Urban food strategies in Central and Eastern Europe: what's specific and what's at stake?

Integrating a larger set of instruments into Rural Development Programmes implied an increasing focus on monitoring and evaluation. Against the highly diversified experience with regard to implementation of policy instruments the Common Monitoring and Evaluation Framework has been set up by the EU Commission as a strategic and streamlined method of evaluating programmes’ impacts. Its indicator-based approach mainly reflects the concept of a linear, measure-based intervention logic that falls short of the true nature of RDP operation and impact capacity on rural changes. Besides the different phases of the policy process, i.e. policy design, delivery and evaluation, the regional context with its specific set of challenges and opportunities seems critical to the understanding and improvement of programme performance. In particular the role of local actors can hardly be grasped by quantitative indicators alone, but has to be addressed by assessing processes of social innovation. This shift in the evaluation focus underpins the need to take account of regional implementation specificities and processes of social innovation as decisive elements for programme performance.

Campaign overfunding and bounded rationality in equity crowdfunding

In the 21st century, a new way of raising funds called crowdfunding has taken off. Among the variety of different crowdfunding subcategories, equity-based crowdfunding has gained popularity, as regulators have opened up the market. While the money is flowing into the campaigns in increasing amounts, a phenomenon called overfunding has become more pronounced. This paper adds perspective to the drivers of overfunding in equity crowdfunding while also looking at the crowd’s decision-making process affecting the phenomena. The study follows previous research made by Koch (2016) in the reward-based context and the work of Herbert Simon (1947), and Kahneman and Tversky (1974) in the behavioral finance literature. Explorative and quantitative research methods are used jointly to study the progress of overfunding due to the lack of comprehensive previous studies. Invesdor Oy, a dominant player among the equity crowdfunding platforms in the Nordics (Lukkarinen et al., 2016: 6), provides the data for this report. The information encompasses 185 projects from the opening of the platform in 2012 up till September 2017. The platform operates on an ‘all or nothing’ model where the money returns for the investor if the campaign does not reach the initial funding target. However, the campaigns can exceed the initial target by large margins as projects can continue to receive contributions until the deadline. Consequently, the maximum amount sought can differ extensively from the original goal. A ratio of finally reached funding X and the initially defined funding goal Xgoal measures the overfunding phenomena. Studying campaign conditions, information disclosure, external context and project segmentation, the study demonstrates that duration, forum posts and external investments are associated with overfunding in equity crowdfunding. The shorter the campaign duration, more pronounced is overfunding. The finding diverges from the earlier overfunding study made by Koch (2016) in the reward-based crowdfunding setting. In addition, the more forum posts and external investments from angel investors the campaign gets, the stronger is overfunding. The finding is similar to earlier reports on overfunding (Koch, 2016; Virtala, 2017) which have examined the effects of communication and external help to campaign success. Percentage-wise, overfunding seems to be a more pronounced phenomenon in equity- than reward-based crowdfunding. Furthermore, the explorative research design suggests that especially present heuristic, herding behavior, anchoring, collective conservatism, satisficing and vividness will affect the overfunding phenomena. In addition, the study has implications for practitioners. With closely the same amount of effort and resources, small enterprises could exceed their funding targets and eventually accelerate their growth story. Moreover, regulators and platform operators should take into consideration the possible drawbacks of the crowd’s heuristics and deliberate spreading of misinformation: some stakeholders could use them as their own advantage without thinking the potential harm for the whole community

Social Work Promoting Community and Environmental Sustainability: A Workbook for Social Work Practitioners and Educators (Volume 1)

Incredible work is being done all over the world by social workers addressing issues at the nexusof community and environmental sustainability. Whether you are a longtime supporter of socialworkers investing in social and environmental sustainability work, or you are new and curiousabout the topic, we hope this resource will inspire and equip you. It is formatted as a workbook,with short lessons accompanied by exercises that help you apply the lessons theoretically and inyour own practice.This book is intended as a tool for international social work practitioners, students, and educatorsto help advance the Global Agenda for Social Work and Social Development theme of “workingtoward environmental sustainability”. The four themes of the Global Agenda are interwoven andall equally important; there is no way to help those in social, economic, and/or political perilwithout also looking at their physical environment, both natural and built. It is imperative that wesee the bigger picture and acknowledge these inextricable links as we engage in work at all levelsto address global injustices by promoting community and environmental sustainability

