Reinventing Media Activism: Public Interest Advocacy in the Making of U.S. Communication-Information Policy, 1960-2002

This report is a long-term analysis of citizens' collective action to influence public policy toward communication and information. The work discusses in greater detail what is meant by communication and information policy (CIP) and why we think it is worthwhile to study it as a distinctive domain of public policy and citizen action. The report concentrates on citizen action in the United States and looks backwards, tracing the long-term evolutionary trajectory of communications-information advocacy in the USA since the 1960s. We focus on the concept of citizen collective action and explain its relevance to CIP.Research supported by the Ford Foundation's Knowledge, Creativity and Freedom Program. The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the views of the School of Information Studies, Syracuse University, or the Ford Foundation

Efficient Decision Support Systems

This series is directed to diverse managerial professionals who are leading the transformation of individual domains by using expert information and domain knowledge to drive decision support systems (DSSs). The series offers a broad range of subjects addressed in specific areas such as health care, business management, banking, agriculture, environmental improvement, natural resource and spatial management, aviation administration, and hybrid applications of information technology aimed to interdisciplinary issues. This book series is composed of three volumes: Volume 1 consists of general concepts and methodology of DSSs; Volume 2 consists of applications of DSSs in the biomedical domain; Volume 3 consists of hybrid applications of DSSs in multidisciplinary domains. The book is shaped upon decision support strategies in the new infrastructure that assists the readers in full use of the creative technology to manipulate input data and to transform information into useful decisions for decision makers

An Introduction to Programming for Bioscientists: A Python-based Primer

Computing has revolutionized the biological sciences over the past several decades, such that virtually all contemporary research in the biosciences utilizes computer programs. The computational advances have come on many fronts, spurred by fundamental developments in hardware, software, and algorithms. These advances have influenced, and even engendered, a phenomenal array of bioscience fields, including molecular evolution and bioinformatics; genome-, proteome-, transcriptome- and metabolome-wide experimental studies; structural genomics; and atomistic simulations of cellular-scale molecular assemblies as large as ribosomes and intact viruses. In short, much of post-genomic biology is increasingly becoming a form of computational biology. The ability to design and write computer programs is among the most indispensable skills that a modern researcher can cultivate. Python has become a popular programming language in the biosciences, largely because (i) its straightforward semantics and clean syntax make it a readily accessible first language; (ii) it is expressive and well-suited to object-oriented programming, as well as other modern paradigms; and (iii) the many available libraries and third-party toolkits extend the functionality of the core language into virtually every biological domain (sequence and structure analyses, phylogenomics, workflow management systems, etc.). This primer offers a basic introduction to coding, via Python, and it includes concrete examples and exercises to illustrate the language's usage and capabilities; the main text culminates with a final project in structural bioinformatics. A suite of Supplemental Chapters is also provided. Starting with basic concepts, such as that of a 'variable', the Chapters methodically advance the reader to the point of writing a graphical user interface to compute the Hamming distance between two DNA sequences.Comment: 65 pages total, including 45 pages text, 3 figures, 4 tables, numerous exercises, and 19 pages of Supporting Information; currently in press at PLOS Computational Biolog

Marine Biotechnology: A New Vision and Strategy for Europe

Marine Board-ESF The Marine Board provides a pan-European platform for its member organisations to develop common priorities, to advance marine research, and to bridge the gap between science and policy in order to meet future marine science challenges and opportunities. The Marine Board was established in 1995 to facilitate enhanced cooperation between European marine science organisations (both research institutes and research funding agencies) towards the development of a common vision on the research priorities and strategies for marine science in Europe. In 2010, the Marine Board represents 30 Member Organisations from 19 countries. The Marine Board provides the essential components for transferring knowledge for leadership in marine research in Europe. Adopting a strategic role, the Marine Board serves its Member Organisations by providing a forum within which marine research policy advice to national agencies and to the European Commission is developed, with the objective of promoting the establishment of the European Marine Research Area

