Poland - Serbia : the challenges of the scientific cooperation

Foreword: "This book contains the collection of 21 academic articles (arranged alphabetically according to the names of the Authors) dedicated to Professor Iliija Rosić, former Rector of Kragujevae University and the Dean of the Faculty of Economics, who died on January 11,2008.The book contains the preface, a biographical note including a complete list of acadcmic achievements, as well as the outline of Professor Rosic’s scholarly, academic and organizational activities in Poland."(...

Knowledge management in Society 5.0 : a sustainability perspective

Organizations require the means to navigate Society 5.0. This is a knowledge-intensive society where a sustainable balance must be created for social good through a system that integrates cyberspace and physical space. With significant data, information and insight exchange based on knowledge in people and machines, organizations need to make sense of the notion that knowledge assets are the central structuring elements for sustainable development. By considering the key aspects of knowledge management (KM) in Society 5.0 as they relate to sustainable development, organizations may leverage their KM capability and learning agility to successfully address the unique requirements of the new society, environment and goals for sustainable development. In this research, automated content analysis was applied to identify key KM aspects using the Leximancer software. A total of 252 academic papers were analyzed, identifying 10 themes related to key KM concepts in Society 5.0 as they pertain to sustainability. The KM concepts identified were described and mapped to the sustainability triple bottom line. They comprised three primary and three intersecting dimensions, i.e., the environment (planet), society (people) and economic performance (profit) in the socio-economic, eco-efficiency and socio-environmental domains. The most significant themes included “knowledge”, “human”, “companies”, “information” and “system”. Secondary themes included “innovation”, “development”, “resources”, “social” and “change”.https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainabilityam2023Informatic

Technopharmacology

Technopharmacology is a modest call to expand media theoretical inquiry by attending to the biological, neurological, and pharmacological dimensions of media and centers on emergent affinities between big data and big pharma

Visualizing Anhydrobiosis: Liquid-liquid phase separation, membraneless organelles, and cellular reorganization.

Water is an integral and necessary component of life. It is then, exceedingly remarkable that some species are capable of surviving virtually complete water loss for extended periods of time. Several decades of intense research into anhydrobiosis, or life without water, have given significant insights into the molecular mechanisms governing this phenomenon. Anhydrobiosis-related intrinsically disordered (ARID) proteins have been demonstrated to be critically important for desiccation tolerance in many anhydrobiotic species and exhibit a considerably wide range of protective properties that include membrane stabilization, reinforcing bioglass formation, and protein stabilization. This dissertation begins with cellular dielectrophoresis suggesting that two ARID proteins, AfrLEA3m and AfrLEA6, were undergoing significant folding in vivo due to moderate intracellular water loss. This was hypothesized to result in these ARID proteins changing from an untangled state to a tangled one, thereby increasing intracellular viscosity. This dissertation then proceeds to further explore AfrLEA6 in vivo, finding it able to undergo a domain-dependent liquid-liquid phase separation to form a selective, stress granule-like membraneless organelle (MLO). Furthermore, the dilute fraction of AfrLEA6 was found to rapidly increase intracellular viscosity at moderate levels of intracellular water loss, supporting the hypothesis that AfrLEA6 was entering a tangled state. Lastly, this dissertation explores cellular reorganization in the anhydrobiotic Polypedilum vanderplanki Pv11 cell line as it undergoes preconditioning, desiccation, and rehydration. The nucleus, mitochondria, ER, Golgi apparatus, nucleolus, F-actin network, and plasma membrane all demonstrated significant morphological and/or physiological changes in response to preconditioning, desiccation and/or rehydration. Surprisingly, the nucleolus still appeared assembled immediately after rehydration, while an identified stress-induced MLO required 1 h to reassemble, suggesting that these two MLOs were protected by different mechanisms. Altogether, this dissertation describes how an ARID protein could protect a wide variety of targets without necessarily requiring a high ratio of protective protein to targets. Furthermore, this dissertation describes the complex cellular reorganization that occurs in Pv11 during preconditioning, desiccation, and rehydration, which may help guide future experiments in the animal model to further our understanding of anhydrobiosis

A Tale of Two Approaches: Comparing Top-Down and Bottom-Up Strategies for Analyzing and Visualizing High-Dimensional Data

The proliferation of high-throughput and sensory technologies in various fields has led to a considerable increase in data volume, complexity, and diversity. Traditional data storage, analysis, and visualization methods are struggling to keep pace with the growth of modern data sets, necessitating innovative approaches to overcome the challenges of managing, analyzing, and visualizing data across various disciplines. One such approach is utilizing novel storage media, such as deoxyribonucleic acid~(DNA), which presents efficient, stable, compact, and energy-saving storage option. Researchers are exploring the potential use of DNA as a storage medium for long-term storage of significant cultural and scientific materials. In addition to novel storage media, scientists are also focussing on developing new techniques that can integrate multiple data modalities and leverage machine learning algorithms to identify complex relationships and patterns in vast data sets. These newly-developed data management and analysis approaches have the potential to unlock previously unknown insights into various phenomena and to facilitate more effective translation of basic research findings to practical and clinical applications. Addressing these challenges necessitates different problem-solving approaches. Researchers are developing novel tools and techniques that require different viewpoints. Top-down and bottom-up approaches are essential techniques that offer valuable perspectives for managing, analyzing, and visualizing complex high-dimensional multi-modal data sets. This cumulative dissertation explores the challenges associated with handling such data and highlights top-down, bottom-up, and integrated approaches that are being developed to manage, analyze, and visualize this data. The work is conceptualized in two parts, each reflecting the two problem-solving approaches and their uses in published studies. The proposed work showcases the importance of understanding both approaches, the steps of reasoning about the problem within them, and their concretization and application in various domains

