No / In a world of sensory overload, it is becoming increasingly important to provide environments that enable us to recover our sense of well being. Such restorative (`tranquil¿) environments need to comprise sufficient sensory stimulation to keep us engaged, whilst at the same time providing opportunity for reflection and relaxation. One essential aspect in safeguarding existing, or developing new `tranquil space¿, is understanding the optimum relationship between the soundscape and the visual composition of a location. This research represents a first step in understanding the effects of audio-visual interaction on the perception of tranquillity and identifies how the interpretation of acoustic information is an integral part of this process. By using uni and bi-modal auditory-visual stimuli in a two stage experimental strategy, it has been possible to measure the key components of the tranquillity construct. The findings of this work should be of particular interest to those charged with landscape management, such as National Park Authorities, Regional Councils, and other agencies concerned with providing and maintaining public amenity. / EPSRC, Wellcome Trust

Yes / Tranquil environments can provide relief from stresses of everyday of life and can be considered restorative environments. This paper considers the effects of “greening” urban environments to enhance tranquillity and ultimately well-being and health benefits. A number of studies have been conducted at the Bradford Centre for Sustainable Environments at the University of Bradford which have examined the effects of natural features on ratings of tranquillity. These include quantifying the effects of the percentage of natural and contextual features and soundscape quality on rated tranquillity. Recently the resulting prediction equation TRAPT (Tranquillity Rating Prediction Tool) has been used to examine a number of scenarios including city parks and squares, country parks and moorland areas and validated using tranquillity ratings made by visitors to these green spaces and their reported levels of relaxation. In this paper TRAPT is used for predicting tranquillity in city squares of different sizes, to examine rated tranquillity behind natural (green) and manufactured noise barriers and to predict changes in urban streets of introducing avenues of trees, hedges and grass verges. Using such scenarios this paper demonstrates how the application of TRAPT can enable changes in tranquillity to be estimated. This can provide planners, environmentalists, civic leaders and concerned citizens with a further tool to guide improvements in the urban environment by “greening” measures and noise reduction of various kinds and to help counter threats such as over development, tree removal or traffic densification that might threaten existing benefits. / Bradford Centre for Sustainable Environments in the Faculty of Engineering and Informatics at the University of Bradford.

One of the biggest challenges in early childhood development (ECD) centres in rural districts is that teachers are not trained adequately and therefore they cannot create learning environments in which young children can develop to their optimal potential. In many cases a large group of children is placed in a classroom and no stimulation is given to them, because the ECD practitioner does not have the knowledge or skills to use what is available in the classroom to stimulate the children and facilitate learning. These teachers are desperately in need of guidance to plan age appropriate and suitable activities that will benefit the overall development of learners and prepare them to be ready for school. By promoting service learning at ECD centres, especially in rural districts, both the in-service and pre-service teachers will benefit from the teaching experience taking place. Since 1994 a great deal of attention has been drawn to the importance of early childhood development and the important role pre-primary education plays in the development of young learners. Early childhood development has the potential to play a crucial role in the socioeconomic transformation of South Africa. By improving the social and economic transformation of the country, more people will be educated, leading to fewer problems with aspects like school readiness and school dropout. Against this background the study will explore service learning as a way of promoting quality learning environments in Early Childhood Centres in rural districts. / MEd (Learner Support), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

One of the biggest challenges in early childhood development (ECD) centres in rural districts is that teachers are not trained adequately and therefore they cannot create learning environments in which young children can develop to their optimal potential. In many cases a large group of children is placed in a classroom and no stimulation is given to them, because the ECD practitioner does not have the knowledge or skills to use what is available in the classroom to stimulate the children and facilitate learning. These teachers are desperately in need of guidance to plan age appropriate and suitable activities that will benefit the overall development of learners and prepare them to be ready for school. By promoting service learning at ECD centres, especially in rural districts, both the in-service and pre-service teachers will benefit from the teaching experience taking place. Since 1994 a great deal of attention has been drawn to the importance of early childhood development and the important role pre-primary education plays in the development of young learners. Early childhood development has the potential to play a crucial role in the socioeconomic transformation of South Africa. By improving the social and economic transformation of the country, more people will be educated, leading to fewer problems with aspects like school readiness and school dropout. Against this background the study will explore service learning as a way of promoting quality learning environments in Early Childhood Centres in rural districts. / MEd (Learner Support), North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2015

