Search Results (20)

As part of the post-conflict reconstruction and recovery, the development of Kabul New City aims to bring relief to the existing capital city, Kabul, which has experienced exponential population growth, putting heavy pressure on its existing resources. Kabul New City is divided into four subsectors, and each of them is being developed and is expected to reach a target population by 2025, as defined by the master plan. The study’s objective is to determine which of the four zones are in demand and need to be prioritized for development, as per the model results. The data collection involves an online questionnaire, and the responses are collected from residents of Kabul and Herat. Agent-based modeling (ABM) is an emerging method of simulating urban dynamics. Cities are evolving continuously and are forming unique spatial patterns that result from the movement of residents in search of new locations that accommodate their needs and preferences. An agent-based model is developed using the weighted random selection process based on household size and income levels. The agents are the residents of Kabul and Herat, and the environment is the land use classification image using the Sentinel 2 image of Kabul New City. The barren class is treated as the developable area and is divided into four sub-sectors. The model simulates three alternative growth rate scenarios, i.e., ambitious, moderate, and steady. The results of the simulation reveal that the sub-sector Dehsabz South, being closer to Kabul city, is in higher demand. Barikab is another sub-sector high in demand, which has connectivity through the highway and is an upcoming industrial hub. Full article

Addressing the urgent need for sustainable energy transitions in rural development while achieving the dual carbon goals, this study focuses on resolving critical challenges in agricultural photovoltaic (PV) applications, including land-use conflicts, compound energy demands (electricity, heating, cooling), and financial constraints among farmers. To tackle these issues, a dual-mode cost–benefit analysis framework was developed, integrating two distinct investment models: self-invested construction (SIC), where farmers independently finance and manage the system, and energy performance contracting (EPC), where third-party investors fund infrastructure through shared energy-saving or revenue agreements. Then, an integrated photovoltaic-storage agricultural greenhouse (PSAG) microgrid optimization model is established, synergizing renewable energy generation, battery storage, and demand-side management while incorporating operational mode selection. The proposed model is validated through a real-world case study of a village agricultural greenhouse in Gannan, China, characterized by typical rural energy profiles and climatic conditions. Simulation results demonstrate that the optimal system configuration requires 27.91 kWh energy storage capacity and 18.67 kW peak output, with annualized post-depreciation costs of 81,083.69 yuan (SIC) and 74,216.22 yuan (EPC). The key findings reveal that energy storage integration reduces operational costs by 8.5% compared to non-storage scenarios, with the EPC model achieving 9.3% greater cost-effectiveness than SIC through shared-investment mechanisms. The findings suggest that incorporating an energy storage system reduces costs for farmers, with the EPC model offering greater cost savings. Full article

Deforestation in Colombia, driven by armed conflict and illicit crops, triggered an environmental crisis, particularly in the Caribbean region, where forest loss in areas such as the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta degraded ecosystems, reduced carbon sequestration, and increased soil erosion, threatening biodiversity and local food security. In response, the Arhuaco Indigenous community implemented an ethnic territorial management system to restore degraded lands and safeguard their ancestral territory. This study evaluates the effectiveness of their efforts, supporting their call for territorial expansion by analyzing forest cover changes (1973–2023) in the Tucurinca and Aracataca river basins. Using Landsat imagery, remote sensing, and a maximum likelihood algorithm, we generated thematic maps and statistical vegetation change data, validated by a 91.4% accuracy rate (kappa coefficient and confusion matrices). Results demonstrate significant forest recovery, highlighting collective reforestation and Indigenous sustainable management as pivotal strategies for reversing deforestation in post-conflict scenarios. Full article

Background/Objectives: The potential of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) to augment clinical consultation services in clinical microbiology and infectious diseases (ID) is being evaluated. Methods: This cross-sectional study evaluated the performance of four GenAI chatbots (GPT-4.0, a Custom Chatbot based on GPT-4.0, Gemini Pro, and Claude 2) by analysing 40 unique clinical scenarios. Six specialists and resident trainees from clinical microbiology or ID units conducted randomised, blinded evaluations across factual consistency, comprehensiveness, coherence, and medical harmfulness. Results: Analysis showed that GPT-4.0 achieved significantly higher composite scores compared to Gemini Pro (p = 0.001) and Claude 2 (p = 0.006). GPT-4.0 outperformed Gemini Pro and Claude 2 in factual consistency (Gemini Pro, p = 0.02; Claude 2, p = 0.02), comprehensiveness (Gemini Pro, p = 0.04; Claude 2, p = 0.03), and the absence of medical harm (Gemini Pro, p = 0.02; Claude 2, p = 0.04). Within-group comparisons showed that specialists consistently awarded higher ratings than resident trainees across all assessed domains (p < 0.001) and overall composite scores (p < 0.001). Specialists were five times more likely to consider responses as “harmless”. Overall, fewer than two-fifths of AI-generated responses were deemed “harmless”. Post hoc analysis revealed that specialists may inadvertently disregard conflicting or inaccurate information in their assessments. Conclusions: Clinical experience and domain expertise of individual clinicians significantly shaped the interpretation of AI-generated responses. In our analysis, we have demonstrated disconcerting human vulnerabilities in safeguarding against potentially harmful outputs, which seemed to be most apparent among experienced specialists. At the current stage, none of the tested AI models should be considered safe for direct clinical deployment in the absence of human supervision. Full article

