The concept of deliberation, both theoretically and empirically, was examined in the Chinese blogosphere by content analyzing Internet blog posts and comments, associated with sixty hotspot incidents in China from 2007 through 2009. Measurements of analytic and social processes were made and the factors that affect these processes were examined to identify deliberative patterns in the blog posts and comments. The findings suggest relatively substantial deliberative outcomes in the blog posts about the incidents, especially relating to the analytic process. Two variables were examined with respect to the factors that determine deliberation: an incident’s category (non-threatening, threat to performance, and threat to legitimacy) as classified under the command and control system, and information availability (news availability and total information availability) about the incident. Findings support the theoretical framework proposed in the study and suggest the following logical sequences: Firstly, the Chinese command and control system is a significant factor in explaining deliberative outcomes about incidents that can be categorized according to their level of considered threat to the system. An incident that was considered to be at a higher level of threat linked to a higher level of deliberation. Secondly, the command and control system also determines the information availability of an incident but in a negative way— incidents with higher threat levels have lower levels of information availability. Thirdly, information availability, in turn, predicted deliberation on its own—higher levels of information availability link to lower levels of deliberation. Moreover, information availability functioned as a moderating variable between the command and control system and the deliberative outcomes. Posts that were associated with non-threatening and threat to performance incidents, with higher levels of information availability, tended to have a lower quality of deliberation. Posts associated with incidents that were a threat to legitimacy, with lower level of information availability, yielded similar deliberative patterns that were of relatively high quality. / text

Long-wavelength magnetic anomalies (LWMA) are broad scale magnetic fields that are usually observed at satellite altitudes. The origin of these fields have been assumed to be solely from the crust, disregarding possible contributions from the upper mantle. Using data from magnetic mantle xenoliths, the possible mantle contribution to LWMA was investigated for different regions including Siberian craton, Kamchatka subduction zone fore-arc, Hawaii hotspot, and French Massif Central plume. To do this, a MATLAB-based forward-modeling of magnetic anomalies from tectonic regions with different upper mantle geotherms and magnetized mantle geometries was developed. This model incorporated the increase in Curie temperature of magnetite with pressure, the current geotherms of the specific regions, and the statistical distributions of magnetic data from xenoliths in the specific regions. A Monte-Carlo method of random selection of values and repeated calculations was utilized in constraining the range of potential mantle contributions to satellite-observable LWMA. The Siberian craton shows the highest possible contribution to satellite magnetic anomalies with amplitudes ranging from 2 nT to 9 nT, with a wavelength equivalent to the long-axis of the craton. The Hawaii hotspot region displays a significant contribution of its upper mantle to satellite measured magnetic anomalies with an amplitude of the order of 2 nT, while the Massif Central plume regions shows an insignificant contribution of its upper mantle to satellite magnetic anomalies with potential total magnetic anomaly amplitude of 0.07 nT. Finally, the mantle portion of Kamchatka subduction zone shows a sizeable contribution to magnetic anomalies measurable at satellite altitude with an amplitude up to 1.3 nT. These results when compared with lithospheric total field intensity model derived from SWARM satellite data, show that the upper mantle can contribute significantly to LWMA depending on (a) the average remanent magnetization in xenoliths from such regions, (b) the thickness of magnetized mantle, and (c) the size of the region under consideration.

