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Return-to-office mandates may not be the solution to downtown struggles that Canadian cities are banking on

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Return-to-office mandates may not be the solution to downtown struggles that Canadian cities are banking on


by Alexander Wray, Jamie Seabrook, Jason Gilliland and Sean Doherty,

office
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

In recent months, many Canadian employers in both the public and private sectors have implemented return-to-office mandates, requiring workers that transitioned to remote or hybrid work during the COVID-19 pandemic to work in-person again.

Employers are justifying these mandates by arguing they improve productivity, build more collaborative teams and improve mentorship for junior employees.

Employers are not the only group ecstatic about these mandates. Municipalities and business owners are also expressing hope that the presence of office workers will spin off into greater consumer spending at restaurants and other businesses near office buildings. The expectation is that office workers will once again start spending money on coffee, lunch or after-work beverages.

In 2022, the mayor of Ottawa partially blamed the downtown core’s economic struggles on the fact that federal public service workers were still largely working remotely. Federal workers have since been mandated to return to work in-person three days a week in late fall.

The Canadian Federation of Independent Business similarly criticized the slow return to offices as a leading factor behind why small and medium-size businesses, especially restaurants and bars, are facing challenges in downtown areas.

Insight into restaurant success

During the pandemic, there were predictions that more than half of Canada’s independent restaurants would fail as part of their customer base—office workers—shifted to working from home.

Our recent study investigated which operational, demographic and land use factors affected restaurant survival during the first year of the pandemic in London, Ont.

We found no significant differences between restaurants that failed and restaurants that survived based on proximity to office uses. Instead, operational decisions made by restaurants individually were much more predictive of their survival than any geographic factor, including the presence of offices.

We found that restaurants located in areas receiving more CERB (Canadian Emergency Response Benefit) payments, and with a higher density of entertainment venues around them, were less likely to survive.

Restaurants that adapted by offering pickup and delivery options were more likely to survive, though only for those that did their own delivery in-house rather than relying on platforms like UberEats and SkipTheDishes. Restaurants that had drive-thrus, held liquor licenses, or had been established for more than five years were more likely to survive. These older, more established restaurants were likely more resilient because of financial stability and customer loyalty.

Table-service restaurants fared better than fast food outlets, likely because they could offer large patio dining spaces during the summer. Restaurants with liquor licenses substantially benefited, especially after a regulatory change by the Ontario government that allowed alcohol sales with takeout and delivery—a first for the province.

In short, restaurant success was driven more by individual business decisions rather than being in a specific location. People working remotely instead of in the office did not significantly affect restaurant survival during the first year of the pandemic.

Downtown struggles

As Canadian downtowns look to recover, many face ongoing challenges. Activity levels are down by about 20 percent from pre-pandemic levels in many places, lagging behind many similarly sized downtowns in the United States.

This downturn has been partially attributed to a combination of higher office building vacancies and fewer workers downtown. For the first time, downtown office vacancy rates have exceeded suburban rates in the Greater Toronto Area. There has also been tremendous housing growth within many downtown cores.

At the same time, downtowns have become a highly visible focal point of Canada’s growing addictions, mental health and housing crises. The pandemic fully revealed the deeper social, economic and health challenges happening in Canadian society.

While violent incidents are rare, the social incivilities and disorder on display—public urination and defecation, open drug use, visible tents and property crime—contributes to a perception that Canadian downtowns are unsafe. This perception, whether accurate or not, has an impact on the willingness of people to engage with their downtowns.

A way forward

The damage to the reputation of Canada’s downtowns has been done. Downtown London now has the highest office vacancy rate in the country. The Workplace Safety Insurance Board of Ontario, for instance, recently chose to consolidate its offices in the outskirts of London, rather than downtown.

Many people now elect to spend their time and money in areas that have embraced the “experience economy.” These are places that provide highly manicured entertainment and shopping destinations, with restaurants being the bedrock of enabling high quality experiences in these areas.

Foot traffic is at an all-time high in suburban shopping centers. The downtowns of cities that are widely known as global tourist destinations—Las Vegas, Miami and Nashville—have activity levels close to or higher than their pre-pandemic levels.

These are places that are developing highly attractive economies that provide people with the safe, fun and exciting experiences they are looking for locally and internationally. Instead of trying to force unwilling workers back to the office, Canadian cities should instead focus on developing downtowns that people genuinely want to visit and experience.