Connected autonomous vehicles (CAVs) face constraints from multiple traffic elements, such as the vehicle, road, and environmental factors. Accurately quantifying the vehicle’s operational status and driving risk level in complex traffic scenarios is crucial for enhancing the efficiency and safety of connected autonomous driving. To continuously and dynamically quantify the driving risks faced by CAVs in the road environment—arising from the front, rear, and lateral directions—this study focused s on the self-driving particle characteristics that enable CAVs to perceive their surrounding environment and make driving decisions. The vehicle-to-vehicle interaction behavior was analogized to the inter-molecular interaction relationship, and a molecular Morse potential model was applied, coupled with the vehicle dynamics theory. This approach considers the safety margin and the specificity of driving styles. A multi-layer decoder–encoder long short-term memory (LSTM) network was employed to predict vehicle trajectories and establish a risk quantification model for vehicle-to-vehicle interaction behavior. Using SUMO software (win64-1.11.0), three typical driving behavior scenarios—car-following, lane-changing, and yielding—were modeled. A comparative analysis was conducted between the risk field quantification method and existing risk quantification indicators such as post-encroachment time (PET), deceleration rate to avoid crash (DRAC), modified time to collision (MTTC), and safety potential fields (SPFs). The evaluation results demonstrate that the risk field quantification method has the advantage of continuously quantifying risk, addressing the limitations of traditional risk indicators, which may yield discontinuous results when conflict points disappear. Furthermore, when the half-life parameter is reasonably set, the method exhibits more stable evaluation performance. This research provides a theoretical basis for the dynamic equilibrium control of driving risks in connected autonomous vehicle fleets within mixed-traffic environments, offering insights and references for collision avoidance design. Full article

Background: Youth violence that takes place within school settings exposes youth to serious social, mental and physical consequences that affect education performance, and life opportunities. Previous work shows positive youth development frameworks can promote social-emotional learning by enhancing empathy and building problem-solving and conflict management skills. Theater-based interventions have been shown to enhance social emotional development by privileging youth voices, and building youth capacities and strengths. The current manuscript presents the evaluation of an arts-based and public health framework conducted to assess the development, implementation and impact of a forum theater production, Say Something, Do Something (SSDS) in St. Louis, Missouri. Methods: An iterative mixed methods approach was used, starting with observations of productions. Using convenience sampling, we then conducted post interviews of the theater team (n = 8) and school personnel (n = 10). Results: Respondents highlighted that as a result of engagement of school personnel in program development, the language and scenarios presented were relevant to students. Data indicated that SSDS increased student knowledge and changed attitudes, developed student conflict management and problem-solving skills, and improved interpersonal behavior. SSDS also raised awareness of the importance of, and created the foundation for, additional system and policy changes in the schools. Conclusion and implications: Forum theater is an approach that can enhance socio-emotional learning and conflict management among youth. Collaborative initiatives between public health and the arts are poised to uniquely engage community partners, animate interventions, and impact critical public health issues including youth violence prevention. Full article

This study investigates the use of ultra-wideband (UWB) tags in traffic conflict techniques (TCT) for the estimation of time occupancy in a real-world setting. This study describes UWB technology and its application in the TCT framework. Many experiments were conducted to evaluate the accuracy of the occupancy time measurement using a UWB-based tag. The UWB performance was measured using data from UWB tags as well as a video camera system by subtracting the time occupancy within a conflict zone. The results show that the UWB-based system can be utilized to estimate occupancy time with a mean absolute error difference from ground truth measurements of 0.43 s in the case of using two tags and 0.06 s in the case of using one tag in an 8 m × 8 m study area with double-sided two-way communication. This study also highlights the advantages and limitations of using UWB technology in TCT and discusses potential applications and future research directions. The findings of this study suggest that the UWB-based localization of multiple tags needs further improvements to enable consistent multi-tag tracking. In future work, this technology could be utilized to estimate post-encroachment time (PET) in various traffic scenarios, which could improve road safety and reduce the risk of collisions. Full article

