Challenges for Federated Crowd Management in Smart Cities

This paper addresses the issue of crowd management in smart cities, where effectively handling large groups is essential for ensuring safety and a positive experience for all. Although smart cities strive to use data for better decision-making, simply measuring crowds is not enough; cities must analyze and utilize this data intelligently. In this paper, we leverage the various experiences of two research groups in this area and present a vision that allows cities to easily establish crowd management platforms by transferring knowledge and insights from similar use cases in other cities

Corpus Literacy in der Lehrer*innenbildung : Englisch (lernen) lehren mit Korpora

This contribution is a report on an intermediate linguistic seminar entitled Using Corpora for Writing Skills. Its overarching goal is to enable students to use corpora, (i. e. large computer-searchable text databases) independently, routinely, and confidently for a variety of purposes. Besides acquiring the basics of corpus research, they practise applications to different central topics of foreign language learning, such as prepositional choices, collocations, confusable homonyms and synonyms, register differences, grammar issues and varieties of English. Emphasis is placed on an appropriate evaluation of the results. Overall, the course received very positive feedback and the willingness of participants to use corpora was significantly higher at the end of each semester than at its beginning. However, what could be established as a major challenge is the fact that students tend to hold on to their binary judgements of right and wrong. Teacher education should thus foster a corpus skillset as a handy tool in everyday school life, along with an open mindset that involves acceptance of heterogeneous corpus data as fully legitimate variation

A fugaz narrativa da ausência : Contos de Luiz Sérgio Metz

Os contos de Luiz Sérgio Metz, «O primeiro e o segundo homem» (1981), apresentam momentos fugazes de uma narrativa da ausência, em que se conta o não acontecido no mundo ficcional, onde há espaço para o não dito e o não visto, inclusive o não pensado. Uma poética da ausência, uma poética do desaparecimento. Escreve-se, nos dias de hoje e também em 1981, do ponto de vista da «cidade letrada» (Ángel Rama dixit) e do mundo da gauchesca só restam os relatos, as narrativas herdadas. São indícios de que aquele mundo talvez tenha existido, exógeno ao texto literário, o que fez Luiz Sérgio Metz embrenhar-se na tarefa de recuperar o perdido, um processo de arqueologia literária. Ainda mais, escrever em 1981 sobre a base histórica, mítica e literária da gauchesca implicava desfazer-se de inúmeras capas culturais, especialmente a folclórica, que já tinham conotado em demasia o mundo do sempre citado e vulgarizado «centauro das coxilhas», «centauro dos pampas» ou alguma outra denominação semelhante. A não-memória do que há pouco tempo ainda era e estava presente, física ou imaginariamente, exige uma representação literária a partir de fugazes momentos de ausência.Luiz Sérgio Metz's short stories, «O primeiro e o segundo homem» («The First and Second Man», 1981), present fleeting moments of a narrative of absence, recounting what did not happen in the fictional world, where there is room for the unsaid and the unseen, including the unthought. A poetics of absence, a poetics of disappearance. Nowadays, as in 1981, writing is done from the perspective of the «literate city» («ciudad letrada», Ángel Rama dixit), and all that remains of the gaucho world are the stories, the inherited narratives. These are indications that that world may have existed, exogenous to the literary text, which led Luiz Sérgio Metz to embark on the task of recovering what was lost, a process of literary archaeology. Moreover, writing in 1981 about the historical, mythical, and literary basis of gaucho culture meant discarding countless cultural layers, especially folkloric ones, which had already overly connoted the world of the oft cited and vulgarized «centaur of the hills» («centauro das coxilhas»), «centaur of the pampas» («centauro dos pampas»), or some other similar name. The non-memory of what was still present, physically or imaginatively, not long ago requires a literary representation based on fleeting moments of absence

Determinants and effects of green bond issuance : Environmental awareness, ecological budget, biodiversity, oil and lithium

This study explores the determinants of green bond issuance and its environmental impacts. The empirical analysis employs a panel dataset from 29 OECD countries for the period 2014–2020 and two main models. The first model identifies determinants of green bond issuance, revealing that higher environmental awareness, GDP per capita, oil prices, a higher degree of urbanization, and lower lithium prices are associated with a higher volume of issued green bonds. The second model employs several indicators of environmental performance as dependent variables. The main independent variables are the issued green bond volume, environmental awareness, GDP per capita, environmental policy stringency, renewable energy capacity, and the share of protected areas. The results show that green bond volume, stringent environmental policy, and higher environmental awareness are positively related to the ecological budget and biodiversity while reducing the ecological footprint. Channels for this impact are positive relationships between green bond funding and renewable energy capacity and the share of protected areas. Governments should therefore not only promote the issuance of green bonds, which are essential to raise the financial resources needed to finance environmentally friendly projects, but also offer tax and investment incentives, provide technical assistance, and simplify procedures for project implementation. In addition, resources should be devoted to raising environmental awareness among the population