One potential way to do this is to provide wrap-around support services and direct pathways to stable housing across the entire community, as the City of London has done. By spreading care and outreach services across the entire city, rather than concentrating them exclusively in downtown areas, the negative effects from Canada’s homelessness crisis can be reduced on urban cores.

This type of strategy will direct those who need help away from downtowns, and may even permanently lift them out of poverty. In turn, Canadian downtowns can return to being places for everyone to shop, eat, relax, and work in comfort.

Provided by
The Conversation


This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.The Conversation

Citation:
Return-to-office mandates may not be the solution to downtown struggles that Canadian cities are banking on (2024, October 3)
retrieved 3 October 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-10-office-mandates-solution-downtown-struggles.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.





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Mercury’s magnetic landscape mapped in 30 minutes

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Mercury’s magnetic landscape mapped in 30 minutes


Mercury's magnetic landscape mapped in 30 minutes
Mercury’s magnetosphere during BepiColombo’s third flyby. Credit: European Space Agency

As BepiColombo sped past Mercury during its June 2023 flyby, it encountered a variety of features in the tiny planet’s magnetic field. These measurements provide a tantalizing taste of the mysteries that the mission is set to investigate when it arrives in orbit around the solar system’s innermost planet.

Like Earth, Mercury has a magnetic field, albeit 100 times weaker at the surface of the planet. Nonetheless, this magnetic field carves out a bubble in space, called a magnetosphere, which acts as a buffer to the continuous flow of particles blown out by the sun as the solar wind.

Because Mercury orbits so close to the sun, the interaction of the solar wind with the magnetosphere and even the surface of the planet is a lot more intense than at Earth. Exploring the dynamics of this bubble and the properties of the particles contained within it is one of the main aims of BepiColombo’s mission.

BepiColombo is set to arrive at Mercury in 2026 using flybys of Earth, Venus and Mercury itself to adjust its speed and trajectory to allow it to be captured into orbit around the planet. The currently “stacked” spacecraft will separate and deploy two science orbiters—the ESA-led Mercury Planetary Orbiter (MPO) and the JAXA-led Mercury Magnetospheric Orbiter (MMO, or Mio)—into complementary orbits to enable the essential dual-spacecraft measurements needed to paint a complete picture of Mercury’s dynamic environment.

As the spacecraft speeds past Mercury during the flybys, many of its science instruments are able to sneak a preview of the exciting science to come. Moreover, the flybys provide unique insights from regions around the planet that won’t be directly accessible from orbit.

Lina Hadid, a former ESA Research Fellow now at the Laboratoire de Physique des Plasmas at Paris Observatory, used the Mercury Plasma Particle Experiment (MPPE) suite of instruments active on Mio during the 19 June 2023 flyby, BepiColombo’s third of six Mercury gravity assists, to build up an impressive picture of the planet’s magnetic landscape in a very short period of time.

Hadid is the lead co-investigator of MPPE and lead of one of its instruments, the Mass Spectrum Analyser. She worked on the paper published in Communications Physics that presented the results with former instrument lead Dominique Delcourt.

“These flybys are fast; we crossed Mercury’s magnetosphere in about 30 minutes, moving from dusk to dawn and at a closest approach of just 235 km above the planet’s surface,” she says. “We sampled the type of particles, how hot they are, and how they move, enabling us to clearly plot the magnetic landscape during this brief period.”

Combining BepiColombo’s measurements with computer modeling to determine the origin of the detected particles based on their motion enabled Hadid and her colleagues to sketch out the various features encountered in the magnetosphere.

“We saw expected structures like the ‘shock’ boundary between the free-flowing solar wind and the magnetosphere, and we also passed through the ‘horns’ flanking the plasma sheet, a region of hotter, denser electrically charged gas that streams out like a tail in the direction away from the sun. But we also had some surprises.”

Delcourt states, “We detected a so-called low-latitude boundary layer defined by a region of turbulent plasma at the edge of the magnetosphere, and here we observed particles with a much wider range of energies than we’ve ever seen before at Mercury, in large thanks to the sensitivity of the Mass Spectrum Analyser designed especially for Mercury’s complex environment.”

“BepiColombo will be able to determine the ion composition of Mercury’s magnetosphere in greater detail than ever.”

“We also observed energetic hot ions near the equatorial plane and at low latitude trapped in the magnetosphere, and we think the only way to explain that is by a ring current, either a partial or complete ring, but this is an area that is much debated,” adds Hadid.