Within the last three years, the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak has contributed to changing many aspects of individual and collective life. Focusing on professional life, the forced shift to remote working modalities, the consequent blurring of work–family (WF) boundaries, and the difficulties for parents in childrearing have significantly impacted family routines. These challenges have been more evident for some specific vulnerable categories of workers, such as dual-earner parents. Accordingly, the WF literature investigated the antecedents and outcomes of WF dynamics, highlighting positive and negative aspects of digital opportunities that may affect WF variables and their consequences on workers’ well-being. In view of the above, the present study aims to investigate the key role of WF conflict and WF balance in mediating the relationship between technostress and work exhaustion. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was used to examine direct and indirect relationships among technostress, WF conflict, WF balance, and work exhaustion. Respondents were 376 Italian workers, specifically dual-earner parents who have at least one child. Results and implications are discussed with specific reference to the organizational policies and interventions that could be developed to manage technostress and WF conflict, fostering individual and social adjustment to the new normal. Full article

The experience of adaptation and instability to a plurality of threats that question the life of human beings on the planet, from the post-pandemic to political conflicts, up to the danger looming in the background—the upheavals expected from climate change—impose a reflection that recognizes that landscape/cultural heritage plays a key role in preservation/enhancement as a specific resource for its “human-centered development”, based on values included. These threats are challenges in which phenomena that require solidarity and common actions are faced, which should lead humans to cooperate to face them. The European Landscape Convention of 2000 attributed an important role to the landscape, as an “essential component of the life context of peoples”. The phase of listening to the territory and participatory and co-design processes are necessary tools for understanding the expectations and perceptions of the communities, co-exploring possible new uses of the landscape, being capable of generating added value for all stakeholders, and adopting a “win-win” approach. From this perspective, this contribution poses the following research question: how to build collaborative processes capable of putting local institutions, businesses, and local communities in synergy, to identify enhancement strategies for the cultural landscape? This study explores the potential of an integrated, incremental, and adaptive decision-making approach, oriented toward the elaboration of shared choices aimed at the elaboration of territorial enhancement strategies attentive to the specificity of the multiple values and complex resources that characterize the cultural terraced landscapes of the Costa Viola (Italy). In particular, the interactions between different knowledge, approaches, and tools makes it possible to formulate scenarios, strategies, and actions, contributing to the creation of a richer and more complex context of knowledge of the territory and to the construction of bottom-up and situated transformation strategies, supported from a decision-making process attentive to the identification of values and an understanding of the needs of the local ‘landscape community’ who live and animate it. Full article

Aviation resources in the post-pandemic era are still in short supply. The increasing air traffic flow aggravates flight delays and makes it difficult to ensure aviation safety. Instead of focusing on the economic benefits, this paper proposes a quantitative method for evaluating the safety of flight plans. A flight plan safety index system is constructed through airspace environment modelling and a conflict probability calculation. The proposed method provides a quantitative basis for the management and adjustment of flight plans at the strategic level. Improving the flight plan management strategy from the perspective of conflict avoidance is expected to fundamentally reduce the potential conflict and workload of controllers and pilots during flight and improve the safety level of the whole air transport system. Finally, the performance of the proposed flight plan safety evaluation method is demonstrated through an illustrative air traffic scenario. Full article

Skateboarding as a method of transportation has become prevalent, which has increased the occurrence and likelihood of pedestrian–skateboarder collisions and near-collision scenarios in shared-use roadway areas. Collisions between pedestrians and skateboarders can result in significant injury. New approaches are needed to evaluate shared-use areas prone to hazardous pedestrian–skateboarder interactions, and perform real-time, in situ (e.g., on-device) predictions of pedestrian–skateboarder collisions as road conditions vary due to changes in land usage and construction. A mechanism called the Surrogate Safety Measures for skateboarder–pedestrian interaction can be computed to evaluate high-risk conditions on roads and sidewalks using deep learning object detection models. In this paper, we present the first ever skateboarder–pedestrian safety study leveraging deep learning architectures. We view and analyze state of the art deep learning architectures, namely the Faster R-CNN and two variants of the Single Shot Multi-box Detector (SSD) model to select the correct model that best suits two different tasks: automated calculation of Post Encroachment Time (PET) and finding hazardous conflict zones in real-time. We also contribute a new annotated data set that contains skateboarder–pedestrian interactions that has been collected for this study. Both our selected models can detect and classify pedestrians and skateboarders correctly and efficiently. However, due to differences in their architectures and based on the advantages and disadvantages of each model, both models were individually used to perform two different set of tasks. Due to improved accuracy, the Faster R-CNN model was used to automate the calculation of post encroachment time, whereas to determine hazardous regions in real-time, due to its extremely fast inference rate, the Single Shot Multibox MobileNet V1 model was used. An outcome of this work is a model that can be deployed on low-cost, small-footprint mobile and IoT devices at traffic intersections with existing cameras to perform on-device inferencing for in situ Surrogate Safety Measurement (SSM), such as Time-To-Collision (TTC) and Post Encroachment Time (PET). SSM values that exceed a hazard threshold can be published to an Message Queuing Telemetry Transport (MQTT) broker, where messages are received by an intersection traffic signal controller for real-time signal adjustment, thus contributing to state-of-the-art vehicle and pedestrian safety at hazard-prone intersections. Full article

