5,102 research outputs found

    Endogenous measures for contextualising large-scale social phenomena: a corpus-based method for mediated public discourse

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    This work presents an interdisciplinary methodology for developing endogenous measures of group membership through analysis of pervasive linguistic patterns in public discourse. Focusing on political discourse, this work critiques the conventional approach to the study of political participation, which is premised on decontextualised, exogenous measures to characterise groups. Considering the theoretical and empirical weaknesses of decontextualised approaches to large-scale social phenomena, this work suggests that contextualisation using endogenous measures might provide a complementary perspective to mitigate such weaknesses. This work develops a sociomaterial perspective on political participation in mediated discourse as affiliatory action performed through language. While the affiliatory function of language is often performed consciously (such as statements of identity), this work is concerned with unconscious features (such as patterns in lexis and grammar). This work argues that pervasive patterns in such features that emerge through socialisation are resistant to change and manipulation, and thus might serve as endogenous measures of sociopolitical contexts, and thus of groups. In terms of method, the work takes a corpus-based approach to the analysis of data from the Twitter messaging service whereby patterns in users’ speech are examined statistically in order to trace potential community membership. The method is applied in the US state of Michigan during the second half of 2018—6 November having been the date of midterm (i.e. non-Presidential) elections in the United States. The corpus is assembled from the original posts of 5,889 users, who are nominally geolocalised to 417 municipalities. These users are clustered according to pervasive language features. Comparing the linguistic clusters according to the municipalities they represent finds that there are regular sociodemographic differentials across clusters. This is understood as an indication of social structure, suggesting that endogenous measures derived from pervasive patterns in language may indeed offer a complementary, contextualised perspective on large-scale social phenomena

    A Design Science Research Approach to Smart and Collaborative Urban Supply Networks

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    Urban supply networks are facing increasing demands and challenges and thus constitute a relevant field for research and practical development. Supply chain management holds enormous potential and relevance for society and everyday life as the flow of goods and information are important economic functions. Being a heterogeneous field, the literature base of supply chain management research is difficult to manage and navigate. Disruptive digital technologies and the implementation of cross-network information analysis and sharing drive the need for new organisational and technological approaches. Practical issues are manifold and include mega trends such as digital transformation, urbanisation, and environmental awareness. A promising approach to solving these problems is the realisation of smart and collaborative supply networks. The growth of artificial intelligence applications in recent years has led to a wide range of applications in a variety of domains. However, the potential of artificial intelligence utilisation in supply chain management has not yet been fully exploited. Similarly, value creation increasingly takes place in networked value creation cycles that have become continuously more collaborative, complex, and dynamic as interactions in business processes involving information technologies have become more intense. Following a design science research approach this cumulative thesis comprises the development and discussion of four artefacts for the analysis and advancement of smart and collaborative urban supply networks. This thesis aims to highlight the potential of artificial intelligence-based supply networks, to advance data-driven inter-organisational collaboration, and to improve last mile supply network sustainability. Based on thorough machine learning and systematic literature reviews, reference and system dynamics modelling, simulation, and qualitative empirical research, the artefacts provide a valuable contribution to research and practice

    Minimum income support systems as elements of crisis resilience in Europe: Final Report

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    Mindestsicherungssysteme dienen in den meisten entwickelten Wohlfahrtsstaaten als Sicherheitsnetz letzter Instanz. Dementsprechend spielen sie gerade in wirtschaftlichen Krisenzeiten eine besondere Rolle. Inwieweit Mindestsicherungssysteme in Zeiten der Krise beansprucht werden, hängt auch von der Ausprägung vorgelagerter Sozialschutzsysteme ab. Diese Studie untersucht die Bedeutung von Systemen der Mindestsicherung sowie vorgelagerter Systeme wie Arbeitslosenversicherung, Kurzarbeit und arbeitsrechtlichem Bestandsschutz für die Krisenfestigkeit in Europa. Im Kontext der Finanzkrise von 2008/2009 und der Corona-Krise wird die Fähigkeit sozialpolitischer Maßnahmen untersucht, Armut und Einkommens­verluste einzudämmen und gesellschaftliche Ausgrenzung zu vermeiden. Die Studie setzt dabei auf quantitative und qualitative Methoden, etwa multivariate Analysen, Mikrosimulationsmethoden sowie eingehende Fallstudien der Länder Dänemark, Frankreich, Irland, Polen und Spanien, die für unterschiedliche Typen von Wohlfahrtsstaaten stehen.The aim of this study is to analyse the role of social policies in different European welfare states regarding minimum income protection and active inclusion. The core focus lies on crisis resilience, i.e. the capacity of social policy arrangements to contain poverty and inequality and avoid exclusion before, during and after periods of economic shocks. To achieve this goal, the study expands its analytical focus to include other tiers of social protection, in particular upstream systems such as unemployment insurance, job retention and employment protection, as they play an additional and potentially prominent role in providing income and job protection in situations of crisis. A mixed-method approach is used that combines quantitative and qualitative research, such as descriptive and multivariate quantitative analyses, microsimulation methods and in-depth case studies. The study finds consistent differences in terms of crisis resilience across countries and welfare state types. In general, Nordic and Continental European welfare states with strong upstream systems and minimum income support (MIS) show better outcomes in core socio-economic outcomes such as poverty and exclusion risks. However, labour market integration shows some dualisms in Continental Europe. The study shows that MIS holds particular importance if there are gaps in upstream systems or cases of severe and lasting crises

