Planned community | EPFL Graph Search

A planned community, planned city, planned town, or planned settlement is any community that was carefully planned from its inception and is typically constructed on previously undeveloped land. This contrasts with settlements that evolve in a more organic fashion. The term new town refers to planned communities of the new towns movement in particular, mainly in the United Kingdom. It was also common in the European colonization of the Americas to build according to a plan either on fresh ground or on the ruins of earlier Native American villages. Planned capitals List of purpose-built national capitals A planned capital is a city specially planned, designed and built to be a capital. Several of the world's national capitals are planned capitals, including Canberra in Australia, Brasília in Brazil, Belmopan in Belize, New Delhi in India, Abuja in Nigeria, Islamabad in Pakistan, Naypyidaw in Myanmar (Burma) and Washington, D.C. in the United States, and the modern pa

How to support teachers to carry out educational robotics activities in school? The case of Roteco, the Swiss robotic teacher community

Sophia Reyes Mury

The development of 21st-century transversal competences such as communication, cooperation, and creativity as well as computational thinking and programming may be aided through educational robotics (ER). Different countries have inserted ER in their school curricula, however, to date ER activities are not carried out systematically in all schools and are more an initiative from single pioneer teachers. In Switzerland, to support all teachers to carry out ER activities and to foster the presence of ER in schools, a robotic teacher community (Roteco) has been created. Teachers may obtain assistance, share experiences, and access instructional resources through a digital platform, which will help them and spread the use of robotics in the classroom. For instance, the site enables educators to simply submit their activities, connect with other educators and professionals, choose and download didactic activities from their peers together with the relevant resources, and stay updated on the newest information, events, research, and further education courses in the field of ER. In the first years of the platform’s existence, already more than 1,400 teachers have joined it. The project and the findings of two surveys are presented in this publication. The first survey was carried out in 2020 with 87 teachers and the second one in 2021 with 48 teachers from the community. The findings highlight the community’s greatest accomplishments as well as the motivations for teachers’ recruitment into the Roteco community and their contributions to its expansion. The results of this project allow for discussion on how to support teachers to implement ER activities in schools in a systematic way.

2022

QUAREP-LiMi: A community-driven initiative to establish guidelines for quality assessment and reproducibility for instruments and images in light microscopy

Andrea Bassi, Antje Keppler, Arne Seitz

A modern day light microscope has evolved from a tool devoted to making primarily empirical observations to what is now a sophisticated , quantitative device that is an integral part of both physical and life science research. Nowadays, microscopes are found in nearly every experimental laboratory. However, despite their prevalent use in capturing and quantifying scientific phenomena, neither a thorough understanding of the principles underlying quantitative imaging techniques nor appropriate knowledge of how to calibrate, operate and maintain microscopes can be taken for granted. This is clearly demonstrated by the well-documented and widespread difficulties that are routinely encountered in evaluating acquired data and reproducing scientific experiments. Indeed, studies have shown that more than 70% of researchers have tried and failed to repeat another scientist's experiments, while more than half have even failed to reproduce their own experiments. One factor behind the reproducibility crisis of experiments published in scientific journals is the frequent underreporting of imaging methods caused by a lack of awareness and/or a lack of knowledge of the applied technique. Whereas quality control procedures for some methods used in biomedical research, such as genomics (e.g. DNA sequencing, RNA-seq) or cytometry, have been introduced (e.g. ENCODE), this issue has not been tackled for optical microscopy instrumentation and images. Although many calibration standards and protocols have been published, there is a lack of awareness and agreement on common standards and guidelines for quality assessment and reproducibility. In April 2020, the QUality Assessment and REProducibility for instruments and images in Light Microscopy (QUAREP-LiMi) initiative was formed. This initiative comprises imaging scientists from academia and industry who share a common interest in achieving a better understanding of the performance and limitations of microscopes and improved quality control (QC) in light microscopy. The ultimate goal of the QUAREP-LiMi initiative is to establish a set of common QC standards, guidelines, metadata models and tools, including detailed protocols, with the ultimate aim of improving reproducible advances in scientific research. This White Paper (1) summarizes the major obstacles identified in the field that motivated the launch of the QUAREP-LiMi initiative; (2) identifies the urgent need to address these obstacles in a grassroots manner, through a community of stakeholders including, researchers, imaging scientists, bioimage analysts, bioimage informatics developers, corporate partners, funding agencies, standards organizations, scientific publishers and observers of such; (3) outlines the current actions of the QUAREP-LiMi initiative and (4) proposes future steps that can be taken to improve the dissemination and acceptance of the proposed guidelines to manage QC. To summarize, the principal goal of the QUAREP-LiMi initiative is to improve the overall quality and reproducibility of light microscope image data by introducing broadly accepted standard practices and accurately captured image data metrics.

WILEY2021

On the probabilistic nature of the species-area relation

Jonathan Giezendanner, Andrea Giometto, Amos Maritan, Andrea Rinaldo, Silvia Zaoli

The Species-Area Relation (SAR), which describes the increase in the number of species S with increasing area A, is under intense scrutiny in contemporary ecology, in particular to probe its reliability in predicting the number of species going extinct as a direct result of habitat loss. Here, we focus on the island SAR, which is measured across a set of disjoint habitat patches, and we argue that the SAR portrays an average trend around which fluctuations are to be expected due to the stochasticity of community dynamics within the patches, external perturbations, and habitat heterogeneity across different patches. This probabilistic interpretation of the SAR, though already implicit in the theory of island biogeography and manifest in the scatter of data points in plots of empirical SAR curves, has not been investigated systematically from the theoretical point of view. Here, we show that the two main contributions to SAR fluctuations, which are due to community dynamics within the patches and to habitat heterogeneity between different patches, can be decoupled and analyzed independently. To investigate the community dynamics contribution to SAR fluctuations, we explore a suite of theoretical models of community dynamics where the number of species S inhabiting a patch emerges from diverse ecological and evolutionary processes, and we compare stationary predictions for the coefficient of variation of S, i.e. the fluctuations of S with respect to the mean. We find that different community dynamics models diverge radically in their predictions. In island biogeography and in neutral frameworks, where fluctuations are only driven by the stochasticity of diversification and extinction events, relative fluctuations decay when the mean increases. Computational evidence suggests that this result is robust in the presence of competition for space or resources. When species compete for finite resources, and mass is introduced as a trait determining species' birth, death and resource consumption rates based on empirical allometric scalings, relative fluctuations do not decay with increasing mean S due to the occasional introduction of new species with large resource demands causing mass extinctions in the community. Given this observation, we also investigate the contribution of external disturbance events to fluctuations of S in neutral community dynamics models and compare this scenario with the community dynamics in undisturbed non-neutral models. Habitat heterogeneity within a single patch, in the context of metapopulation models, causes variability in the number of coexisting species which proves negligible with respect to that caused by the stochasticity of the community dynamics. The second contribution to SAR fluctuations, which is due to habitat heterogeneity among different patches, introduces corrections to the coefficient of variation of S. Most importantly, inter-patches heterogeneity introduces a constant, lower bound on the relative fluctuations of S equal to the coefficient of variation of a habitat variable describing the heterogeneity among patches. Because heterogeneity across patches is inevitably present in natural ecosystems, we expect that the relative fluctuations of S always tend to a constant in the limit of large mean S or large patch area A, with contributions from community dynamics, inter-patches heterogeneity or both. We provide a theoretical framework for modelling these two contributions and we show that both can affect significantly the fluctuations of the SAR. (C) 2018 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

2019