Advancing Climate Change Research and Hydrocarbon Leak Detection : by Combining Dissolved Carbon Dioxide and Methane Measurements with ADCP Data

With the emergence of largescale, comprehensive environmental monitoring projects, there is an increased need to combine state-of-the art technologies to address complicated problems such as ocean acidifi cation and hydrocarbon leak detection

Research universities, technology transfer, and job creation: what infrastructure, for what training?

International audienceTechnology transfer and innovation are considered major drivers of sustainable development; they place knowledge and its dissemination in society at the heart of the development process. This article considers the role of research universities, and how they can interact with key actors and institutions involved in 'innovation ecosystems'. Considering various approaches of innovation and institutional analysis design (IAD), it proposes an institutional model of innovation where different authorities produce rules and knowledge that can be mobilized and/or changed in their respective action arenas. On this conceptual basis, one initiative is described: integrated poles of excellence (IPEs) for renewable energy in West Africa, which were conceptualized as a resource and knowledge centre connected to project implementation

Missed Connections: Mobility Management and the Swedish Public Transport Administration

Kommuner and the Swedish National Government have been promoting sustainable transport in Sweden. Their actions and plans use the concept of mobility management, as well as infrastructure investments. However the public transport administrations who are responsible for the procurement of public transport in Sweden have had limited visible engagement with this concept. The purpose of this thesis was to determine if the framework conditions for the use of mobility management by regional public transport administrations in Sweden existed and could be enhanced on a national scale. Interviews were conducted with key informed actors in the Swedish system for supporting the provision of public transport, with the organisations that actually procure public transport, and with cases internationally where public transport administrations are engaging with mobility management. The PAIRs scheme from MOST was used as a tool to characterise the framework conditions, and determine lacunae in support and potential leverage points. Lacunae were determined to be: lack of political will, lack of long term financial stability, lack of adequate staffing, lack of supportive legal structures, lack of quality assurance, general lack of awareness, and the constraint on relationships of public sector actors. Leverage points were determined to be: the autonomous nature of actors, the legislative framework which is already in place at a national level, engagement and education not only through PTA networks but also with kommuner and organisations coordinating infrastructure, personal economics when choosing a transport mode, and the integration of technology which is already a strength of PTAs and could be capitalised on to work on other areas. Recommendations were based on using these leverage points to ameliorate the conditions, and fill the lacunae, for engagement with mobility management by public transport administrations

Knowledge society arguments revisited in the semantic technologies era

In the light of high profile governmental and international efforts to realise the knowledge society, I review the arguments made for and against it from a technology standpoint. I focus on advanced knowledge technologies with applications on a large scale and in open- ended environments like the World Wide Web and its ambitious extension, the Semantic Web. I argue for a greater role of social networks in a knowledge society and I explore the recent developments in mechanised trust, knowledge certification, and speculate on their blending with traditional societal institutions. These form the basis of a sketched roadmap for enabling technologies for a knowledge society

Industrial Relations and "Humanware"

This is a preliminary paper. Please do not quote without the permission of the author. The research on which this paper is based has been conducted with the collaboration of John Paul MacDuffie, MIT. The researchers owe much to the warm cooperation of managers, employees, and union officials of Japanese auto companies and joint venture companies in the U.S. as well as American auto companies and the UAW. We would like to express our sincere appreciation for their assistance

Doctrinal and applied TQM in relation to dominant models of organisation: A comparative study

Total Quality Management (TQM) is examined in five organisations in light of the assumption that its implementation is an ongoing negotiated order rather than an objective reality as often accepted by the literature. Guided by a theoretical framework identified by Spencer (1994) and a qualitative methodology suggested by Miles and Huberman (1994), the perceptions of a cross section of organisational members in five organisations are used to establish the nature of applied TQM in terms of mechanistic and organismic \u27mental models\u27 of organisation and the degree to which applied TQM varies from the basic doctrine. It is argued that both .models influence the way in which TQM is applied in organisations, and the research aims to identify the strength and direction of the influence exerted towards a more mechanistic or a more organismic implementation. Further, this research is intended to make a positive contribution to the presently limited amount of empirical evidence on the implementation of TQM upon which theory building in the literature is based. The results of the research indicate that TQM in three of the organisations studied is being implemented in generally organismic ways although in two organisations, strong influences by the mechanistic model were detected. Further, major differences between the basic doctrine of TQM, as identified in the literature, and the practical experience of TQM as applied in organisations were identified. These differences relate to organisational goal orientation, conceptions of quality and, to a lesser extent, the direction and pattern of organisational communication. Several possible explanations for these results are put forward, especially in the light of themes emerging from the evidence collected, although this exploratory research does not attempt to develop theory or propose explanatory relationships between possible variables. It is argued that these results have significant implications, and recommendations for further research on a number of key themes indicated by this research are made. In particular, longitudinal research using the same or similar organisations is called for, as the application of TQM is an ongoing process and its full evolutionary nature can only be captured over time

Dynamic trust negotiation for decentralised e-health collaborations

In the Internet-age, the geographical boundaries that have previously impinged upon inter-organisational collaborations have become decreasingly important. Of more importance for such collaborations is the notion and subsequent nature of security and trust - this is especially so in open collaborative environments like the Grid where resources can be both made available, subsequently accessed and used by remote users from a multitude of institutions with a variety of different privileges spanning across the collaboration. In this context, the ability to dynamically negotiate and subsequently enforce security policies driven by various levels of inter-organisational trust is essential. Numerous access control solutions exist today to address aspects of inter-organisational security. These include the use of centralised access control lists where all collaborating partners negotiate and agree on privileges required to access shared resources. Other solutions involve delegating aspects of access right management to trusted remote individuals in assigning privileges to their (remote) users. These solutions typically entail negotiations and delegations which are constrained by organisations, people and the static rules they impose. Such constraints often result in a lack of flexibility in what has been agreed; difficulties in reaching agreement, or once established, in subsequently maintaining these agreements. Furthermore, these solutions often reduce the autonomous capacity of collaborating organisations because of the need to satisfy collaborating partners demands. This can result in increased security risks or reducing the granularity of security policies. Underpinning this is the issue of trust. Specifically trust realisation between organisations, between individuals, and/or between entities or systems that are present in multi-domain authorities. Trust negotiation is one approach that allows and supports trust realisation. The thesis introduces a novel model called dynamic trust negotiation (DTN) that supports n-tier negotiation hops for trust realisation in multi-domain collaborative environments with specific focus on e-Health environments. DTN describes how trust pathways can be discovered and subsequently how remote security credentials can be mapped to local security credentials through trust contracts, thereby bridging the gap that makes decentralised security policies difficult to define and enforce. Furthermore, DTN shows how n-tier negotiation hops can limit the disclosure of access control policies and how semantic issues that exist with security attributes in decentralised environments can be reduced. The thesis presents the results from the application of DTN to various clinical trials and the implementation of DTN to Virtual Organisation for Trials of Epidemiological Studies (VOTES). The thesis concludes that DTN can address the issue of realising and establishing trust between systems or agents within the e-Health domain, such as the clinical trials domain