of the key precedents I am looking at for the purpose of studying water edge conditions and corridor conditions, and to deduce a way to best design hybrid community in the Xinji residential area, which is selected as my research site. It is identified as one of the peripheral node for the moving out policy by Shanghai government? My research, therefore, tries to explore a new typology of Xinji residential area, which can provide both existing residents and 'Longtang' residents with diverse water based community space in the residential area and its context.

Boundaries between adjacent habitats can create unique biotic and abiotic conditions, varying species compositions and abundances between the edge and interior of habitats. As habitats become fragmented, the relative amount of edge increases. Understanding the role that habitat edges have in determining species compositions and abundances is fundamental for conservation and management of habitats, particularly those under threat from fragmentation. Seagrass habitats are common nearshore habitats that harbour a rich and diverse faunal assemblage that are under threat worldwide from human disturbance. Human induced fragmentation, and the propensity of seagrass to form naturally patchy landscapes, makes it an ideal system to study the effects of edges on fauna. / Evidence of fish displaying edge effects in seagrass habitats is equivocal. Assessment of fish edge effects was done by sampling seven positions within seagrass habitats at fine spatial scales. Strong, consistent patterns in fish distributions demonstrated clear edge effects both within and alongside seagrass at these sites. The total number of fish sampled was greater at the seaward seagrass edge than the seagrass middle, but there was little difference between the seagrass middle and the shoreward seagrass edge. Four individual fish species showed preferences for the seagrass edges. Further investigation revealed that patch size could influence the magnitude of edge effects in seagrass beds. Fish were sampled in ten variously sized seagrass patches in three positions within each patch. Two species showed variations in edge effects across patches which could be attributed to the area of the patch. Changes in patch size can influence the magnitude of edge effects that species display, suggesting that patch area effects (fish density varying with patch size) could be caused by edge effects. / Food availability and predation are mechanisms commonly used to explain edge effect patterns. Gut analysis was done on Stigmatopora nigra sampled at the edge and middle of patches to determine if prey consumption varied between positions, and explain S. nigra distribution. There was little difference in prey consumed by S. nigra at the edge and middle of patches, suggesting that food was unlikely to be causing S. nigra edge effects, or that the influence of prey distribution was being masked by other factors such as seagrass structure. Predator abundances and foraging efficiency may vary at the edge and middle of patches, and consequently influence the distribution of prey fish within patches. Underwater videos were placed at four positions within seagrass habitats to assess predator distributions. Predatory Australian salmon, Arripis spp., spend more time over adjacent sand than other positions, while small potential prey species (King George whiting, Sillaginodes punctata, recruits) appear to prefer the middle of seagrass patches, possibly to avoid encounters with salmon. To test if the predator-prey distributions reflected actual predation pressure, a tethering experiment was done to determine if predation was causing edge effects in small fishes. / King George whiting recruits and pipefish (Stigmatopora spp.) were tethered at each of the four positions at different depths. Survival time of whiting recruits was greater in the middle of shallow seagrass patches than other positions. Few pipefish were preyed upon, and survival time was lower over sand adjacent to seagrass than at the seagrass edge or middle. Video footage revealed that salmon was the dominant predator of both whiting recruits and pipefish. The distribution of predators and associated predation can explain edge effects for some species (whiting) but other mechanisms, or a combination of mechanisms, are determining edge effects for other species (pipefish). / Edge effects were common amongst fish species in seagrass habitats, and included permanent, temporary and predatory species. Patch size was found to influence the extent of the edge effect. There was little evidence to support prey consumption as an underlying mechanism causing higher fish abundances at the interior or edge of patches, however there was evidence that predation could be causing edge effects. Changes in fish distributions within seagrass patches due to patch size and predation when seagrass undergoes fragmentation need to be considered by not only ecologists, but also by managers in the development of plans for seagrass conservation. Future studies should investigate the relative contribution of different edge characteristics in determining the degree of seagrass edge effects.

<p>This report contains a description on how it is possible to guide a robot along an edge, by using a camera mounted on the robot. If stereo matching is used to calculate 3Dcoordinates of an object or an edge, it requires two images from different known positions and orientations to calculate where it is. In the image analysis in this project, the Canny edge filter has been used. The result from the filter is not useful directly, because it finds too many edges and it misses some pixels. The Canny edge result must be sorted and finally filled up before the final calculations can be started. This additional work with the image decreases unfortunately the accuracy in the calculations. The accuracy is estimated through comparison between measured coordinates of the edge using a coordinate measuring machine and the calculated coordinates. There is a deviation of up to three mm in the calculated edge. The camera calibration has been described in earlier thesis so it is not mentioned in this report, although it is a prerequisite of this project.</p>

