Maze or Labyrinth: Identifying PTSD Stressors in the Built Space of Zaatari and Calais Refugee Camps

In this study, we analyze the structure of paths within two refugee camps (Calais, France, and Zaatari, Jordan) as a preliminary study examining posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) stressors within such camps. We do so through a geospatial analysis of intersections and viewsheds within the camps. Given that anxiety, and the avoidance associated with it, is a primary characteristic of PTSD, refugees might prefer built environments with fewer stressors or anxiety triggers. This study provides a baseline for analyzing basic stressors in a way to test whether design supports anxiety-based avoidance. The planned structure of Zaatari shows a high prevalence of spatial PTSD stressors with lower visibility and a more maze-like structure than that of Calais. This suggests a coping strategy taken by refugees to produce a more suitable and less stressing labyrinth structure. To properly treat PTSD in geographical space, we suggest a need for consideration of this in the planning, function, and very existence of refugee camps and settlements.     

The Reinvention of Public Green Space

Much attention has been paid to preserving land at the urban fringe, and to the negative effects of sprawl and its costs. There is increasing recognition that enhancing green, public open spaces in cities provides a strategy to make those cities more sustainable, more livable, and more equitable. This involves a new approach to public spaces that integrates infrastructure needs, takes equity into account, and reexamines the range of uses public spaces offer. We consider the potential for urban greening through a case study in the dense inner core of Los Angeles that probed local resident attitudes and values toward a more inclusive strategy, and that measured the potential value of nature's services in the urban fabric using a GIS program.     

GEO-Environmental Suitability Evaluation of Land for Urban Construction Based on A Back-Propagation Neural Network and GIS: A Case Study of Hangzhou

Evaluating the geo-environmental suitability of land for urban construction is an important step in the analysis of urban land use potential. Using geo-environmental factors and the land use status of Hangzhou, China, a back-propagation (BP) neural network model for the evaluation of the geo-environmental suitability of land for urban construction was established with a geographic information system (GIS) and techniques of grid, geospatial, and BP neural network analysis. Four factor groups, comprising nine separate subfactors of geo-environmental features, were selected for the model: geomorphic type, slope, site soil type, stratum steadiness, Holocene saturated soft soil depth, groundwater abundance, groundwater salinization, geologic hazard type, and geologic hazard degree. With the support of the model, the geo-environmental suitability of Hangzhou land for urban construction was divided into four suitability zones: zone I, suitable for super high-rise and high-rise buildings; zone II, suitable for multi-story buildings; zone III, suitable for low-rise buildings; and zone IV, not suitable for buildings. The results showed that a BP neural network can capture the complex non-linear relationships between the evaluation factors and the suitability level, and these results will support scientific decision-making for urban-construction land planning, management, and rational land use in Hangzhou.     

Forest fire risk maps: a GIS open source application – a case study in Norwest of Portugal

Forest fires are widely recognized as one of the most critical events in global change. Successful fire management depends on effective fire prevention, detection, and presuppression, having an adequate fire suppression capability, and consideration of fire ecology relationships. Geographical information systems (GIS) provide tools to create, transform, and combine georeferenced variables. In Portugal, as in many other countries, it is mandatory that all the municipalities produce forest fire risk maps on an annual basis, following the rules of the Portuguese Forest Authority, a governmental association. This article presents the results of a research project aimed at producing forest fire risk maps in a GIS open source environment in Portugal. The requirements of an open source application are better quality, higher reliability, more flexibility, lower cost, and an end to predatory vendor lock-in. Three different open source desktop GIS software projects were evaluated: Quantum GIS (QGIS), generalitat valenciana, Sistema d'Informacio Geografica, and Kosmo. Taking into account the skills and experience of the authors, the main advantage of QGIS relies on the easiness and quickness in developing new plug-ins, using Python language. Therefore, this project was developed in QGIS platform and the interface was created in Python. This application incorporates seven procedures under a single toolbar. The production of the forest fire risk map comprises several steps and the production of several maps: probability, susceptibility, hazard, vulnerability, economic value, potential loss, and finally the forest fire risk map. The forest fire risk map comprises five classes: very low risk (dark green), low risk (green), medium risk (yellow), high risk (orange), and very high risk (red). This application was tested in three different municipal governments of the Norwest zone of Portugal. This application has the advantages of grouping in a unique toolbar all the procedures needed to produce forest fire risk maps and is free for the institution/user. Beyond being an open source application, this application may be faster and easier when compared with the GIS proprietary solutions that usually comprise several steps and the use of different software extensions. This work presents several contributions for the area of the GIS open source applications to forest fire risk management.     