Submitted by Divisão de Documentação/BC Biblioteca Central (ddbc@ufam.edu.br) on 2018-08-02T19:34:54Z No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) DISSERTAÇÃO - EDSON RODRIGUES COSTA -- PPG-ZOOL.pdf: 2118975 bytes, checksum: b9c9f5cbb00a306e3137c47f77f86c36 (MD5) / Approved for entry into archive by Divisão de Documentação/BC Biblioteca Central (ddbc@ufam.edu.br) on 2018-08-02T19:35:12Z (GMT) No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) DISSERTAÇÃO - EDSON RODRIGUES COSTA -- PPG-ZOOL.pdf: 2118975 bytes, checksum: b9c9f5cbb00a306e3137c47f77f86c36 (MD5) / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-02T19:35:37Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license_rdf: 0 bytes, checksum: d41d8cd98f00b204e9800998ecf8427e (MD5) DISSERTAÇÃO - EDSON RODRIGUES COSTA -- PPG-ZOOL.pdf: 2118975 bytes, checksum: b9c9f5cbb00a306e3137c47f77f86c36 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2018-06-05 / FAPEAM - Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado do Amazonas / The construction of highways is important for the economic, social and political development of a region, but they threaten biodiversity in promoting impacts, such as roadkills. With the fragmentation of the habitats, the arboreal animals are among the most hit vertebrates, among them are the Neotropical marsupials, mainly on highways that cut the Amazon forest. Roadkills are attributed to several factors, and such collisions may occur in a non-random manner. Our objectives were to investigate the effects of rainfall and vehicle flow on marsupial roadkills and to identify sites with roadkills hotspots on a stretch of the road BR-174 in the Waimiri Atroari Indigenous Land, between Amazonas and Roraima. Data collected over six years of monitoring were used. These were used in multiple regression analyzes to see the possible relation of roadkills with local rainfall data and overnight vehicle flows, as well as spatial analysis of roadkills. The individuals collected in the last year were identified. The multiple regression analysis showed that roadkills tended to increase in the period with less rainfall and in the period with more vehicles traveling at night. The locations where the hotspots of roadkills occurred, were identified, and these appeared in different places between the analyzed years. As measures that may mitigate roadkills of arboreal animals in the study area, on both sides of the highway it is necessary the maintenance and plantations of native trees with potential for forming natural walkways with their canopy. In addition, the installation of artificial bridges and speed reducers in specific locations as the natural passages form. However, landscape studies and populations of marsupials and other groups, are needed to better understand the causes and to assist in decision-making and conservation of local biodiversity. / A construção de rodovias é importante para o desenvolvimento econômico, social e político de uma região, porém, ameaçam a biodiversidade com diferentes impactos, como os atropelamentos. Com a fragmentação dos habitats, os animais arborícolas estão entre os vertebrados mais atropelados, dentre estes estão os marsupiais neotropicais, principalmente nas rodovias que cortam a floresta amazônica. Os atropelamentos são atribuídos a vários fatores e as colisões podem ocorrer de forma não-aleatória. Nossos objetivos foram investigar o efeito da pluviosidade e do fluxo de veículos para os atropelamentos de marsupiais e identificar locais com hotspots de atropelamentos num trecho da BR-174, na Terra Indígena Waimiri Atroari, entre os estados de Amazonas e Roraima. Foram usados dados georreferenciados coletados em seis anos de monitoramento. Estes foram usados nas análises de regressão múltipla confrontando-os com dados de pluviosidade local e de fluxo de veículos do período noturno, assim como nas análises espaciais dos atropelamentos. Foram identificados os indivíduos coletados no último ano de coleta. A análise de regressão múltipla mostrou que os atropelamentos tendem a aumentar em período com menos chuvas e em período com mais veículos trafegando à noite. Foram identificados os hotspots de atropelamentos, sendo que esses surgiram em locais diferentes entre os anos analisados. Como medidas que mitiguem atropelamentos de animais arborícolas na área de estudo, em ambas as margens da rodovia é necessário a manutenção e plantação de árvores nativas com potencial para formação de passarelas naturais. Além disso, sugerimos a instalação de pontes artificiais e redutores de velocidade em locais específicos enquanto as passagens naturais se formem. Contudo, estudos de paisagem e de populações de marsupiais e de outros grupos são necessários, para melhor compreensão das causas dos atropelamentos, para que possam auxiliar nas tomadas de decisões e de conservação da biodiversidade local.

