Occupant Movement Research Articles

An Analysis of Socioeconomic Stratification, Intra-Temporal and Intra Generational Household Mobility in Central Punjab, Pakistan

The study identifies the factors of intra temporal and intra generational household mobility in three districts of Central Punjab. The intra- temporal household mobility estimates the direction of transformation as disequalizing long term income. For the current analysis, three districts of Central Punjab are selected for data collection using literacy rate as prevalence rate. The results of the study show an improvement in education of head of household and other household members which may lead to upward transformation. Furthermore, geography and occupation progression contribute to inter temporal and intra generational mobility in Central Punjab. The results show big cities of central Punjab have considerable benefits of occupational movers from one sector to another as there are sufficient job opportunities available to the households and in rural areas of all the districts households are reluctant to get the benefits of occupational movement. The study concludes that most of the heads of household are educated but occupationally deprived which lead to low extent of intra generational mobility as compared to intra temporal mobility.

Property Rights Through Social Movements: The Case of Plantations in Kerala, India

Globally, increased investor interest in land is confronting various types of political mobilisations from communities at the grassroots level. This article examines the case study of a land occupation movement called Chengara struggle in the largest corporate plantation in southern India. The movement is led by the historically dispossessed scheduled caste and scheduled tribe communities. The objective of the study is to understand the type of institutional transformation of property rights that the movement is calibrating. Institutional theory is used to determine the nature and direction of transformation using the framework of economic and political transaction costs. The article concludes that the central demand of the struggle for individual title deed has higher private gains for right-holders, but has overall negative gains for agricultural productivity. The article concludes that productivity-oriented demands to restructure land-use rights within plantations might converge in the land struggles of the future.

The Housing Struggle in Milan in the 1970s: Influences and Particularities

The article examines the housing occupation movements in Milan in 1969-1975, relating them to the restricted supply of cheap housing—a situation that created difficulties for newly arrived immigrant. Housing occupation activists were influenced by the experience of squatting in other European cities, a phenomenon that particularly fascinated the educated young, who participated in the movement, supported by organizations of the radical left. The movement’s political project was to take the class struggle outside the factories, to attack “urban income growth” as a tool of capitalist domination. Compared with other Italian experiences, there was less involvement from the underclass, and the aim of obtaining a house was secondary to the project of maintaining political conflict at a high level. The movement waned in the late 1970s, due to the fact that the revolutionary groups’ drive for political mobilization no longer coincided with the social housing needs of young people.

Simulating pre-evacuation times using hazard-based duration models: Is waiting strategy more efficient than instant response?

In an indoor evacuation scenario, an early decision to be made by each occupant is when to initiate the (decisive) evacuation movement, a decision that determines the pre-evacuation (or pre-movement) time. We employ a class of econometric models, proportional hazard duration models, to simulate the probabilistic relation between the pre-movement times and the occupant’s proximity to exits at the onset of evacuations. This is based on the empirically-supported assumption that occupants that are relatively further from exit locations when the evacuation cue is perceived, take relatively longer times to initiate their evacuation movement. Implementing these parametric models and using extensive numerical simulations, we investigate the effects of (various degrees and forms of) pre-movement-time heterogeneity on the evacuation efficiency. This is to revisit and test the anecdotal idea that occupants’ collective instant rush hinders evacuation processes. In testing this assumption, we examined whether heterogeneity (i.e. variation) in pre-movement times can lead to better outcomes (i.e. shorter evacuation times). Our analyses included both purely-random heterogeneity as well as strategized heterogeneity, one in which occupants nearer to exits are prioritised, as a (probabilistic) waiting strategy. We observed that the instant movement of occupants led to bigger crowd jams at bottlenecks and created greater degrees of congestion which sustained for longer amounts of time. However, from a time-minimisation perspective, collective instant movement was invariably the best strategy. Neither the random nor the strategized forms of pre-movement-time heterogeneity resulted in any shorter evacuation time than when all occupants initiated their movement instantly. In fact, increasing the degree of pre-movement-time heterogeneity led monotonically to longer evacuation times, despite making the evacuation more orderly. This finding suggests that advising occupants to avoid instant rush may not be a time-optimal strategy, even though it mitigates congestion. The finding has not been tested in relation to high-rise buildings and needs further investigation in that context.

