The main goal of the present study was to develop an ecological integrity index for littoral wetland management and conservation in semiarid Mediterranean areas that have been highly impacted by agriculture, including the selection of pressure and state indicators at landscape and wetlands scales that reflect the status, condition, and trends of wetlands ecosystems. We used a causality framewor...

This paper introduces a view on planning that is based on interpreting objects not by their identity but by their functionality. Ecological psychologist J.J. Gibson’s concept of affordances provides the underlying theory for developing a system that does not distinguish between objects of functional equivalence. It will be argued that the plans resulting from this approach are both less complex...

A small refrigeration plant, for teaching refrigeration theory, used a control console built to traditional design guidelines: one output in the display for each sensor in the plant. This style of console is notorious for inducing high cognitive loads on operators and for displaying redundant data. Often the high cognitive load is the result of inconsistency between the intent for displaying th...

The goal of this paper is to propose a performance assessment for normally closed-loop type distribution power systems. Pilot relaying systems have been successfully applied to the protection scheme for normally closed-loop distribution systems in the Taiwan Power Company (Taipower). This paper demonstrates that the proposed protection scheme is extremely well designed, such that both the numbe...

Individuals with elevated social anxiety appear especially vulnerable to cannabis-related problems, yet little is known about the antecedents of cannabis-related behaviors among this high-risk population. The present study used ecological momentary assessment (EMA) to examine the relations among social anxiety, cannabis craving, state anxiety, situational variables, and cannabis use in the natu...

One of the main theories in ecological psychology is the theory of affordances. Affordances are opportunities for action which are provided by the environment in which the action takes place and are action specific. So affordances describe how the environment allows, supports and constrains an action. The idea of studying the affordances can also be applied to sport, in this case to putting in ...

Biosphere 2 is a closed ecosystem located near Tucson, Arizona, designed for studying the interactions between different biological species among each other and with their materially closed controlled environment, taking into account the limited resources that such an environment provides. Energy considerations play a central role in how these interactions play out. To this end, bond graph mode...

We explore the construction of parametric surfaces which interpolate prescribed 3D scattered data using spaces of parametric splines defined on a 2D triangulation. The method is based on minimizing cettain natura1 energy expressions. Several examples involving filling hoies and crowning surfaces are presented, and the role of the triangulation as a Parameter is explored. The problem of creating...

Development of the general ecological model (EM) of the CSSR has been included in the state program for environmental policy the Ecoprogramme of the CSSR at a scale of 1 : 1 000 000 for the entire Czechoslovak territory and at a scale of 1500 000 for the Czech Socialist Republic (CSR) and the Slovak Socialist Republic (SSR). The objective of the first EM stage was to make a survey of spatial di...

The superform construction of supersymmetric invariants, which consists of integrating the top component of a closed superform over spacetime, is reviewed. The cohomological methods necessary for the analysis of closed superforms are discussed and some further theoretical developments presented. The method is applied to higher-order corrections in heterotic string theory up to α. Some partial r...