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Addressing urban air pollution is a pressing challenge, prompting the exploration of mitigation strategies such as urban greening. However, certain innovative greening approaches, while promising, may inadvertently incorporate unsustainable elements that undermine their eco-friendly philosophy. In this context, our research focuses on addressing the replacement of a petroleum-based filter substrate in an existing ‘green’ outdoor air purification system that utilizes ‘moss filters’, known as a ‘moss wall’. This initiative is driven by concerns about microplastic leakage from the substrate and the need to optimize the moss wall system in terms of circularity. This preliminary study presents a crucial first step, aiming to assess the feasibility of developing a circular, bio-based plate as a replacement for the existing microfiber filter substrate. The focus is on the potential of this plate to recycle moss from the system itself as raw material, ensuring structural integrity and the ability to support its own weight. To achieve this goal, a series of controlled experiments were conducted in a laboratory setting using cellulose, corn starch, and metakaolin binders. Our findings indicated that cellulose was crucial for the structural integrity, starch significantly enhanced the sample strength, and metakaolin improved the water resistance. These insights culminated in the creation of a laboratory-scale moss-based composite prototype, with moss constituting more than half of the total mass. This prototype demonstrated promising results as a starting point for a more environmentally friendly and bio-based moss wall substrate. Subsequent research efforts will concentrate on optimizing the binder and fiber composition, evaluating and improving the bioreceptivity and filter properties, conducting outdoor testing, and scaling up the prototype for practical implementation.

Food, food media, and celebrity chefs make up an increasingly important element of the cultural industries. The craze is not altogether new, but the cultural relevance and ubiquitous appearance of chefs in all forms of popular media is a relatively recent phenomenon. Anthony Bourdain, although by no means the first celebrity chef in the era of cable television and omnipresent chef personae, did introduce a new and important image of chefs in the culinary media industry, what I call the “chef underground.” For this brand of chef the kitchen represented an escape from mainstream culture and values. The kitchen was not a sight for self-promotion or entrepreneurism, but rather a space that allowed for a prolonged commitment to subcultural participation. The kitchen was, and is, of course, a space of labor exploitation. Yet, for those travelers in the chef underground the kitchen allowed for the development of a transient existence, relatively free from outside scrutiny as well as normative notions and expectations of workplace and lifestyle behavior. By identifying and detailing the alternative social and cultural dispositions of the chef underground in his writing—and aligning himself with them—Bourdain at once managed to construct a unique anti-establishment media persona for himself as well as render the once nebulous group of outsider chefs and cooks legible in mainstream consumer culture. This dissertation investigates the cultural influence of the new archetype of chefs following Bourdain’s rise to prominence. In the midst of a broad cultural valorization of chefs and cooks, the promotion of Bourdain’s anti-establishment persona through multiple mass media created a new popular image of professional chefs. The previously unglamorous career of working in a restaurant kitchen was transformed into a cool and authentic occupation and subcultural formation. This dissertation explores the cultural significance of this re-articulation of chefdom by employing multiple methodological approaches in order to understand how the re-presentation of chefs and cooks after Bourdain’s rise to fame has affected the everyday lives of individuals working in contemporary professional kitchens and influenced the broader culinary and media industries.

Understanding attitudes towards STEM means quantifying the cognitive and emotional ways in which individuals, and potentially large language models too, conceptualise such subjects. This study uses behavioural forma mentis networks (BFMNs) to investigate the STEM-focused mindset, i.e. ways of associating and perceiving ideas, of 177 human participants and 177 artificial humans simulated by GPT-3.5. Participants were split in 3 groups - trainees, experts and academics - to compare the influence of expertise level on their mindset. The results revealed that human forma mentis networks exhibited significantly higher clustering coefficients compared to GPT-3.5, indicating that human mindsets displayed a tendency to form and close triads of conceptual associations while recollecting STEM ideas. Human experts, in particular, demonstrated robust clustering coefficients, reflecting better integration of STEM concepts into their cognitive networks. In contrast, GPT-3.5 produced sparser mindsets. Furthermore, both human and GPT mindsets framed mathematics in neutral or positive terms, differently from STEM high schoolers, researchers and other large language models sampled in other works. This research contributes to understanding how mindset structure can provide cognitive insights about memory structure and machine limitations.