A standards-based ICT framework to enable a service-oriented approach to clinical decision support

This research provides evidence that standards based Clinical Decision Support (CDS) at the point of care is an essential ingredient of electronic healthcare service delivery. A Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) based solution is explored, that serves as a task management system to coordinate complex distributed and disparate IT systems, processes and resources (human and computer) to provide standards based CDS. This research offers a solution to the challenges in implementing computerised CDS such as integration with heterogeneous legacy systems. Reuse of components and services to reduce costs and save time. The benefits of a sharable CDS service that can be reused by different healthcare practitioners to provide collaborative patient care is demonstrated. This solution provides orchestration among different services by extracting data from sources like patient databases, clinical knowledge bases and evidence-based clinical guidelines (CGs) in order to facilitate multiple CDS requests coming from different healthcare settings. This architecture aims to aid users at different levels of Healthcare Delivery Organizations (HCOs) to maintain a CDS repository, along with monitoring and managing services, thus enabling transparency. The research employs the Design Science research methodology (DSRM) combined with The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), an open source group initiative for Enterprise Architecture Framework (EAF). DSRM’s iterative capability addresses the rapidly evolving nature of workflows in healthcare. This SOA based solution uses standards-based open source technologies and platforms, the latest healthcare standards by HL7 and OMG, Decision Support Service (DSS) and Retrieve, Update Locate Service (RLUS) standard. Combining business process management (BPM) technologies, business rules with SOA ensures the HCO’s capability to manage its processes. This architectural solution is evaluated by successfully implementing evidence based CGs at the point of care in areas such as; a) Diagnostics (Chronic Obstructive Disease), b) Urgent Referral (Lung Cancer), c) Genome testing and integration with CDS in screening (Lynch’s syndrome). In addition to medical care, the CDS solution can benefit organizational processes for collaborative care delivery by connecting patients, physicians and other associated members. This framework facilitates integration of different types of CDS ideal for the different healthcare processes, enabling sharable CDS capabilities within and across organizations

Knowledge visualization: From theory to practice

Visualizations have been known as efficient tools that can help users analyze com- plex data. However, understanding the displayed data and finding underlying knowl- edge is still difficult. In this work, a new approach is proposed based on understanding the definition of knowledge. Although there are many definitions used in different ar- eas, this work focuses on representing knowledge as a part of a visualization and showing the benefit of adopting knowledge representation. Specifically, this work be- gins with understanding interaction and reasoning in visual analytics systems, then a new definition of knowledge visualization and its underlying knowledge conversion processes are proposed. The definition of knowledge is differentiated as either explicit or tacit knowledge. Instead of directly representing data, the value of the explicit knowledge associated with the data is determined based on a cost/benefit analysis. In accordance to its importance, the knowledge is displayed to help the user under- stand the complex data through visual analytical reasoning and discovery

Multi-level processes of integration and disintegration. Proceedings of the Third Green Week Scientific Conference