Occupy, Resist, Construct, Dwell!: A Genealogy of Urban Occupation Movements in Central São Paulo

This paper offers a genealogy of building occupations carried out by occupation movements in central São Paulo to shed light on the particular form of urbanism that emanates from such downtown occupation practices. The main objective is to illustrate how occupation movements played a structural role in the urban recuperation of São Paulo’s central area by re-inhabiting a disaggregated stockpile of vacant buildings with thousands of homeless families, initiating parallel processes of architectural renewal and social reform. To that end, the contribution reconstructs the emergence and subsequent proliferation of occupation movements in central São Paulo between the 1970s and the 2010s. It dwells on particular exemplary building occupations during this period. This contribution draws from extensive discourse analysis, and multiple years of participant observation carried out in close collaboration with multiple occupations movements, especially the FLM (Alliance of the Struggle for Housing) and the MSTC (Homeless Movement of the Centre).

Output of part I:

In part 1, a literature review was done to summarise and introduce the theoretical background knowledge of thermal comfort and passive cooling technology. The adaptive thermal comfort was explained because it is applicable to a free-running building which is the studied object of this research. The basic theory and design standards of adaptive thermal comfort were reviewed. A brief overview of passive cooling techniques was given. The techniques were then reviewed based on their relationships with urban morphology, building shape, layout, opening and “elements”. The study started with a Chinese vernacular building (chapter 4) because these always use the passive way to achieve a comfortable living environment under the limitations of technology at that time. Firstly, the spatial design strategies for passive cooling of a Chinese vernacular house were investigated in a field survey. The design of modern rural houses under free-running conditions compared with the Chinese vernacular house. It was found that the modern rural house did not achieve a satisfactory thermal summer environment under free-running conditions, while the vernacular house did. Furthermore, the vernacular house was deeply analysed by field measurements and dynamic thermal simulations. It was found that the particular spatial design of the vernacular house has its own building microclimate, which is important for the occupants’ thermal summer comfort. The concept of building microclimate was identified. In this study, the scale of “building microclimate” refers to a type of microclimate, involving the indoor space and the spaces around the indoor spaces of a particular building. It is the extension of the indoor climate. The spatial scale is smaller than the urban fabric. It rarely covers an area more than several hundred meters wide, but is bigger than an indoor space alone. It is limited to one particular building, whether a small house or a big stadium. The building microclimate is mainly defined by the spatial and the thermo-physical properties. Similar to the influence of urban morphology on urban microclimate, the spatial configuration influences the building microclimate significantly. To have a particular microclimate at the building scale, some key factors of spatial configuration such as spatial diversity, spatial arrangement and boundary conditions between spaces should be identified. The spatial design of modern house is different from the vernacular house due to the evolution of people’s lifestyle over a long period. Can a modern house have a good building microclimate? To answer this question, the spatial design and thermal environment of a modern house were analysed through field survey and simulation. It was found that a modern house can also have its own microclimate and that the microclimate of this particular building can provide considerable thermal comfort for the occupants in summer under local climate conditions. Adaptive actions, for example movement, can explain why occupants can achieve thermal comfort in a building microclimate with diverse spaces. To find the relationship between the occupants’ spatial perception and thermal perception, a questionnaire was put forward. It was found that the spatial openness of a particular space significantly affects the occupants’ visual perception, wind speed perception and thermal perception. It was revealed that the occupants’ spatial perception and thermal perception are associated. The strongest correlation is between spatial openness and visual perception and wind speed perception. That means spatial boundary conditions can strongly influence occupants’ comfort perception, and subsequently influence the occupants’ spatial choice and movement in a particular thermal environment, given the opportunity, as Humphreys (1997) pointed out: when people are free to choose their location, it helps if there is plenty of thermal variety, giving them the opportunity to choose the places they like. The fundamental assumption of the adaptive approach is expressed by the adaptive principle: “if a change occurs such as to produce discomfort, people react in ways which tend to restore their comfort”. Nicol et al. (2012) proposed that there are at least five basic types of adaptive actions. One important adaptive action is selecting a different thermal environment. Occupant movement in a particular building microclimate is significant for thermal comfort. Occupants can change their location for different activities. Movement is possible between buildings, between rooms, around rooms, out of the sun and into the breeze, and so on (Nicol et al., 2012).