A ring current is an electric current carried by charged particles trapped in the magnetosphere. Earth has a well-understood ring current located tens of thousands of kilometers from its surface. At Mercury it is less clear how the particles can stay trapped within a few hundred kilometers of the planet, especially as the magnetosphere is squashed against the planet’s surface. This debate will likely be settled once MPO and Mio are collecting data full-time.

Mercury's magnetic landscape mapped in 30 minutes
Simulation of Mercury’s magnetic environment. Credit: European Space Agency

Hadid and her colleagues also observed the direct interaction of the spacecraft with the surrounding space plasma. When the spacecraft is heated by the sun it cannot detect the colder, heavy ions because the spacecraft itself gets electrically charged and repels them.

But as the spacecraft moves through the planet’s nightside shadow, the charging is different, and suddenly a sea of cold plasma ions becomes visible. For example, the spacecraft detected ions of oxygen, sodium and potassium, which were likely sent flying from the planet’s surface by micro-meteorite strikes or through interactions with the solar wind.

“It’s like we’re suddenly seeing the surface composition ‘exploded’ in 3D through the planet’s very thin atmosphere, known as its exosphere,” remarks Delcourt. “It’s really exciting to start seeing the link between the planet’s surface and the plasma environment.”

“In this rare dusk-to-dawn sweep through the large-scale structure of Mercury’s magnetosphere we’ve tasted the promise of future discoveries,” says Go Murakami, JAXA’s BepiColombo project scientist.

“The observations emphasize the need for the two orbiters and their complementary instruments to tell us the full story and build up a complete picture of how the magnetic and plasma environment changes over time and in space,” adds Geraint Jones, ESA BepiColombo project scientist.

“We can’t wait to see how BepiColombo will impact our broader understanding of planetary magnetospheres.”

Meanwhile, scientists are already digging into the data snatched during last month’s fourth close Mercury flyby, while flight controllers are readying for the final two back-to-back flybys slated for 1 December 2024 and 8 January 2025, respectively.

More information:
Lina Z. Hadid et al, Mercury’s plasma environment after BepiColombo’s third flyby, Communications Physics (2024). DOI: 10.1038/s42005-024-01766-8

Citation:
Mercury’s magnetic landscape mapped in 30 minutes (2024, October 3)
retrieved 3 October 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-10-mercury-magnetic-landscape-minutes.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
part may be reproduced without the written permission. The content is provided for information purposes only.





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Protection decisions loom for endangered North Atlantic right whales

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Protection decisions loom for endangered North Atlantic right whales


North Atlantic right whale
Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain

Pregnant North Atlantic right whales will soon begin the long swim from the frigid waters off New England’s shores to the warm calving grounds of Georgia’s coast.

By the time the endangered mammals start arriving in mid-November, the federal government may—or may not—have imposed a revised vessel speed rule meant to protect the mothers and their newborns from boat strikes.

Next month, the Biden administration is expected to give final consideration to a two-year-old proposal to expand a 10-knot speed limit for large vessels operating in the calving grounds on smaller boats 35 feet and longer. Yet as the White House readies to act, a congressional committee recently advanced legislation sponsored by U.S. Rep. Buddy Carter, R-St. Simons Island, meant to halt the speed rule’s implementation.

The House Committee on Natural Resources approved House Resolution 8704 on Sept. 19, making it eligible for a vote before the full House. The legislation would block funding for implementation and enforcement of the speed rule through the end of 2030 and create a grant program to spur new technological developments to help boat captains spot whales and avoid collisions.

“There is technology that exists to track right whales, and we must implement it before endangering boaters’ and harbor pilots’ lives with unworkable speed restrictions. I urge a swift vote on the House floor so we can get these critical safeguards signed into law,” Carter said.

The resolution faces political challenges should it pass the House, at least through the end of 2024. Democrats broadly support the speed rule and the party holds majority control of the U.S. Senate, although that could change in the upcoming election. So could the presidency, as Democrat Joe Biden is not seeking reelection.

Vice President Kamala Harris, a Democrat, is locked in a tight race with the Republican nominee, former President Donald Trump.

Even if Democrats retain power, Carter’s objection to the vessel speed rule is being watched closely by whale advocates. Gib Brogan with Oceana, an environmental group focused on the world’s oceans, labeled efforts to delay the limit’s implementation as “legislative attacks” that could be “disastrous” for the right whales.

“Carter’s bill would pave the way toward extinction for this species,” Brogan said. “More needs to be done and needs to be done immediately. We can’t wait until 2031 to protect the whales from boat strikes.”