CONTENTS: ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ... I; ABOUT THE MACE PROJECT... III; PLENARY PRESENTATION ... 1; Landscape agroecology: Managing interactions between agriculture, nature and socio-economy... 3, Tommy Dalgaard; DEVELOPMENT CHALLENGES IN RURAL AREAS ... 13; Patterns of rural development in mountainous areas of the Mediterranean: Between innovation and tradition ... 15, Angela Guarino; Agro ecology: Hypothesis for a sustainable local development?... 22, Silvia Doneddu; The farmers' early retirement scheme as an instrument of structural changes in the rural areas after Poland's accession to the EU ... 29, Michal Dudek; FOOD MARKETS AND AGRICULTURAL MARKETING... 37; G/Local brand challenges in the Austrian agricultural food market ... 39, Bernadette Frech, Ana Azevedo, Hildegard Liebl; Willingness of food industry companies to co-finance collective agricultural marketing actions... 48, Anikó Tóth, Csaba Forgács; MULTIFUNCTIONAL AGRICULTURE ... 57; The role of multifunctional agriculture for rural development in Bulgaria... 59, Violeta Dirimanova; A methodological review of multifunctional agriculture ... 66, Concettina Guarino, Francesco Di Iacovo; A spatially explicit decision-making support tool for integral rural development ... 75, Catherine Pfeifer, Jetse Stoorvogel; AGRICULTURAL EXTENSION AND NETWORKS IN RURAL AREAS... 89; Feasibility and implementation strategies of dairy extension in Ulaanbaatar/Mongolia... 91, Baast Erdenebolor, Volker Hoffmann; The relevance of social networks for the implementation of the LEADER programme in Romania ... 99, Doris Marquardt, Gertrud Buchenrieder, Judith Möllers; Quality assessment problems of agricultural advisory centres' services... 113, Gunta Grinberga; INTEGRATION PROCESSES INTO INTERNATIONAL MARKETS... 125; Competition or market power in the Ukrainian meat supply chain? ... 127, Andriy Matyukha, Oleksandr Perekhozhuk; Integration of the Hungarian cereal market into EU 15 markets ... 138, Attila Jambor; Regional specialisation of agriculture and competitive advantages of East-European countries... 146, Oleksandr Zhemoyda, Stephan J. Goetz; GOVERNANCE AND USE OF NATURAL RESOURCES ... 155; An analysis of biodiversity governance in the Kiskunság National Park according to the GoverNat Framework... 157, Cordula Mertens, Eszter Kelemen, György Pataki; Hierarchical network modelling and multicriteria analysis for agri-environmental measures in Poland ... 168, Jadwiga Ziolkowska; Assessing rural livelihood development strategies combining socioeconomic and spatial methodologies ... 179, K.C. Krishna Bahadur; SUSTAINABLE AGRICULTURAL LAND USE... 189; Linking economic and energy modelling with environmental assessment when modelling the on-farm implementation of Anaerobic Digestion ... 191, Andreas Muskolus, Andrew M. Salter, Philip J. Jones; Phytoremediation of a heavy metal-contaminated agricultural area combined with energy production. Multifunctional use of energy maize, rapeseed and short rotation crops in the Campine (BE)... 200, Nele Witters, Stijn Van Slycken, Erik Meers, Kristin Adriaensen, Linda Meiresonne, Filip Tack, Theo Thewys, Jaco Vangronsveld --

Sustainable Multi-objective Optimisation in Land-use Planning based on Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II): a Case Study in Alexandria, Egypt

Due to urban sprawling, the world’s land-use patterns have rapidly changed, leading to conflict and competition among urban land-uses. This conflict resulted in a range of inefficient land-use patterns. The negative impacts of such patterns suggest the need to improve the efficiency of land-use planning strategies to support better sustainable development. To attain such efficiency, many researchers have adopted algorithmic approaches perceiving land-use planning as a multi-objective optimization problem. These approaches allow encompassment of the numerous variables and constraints that are introduced in the planning process by decision makers and stakeholders. In this regard, a meta-heuristic method; the Nondominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II), could provide an efficient decision support tool for landuse planning through offering pareto optimal land-use allocation alternatives. This paper aims at adopting NSGA-II to enhance sustainable land-use planning strategies at a neighborhood scale in the city of Alexandria, Egypt. The research suggests the adaptation of the Constrained Multiobjective Optimization of Land-use Allocation model (CoMOLA) for three main objectives: (i) maximizing the value of economic benefit, (ii) spatial compactness, and (iii) land-use compatibility. Several land-use allocation scenarios are investigated through an iterative process which includes the variables of spatial units’ number, population sizes and significance of allocation objectives. The scenarios are then compared to the existing condition of land-use distribution. The results show that the proposed approach using CoMOLA tool exhibits good potential to support interactive land-use planning processes by searching over multiple plans for optimal sets of non-dominated solutions. The optimized results could provide the scientific basis for defining suitable interventions for improving sustainability measures and spatial optimization of landuses at the neighborhood scale