Hydroclimatological data and analyses from a headwaters region of Mongolia as boundary objects in interdisciplinary climate change research

Collaborative work on increasingly complex hydroclimatic investigations often crosses disciplinary boundaries. Elements of scientific inquiry, such as data or the results of analyses can become objectified, or capable of being adopted and/or adapted by users from multiple disciplinary realms. These objects often provide a bridge for collaborative endeavors, or are used as tools by individuals pursuing multi-disciplinary work. Boundary object terminology was first formalized and applied by social scientists. However, few examples of the application of this useful framework are found in the hydrologic literature. The construct is applied here to identify and discuss how common researcb products and processes are used both internally and externally through providing examples from a project examining the historical and paleo proxy-based hydroclimatology of a headwaters region of Mongolia. The boundary object concept is valuable to consider when conducting and critiquing basic research, collaborating across multiple disciplinary teams as when studying climate change issues, as an individual researcher working in a cross boundary sense using methods from differing disciplines to answer questions, and/or when one group adapts the work of another to their own research problems or interpretive needs, as occurred with selected products of this project.

Monocular Depth Estimation with Sharp Boundary

Monocular depth estimation is the basic task in computer vision.Its accuracy has tremendous improvement in the decade with the development of deep learning.However,the blurry boundary in the depth map is a serious problem.Researchers find that the blurry boundary is mainly caused by two factors.First,the low-level features,containing boundary and structure information,may be lost in deep networks during the convolution process.Second,themodel ignores the errors introduced by the boundary area due to the few portions of the boundary area in the whole area,during the backpropagation.Focusing on the factors mentioned above.Two countermeasures are proposed to mitigate the boundary blur problem.Firstly,we design a scene understanding module and scale transformmodule to build a lightweight fuse feature pyramid,which can deal with low-level feature loss effectively.Secondly,we propose a boundary-aware depth loss function to pay attention to the effects of the boundary’s depth value.Extensive experiments show that our method can predict the depth maps with clearer boundaries,and the performance of the depth accuracy based on NYU-Depth V2,SUN RGB-D,and iBims-1 are competitive.

Benefits and Challenges of Resilience and Vulnerability for Disaster Risk Management

This article addresses resilience and vulnerability as two prominent concepts within disaster risk science. The authors provide an overview of current uses and bene?ts of and challenges to resilience and vulnerability concepts for disaster risk management(DRM). The article summarizes the evolution of these concepts and of attempts to de?ne them precisely,and addresses the potential bene?ts of conceptual vagueness.The usage and conception of resilience and vulnerability within a selection of strategies and legislations in DRM are compared. Complementing this analysis of disaster risk research and management practice, a survey identi?es some of the bene?ts of and challenges to the concepts of resilience and vulnerability as seen by a peer-community. Synthesizing the three approaches, we conclude that a certain conceptual and methodological ‘‘haze’’ prevails, which hampers the transfer of information and ?ndings within disaster risk science, from science to practice, and vice versa. But this vagueness offers opportunities for communication between disaster risk science, policy, and practice. Overall, evaluations of the resilience and vulnerability concepts are lacking, which demands the development of criteria to identify and assess the challenges to and bene?ts of resilience and vulnerability for DRM.

Läxhjälp as Shadow Education in Sweden:The Logic of Equality in“A School for All”

Purpose:Taking läxhjälp/homework support in Sweden as a case,this article aims to further explore shadow education,especially as a pedagogical object from curriculum theory perspective.Design/Approach/Methods:Approaches including policy analyses,ethnomethodological work based on video-recorded interaction,and narratives have produced empirically grounded knowledge.We use examples from several substudies and analyze the reentry and regulation of supplementary education and how tutors and tutees interact in tutoring settings and negotiate identities in läxhjälp as well as the relation to regular schooling.Findings:Läxhjälp is conditioned by the logic of equality and changes in the governance of läxhjälp.The proliferation of different kinds of tutoring practices provided by various organizations calls for a broad definition of shadow education.With curriculum as boundary object,equality and academic success are foundational.Different settings and spatiotemporal arrangements affect modes of interaction,distribution of epistemic authority,and negotiations of identities.Originality/Value:With Sweden as a case,it is possible to explore shadow education in a new context,the Scandinavian welfare state,and its history of comprehensive education.Moreover,ethnomethodological interaction and narrative studies and curriculum perspectives are seldom employed within research on shadow education.A number of critical key boundary objects are identified.