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Applying notions of interdiscursivity, commodification of discourse (Fairclough 1993) and semiotic remediation (Bolter and Grusin 2000), this paper analyses toilet graffiti in men’s and women’s toilets at the University of the Western Cape in order to capture how the toilet walls become platforms where texts associated with other genres and discourses are appropriated, remediated, and transformed for expanded production and consumption of meaning. In turn, it explores the ideological and identity manifestations of the inscriptions in the transformed and remediated semiotic material, and the dialogicality and the trajectory of the texts across space and time. Thereafter, a discussion is presented of the implications of the expanded meaning potentials resulting from blended and recontextualized discourses from other genres and cultural contexts.

This article offers a narrative of the University of the Western Cape, South Africa, from the prism of the duality of language as a co-modality (with people, protest, policy and practices) for constituting the institution in whole or in part and as a reflection of its co-modalities. For its framing, the narrative eclectically draws on language politics and policy, a grammar of multilingual landscapes and the epistemology of linguistics. Besides contributing to a historiography of university language policies, the narrative has implications for language policy analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

[Display omitted] • An evaluation method was proposed to assess the construction quality of UWC. • The admixtures have an effect on early-age hydration of the UWC. • The hydration of UWC can be divided into fluid, plasticized, and hardened stages. • The prediction model makes it feasible to obtain the strength of practical structures. Owing to the undrained construction, not only the admixtures but also the hardening process is believed to have a significant effect on the final strength of non-dispersible underwater concrete (UWC). To ensure the stability and workability of UWC, this paper defined the hydration stages of UWC by conducting an early-age hydration monitoring experiment based on PZT (Piezoceramic Lead-Zirconate-Titanate) sensors and an isothermal calorimetry experiment. Additionally, a 90-day strength gain monitoring experiment and a compressive strength experiment were also carried out to establish a semi-empirical strength prediction model, which can be utilized to assess the real strength of UWC by substituting the monitoring data from practical structures. With practical application in a corroded bridge pier strengthened by prefabricated Basalt FRP (BFRP) shell and UWC, the strength prediction model presents a high accuracy on the prediction of hardening strength of UWC, and all the indices of the practical bridge pier strengthened by BFRP and UWC meet with the design codes. This indicates that the strength monitoring approach and construction quality evaluation method can apply to practical underwater structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The urban water cycle (UWC), which is composed of the water supply system (WSS) and urban drainage system (UDS), is a critical infrastructure required for the functioning of urban society. Considering the growing pollution and subsequent water scarcity caused by increasing urbanization and climate change, efficient UWC management is required to maintain resource sustainability and environmental protection. Cyber-physical systems (CPSs) provide a technological suite for the efficient management of critical systems. To exploit advantages of CPS for UWC, this paper proposes a CPS-based management framework enabling supervision, subsystem interoperability, and integrated optimization of UWC: (1) Firstly, clear definitions are provided to demonstrate that UWC systems can be considered as CPSs. (2) A multi-layer CPS-based supervision framework is presented afterwards, conceptually dividing the physical UWC and its digital counterpart into Supervision&Control, Scheduling, Digital Twin, and Water Users and Environment four layers. (3) The information flows that interact with each layer, as well as a key aspect of CSP operation, namely the interoperability among subsystems in the context of UWC, are also addressed. (4) To demonstrate advantages of supervision and interoperability of subsystems under the CPS framework, an integrated optimizer based on model predictive control (MPC) is applied and compared against the individual control of each system. A real case study of the WSS and UDS in Barcelona UWC is applied in order to validate the proposed approaches through virtual reality simulations based on MATLAB/SIMULIN and EPA-SWMM. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]