Personal learning environments (PLEs) aim at putting the learner central stage and comprise a technological approach towards learning tools, services, and artifacts gathered from various usage contexts and to be used by learners. Due to the varying technical skills and competences of PLE users, recommendations appear to be useful for empowering learners to set up their environments so that they can connect to learner networks and collaborate on shared artifacts by using the tools available. In this paper we examine different recommender strategies on their applicability in PLE settings. After reviewing different techniques given by literature and experimenting with our prototypic PLE solution we come to the conclusion to start with an item-based strategy and extend it with model-based and iterative techniques for generating recommendations for PLEs. (author's abstract)

This thesis focuses on virtual restorative environments – specifically, the way that natural environments have been created in a virtual context to elicit beneficial effects on restoration and stress recovery. As the field of restorative environment research is mostly concerned with studying the environment itself, the interaction between participant and environment tends to consist of open exploration, and other ways to interact are often overlooked. The aim of this thesis was therefore to construct a virtual restorative environment with an additional possibility to interact, and to explore how the interaction is connected to a virtual environment’s perceived restorativeness. To gain deeper understanding about how different people perceived the virtual environments, the experiment was conducted using qualitative measures such as questionnaires, open questions and interviews. The results indicate that the perception of a virtual environment’s restorativeness is a very subjective matter, as the individual differences between the participants affected the way that they perceived the environments.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 26-29, 1998 / Town & Country Resort Hotel and Convention Center, San Diego, California / The design and testing of an optical fiber telemetry link for use in rugged environments is described. Several potential applications for this cost effective telemetry link built from readily available components are given. The results of testing the simple telemetry link for vibrations up to 20g and temperatures up to 150° C are reported.

This thesis describes a study carried out with the aim of discovering user preferences as to the design of 3-dimensional virtual worlds for accessing information. No literature was found which dealt with this topic, and it was therefore thought that, rather than ask users to make a selection from arbitrarily-chosen designs, it would be informative to consult the users from the beginning of the design process. To this end, a Grounded Theory methodology was adopted, and users were selected from postgraduate students and staff from Information Management courses at the Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen. Three “rounds” of interviews were conducted. The first round was concerned with finding out what ideas for a world design people would have, the second with testing four worlds derived from the first round, and the third with exploring further ideas that users had, based on their experience of the test worlds. At each stage of the process, emergent theories were constructed, and modified according to subsequent findings. It was established that the factors which influenced this group of users in their preferences for the design of worlds were not structural, as might have been assumed, but instead were related to properties such as familiarity, organisation, assistance, and quality of information and presentation. When the results were examined in the context of developments in the use of virtual environments, it was found that they provide a theoretical underpinning for practices such as the provision of “conventional” library structures in the popular online environment Second Life. This is not a statistical exercise, but it would appear that there are no significant differences based on the criteria of age, gender, or whether a user was staff or student. More thorough studies would be required to determine this absolutely, but for the moment it appears more useful to draw a broad set of conclusions. ii Issues were identified which indicate potentially rewarding areas for further research and design. Specifically, it would be of interest to discover whether the affective responses of these groups are also common to other groups, and to experiment further with worlds designed in the light of the current findings. Further investigation of the small number of cases in which users do not respond to the worlds would also be desirable, to determine whether this response is characteristic of a group of people who will not react positively to any world, or whether these users simply reacted negatively to the examples presented.

Modern cryptography responds to the need for security that has arisen with the emergence of communication appliances. However, its adapted integration in the wide variety of existing communication systems has opened new design challenges. Amongst them, this thesis addresses two in particular, related to hardware integration of cryptographic algorithms: constrained environments and side-channel security. In the context of constrained environments, we propose to study the interest of the Scalable Encryption Algorithm SEA for constrained hardware applications. We investigate both the FPGA and ASIC contexts and illustrate, using practical implementation results, the interest of this algorithm. Indeed, we demonstrate how hardware implementations can keep its high scalability properties while achieving interesting implementation figures in comparison to conventional algorithms such as the AES. Next, we deal with three complementary aspects related to side-channel resistance. We first propose a new class of dynamic and differential logic families achieving low-power performance with matched leakage of information to state of-the-art countermeasures. We then discuss a power consumption model for these logic styles and apply it to DyCML implementations. It is based on the use of the isomorphism existing between the gate structures of the implemented functions and the binary decision diagrams describing them. Using this model, we are not only able to predict the power consumption, and therefore attack such implementations, but also to efficiently choose the gate structures achieving the best resistance against this model. We finally study a methodology for the security evaluation of cryptographic applications all along their design and test phases. We illustrate the interest of such a methodology at different design steps and with different circuit complexity, using either simulations or power consumption measurements.

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