An active crawler for discovering geospatial Web services and their distribution pattern – A case study of OGC Web Map Service

The increased popularity of standards for geospatial interoperability has led to an increasing number of geospatial Web services (GWSs), such as Web Map Services (WMSs), becoming publicly available on the Internet. However, finding the services in a quick and precise fashion is still a challenge. Traditional methods collect the services through centralized registries, where services can be manually registered. But the metadata of the registered services cannot be updated timely. This paper addresses the above challenges by developing an effective crawler to discover and update the services in (1) proposing an accumulated term frequency (ATF)–based conditional probability model for prioritized crawling, (2) utilizing concurrent multi-threading technique, and (3) adopting an automatic mechanism to update the metadata of identified services. Experiments show that the proposed crawler achieves good performance in both crawling efficiency and results' coverage/liveliness. In addition, an interesting finding regarding the distribution pattern of WMSs is discussed. We expect this research to contribute to automatic GWS discovery over the large-scale and dynamic World Wide Web and the promotion of operational interoperable distributed geospatial services.     

Advance hydrological studies utilizing open access internet databases

This paper introduces three web‐based databases relating to hydrological and water resources studies in the United States of America with the intention of promoting public awareness of their existence. These open access databases are the products of efforts taken by federal and state governments to make government‐owned data more accessible to the general public. The megadata sets of climate, surface water, groundwater, and water quality contained in these databases provide hydrologists and environmental scientists with unprecedented opportunities to conduct research across multiple regions and on different scales.     

A high‐frequency open boundary for transient seepage analyses of semi‐infinite layers by extending the scaled boundary finite element method

A high‐frequency open boundary has been developed for the transient seepage analyses of semi‐infinite layers with a constant depth. The scaled boundary finite element equation of pore water pressure is formulated first in the frequency domain. With the eigenvalue problem, the equation can be decoupled into modal equations whose modal dynamic permeability equation can be determined. The continued fraction technique is adopted to formulate the continued fraction solution in the frequency domain. All constants in the solution are determined recursively at the high‐frequency limit. By introducing auxiliary variables and the continued fraction solution to the relationship between the prescribed seepage flow and the pore water pressure in the frequency domain, the open boundary condition is obtained. After transformed to the time domain, the open boundary condition is expressed as a system of fractional differential equations. No convolution integral is required. The accuracy of the analysis results increases with the increasing orders of continued fraction. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Simulation of floor response spectra in shake table experiments

Among several different experimental techniques, used to test the response of structures and to verify their seismic performance, the shake table testing allows to reproduce the conditions of true effects of earthquake ground motions in order to challenge complex model structures and systems. However, the reproduction of dynamic signals, due to the dynamics of the shake table and of the specimen, is usually imperfect even though closed‐loop control in a shake table system is used to reduce these errors and obtain the best fidelity reproduction. Furthermore, because of the dynamic amplifications in the specimen, the signal recorded at desired locations could be completely different from the expected effect of shake table motion. This paper focuses on the development of practical shake table simulations using additional ‘open loop’ feedforward compensation in form of inverse transfer functions (i.e. the ratio of the output structural response to an input base motion in the frequency domain) in order to obtain an acceptable reproduction of desired acceleration histories at specific locations in the specimen. As the first step, a well‐known global feedforward procedure is reformulated for the compensation of the table motion distortions due to the servo‐hydraulic system. Subsequently, the same concept is extended to the table‐structure system to adjust the shake table input in order to achieve a desired response spectrum at any floor of the specimen. Implementations show how such a method can be used in any experimental facility. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

电感耦合等离子体光谱法测定黄铁矿和黄铜矿中的铁铜硫

样品用王水水浴和HCl-HNO3-HF-HClO4敞开酸溶两种溶矿方式分解,电感耦合等离子体发射光谱法(ICP-AES)测定黄铜矿和黄铁矿中铁、铜、硫。应用称重法配制标准溶液,明显地降低了在标准溶液在逐级稀释过程中由于体积读数等原因产生的误差。样品用王水水浴分解,消解时间短,试剂加入量少,分析步骤简单;由于硫化矿石中Fe的一部分可能与Si结合,王水无法将其全部溶解,对于Fe的测定采用混合酸敞开酸溶。王水水浴溶矿方式选择浓王水作为溶剂,在混合酸敞开溶矿方式的溶解盐类阶段选择浓HCl作为溶剂。确定了ICP-AES法测定高含量(x%～xx%)的铁、铜、硫适用的光谱谱线,稀释倍数为1000。两种样品处理方法操作简便,准确度好,精密度高。经国家一级标准物质GBW 07267(黄铁矿)、GBW 07268(黄铜矿)验证,经混合酸敞开酸溶处理后硫的测定结果偏低,准确度分别为-9.48%和-18%,铁和铜的精密度(RSD,n=5)均小于2%。GBW 07268(黄铁矿)、GBW 07267(黄铜矿)用王水水浴法处理,连续测定10次的短期稳定性,精密度(RSD)小于2%。     

开放系统下饱和正冻土热质迁移的数值分析

引人Heaviside阶梯函数和Z函数使得冻结区和未冻区的导水系数、导热系数、体积热容量和土水势可以用统一的公式表达,提出了开放系统下饱和土在冻结过程中热质迁移的数学模型．对一个侧面绝热的圆柱土样的热质迁移过程进行了计算机模拟,结果表明：温度变化速率、冻结速率和温度梯度随时间减小,在冻结锋面附件温度分布曲线有拐点,冻结...