Global conflicts can severely affect a nation’s tourism activities. Tourism can also be seriously affected by health problems such as epidemics or pandemics. It is important to establish strategies to be prepared for adverse situations. The objective of this study focused on analyzing nature tourism from a post-conflict and post-COVID-19 situation in the Amazonian border of Colombia (Department of Putumayo) and Ecuador (Province of Sucumbíos), which will contribute to establishing future strategic management scenarios. In order to respond to this objective, a systematic bibliographic review was carried out, accompanied by fieldwork (interviews). The results indicate that in the face of adverse situations, the tourism industry has the capacity to be resilient. The success of its recovery will be directly proportional to its capacity to create policies and strategies that allow it to take advantage of natural resources and turn them into an opportunity for the socioeconomic development of its population. Full article

Blister or vesicant chemical warfare agents (CWAs) have been widely used in different military conflicts, including World War I and the Iran-Iraq War. However, their mechanism of action is not fully understood. Sulfur and nitrogen mustard exert toxic effects not only through the alkylation of thiol-bearing macromolecules, such as DNA and proteins, but also produce free radicals that can develop direct toxic effects in target organs such as the eyes, skin, and respiratory system. The lack of effective treatments against vesicant CWAs-induced injury makes us consider, in this complex scenario, the use and development of melatonin-based therapeutic strategies. This multifunctional indoleamine could facilitate neutralization of the oxidative stress, modulate the inflammatory response, and prevent the DNA damage, as well as the long-term health consequences mediated by vesicant CWAs-induced epigenetic mechanisms. In this context, it would be essential to develop new galenic formulations for the use of orally and/or topically applied melatonin for the prophylaxis against vesicant CWAs, as well as the development of post-exposure treatments in the near future. Full article

The expansion of urban areas around the world and the application of the sustainability paradigm to tourism discourses has favored an increase in the number of people visiting natural protected areas (NPAs) in their leisure time. While tourism is desired to boost the economy of destinations, mismanagement can bring negative consequences for social–ecological systems, particularly in post-conflict rural scenarios. In the context of a broader ethnographic research, we analyzed the perceptions of the local population about tourism development in the NPA Jaltepeque Estuary (El Salvador, Central America) and the establishment of a Biosphere Reserve in the area, using structured questionnaires and Multiple Correspondence Analysis for the typification of social actors. We found that overall, the population regards positively the development of tourism in the area. Fishermen are the only ones who highlight the negative economic consequences of tourism development, claiming disparity in the distribution of benefits and an increase in the cost of living. We conclude that although tourism development is an activity desired by local people, there is a need in the community to discuss how this process of socio-economic transformation should be approached and an evident conflict between two different models: the one desired and offered by the population and the one that is currently being developed in the nearby Costa del Sol corridor. Full article

In complex traffic environments, collision warning systems that rely only on in-vehicle sensors are limited in accuracy and range. Vehicle-to-infrastructure (V2I) communication systems, however, offer more robust information exchange, and thus, warnings. In this study, V2I was used to analyze side-collision warning models at non-signalized intersections: A novel time-delay side-collision warning model was developed according to the motion compensation principle. This novel time-delay model was compared with and verified against a traditional side-collision warning model. Using a V2I-oriented simulated driving platform, three vehicle-vehicle collision scenarios were designed at non-signalized intersections. Twenty participants were recruited to conduct simulated driving experiments to test and verify the performance of each collision warning model. The results showed that compared with no warning system, both side-collision warning models reduced the proportion of vehicle collisions. In terms of efficacy, the traditional model generated an effective warning in 84.2% of cases, while the novel time-delay model generated an effective warning in 90.2%. In terms of response time and conflict time difference, the traditional model gave a longer response time of 0.91 s (that of the time-delay model is 0.78 s), but the time-delay model reduced the driving risk with a larger conflict time difference. Based on an analysis of driver gaze change post-warning, the statistical results showed that the proportion of effective gaze changes reached 84.3%. Based on subjective evaluations, drivers reported a higher degree of acceptance of the time-delay model. Therefore, the time-delay side-collision warning model for non-signalized intersections proposed herein can improve the applicability and efficacy of warning systems in such complex traffic environments and provide reference for safety applications in V2I systems. Full article