Women, Education and Social Mobility in Britain during the Long 1970s

ABSTRACTThrough analysis of oral history interviews and quantitative source material, this article offers a gendered model of social mobility in the post-war decades. It argues that women born between the late 1930s and early 1950s achieved social mobility through entering post-secondary education after a period of employment, followed by occupational movement into the welfare professions. Women’s mobility primarily occurred in the long 1970s, facilitated by the Wilson government’s investment in the welfare state and its expansion of further education and creation of the polytechnics. This challenges the predominantly masculinised trope of the grammar school as the driver of post-war mobility.

LoMo: Mobility for Sustainability of Human and Environment based on Man Powered Robotics

In this study, focusing on the sustainability of environment and health, it has proposed Man-powered mobility.The proposed system is designed on the“ Man-powered robotics”, which realizes the intelligent operation by controlling the power to be transmitted to the output shaft in the robot system. Man-power to implement the safety control in mobility to the power source, it puts control to allow prolonged exercise. As a result, to increase the chance of occupant movement, to prevent Lifestyle-related disease and fatness is expected. Moreover, by making human power to power, it becomes environmentally friendly mobility. In this paper, the pedal to measure input power of proposed mobility is described.

EXTENSÃO, PESQUISA E ENGAJAMENTO: APRENDIZADO DE LUTAS E DORES NO SEMINÁRIO MEMORIAL DAS OCUPAÇÕES ESTUDANTIS

This article describes and analyzes the Seminar: Memorial of students´ occupations that took place in November, 2016.The seminar was part of the outreach project from the Federal University of Alfenas (UNIFAL-MG) called Study Group about Youth. The Study Group used Walter Benjamin´s categories about history and memory and Jacques Ranciers´s category about political subjectivation to analyze the planning records, as well as the implementation and the evaluation of the seminar in addition to the unfoldings of the event. The outcomes include meeting the goal of valuing the memories of the struggles of the movement and the occupations in the south of Minas Gerais in addition to the recognition, which was not expected, of a feeling of anguish and discomfort among the students that occupied the schools and the university. At the end of the article, a research proposal is presented. The research will investigate the school and political trajectories of the students that participated of the occupation movement.

Vehicle Occupant Movement in Pre-crash Maneuvers

Vehicle Occupant Movement in Pre-crash Maneuvers

Forensic Performance Analysis of Load‐Limiting Devices in Automotive Seat Belt Retractors

The introduction of frontal airbags and seatbelt pretensioners for front seat occupants provided an opportunity to address injuries caused by seatbelt loading by introducing load-limiters, which were intended to reduce belt loading while maintaining proper restraint. Investigation and forensic analysis of real-world crashes identified that the implementation of these devices, in some circumstances, increased the potential of injury. This paper focuses on the trade-offs of load-limiters, that is, the reduction loading to the occupant versus the corresponding increase in seatbelt webbing and occupant movement. If the additional webbing introduced is not controlled, the risk of injury to the occupant is increased and could result in more frequent and severe injuries rather than a reduction. This paper quantifies the webbing introduced by load-limiter activation through forensic analysis of the seatbelt involved in real-world crashes and testing and assesses its effect on the injuries sustained by the occupant.

An Experimental Study of Ascent and Descent Movement of People on Long Stair with High Occupant Density

This paper presents an experimental study of the movements of both ascent and descent in a high occupant density 20-level building in order to exploit the characteristics of occupant movement on long stairwells. The movement processes of the participants are recorded in order to estimate both overall and local movement speeds, as well as flow rate and occupant density in the stairwell. When a merging flow is presented, the average movement time from one floor to the next is 35.8 s ± 15.6 s, and 37.3 s ± 10.6 s for ascent and descent movement, respectively. When a merging flow is not presented, the average movement time per floor is 15.1 s ± 0.8 s and 11.9 s ± 0.8 s for the ascent and descent movement. Under congested conditions, the average speeds on long stairwells maintains a relatively constant value of approximately 0.50 m/s ± 0.17 m/s, and 0.61 m/s ± 0.14 m/s for respective ascent and descent movement, while the traveling distance has no obvious impact on speed. Furthermore, the relationship between velocity and density in our observations is in line with linear functions and equations are accordingly proposed.