Knowing when it’s ‘necessary’ : academic parents’ strategic intervention and involvement

This paper investigates how parents from different socioeconomic backgrounds support their teenage children in upper secondary education and how this influences their educational pathway. Based on 31 in-depth qualitative interviews with former participants of the BiKS-panel-study, this study combines qualitative insights with longitudinal data to examine mechanisms of educational inequality. While much research contrasts broader social groups, this paper also uncovers in-group-variation. The results reveal differences not only between non-academic and academic parents but also within the group of academic parents, especially between educational insiders (teachers) and outsiders (parents with university degrees in other subjects). Educational insider parents can better recognize educationally relevant opportunities, situations, and decisions and provide appropriate support because they have access to more relevant resources and field-specific knowledge. They do not intervene consistently but instead recognize when intervention is ‘necessary’ within the specific educational system, resulting in educational advantages for their children

Organizational Influence on Security Development in Open-Source Software Projects

Increasing technological complexity, intensified competition, and security requirements have driven open-source software (OSS) projects to become a crucial part of organizations' software development. This study focuses on the OSS project TensorFlow (TF) and uses a case study to examine how organizations and their associated developers collaborate to identify, fix and prevent security vulnerabilities. Social Network Analysis (SNA) of archived security data from software repositories is used to gain insight into security activities. The study examines the internal structure and evolution of security code collaboration, organizational networks, and top organizational contributors to TF. It also examines productivity, homophily, development diversity, and turnover rates among developers across various software releases. The in-depth insights from this research enhance our understanding of collaborative patterns in OSS communities within open software ecosystems, particularly in the security context

Do corpus data on World Englishes inspire tolerance of variation in ELT professionals? : An experimental questionnaire study with native English speaking teachers

The present study aims to show that – given the status of English as a pluricentric global language and as a lingua franca – Corpus Linguistics has important and unique contributions to make to English Language Teaching (ELT). Desirable innovations arguably involve popularizing the use of corpus concordancing as a tool to put native speaker intuitions on a firmer empirical footing, and imbuing ELT practitioners with an awareness that variation –in particular (but not only) between geographical varieties – is an inherent and legitimate characteristic of language in use. To support these points, a quasi-experimental questionnaire study with 76 native English speaking teachers based at German universities is reported, which demonstrates the promises but also the obstacles of such an approach

Notes on Gödel’s and Scott’s variants of the ontological argument

Notes on Kurt Gödel’s modal ontological argument and Dana Scott’s variant of it are presented. These remarks, supported by experimental studies with a proof assistant system for classical higher-order logic, implicitly answer some questions the authors have received over the last decade(s). In addition, some new insights resulting from the conducted experiments are reported

British and American standards in the English classroom : Using corpora to overcome doubts about ‘correct’ usage

British and American English are both recognized as target varieties in institutionalized ELT settings. However, these are on an unequal footing when it comes to the impact they have on learners and the reactions they evoke among teachers. The present contribution discusses the problem of standards in English as a pluricentric language, the ideal of consistency in the use of one or the other, their representation in teaching materials and potential alternatives, as well as current linguistic research on varieties and their mutual influence. A quasi-experimental questionnaire study involving more than 400 nonnative teachers of English confirms the expectation that language professionals’ intuitions about acceptability are constrained by the variety they know best. Advocating a pedagogy that takes into account the role of English as an international lingua franca and concomitant variation, the study demonstrates that corpus literacy, widely taught in the linguistic components of teaching degrees, should also be routinely applied as a practical tool empowering teachers to transcend limitations resulting from their language contact biographies. The final sections point to the challenges of adopting an ELF-aware mindset in institutional settings and ways of overcoming these

Positionspapier : Fachspezifische Informationskompetenz-Vermittlung und Künstliche Intelligenz

Das Positionspapier erörtert Perspektiven für die Vermittlung von Informationskompetenz im Kontext von Künstlicher Intelligenz