Master of Science / Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering / Don M. Gruenbacher / The method for communicating within an interconnection network, or fabric of connections between nodes, can be as diverse as are the applications which utilize them. Because of dynamic traffic loads on these interconnection networks, fully-adaptive routing algorithms have been shown to exploit locality while balancing loads and softening the effects of hot-spots. One issue which has been overlooked is the impact of data traveling along the periphery of a selected minimal routable quadrant (MRQ) within these fully-adaptive algorithms. As data aligns with the destination in the x, y, and z dimensions for instance, the data then traverses the periphery of an MRQ. For each dimension that this occurs, the data is given one less choice for routing around hotspots which could appear later along the path. By weighting the decision of selecting a next-hop by avoiding the periphery of the selected MRQ, the data then has more options for avoiding hotspots. One hybridized routing algorithm which borrows heavily from CQR (an efficient and stable fully-adaptive algorithm), is introduced within this work. Enhanced CQR with Periphery Avoidance, attempts to weight the routing decision for a next hop using both output queues and the proximity to the periphery of the MRQ. This fully-adaptive algorithm is tested using simulations and a laboratory research cluster using a USB interconnect in the hypercube topology. It is also compared against other static, oblivious, and adaptive algorithms. Thor's Tack Hammer, the Kansas State University research cluster, is also benchmarked and discussed as an inexpensive and dependable parallel system.

Orientador: Tiago da Silveira Vasconcelos / Resumo: A ecologia geográfica atua na busca por padrões da diversidade biológica que podem ser mapeados, sendo que o mapeamento de diferentes métricas compreende em um dos padrões da macroecologia como a determinação da distribuição global da diversidade beta de diversos organismos. O objetivo deste trabalho foi mapear o padrão de distribuição dos índices diversidade beta dos anuros da Mata Atlântica e do Cerrado utilizando 3 métodos de mapeamento; point-to-grid (PTG), mapas de extensão de ocorrência (EOO) e modelagem de nicho climático (ENM) e comparar esses a congruência desses padrões em cada método e avaliar como estruturação da diversidade beta com os componentes “aninhamento” e ‘’troca de espécies’’ variam de acordo com cada mapeamento. O método PTG, por ser um método de caráter pontual, vemos maior proporção de ausência de dados de ocorrência no sistema de grids das duas regiões. No Cerrado vemos valores altos da contribuição local da diversidade beta (Local Contribution to beta diversity: LCBD) nas regiões de ecótones enquanto na Mata Atlântica vemos valores maiores nas regiões costeiras. Os métodos ENM e EOO apresentaram uma congruência maior entre si do que com o método PTG nas duas regiões. A estruturação da diversidade beta mostrou que os métodos ENM e EOO apresentam valores maiores para o componente de “troca de espécies”, mas não tão alto do que a diversidade beta gerada por PTG. Com isso podemos ver que todos os métodos possuem seus defeitos e qualidadem, porém, na urg... (Resumo completo, clicar acesso eletrônico abaixo) / Abstract: The geographical ecology aims to seek patterns of biological diversity that can be put on a map, such as the mapping of beta diversity gradients in a biogeographical scale of a range of organisms. The aim of this Dissertation is to map the distribution patterns of anuran beta diversity in the Atlantic Forest and Cerrado generated by three different mapping methods: point-to-grid (PTG), extent of occurrence maps (EOO), and ecological niche modelling (ENM), so we were able to compare the congruence of the beta diversity index generated by these different mapping methods. Moreover, we evaluate the turnover and nestedness components of the beta diversity among the mapping methods. PTG maps generated the most incongruent mapsprobably due to the punctual characteristics of species occurrences, so EEO and ENM generated similar beta diversity estimates for the Atlantic Forestand Cerrado. High beta diversity values in the Cerradowere recorded in ecotone regions, whereas in the Atlantic Forestthe highest beta diversity values were found along the Atlantic coast. The structure of beta diversity of PTG showed way too high values of importance for the turnover component compared to the EEO and ENM maps, which also recorded higher importance for turnover. Our results suggest that, for biogeographical and macroecological purposes, the use of PTG maps is unsuitable due to the high rates of omission erros. Then, in light of urgency of biogeographical conservation studies of threatened regions... (Complete abstract click electronic access below) / Mestre