Protection vs. balance

Carter’s opposition is grounded in economic concerns. His district stretches the length of the Georgia coast, and his constituents include commercial fishermen and recreational boaters, some of whom would have to abide by the speed limit.

The loudest outcry against the vessel speed rule, though, has come from Georgia Ports Authority officials. The state-run entity operates the third-busiest port in the nation with marine terminals in Savannah and Brunswick. The facilities are economic engines, supporting 561,000 jobs and contributing $59 billion annually to the state’s gross domestic product, a 2022 study showed.

Authority leaders oppose the rule because of the effect it would have on the harbor pilots who bring cargo ships into the port. Those professionals are ferried to and from the freighters on boats that would be subject to the expanded speed rule.

This presents safety concerns—the pilots board the vessels on the open seas within the calving grounds. Pilot boats must typically reach speeds as high as 12 knots to perform the transfer of the captains to and from the cargo ships. The boarding process requires that pilot boats move in quickly beside the freighters, which in rough seas must travel at 8–10 knots to maintain steerage and limit the chance of injury to the pilots.

Should the speed limits be expanded, the pilots have told the ports authority they would refuse to work when seas are rough.

“Operating around the end of the channel at 10 knots or less is a dangerous thing,” said Trey Thompson, president of the Savannah Pilots Association. “You’d be like a cork bobbing around, especially in the wintertime.”

While proponents of the vessel speed rule say exceptions could be made for the pilots, the ports authority remains opposed to the limits. Authority Chief Operating Officer Jamie McCurry warned a House subcommittee of “unintended consequences” during a hearing in June and testified that it is “crucial to find a balanced approach” such as outlined in Carter’s legislation.

Facing extinction

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officials and environmental groups say the expanded speed rule should be put in place before the 2024–2025 calving season begins.

At the June House subcommittee hearing, Evan Howell, director of NOAA’s office of science and technology, testified that the whales’ extinction is imminent and that no technology developed under the House resolution’s grant program could be proved and adopted quickly enough to protect the whales from vessel strikes.

Vessel strikes are a threat to the whales, which can reach 50 feet in length, weigh as much as 70 tons and typically swim just below the ocean’s surface. Researchers estimate 15 right whales have died due to vessel strikes since 2017, with three documented deaths this year. About 360 North Atlantic right whales—and just 70 reproductively active females—remain on Earth.

“As we prepare to enter yet another calving season along Georgia’s coast, we cannot sit idly by as vessel strikes continue to injure and kill our whales at unsustainable levels, like what we saw in 2024,” said Catherine Ridley of One Hundred Miles, a Georgia-focused environmental group.

“Our elected leaders must rely on facts and the best available science now. NOAA’s proposed expansion of its 2008 rule is safe, effective—and urgently needed.”

2024 The Atlanta Journal-Constitution. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Citation:
Protection decisions loom for endangered North Atlantic right whales (2024, October 3)
retrieved 3 October 2024
from https://phys.org/news/2024-10-decisions-loom-endangered-north-atlantic.html

This document is subject to copyright. Apart from any fair dealing for the purpose of private study or research, no
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Google is working on reasoning AI, chasing OpenAI’s efforts

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Google is working on reasoning AI, chasing OpenAI’s efforts


Google
Credit: cottonbro studio from Pexels

Google is working on artificial intelligence software that resembles the human ability to reason, similar to OpenAI’s o1, marking a new front in the rivalry between the tech giant and the fast-growing startup.

In recent months, multiple teams at Alphabet Inc.’s Google have been making progress on AI reasoning software, according to people with knowledge of the matter, who asked not to be identified because the information is private. Such software programs are more adept at solving multistep problems in fields such as math and computer programming.

AI researchers are pursuing reasoning models as they search for the next significant step forward in the technology. Like OpenAI, Google is trying to approximate human reasoning using a technique known as chain-of-thought prompting, according to two of the people.

In this technique, which Google pioneered, the software pauses for a matter of seconds before responding to a written prompt while, behind the scenes and invisible to the user, it considers a number of related prompts and then summarizes what appears to be the best response.

Google declined to comment on the effort.

Google and OpenAI have been locked in an intense fight for dominance in AI, particularly since the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, a popular chatbot that some investors worry will eventually obviate the need for Google search.

Google has taken various steps to regain its lead, including merging its premier research labs to form the Google DeepMind unit and fortifying relationships between researchers and product teams.