    The Palaces of Comfort, Consolation and Distraction - The Pie and Mash shop as a performative space of a contested London working class memory

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    This thesis seeks to interrogate and clarify the history and culture of London’s traditional but fading and largely forgotten eel, pie and mash shops. In doing so the work examines their cultural conduit, the adjacent and evolving identity of the cockney whose contested memoryscapes have, I suggest, great contemporary political and cultural relevance in an age of populism and Brexit. The work excavates a tracing around the shops’ absences in historical literature. It situates their establishment within the dying breath of an older, popular street culture and the birth of a new London working class, centred around unofficial street markets and in a synchronous dance with the ideological accession of the bourgeoisie. The thesis employs the biological notion of a taxon to illustrate the shops’ evolution largely defined by the class-demotion of their clientele that mirrored the changing cartography of the city. By the late nineteenth century, this work argues, the eel and pie shops had become a pillar of a respectable London working class culture whose hyper-local solidarities revolved around micro-class divisions of work and negotiated bourgeois codes of propriety as part of a ‘culture of consolation’ that has remained largely impenetrable to outsiders. The study explores this concomitant cockney identity which became, partly through bourgeois theatrical ventriloquising, a figure of imperial incorporation. This eventually came to represent a particular type of ‘ordinariness’, subsequently reconfigured around the gains of a Welfare State and a national economy that continues to be periodically valorised according its usefulness to capital at times of political stress. Utilising sensory ethnography and memory studies the work explores the landscape and territoriality of the contemporary eel, pie and mash shop. It interrogates the rituals and complex, often competing and polyphonic memory inscriptions which memorialise a largely post-colonial nostalgic melancholia around the loss of fantasy of a British omnipotence. The thesis argues that the shops and their simulacra-like reincarnations amongst the cockney diaspora in the Essex new towns offer an insight into the changing notions of taste and class within the convivialities of a unique but broadly closed heritage of proletarian culture as a zone of resistance in the neoliberal city

    INTUITION: a data platform to integrate human epilepsy clinical care and support for discovery

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    To make appropriate clinical decisions, clinicians consider many types of data from multiple sources to arrive at a diagnosis and plan. However, the current health systems have siloed data, making it challenging to develop information platforms that integrate this process into a single place for comprehensive clinical evaluation and research. INTUITION is a human brain integrative data system that facilitates multimodal data integration, unified storage, cohort selection, and analysis of multidisciplinary datasets. In this article, we describe the use of INTUITION to include electronic health records together with co-registered neuroimaging and EEG from patients who undergo invasive brain surgery for epilepsy. In addition to providing clinically useful visualizations and analytics to help guide surgical planning, INTUITION also links a bank of human brain epileptic tissues from specific brain locations to quantitative EEG, imaging, histology, and omics studies in a unique, completely integrated informatics platform. Having a clinically useful platform for integrating multimodal datasets can not only aid in clinical management decisions but also in creating a unique resource for research and discovery when linked to spatially mapped tissue samples

    DIN Spec 91345 RAMI 4.0 compliant data pipelining: An approach to support data understanding and data acquisition in smart manufacturing environments

