Abstract. Steadily increasing number of the world's population is living in urban centres. The issue of security and citizen safety in densely populated areas is a growing concern. Considering terrorism and large scale accident scenarios, natural disasters and crime, urban planning practice must be complemented with vulnerability identification and resilience enhancements methods. The VITRUV project, funded by the European Commission under its FP7 Research & Technical Development Programme, is carried out by a consortium of 12 industry partners, public end-users and research institutions drawn from 8 European countries. The aim is the development of software tools for the consideration of extraordinary threats. For the complex process of urban planning the tools supports the planning process through all three planning stages, from concept to plan and detail design, compatible with existing planning formats and software solutions. The qualitative or quantitative hazard and risk analysis of single buildings of infrastructure forms the basis. It consists of the analysis of events, scenarios, hazards, damage, frequency of events, exposure of personnel and risk including options for risk visualization and risk assessment for plan and detail level. Based on an all hazard risk approach, the tools will enable planners -to include a security assessment and security knowledge in their planning process, in order to make well-considered systematic qualitative decisions (concept level), -to analyse the susceptibility of urban spaces with respect to new threats (plan level), and -to perform vulnerability analysis of urban spaces by computing the likely damage on humans, buildings and traffic infrastructure (detail level).
Website analysis is an interdisciplinary field of inquiry that focuses on both digital literacy and language competence (Brugger, 2009). Website analysis in an EFL learning context has the potential to facilitate logical thinking and in the process develop functional language proficiency. This study reported on an English language website (http://www.travelbelize.org/) analysis experiment carried out for three weeks as an in-class and homework activity in a third year (junior) level English as a Foreign Language (EFL) course at a Japanese technical university. The purpose was to explore EFL learners’ ability to analyze an English language website and produce concrete design responses in English. During the first week of the analysis (involving sixteen students selected due to performing the best during earlier in-class website analysis activities on the course), participants produced their own responses to eight open-ended design questions about the website. The second week of the analysis (involving all 59 students on the course) tested the students’ ability to search for information from the website, and recorded their impressions about the website design based on standard usability questionnaires (CSUQ, QUIS, and MPRC). The third week of the analysis had the 59 students self-report on their use of meta-cognitive reading strategies (MARSI 1.0 Questionnaire) during the website analysis. The results of the questionnaires showed that, overall, the EFL students had a basic understanding of major design questions related to information organization, screen interface design, audience, technology used, etc. However, there was statistically significant variability between responses in different groups (comprehensive evaluation, webpage design, terminology and website information and website capabilities) and the respondents were not unanimous in their impressions about the website. The result of the student self-reports on metacognitive reading strategies showed wide acceptability and use of problem-solving strategies.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.