Anti-computing

Anti-computing explores forgotten histories and contemporary forms of dissent – moments when the imposition of computational technologies, logics, techniques, imaginaries, utopias have been questioned, disputed, or refused. It also asks why these moments tend to be forgotten. What is it about computational capitalism that means we live so much in the present? What has this to do with computational logics and practices themselves? This book addresses these issues through a critical engagement with media archaeology and medium theory and by way of a series of original studies; exploring Hannah Arendt and early automation anxiety, witnessing and the database, Two Cultures from the inside out, bot fear, singularity and/as science fiction. Finally, it returns to remap long-standing concerns against new forms of dissent, hostility, and automation anxiety, producing a distant reading of contemporary hostility.At once an acute response to urgent concerns around toxic digital cultures, an accounting with media archaeology as a mode of medium theory, and a series of original and methodologically fluid case studies, this book crosses an interdisciplinary research field including cultural studies, media studies, medium studies, critical theory, literary and science fiction studies, media archaeology, medium theory, cultural history, technology history

Here We Don't Speak, Here We Whistle. Mobilizing A Cultural Reading of Cognition, Sound and Ecology in the Design of a Language Support System for the Silbo Gomero.

This thesis presents the study of a whistled form of language known as the Silbo Gomero (Island of La Gomera, Canarian Archipelago). After fifty years of almost total extinction this form of communication has been revived, shifting from the fields where it was once used by peasant islanders and into the space of the classroom. Here, it is integrated into the curriculum of the island’s schools while providing children with a rich cultural platform that instigates linguistic and auditory experimentation. As a response to this transformation, the need to develop didactic materials is presented as one of the main challenges encountered by the community. Taking this condition as the driver of its research, this body of work draws on phonological, bioacoustic and cognitive theories to develop a formal understanding of the Silbo Gomero in a way which aims to complement the whistler’s own experience and mastery of the language by also developing an ethnographic reading of this indigenous body of knowledge and its characteristic auditory perceptual ecology. The investigation has culminated in the design of a digital application, El Laberinto del Sonido, and its active use within the educational community of the island. Finally, emphasising the practice-based nature of the research, this thesis attempts to relocate the question of intangible heritage from a focus on cultural safeguarding and transmission to one of experimentation, where an indigenous body of knowledge not only provides new exploratory paradigms in the design of didactic materials, but also contributes towards the sustainability of culturally situated forms of apprenticeship within contemporary educational contexts

Shopping and Guns: an analysis of public discourses in social media about mall robberies in South Africa

A research report submitted to the Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Art in International relations, 2017This research project investigates public opinions about South African mall robberies discussed on Twitter. Using the principles of discourse and multimodal analysis, it provides critical insights constructed from the represented narratives of select, proposed middle-class consumers illustrating distinct sentiments about malls, crime and shopping. Malls are empirical objects that have been trivialised as ordinary and mundane consumer sites, devoid of any sociological significance embedded within the daily practices of shopping. This paper makes the argument that when contested by criminal activity, malls become valuable sites for critical enquiry towards gaining a deeper understanding of what these shopping attitudes mean within a post-apartheid, South African consumer landscape. The central issue of crime threatening public safety at malls diverges into an array of thematic discussions, revealing distinct indoctrinations surrounding apartheid’s iniquitous system of racial and social engineering. This study’s principle argument makes the claim that anxieties concerning public safety are only the tip of the iceberg, and this serves as an entry point into a discourse contesting exclusive shopping rights above constitutional equality for all. The test tube of mall robberies mixes desirable pleasures and humanitarian moralities together and creates a volatile cocktail of conflicting, consumer aspirations. In short, the public discourse of mall crimes is about maintaining self-entitled spaces of exclusivity within a desperate socioeconomic climate. This study concludes with questions and considerations raised by these authors which could springboard into opportunities for future inquiry.XL201

Anti-computing

We live in a moment of high anxiety around digital transformation. Computers are blamed for generating toxic forms of culture and ways of life. Once part of future imaginaries that were optimistic or even utopian, today there is a sense that things have turned out very differently. Anti-computing is widespread. This book seeks to understand its cultural and material logics, its forms, and its operations. Anti-Computing critically investigates forgotten histories of dissent – moments when the imposition of computational technologies, logics, techniques, imaginaries, utopias have been questioned, disputed, or refused. It asks why dissent is forgotten and how - under what circumstances - it revives. Constituting an engagement with media archaeology/medium theory and working through a series of case studies, this book is compelling reading for scholars in digital media, literary, cultural history, digital humanities and associated fields at all levels