Staging Atmosphere on the Ukrainian Maidan

This article uses atmosphere theory to describe the revolutionary events on Ukraine’s Maidan Nezalezhnosti as they unfolded from November 2013 to February 2014. Like other recent occupation movements (Tahrir Square, Gezi Park, Zuccotti Park), the Maidan protestors created a vast infrastructure that supported large-scale protest and daily life on the square. I argue that atmosphere, or the feeling of place, was important to the makeup of Maidan. Like other occupation movements, Maidan became a “world” unto itself because it generated unique feelings that held the place together. Drawing on atmosphere theorists Peter Sloterdijk and Gernot Böhme, I describe the atmospheres of Maidan, show how these atmospheres were generated, and then describe how these atmospheres influenced the course of the revolution.

Modeling occupancy distribution in large spaces with multi-feature classification algorithm

Occupancy information enables robust and flexible control of heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning (HVAC) systems in buildings. In large spaces, multiple HVAC terminals are typically installed to provide cooperative services for different thermal zones, and the occupancy information determines the cooperation among terminals. However, a person count at room-level does not adequately optimize HVAC system operation due to the movement of occupants within the room that creates uneven load distribution. Without accurate knowledge of the occupants' spatial distribution, the uneven distribution of occupants often results in under-cooling/heating or over-cooling/heating in some thermal zones. Therefore, the lack of high-resolution occupancy distribution is often perceived as a bottleneck for future improvements to HVAC operation efficiency. To fill this gap, this study proposes a multi-feature k-Nearest-Neighbors (k-NN) classification algorithm to extract occupancy distribution through reliable, low-cost Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) networks. An on-site experiment was conducted in a typical office of an institutional building to demonstrate the proposed methods, and the experiment outcomes of three case studies were examined to validate detection accuracy. One method based on City Block Distance (CBD) was used to measure the distance between detected occupancy distribution and ground truth and assess the results of occupancy distribution. The results show the accuracy when CBD = 1 is over 71.4% and the accuracy when CBD = 2 can reach up to 92.9%.

High-resolution modeling of elevator power consumption

This paper proposes a framework for modeling the instantaneous power consumption of individual elevators and elevator groups based on passenger traffic. Though elevators have a key role in the modern urban society, they have remained as rather neglected appliances in the energy efficiency research. To accelerate the energy efficiency studies of elevators, this paper has two major contributions. First, we propose means to model the instantaneous power consumption of individual elevators and elevator groups and analyze the reliability of these means versus the complexity of the modeling. Second, we present an elevator group control scheme to organize the elevator dispatching according to the simulated passenger traffic. When combined, these methods yield enhanced predictions about the energy and power consumption of elevators in a specific type of building with measured or simulated movement of occupants.

Research on Occupant Evacuation Simulation during Civil Aircraft Emergency

Abstract In order to simulate aircraft evacuation process vividly in the 90s certification trials, the influence elements of occupant evacuation during aircraft emergency need to be analyzed. These elements were achieved as evacuee element, aircraft type element, and aircraft external environment element. The three elements were consisted of several factors respectively. In evacuee element contained individual physiological factor and psychological factor, the diversities of individual behavior were discussed in the three escape stages. These factors were applied to cellular automata theory. Then, the cabin environment model was established according to the characteristics of occupant movement during emergency evacuation, and the non-wing exit escape time model was built through a self-designed jumping slide experiment. This research took B737-800 as the experiment prototype and developed the simulation software (EES-air) based on the above models and the existing research results. Three distribution plans of occupant evacuation in cabin area were designed in the simulation software. The simulation results were analyzed from the evacuation efficiency, the number of escape at different time, and the available exit utilization rate. The research results could provide strategy and guidance to emergency evacuation and emergency training for airline.

Range of motion limitations of the upper body in obese female workers.