Congress UPV Proceedings of the 21ST International Conference on Science and Technology Indicators

This is the book of proceedings of the 21st Science and Technology Indicators Conference that took place in València (Spain) from 14th to 16th of September 2016. The conference theme for this year, ‘Peripheries, frontiers and beyond’ aimed to study the development and use of Science, Technology and Innovation indicators in spaces that have not been the focus of current indicator development, for example, in the Global South, or the Social Sciences and Humanities. The exploration to the margins and beyond proposed by the theme has brought to the STI Conference an interesting array of new contributors from a variety of fields and geographies. This year’s conference had a record 382 registered participants from 40 different countries, including 23 European, 9 American, 4 Asia-Pacific, 4 Africa and Near East. About 26% of participants came from outside of Europe. There were also many participants (17%) from organisations outside academia including governments (8%), businesses (5%), foundations (2%) and international organisations (2%). This is particularly important in a field that is practice-oriented. The chapters of the proceedings attest to the breadth of issues discussed. Infrastructure, benchmarking and use of innovation indicators, societal impact and mission oriented-research, mobility and careers, social sciences and the humanities, participation and culture, gender, and altmetrics, among others. We hope that the diversity of this Conference has fostered productive dialogues and synergistic ideas and made a contribution, small as it may be, to the development and use of indicators that, being more inclusive, will foster a more inclusive and fair world

Information and communication techologies and the urban transformation of South African informal settlement communities

The paper explores the Information and Communication Technology (ICT) practices of the Social Justice Coalition (SJC), a grassroots community based organisation working with informal settlement communities in Khayelitsha, a largely informal neighbourhood on the south-eastern fringes of Cape Town, South Africa. The study focuses on SJC’s advocacy work in the delivery of ‘decent sanitation’ to informal settlement residents. This has been an explosive political issue for a number of years now. Many communities within Khayelitsha rely on communal toilets for sanitation, and the maintenance thereof has left much to be desired. Within the larger theme of digital activism, three main research areas were identified and explored: the appropriation of ICTs by the SJC’s field staff, the use of their Web 2.0 based social networking sites (SNS) in their advocacy work and digital mapping of portable communal toilets in the RR Section of Khayelitsha. The research interrogates the use of ICT as a strategic tool for knowledge-based community empowerment, with the aim of understanding how these emerging uses of technology could assist urban transformation work within this sprawling area. The research emphasizes the roles of various actors, the roles played by different technologies and the relations between technology and people. The emphasis on agency reveals that technology is not enough to augment empowerment processes. Technology-organisational relations are enmeshed within an institutional frame, where the enrollment of technology as actor, requires a repositioning of network relations, in order for it to fulfill its potential as an empowerment tool

Graphs behind data: A network-based approach to model different scenarios

openAl giorno d’oggi, i contesti che possono beneficiare di tecniche di estrazione della conoscenza a partire dai dati grezzi sono aumentati drasticamente. Di conseguenza, la definizione di modelli capaci di rappresentare e gestire dati altamente eterogenei è un argomento di ricerca molto dibattuto in letteratura. In questa tesi, proponiamo una soluzione per affrontare tale problema. In particolare, riteniamo che la teoria dei grafi, e più nello specifico le reti complesse, insieme ai suoi concetti ed approcci, possano rappresentare una valida soluzione. Infatti, noi crediamo che le reti complesse possano costituire un modello unico ed unificante per rappresentare e gestire dati altamente eterogenei. Sulla base di questa premessa, mostriamo come gli stessi concetti ed approcci abbiano la potenzialità di affrontare con successo molti problemi aperti in diversi contesti. ​Nowadays, the amount and variety of scenarios that can benefit from techniques for extracting and managing knowledge from raw data have dramatically increased. As a result, the search for models capable of ensuring the representation and management of highly heterogeneous data is a hot topic in the data science literature. In this thesis, we aim to propose a solution to address this issue. In particular, we believe that graphs, and more specifically complex networks, as well as the concepts and approaches associated with them, can represent a solution to the problem mentioned above. In fact, we believe that they can be a unique and unifying model to uniformly represent and handle extremely heterogeneous data. Based on this premise, we show how the same concepts and/or approach has the potential to address different open issues in different contexts. ​INGEGNERIA DELL'INFORMAZIONEopenVirgili, Luc