Yet the search giant continues to move more slowly when it comes to releasing AI products, pausing to consider ethical problems, the need to live up to the public’s expectations of trust in its brand, and the competing interests of multiple similar efforts in the vast organization.

Since OpenAI unveiled its o1 model, known internally as Strawberry, in mid-September, some in DeepMind have fretted that the company had fallen behind, according to another person with knowledge of the matter. But employees are no longer as concerned as they were following the launch of ChatGPT, now that Google has debuted some of its own work, the person said.

Despite the slower pace of Google’s product rollouts, it remains a formidable player, said Oren Etzioni, a veteran AI researcher who founded TrueMedia.org, a nonprofit dedicated to combating political disinformation.

“Technically it’s always been the case that Google’s capabilities were top notch. They were just more conservative in rolling things out,” Etzioni said. “It’s a marathon, and it’s anybody’s race to win.”

In July, Google showcased AlphaProof, which specializes in math reasoning, and AlphaGeometry 2, an updated version of a model focused on geometry that the company debuted earlier this year. The programs aced four of the six problems featured in the International Mathematical Olympiad, an annual competition in which students tackle topics such as algebra and geometry, Google said in a blog post.

At its developer conference in May, Google offered a glimpse of an AI assistant, Astra, which can use a phone’s camera to see the world around it and answer questions, such as telling a user where she had left her glasses. Google said some features of assistant may come to its flagship AI model, Gemini, toward the end of this year.

“Advanced mathematical reasoning is a critical capability for modern AI,” Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis wrote in a post on social network X in July.

2024 Bloomberg L.P. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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Google is working on reasoning AI, chasing OpenAI’s efforts (2024, October 3)
retrieved 3 October 2024
from https://techxplore.com/news/2024-10-google-ai-openai-efforts.html

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Engineers teach a quadruped robot to climb standard ladders

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Engineers teach a quadruped robot to climb standard ladders


A quadruped robot that can easily climb a standard ladder
Composite image of a quadrupedal robot equipped with hooked end-effectors, ascending a ladder in 4 s with a reinforcement learning-based control policy. Ladder shown has parameters 90°incline, 1.8 m length, 0.3 m inter-rung spacing, 2.5 cm rung radius, and 1 m width. Credit: arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2409.17731

A team of robotics engineers at ETH Zurich, Robotics Systems Lab, has modified an ANYbotics ANYMal quadruped robot to allow it to easily and effectively climb a standard ladder. The group has written a paper describing their efforts and results and has posted it on the arXiv preprint server.

For many years, manufacturers who have deployed robots in their facilities have noted that while robots have come a long way in replacing human laborers, one area where they fall short is climbing simple ladders. In response, engineers from several companies have attempted to give robots such an ability, almost all of which have been humanoid bipedal type robots.

Such robots are typically very slow and tentative and not very useful in a real-world environment. In this new effort, the research team has modified a standard working quadruped robot known as ANYMal in a way that allows it to very quickly and nimbly climb standard ladders.






The team noted that most robot “hands” or “paws” are not very conducive to ladder climbing. Humans, they note, form their hands into a hook and then grip each rung as they proceed upward. Therefore, the research team started by designing a custom paw with a hook-like gripping ability—one that allowed for clenching once a hook was made. They then used reinforcement learning to teach the robot how to use its hooks to climb a ladder.

To speed up the training, the researchers used a simulation where a privileged teacher–student approach was employed, where the teacher was given access to observational videos of simulated robots climbing ladders in a variety of environments and where problems were encountered, such as a jiggling ladder or a missed step. Such training allowed for learning robust climbing skills. Multiple student robots were then taught by allowing them to mimic the teacher.

Once they had a test robot thoroughly trained, the research team set it loose in a real-world environment where it was asked to climb a variety of ladders. The researchers found it to be successful approximately 90% of the time. They also found their modified robot greatly outperformed the same type of robot without the hooked feet.

The research team plans to continue their work with ladder climbing, hoping to add more features such as the ability to traverse ladders in unstructured environments without the need for motion capture equipment.

More information:
Dylan Vogel et al, Robust Ladder Climbing with a Quadrupedal Robot, arXiv (2024). DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2409.17731

Journal information:
arXiv


© 2024 Science X Network

Citation:
Engineers teach a quadruped robot to climb standard ladders (2024, October 3)
retrieved 3 October 2024
from https://techxplore.com/news/2024-10-quadruped-robot-climb-standard-ladders.html

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