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    Today, data scientists in the manufacturing domain are confronted with a set of challenges associated to data acquisition as well as data processing including the extraction of valuable in-formation to support both, the work of the manufacturing equipment as well as the manufacturing processes behind it. One essential aspect related to data acquisition is the pipelining, including various commu-nication standards, protocols and technologies to save and transfer heterogenous data. These circumstances make it hard to understand, find, access and extract data from the sources depend-ing on use cases and applications. In order to support this data pipelining process, this thesis proposes the use of the semantic model. The selected semantic model should be able to describe smart manufacturing assets them-selves as well as to access their data along their life-cycle. As a matter of fact, there are many research contributions in smart manufacturing, which already came out with reference architectures or standards for semantic-based meta data descrip-tion or asset classification. This research builds upon these outcomes and introduces a novel se-mantic model-based data pipelining approach using as a basis the Reference Architecture Model for Industry 4.0 (RAMI 4.0).Hoje em dia, os cientistas de dados no domínio da manufatura são confrontados com várias normas, protocolos e tecnologias de comunicação para gravar, processar e transferir vários tipos de dados. Estas circunstâncias tornam difícil compreender, encontrar, aceder e extrair dados necessários para aplicações dependentes de casos de utilização, desde os equipamentos aos respectivos processos de manufatura. Um aspecto essencial poderia ser um processo de canalisação de dados incluindo vários normas de comunicação, protocolos e tecnologias para gravar e transferir dados. Uma solução para suporte deste processo, proposto por esta tese, é a aplicação de um modelo semântico que descreva os próprios recursos de manufactura inteligente e o acesso aos seus dados ao longo do seu ciclo de vida. Muitas das contribuições de investigação em manufatura inteligente já produziram arquitecturas de referência como a RAMI 4.0 ou normas para a descrição semântica de meta dados ou classificação de recursos. Esta investigação baseia-se nestas fontes externas e introduz um novo modelo semântico baseado no Modelo de Arquitectura de Referência para Indústria 4.0 (RAMI 4.0), em conformidade com a abordagem de canalisação de dados no domínio da produção inteligente como caso exemplar de utilização para permitir uma fácil exploração, compreensão, descoberta, selecção e extracção de dados

    The Future of Work and Digital Skills

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    The theme for the events was "The Future of Work and Digital Skills". The 4IR caused a hollowing out of middle-income jobs (Frey & Osborne, 2017) but COVID-19 exposed the digital gap as survival depended mainly on digital infrastructure and connectivity. Almost overnight, organizations that had not invested in a digital strategy suddenly realized the need for such a strategy and the associated digital skills. The effects have been profound for those who struggled to adapt, while those who stepped up have reaped quite the reward.Therefore, there are no longer certainties about what the world will look like in a few years from now. However, there are certain ways to anticipate the changes that are occurring and plan on how to continually adapt to an increasingly changing world. Certain jobs will soon be lost and will not come back; other new jobs will however be created. Using data science and other predictive sciences, it is possible to anticipate, to the extent possible, the rate at which certain jobs will be replaced and new jobs created in different industries. Accordingly, the collocated events sought to bring together government, international organizations, academia, industry, organized labour and civil society to deliberate on how these changes are occurring in South Africa, how fast they are occurring and what needs to change in order to prepare society for the changes.Deutsche Gesellschaft für Internationale Zusammenarbeit (GIZ) British High Commission (BHC)School of Computin

    Z-Numbers-Based Approach to Hotel Service Quality Assessment

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    In this study, we are analyzing the possibility of using Z-numbers for measuring the service quality and decision-making for quality improvement in the hotel industry. Techniques used for these purposes are based on consumer evalu- ations - expectations and perceptions. As a rule, these evaluations are expressed in crisp numbers (Likert scale) or fuzzy estimates. However, descriptions of the respondent opinions based on crisp or fuzzy numbers formalism not in all cases are relevant. The existing methods do not take into account the degree of con- fidence of respondents in their assessments. A fuzzy approach better describes the uncertainties associated with human perceptions and expectations. Linguis- tic values are more acceptable than crisp numbers. To consider the subjective natures of both service quality estimates and confidence degree in them, the two- component Z-numbers Z = (A, B) were used. Z-numbers express more adequately the opinion of consumers. The proposed and computationally efficient approach (Z-SERVQUAL, Z-IPA) allows to determine the quality of services and iden- tify the factors that required improvement and the areas for further development. The suggested method was applied to evaluate the service quality in small and medium-sized hotels in Turkey and Azerbaijan, illustrated by the example

    19th SC@RUG 2022 proceedings 2021-2022

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