Communication, digital media and future: new scenarios and future changes

Proceedings of the MEDCOM 2020+1 International Conferenc

Augmentation of Brain Function: Facts, Fiction and Controversy. Volume III: From Clinical Applications to Ethical Issues and Futuristic Ideas

The final volume in this tripartite series on Brain Augmentation is entitled “From Clinical Applications to Ethical Issues and Futuristic Ideas”. Many of the articles within this volume deal with translational efforts taking the results of experiments on laboratory animals and applying them to humans. In many cases, these interventions are intended to help people with disabilities in such a way so as to either restore or extend brain function. Traditionally, therapies in brain augmentation have included electrical and pharmacological techniques. In contrast, some of the techniques discussed in this volume add specificity by targeting select neural populations. This approach opens the door to where and how to promote the best interventions. Along the way, results have empowered the medical profession by expanding their understanding of brain function. Articles in this volume relate novel clinical solutions for a host of neurological and psychiatric conditions such as stroke, Parkinson’s disease, Huntington’s disease, epilepsy, dementia, Alzheimer’s disease, autism spectrum disorders (ASD), traumatic brain injury, and disorders of consciousness. In disease, symptoms and signs denote a departure from normal function. Brain augmentation has now been used to target both the core symptoms that provide specificity in the diagnosis of a disease, as well as other constitutional symptoms that may greatly handicap the individual. The volume provides a report on the use of repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) in ASD with reported improvements of core deficits (i.e., executive functions). TMS in this regard departs from the present-day trend towards symptomatic treatment that leaves unaltered the root cause of the condition. In diseases, such as schizophrenia, brain augmentation approaches hold promise to avoid lengthy pharmacological interventions that are usually riddled with side effects or those with limiting returns as in the case of Parkinson’s disease. Brain stimulation can also be used to treat auditory verbal hallucination, visuospatial (hemispatial) neglect, and pain in patients suffering from multiple sclerosis. The brain acts as a telecommunication transceiver wherein different bandwidth of frequencies (brainwave oscillations) transmit information. Their baseline levels correlate with certain behavioral states. The proper integration of brain oscillations provides for the phenomenon of binding and central coherence. Brain augmentation may foster the normalization of brain oscillations in nervous system disorders. These techniques hold the promise of being applied remotely (under the supervision of medical personnel), thus overcoming the obstacle of travel in order to obtain healthcare. At present, traditional thinking would argue the possibility of synergism among different modalities of brain augmentation as a way of increasing their overall effectiveness and improving therapeutic selectivity. Thinking outside of the box would also provide for the implementation of brain-to-brain interfaces where techniques, proper to artificial intelligence, could allow us to surpass the limits of natural selection or enable communications between several individual brains sharing memories, or even a global brain capable of self-organization. Not all brains are created equal. Brain stimulation studies suggest large individual variability in response that may affect overall recovery/treatment, or modify desired effects of a given intervention. The subject’s age, gender, hormonal levels may affect an individual’s cortical excitability. In addition, this volume discusses the role of social interactions in the operations of augmenting technologies. Finally, augmenting methods could be applied to modulate consciousness, even though its neural mechanisms are poorly understood. Finally, this volume should be taken as a debate on social, moral and ethical issues on neurotechnologies. Brain enhancement may transform the individual into someone or something else. These techniques bypass the usual routes of accommodation to environmental exigencies that exalted our personal fortitude: learning, exercising, and diet. This will allow humans to preselect desired characteristics and realize consequent rewards without having to overcome adversity through more laborious means. The concern is that humans may be playing God, and the possibility of an expanding gap in social equity where brain enhancements may be selectively available to the wealthier individuals. These issues are discussed by a number of articles in this volume. Also discussed are the relationship between the diminishment and enhancement following the application of brain-augmenting technologies, the problem of “mind control” with BMI technologies, free will the duty to use cognitive enhancers in high-responsibility professions, determining the population of people in need of brain enhancement, informed public policy, cognitive biases, and the hype caused by the development of brain- augmenting approaches