Search results for "Naturalness"

The Adequacy of Resemblance Nominalism about Perfect Naturalness

2016

The Visual Quality of Urban Park Scenes of Kowloon Park, Hong Kong: Likeability, Affective Appraisal, and Cross-Cultural Perspectives

2005

The urban park is a place where urbanites can escape from the stresses of everyday life. Using a set of fifteen photographs as visual stimuli, we attempted to identify those scenes that are liked by visitors to Kowloon Park, Hong Kong. The visual quality of an urban park scene is measured by its likeability, referring to the probability that the scene will evoke a strong and positive response among the users of the park. Because Hong Kong is an international metropolis, the respondent sample included both Hong Kong residents and tourists. The principal component analysis revealed the three underlying ‘dimensions’ of the appraisal aspects of the data: the ‘affective’ component, the ‘managem…

Forest Naturalness in Northern Europe: Perspectives on Processes, Structures and Species Diversity

2011

Saving the remaining natural forests in northern Europe has been one of the main goals to halt the ongoing decline of forest biodiversity. To facilitate the recognition, mapping and efficient conservation of natural forests, there is an urgent need for a general formulation, based on ecological patterns and processes, of the concept of “forest naturalness”. However, complexity, structural idiosyncracy and dynamical features of unmanaged forest ecosystems at various spatio-temporal scales pose major challenges for such a formulation. The definitions hitherto used for the concept of forest naturalness can be fruitfully grouped into three dimensions: 1) structure-based concepts of natural …

Dubbing dialogues… naturally: a pragmatic approach to the translation of transition markers in dubbing

2012

Although research in Audiovisual Translation is said to have come of age in the past decade, there are still several key issues that have not received the scholarly attention they deserve. In the case of dubbing, the study of the naturalness of dubbed dialogue is a case in point. The aim of the present article is to analyse the use of transition markers in dubbing in order to look precisely at the naturalness of dubbed dialogue while taking into account the dubbing constraints at play. This analysis is carried out by comparing the dubbed dialogue (English-Spanish) of a popular American sitcom to the non-translated but prefabricated dialogue of a Spanish sitcom and finally to spontaneous con…

Geobotanical approach to detect land-use change of a Mediterranean landscape: a case study in Central-Western Sicily

2018

A landscape is a palimpsest of the interactions between human activities and ecological dynamics. In an interdisciplinary perspective of dialogue between the ‘Two Cultures’ (Natural Sciences and Humanities), a study of a rural area has been carried out through a reading of plant ecosystems as signs of human impact. The purpose of this paper—as part of the project ‘Harvesting Memories’: Ecology and landscape archaeology of Castro/Giardinallo Valley and Mt. Barrau district (Corleone, Palermo, Sicily)—is to analyse the formative-processes of a Sicilian rural landscape and its changes in the last century. A key element in the reconstruction of the formation of the present landscape is the serie…

Wood-inhabiting fungal responses to forest naturalness vary among morpho-groups

2021

The general negative impact of forestry on wood-inhabiting fungal diversity is well recognized, yet the effect of forest naturalness is poorly disentangled among different fungal groups inhabiting dead wood of different tree species. We studied the relationship between forest naturalness, log characteristics and diversity of different fungal morpho-groups inhabiting large decaying logs of similar quality in spruce dominated boreal forests. We sampled all non-lichenized fruitbodies from birch, spruce, pine and aspen in 12 semi-natural forest sites of varying level of naturalness. The overall fungal community composition was mostly determined by host tree species. However, when assessing the …

Long-lived particles at the energy frontier: the MATHUSLA physics case

2019

We examine the theoretical motivations for long-lived particle (LLP) signals at the LHC in a comprehensive survey of Standard Model (SM) extensions. LLPs are a common prediction of a wide range of theories that address unsolved fundamental mysteries such as naturalness, dark matter, baryogenesis and neutrino masses, and represent a natural and generic possibility for physics beyond the SM (BSM). In most cases the LLP lifetime can be treated as a free parameter from the $\mu$m scale up to the Big Bang Nucleosynthesis limit of $\sim 10^7$m. Neutral LLPs with lifetimes above $\sim$ 100m are particularly difficult to probe, as the sensitivity of the LHC main detectors is limited by challenging …

Analisi della naturalità del mosaico territoriale in Sicilia

2009

A new index (NEI - Naturalness Evaluation Index) is applied in order to evaluate the landscape degree of conservation and naturalness. Land mosaic has been classified into four different levels of conservation, taking into account the relative influence of natural processes and anthropic activities. Fitocoenoses structure and floristic composition are used as indicators. As a case study Sicily (Italy) was chosen. The methodology has been applied to reclassify Corine Land Cover data and obtain a Naturalness map. The area of study has been divided into reference units (municipalities) and the index has been calculated for each land unit. The index has proved to be very useful for visualising …

When Ethics and Aesthetics Are One and the Same: A Wittgensteinian Perspective on Natural Value

2015

Many environmental philosophers have held naturalness to be a primary source of nature’s value. Seen this way, the nature that is most valuable is wild nature, and ‘wild’ is that which is unmodiled by human activity. However, accounts of our attributions of value to the wild often have an aura of elusiveness to them, as if what really matters about nature being wild could not ultimately be captured by words. In an attempt to account for what really matters, I relate our fascination with wild nature to a famous Wittgensteinian quote—‘Ethics and Aesthetics are one and the same’ (Tractatus 2006a: 28, §6.421)—and inspect the ways in which important dimensions of our attributions of value to wil…

extended MSSM

2012

We investigate the perturbative regime of the Minimal Supersymmetric Con- formal Technicolor and show that it allows for a stable vacuum correctly breaking the electroweak symmetry. We nd that the particle spectrum is richer than the MSSM one since it features several new particles stemming out from the new N = 4 sector of the theory. The parameter space of the new theory is reduced imposing naturalness of the cou- plings and soft supersymmetry breaking masses, perturbativity of the model at the EW scale as well as phenomenological constraints. By studying the RGEs at two loops we nd that the Yukawa couplings of the heavy fermionic states