The prevalence of obesity is increasing worldwide, and the economic consequences of an increased percentage of obese workers are relevant in terms of health costs and absences from work. Obesity is associated with reduced participation in the workforce, increased absence from work, disability and health costs, lower salaries and reduced productivity. We aimed at quantifying the limitations in range of motion (ROM) of the upper limb and the trunk of obese workers during basic occupational tasks. One group of 15 obese female subjects (BMI: 42.10±9.10 kg/m2) and one control group of 13 normal-weight female subjects were recruited. Three group of tasks were selected as representative of basic occupational movements: 1) upper limb movements (reaching, abduction-adduction, frontal elevation); 2) trunk movements (lateral bending, rotation); 3) whole body movement (target task). We observed significant range of motion limitations in lateral and frontal upper arm elevation. Statistically significant difference in terms of center of pressure (the point of application of the ground reaction force measured by means of force platform) excursions was observed for lateral bending and trunk rotation tasks. Our results show that obese subjects have significant range of motion limitations of the upper body during basic occupational activities. This study provides quantitative evidence of these limitations of obese workers and may serve occupational specialists to allocate them to adequate jobs and reduce the rate of work-related musculoskeletal disorders.

A numerical simulation strategy on occupant evacuation behaviors and casualty prediction in a building during earthquakes

Casualty prediction in a building during earthquakes benefits to implement the economic loss estimation in the performance-based earthquake engineering methodology. Although after-earthquake observations reveal that the evacuation has effects on the quantity of occupant casualties during earthquakes, few current studies consider occupant movements in the building in casualty prediction procedures. To bridge this knowledge gap, a numerical simulation method using refined cellular automata model is presented, which can describe various occupant dynamic behaviors and building dimensions. The simulation on the occupant evacuation is verified by a recorded evacuation process from a school classroom in real-life 2013 Ya’an earthquake in China. The occupant casualties in the building under earthquakes are evaluated by coupling the building collapse process simulation by finite element method, the occupant evacuation simulation, and the casualty occurrence criteria with time and space synchronization. A case study of casualty prediction in a building during an earthquake is provided to demonstrate the effect of occupant movements on casualty prediction.

Isso aqui está virando brasil… Cinema e produções audiovisuais no espaço da formação de professores

No presente texto, trazemos a discussão sobre o potencial do cinema na escola e na formação de professores. Pela dimensão estética a linguagem cinematográfica é uma experiência de arte no espaço educacional, ainda, ampliada na concepção de que o cinema entra na educação como criação, como produção. Nessa perspectiva, apresentamos uma experiência realizada no âmbito da formação inicial de professores (as) no curso de Pedagogia diurno da Universidade Federal de Santa Maria, onde a proposição é o desenvolvimento da observação e registro do cotidiano da cidade e da escola como espaços de desaprendizagem e aprendizagem de outras formas de sentir e viver. Aprender a gramática cinematográfica apresentou-se junto com outro desafio – documentar os movimentos de ocupações nas escolas públicas e no espaço universitário. Enviado em: 06 de junho de 2017.Aprovado em: 13 de julho de 2017.

The Occupation Movements: Acting, Protesting, Criticizing

L’article s’interesse aux occupations de lieux, qu’il s’efforce de reinscrire dans l’historicite ideologique des modes d’action contestataires, dans la variabilite des significations que leur attribuent les individus et les collectifs – eux-memes heterogenes – qui s’y engagent, et surtout dans la materialite des pratiques qui s’y deploient. Croisee a l’examen des trajectoires sociales des acteurs, l’attention ethnographique portee aux gestes accomplis dans le quotidien reinvente des lieux occupes permet de mettre a nu l’importance des mecanismes de declassement social, d’experience de la marge ou d’exposition a la violence dans la comprehension des processus d’entree en occupation, particulierement pour les acteurs sans passe militant. En permettant la reconversion d’une experience intime de la souffrance et de l’injustice en ressource militante, l’engagement dans un regime d’action occupationnel, a la fois radical et familier, offre un espace de reconnaissance collective ou s’explorent les voies d’une citoyennete vecue comme accomplie, car indexee a un agir politique en actes.