SUMMARY In a midstory isolated building, the isolation system is incorporated into the midstory rather than the base of the building. Because of the flexibility of the substructure below the isolation system in a midstory isolated building, the contribution of higher modes to the seismic responses of the midstory isolated structure may not be negligible, especially when the coupling of higher modes exists. To investigate this modal coupling effect, a simplified three‐lumped‐mass structural model of the midstory isolated building is assumed in this study. Through the equivalent linear analysis and shaking table tests, it is found that the coupling of higher modes may lead to enlarged acceleration responses at the super‐floor and superstructure above the isolation layer. Accordingly, a simple method to prevent the midstory isolation design from the coupling of higher modes attributed to the improper design of the substructure and superstructure is proposed in this paper. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

University campus sustainability projects frequently aim to promote ecological behavior of their community members. However, these projects rarely consider the level of students’ self-construal, the view of self held by members of the university community (i.e., whether the self is viewed as independent or interdependent with nature). This runs counter to the findings in psychology that people’s behavior is strongly affected by their self-construal. We thus conducted an exploratory attempt to include self-construal measurements into a campus environmental sustainability project at National Taiwan University. We specifically examined whether the university had contributed to the transformation of students’ self-construal for greater environmental sustainability. Toward this end, we first confirmed that a psychological scale for self-construal, the connectedness to nature scale (CNS) that had been mainly tested in Western contexts, successfully predicted the likelihood of students’ ecological behaviors (e.g., reducing waste) in an East Asian context. We found only a small difference in the CNS between students for different academic years, which suggests that the university was unsuccessful in transforming students’ self-construal for greater sustainability. This finding resonates with the practice of universities in the modern era to emphasize cognitive dimensions of learning rather than ontological dimensions. Our results thus suggest that mainstreaming ontological dimensions would be one potential way for universities to move toward campus sustainability.

<p>Sustainability transition on climate change, energy systems, and low carbon society is a big issue in 21 century. However, it’s not a linear question in a specific single research community. This study aims to contribute a transdisciplinary research (TDR) framework to support climate change decision-making as wicked problems. To achieve the global goal of 2050 Net Zero, it needs a science-based scenario setting for both adaptation and mitigation while making decisions and climate risk assessment in business and governance. From knowledge to actions, academics and non-academics are encouraged to engage in climate actions at the same time. This study delivers a system-dynamic approach to integrate the environmental, social, and economical components from participants and stakeholders with different backgrounds in TDR to reduce climate risks including resilient adaptation for physical risk and low carbon transition for transition risk. The TDR framework on climate change dynamic decision-making would be demonstrated through a case of the Carbon Neutrality Project of National Taiwan University.</p>

This paper presents an error-resilient MPEG-4 video communication system. The system comprises an error-resilient encoder, an adaptive error-resilient transcoder, an error-resilient decoder and the PLBP encoderidecoder. It has been evaluated under a configurable network error simulator. In addition, the system integrates the error resilience tools defined in MPEG-4 visual standard, namely Video Packet Structure, Header Extension Code (HEC) and NEWPRED, as well as three proposed novel error-resilient techniques, namely Prioritized-Level Bitstream Protection (PLBP), Protected Data Partitioning (PDP) and Restorative Intra Adoption (RIA). In the decoder, three error concealment techniques are implemented. They are temporal replacement, motion replacement, and predictive motion replacement. The decoder also implements an error detection mechanism that has high sensitivity to catch errors.Finally, the performance of the hybrid error-resilient system has been evaluated. The experimental results show that under the error-prone networks, acceptable video quality has been successfully retained without incurring much overhead.