Crime is not spread evenly over space or time. This suggests that offenders favour certain areas and/or certain times. People base their daily activities on this notion and make decisions to avoid certain areas or feel the need to be more alert in some places rather than others. Even when making choices of where to stay, shop, and go to school, people take into account how safe they feel in those places. Crime in relation to space and time has been studied over several centuries; however, the era of the computer has brought new insight to this field. Indeed, computing technology and in particular geographic information systems (GIS) and crime mapping software, has increased the interest in explaining criminal activities. It is the ability to combine the type, time and spatial occurrences of crime events that makes the use of these computing technologies attractive to crime analysts. This current study predicts robbery crime events in the City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality. By combining GIS and statistical models, a proposed method was developed to predict future robbery hotspots. More specifically, a robbery probability model was developed for the City of Tshwane Metropolitan Municipality based on robbery events that occurred during 2006 and this model is evaluated using actual robbery events that occurred in the 2007. This novel model was based on the social disorganisation, routine activity, crime pattern and temporal constraint crime theories. The efficacy of the model was tested by comparing it to a traditional hotspot model. The robbery prediction model was developed using both built and social environmental features. Features in the built environment were divided into two main groups: facilities and commuter nodes. The facilities used in the current study included cadastre parks, clothing stores, convenience stores, education facilities, fast food outlets, filling stations, office parks and blocks, general stores, restaurants, shopping centres and supermarkets. The key commuter nodes consisted of highway nodes, main road nodes and railway stations. The social environment was built using demographics obtained from the 2001 census data. The selection of these features that may impact the occurrence of robbery was guided by spatial crime theories housed within the school of environmental criminology. Theories in this discipline argue that neighbourhoods experiencing social disorganisation are more prone to crime, while different facilities act as crime attractors or generators. Some theories also include a time element suggesting that criminals are constrained by time, leaving little time to explore areas far from commuting nodes. The current study combines these theories using GIS and statistics. A programmatic approach in R was used to create kernel density estimations (hotspots), select relevant features, compute regression models with the use of the caret and mlr packages and predict crime hotspots. R was further used for the majority of spatial queries and analyses. The outcome consisted of various hotspot raster layers predicting future robbery occurrences. The accuracy of the model was tested using 2007 robbery events. Therefore, this current study not only provides a novel statistical predictive model but also showcases R’s spatial capabilities. The current study found strong supporting evidence for the routine activity and crime pattern theory in that robberies tended to cluster around facilities within the city of Tshwane, South Africa. The findings also show a strong spatial association between robberies and neighbourhoods that experience high social disorganisation. Support was also found for the time constraint theory in that a large portion of robberies occur in the immediate vicinity of highway nodes, main road nodes and railway stations. When tested against the traditional hotspot model the robbery probability model was found slightly less effective in predicting future events. However, the current study showcases the effectiveness of the robbery probability model which can be improved upon and used in future studies to determine the effect that future urban development will have on crime. / Dissertation (MSc)--University of Pretoria, 2020. / Geography, Geoinformatics and Meteorology / MSc / Unrestricted

Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis (IUPUI) / Social harm involves incidents resulting in physical, financial, and emotional hardships such as crime, drug overdoses and abuses, traffic accidents, and suicides. These incidents require various law-enforcement and emergency responding agencies to coordinate together for mitigating their impact on the society. With the advent of advanced networking and computing technologies together with data analytics, law-enforcement agencies and people in the community can work together to proactively reduce social harm. With the aim of effectively mitigating social harm events in communities, this thesis introduces a distributed web application, Community Data Analytic for Social Harm (CDASH). CDASH helps in collecting social harm data from heterogenous sources, analyzing the data for predicting social harm risks in the form of geographic hotspots and conveying the risks to law-enforcement agencies. Since various stakeholders including the police, community organizations and citizens can interact with CDASH, a need for a trust framework arises, to avoid fraudulent or mislabeled incidents from misleading CDASH. The enhanced system, called Trusted-CDASH (T-CDASH), superimposes a trust estimation framework on top of CDASH. This thesis discusses the importance and necessity of associating a degree of trust with each social harm incident reported to T-CDASH. It also describes the trust framework with different trust models that can be incorporated for assigning trust while examining their impact on prediction accuracy of future social harm events. The trust models are empirically validated by running simulations on historical social harm data of Indianapolis metro area.

