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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences

Ontology-Aided Feature Correlation For Multi-Modal Urban Sensing, Archan Misra, Zaman Lantra, Kasthuri Jayarajah Apr 2016

Ontology-Aided Feature Correlation For Multi-Modal Urban Sensing, Archan Misra, Zaman Lantra, Kasthuri Jayarajah

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

The paper explores the use of correlation across features extracted from different sensing channels to help in urban situational understanding. We use real-world datasets to show how such correlation can improve the accuracy of detection of city-wide events by combining metadata analysis with image analysis of Instagram content. We demonstrate this through a case study on the Singapore Haze. We show that simple ontological relationships and reasoning can significantly help in automating such correlation-based understanding of transient urban events.


Disentangling Greenhouse Warming And Aerosol Cooling To Reveal Earth's Climate Sensitivity, T. Storelvmo, T. Leirvik, U. Lohmann, Peter C. B. Phillips, M. Wild Apr 2016

Disentangling Greenhouse Warming And Aerosol Cooling To Reveal Earth's Climate Sensitivity, T. Storelvmo, T. Leirvik, U. Lohmann, Peter C. B. Phillips, M. Wild

Research Collection School Of Economics

Earth's climate sensitivity has long been subject to heated debate and has spurred renewed interest after the latest IPCC assessment report suggested a downward adjustment of its most likely range(1). Recent observational studies have produced estimates of transient climate sensitivity, that is, the global mean surface temperature increase at the time of CO2 doubling, as low as 1.3 K (refs 2,3), well below the best estimate produced by global climate models (1.8 K). Here, we present an observation-based study of the time period 1964 to 2010, which does not rely on climate models. The method incorporates observations of greenhouse gas …


Precolonial Institutions And Deforestation In Africa, S. Larcom, Terry Van Gevelt, A. Zabala Feb 2016

Precolonial Institutions And Deforestation In Africa, S. Larcom, Terry Van Gevelt, A. Zabala

Research Collection College of Integrative Studies

We find that local institutions inherited from the precolonial era continue to play an important role in natural resource governance in Africa. Using satellite image data, we find a significant and robust relationship between deforestation and precolonial succession rules of local leaders (local chiefs). In particular, we find that those precolonial areas where local leaders were appointed by ‘social standing’ have higher rates of deforestation compared to the base case of hereditary rule and where local leaders were appointed from above (by paramount chiefs). While the transmission mechanisms behind these results are complex, we suggest that areas where local leaders …


Assessment Of Measured And Perceived Microclimates Within A Tropical Urban Forest, Winston T. L. Chow, Siti Nur ‘Assyakirin Binte Ali Akbar, Su Li Heng, Matthias Roth Jan 2016

Assessment Of Measured And Perceived Microclimates Within A Tropical Urban Forest, Winston T. L. Chow, Siti Nur ‘Assyakirin Binte Ali Akbar, Su Li Heng, Matthias Roth

Research Collection School of Social Sciences

Urban greenery is a favoured approach applied towards reducing urban warmth and climate discomfort, but ascertaining its measured and perceived effectiveness in tropical climates is relatively understudied. To this end, we investigated microclimate differences within an urban park (the Singapore Botanic Gardens) to assess if variations in plot-scale land cover affect both objective (measured) and subjective (surveyed) microclimate data. Over two monsoonal seasons, we obtained data from four distinct sites—a tropical rainforest stand, a palm tree valley, a water-body feature, and the park visitors’ centre. Measured climate data (e.g. air temperature, vapour pressure, wind velocity and globe temperatures) were used …


A Study On Singapore Haze, Bingtian Dai, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Ee-Peng Lim, Archan Misra, Shriguru Nayak Jan 2016

A Study On Singapore Haze, Bingtian Dai, Kasthuri Jayarajah, Ee-Peng Lim, Archan Misra, Shriguru Nayak

Research Collection School Of Computing and Information Systems

In 2015, Singaporean have experienced one of the worse air pollution crises in history. With datasets from a well-known photo sharing social network, we analyze how this haze affects Singaporean's daily life. We will share our preliminary results in this paper.