<p>Edge wicking, i.e. in-plane wetting, is an important parameter for liquid packaging board products. Before filling of the products at the dairy the web is being sterilised with hydrogen peroxide (H2O2). A tube is shaped and cut into packages which mean that new surfaces are created. If a short stop occurs in the sterilising bath the raw edges exposed to H2O2 could absorb the liquid and when the package later is being filled this absorption could lead to tube burst. For the end products it is also important to prevent the liquid from penetrating the raw edges of the board in order to maintain the functionality and fresh look of the package.</p><p>To control edge wicking different kinds of internal hydrophobic sizing agents are used. Alkyl ketene dimer (AKD) is the most common size in neutral sizing and rosin in conjunction with alum is the traditional acidic sizing agent. AKD and rosin size are often used in combination (dual sizing) to make the board hydrophobic.</p><p>The objective of this work was to examine the effects of the sizing agents on different pulps in different dosages. The pulps used in the sheet preparation were unbleached kraft pulp as well as bleached and unbleached CTMP refined to different levels. Apart from varying the size dosages, the wet sheets were also pressed at different levels to vary the density. The major part of the study included dual sizing but a minor part also concerned mono sized sheets.</p><p>The parameters investigated on the laboratory sheets were STFI-Density, hydrogen peroxide edge wicking, pressurised edge wicking, lactic acid edge wicking (LA) and AKD and rosin size content.</p><p>In hydrogen peroxide edge wicking the amount of size was the central source of improved wick index. The retention was therefore of great significance for the results. The dual sized sheets were found to give least edge wicking, due to the synergy effect between AKD and alum rosin size. The kraft pulps gave sheets with satisfactory edge wicking even at the lowest size dosage (1 kg/t) while CTMP required a dosage of 4 kg/t to reach the same wick index.</p><p>To achieve acceptable pressurised edge wicking values the most important parameter was found to be the density of the sheets. The kraft pulp sheets gave the lowest edge penetration while the high freeness CTMP sheets did not give satisfactory penetration resistant even at the highest size dosage.</p><p>The edge wicking of lactic acid could be prevented by sizing with AKD only. Sheets made from mono sized sheets containing rosin size did not manage to avoid a large in-plane wetting of the board structure. Hence, dual sizing to improve the edge wicking of lactic acid is not necessary. The density was found not to be an important parameter in lactic acid edge wicking, all the pulps got equal edge wicking regardless of density. Retention above 1 kg/t AKD in sheets was enough to prevent penetration. Retention above 1.5 kg/t AKD in sheet did not improve the edge wicking any further.</p><p>No significant difference in sizeability between unbleached and bleached CTMP was observed.</p>

This paper reports progress toward the development of a representation of significant surface changes in dense depth maps. We call the representation the Surface Primal Sketch by analogy with representation of intensity changes, image structure, and changes in curvature of planar curves. We describe an implemented program that detects, localizes, and symbolically describes: steps, where the surface height function is discontinuous; roofs, where the surface is continuous but the surface normal is discontinuous; smooth joins, where the surface normal is continuous but a principle curvature is discontinuous and changes sign; and shoulders, which consists of two roofs and correspond to a step viewed obliquely. We illustrate the performance of the program on range maps of objects of varying complexity.

Information representation is a critical issue in machine vision. The representation strategy in the primitive stages of a vision system has enormous implications for the performance in subsequent stages. Existing feature extraction paradigms, like edge detection, provide sparse and unreliable representations of the image information. In this thesis, we propose a novel feature extraction paradigm. The features consist of salient, simple parts of regions bounded by zero-crossings. The features are dense, stable, and robust. The primary advantage of the features is that they have abstract geometric attributes pertaining to their size and shape. To demonstrate the utility of the feature extraction paradigm, we apply it to passive navigation. We argue that the paradigm is applicable to other early vision problems.

Many geophysical inverse problems are ill-posed and have to be regularized. The most often used solution methods for solving ill-posed problems are based on the use of quadratic regularization that results in smooth solutions. Solutions of this type are not to be suitable when the model parameter is piecewise continuous blocky and edges are desired in the regularized solution. To avoid the smoothing of edges, which are very important attributes of an image, an edge-preserving regularization (non-quadratic regularization) term has to be employed. Total Variation (TV) regularization is one of the most effective regularization techniques for allowing sharp edges and the existence of discontinuities in the solutions. The edge-preserving regularization based on the TV method for small-scale geophysical inverse problems to the problem of estimating the acoustic velocity perturbation from a multi-source-receiver geophysical experiment is studied. The acoustic velocity perturbation is assumed to be piecewise continuous and blocky. The problem is based on linearization acoustic modeling using the framework of the single-scattering Born approximation from a known constant background medium. To solve this non-linear and ill-posed problem, an iterative scheme based on the conjugate gradient method is employed. The TV regularization method provides us with the opportunity to recover more useful information of velocity profiles from the measured seismic data. Though it requires more effort in implementing the TV term to control the smoothing and regularization parameter, the algorithm possesses the strong ability of marking the discontinuities and ensures their preservation from over-smoothing. / Geophysics

For elliptic problems on manifolds with edges, we construct index formulas in form of a sum of homotopy invariant contributions of the strata (the interior of the manifold and the edge). Both terms are the indices of elliptic operators, one of which acts in spaces of sections of finite-dimensional vector bundles on a compact closed manifold and the other in spaces of sections of infinite-dimensional vector bundles over the edge.

We construct a class of elliptic operators in the edge algebra on a manifold M with an embedded submanifold Y interpreted as an edge. The ellipticity refers to a principal symbolic structure consisting of the standard interior symbol and an operator-valued edge symbol. Given a differential operator A on M for every (sufficiently large) s we construct an associated operator As in the edge calculus. We show that ellipticity of A in the usual sense entails ellipticity of As as an edge operator (up to a discrete set of reals s). Parametrices P of A then correspond to parametrices Ps of As, interpreted as Mellin-edge representations of P.

The ellipticity of operators on a manifold with edge is defined as the bijectivity of the components of a principal symbolic hierarchy σ = (σψ, σ∧), where the second component takes value in operators on the infinite model cone of the local wedges. In general understanding of edge problems there are two basic aspects: Quantisation of edge-degenerate operators in weighted Sobolev spaces, and verifying the elliptcity of the principal edge symbol σ∧ which includes the (in general not explicitly known) number of additional conditions on the edge of trace and potential type. We focus here on these queations and give explicit answers for a wide class of elliptic operators that are connected with the ellipticity of edge boundary value problems and reductions to the boundary. In particular, we study the edge quantisation and ellipticity for Dirichlet-Neumann operators with respect to interfaces of some codimension on a boundary. We show analogues of the Agranovich-Dynin formula for edge boundary value problems, and we establish relations of elliptic operators for different weights, via the spectral flow of the underlying conormal symbols.