Arbetet har syftat till att undersöka om brottsförebyggande åtgärder i den fysiska miljön kan vara en del av lösningen på trygghets- och brottsproblematiken i en socioekonomiskt utsatt stadsdel. För att kunna besvara syftet besvarades två uppställda forskningsfrågor. Den första forskningsfrågan styrde arbetet till att identifiera platser med hög koncentration av brottslighet (hotspots) i Araby samt att identifiera och diskutera hur hotspotsens fysiska miljö, enligt CPTED, bidrar till en minskad trygghetskänsla och en ökad risk för brottslighet. Den andra frågeställningen styrde arbetet till att föreslå åtgärdsförslag som, enligt CPTED, kommer att stärka hotspotsens trygghetskänsla och minska platsernas brottslighet. Arbetets empiriska data består av kvalitativ data som samlades in genom platsanalyser samt genom en forskningsöversikt. Syftet med platsanalyserna var att identifiera vilka brister hotspotsens fysiska miljö har enligt CPTED. Forskningsöversikten syftade till att studera och sammanställa undersökta forskningsarbetens slutsatser om trygghet, säkerhet, hur den fysiska miljön påverkar tryggheten och minskad brottslighet, CPTED och utsatta områden. Detta studerades genom att undersöka texttyperna avhandlingar, facklitteratur, rapporter samt vetenskapliga artiklar.  Arbetet kunde identifiera två hotspots i Araby. Dessa hotspots benämndes som 1) Område A och 2) Område B. Med hjälp av platsanalyserna och resultaten från forskningsöversikten konstaterades det att hotspotsen:s fysiska miljö har brister som, enligt CPTED, minskar trygghetskänslan och ökar risken för att brottsliga handlingar kommer att genomföras. Utifrån de identifierade bristerna presenterade arbetet åtgärdsförslag utifrån CPTED:s sex principer. Åtgärdsförslagen berör exempelvis vikten av informell och formell övervakning, vikten av en territorialgräns och vikten av en god image. De föreslagna åtgärderna grundar sig på, och motiveras, med hjälp av platsanalysernas och forskningsöversiktens resultat.

Whereas disability is a significant risk factor and contributor to various chronic conditions that lead to decline in the quality of life and to early death among older US Armed Forces veterans (> 64 years), little research exists focused on more granular levels of analysis to determine community level risk factors (such as rurality) associated with disability prevalence. A quantitative and cross-sectional design used 2010 – 2014 and 2015 – 2019 data sets from the United States Census Bureau American Community Survey. Results obtained have shown that disability is most prevalent among the older (>64) veteran population, overtime, rates are getting worse, rural areas are most affected, and primary care physicians are needed in areas where rates of disability is high. The findings help to improve our understanding of disability prevalence among older veterans and non-veterans and provide a foundation for the development and implementation of appropriate geographically targeted policy and program interventions to support the development and enhancement of services made at the federal, state, and local/community levels. Through effective interventions, the risk of having increased rates of poor health status, poor quality of life, and risk of death can be reduced substantially, particularly among older veterans in rural areas of the United States.

There has been an overwhelming interest in public Wi-Fi due to the increasing number of mobile users and a growing perception that Wi-Fi provides better connection experience at lower costs. Moreover, end users increasingly expect Wi-Fi to be free, thereby motivating a strong transition in leading markets to provide free-to-the-end-user Wi-Fi. Providing free internet to the users is a challenge as potential solutions must be self-sustainable and provide sufficient financial returns. Framework for Advertisement-based Community Wi-Fi access, called FRAC is a self-sustainable advertisement-based community network sharing framework which has the competence to provide significant financial returns. FRAC provides free internet access to its users by motivating Wi-Fi access point (AP) owners to share their internet service for benefits. FRAC builds on privately or commercially-owned, existing Wi-Fi infrastructure. The users accessing the internet using this framework provide a strong customer base for online marketing and advertising which provides the revenue to sustain this framework. This thesis describes the design and implementation of a prototype of the FRAC system. The design of key features of the framework such as user authentication, advertisement delivery, quality of service, messaging and security, are described, based on which an overall design of the framework is provided. The prototype developed includes a browser extension to support browser-based devices like laptops, netbooks and embeddable software that can be installed on wireless routers with Linux-based dd-wrt firmware. / Master of Science