7,299 research outputs found
Urbanised forested landscape: Urbanisation, timber extraction and forest care on the Vișeu Valley, northern Romania
By looking at urbanisation processes from the vantage point of the forest, and the ways in which it both constitutes our living space while having been separated from the bounded space of the urban in modern history, the thesis asks: How can we (re)imagine urbanisation beyond the limits of the urban? How can a feminine line of thinking engage with the forest beyond the capitalist-colonial paradigm and its extractive project? and How can we “think with care” (Puig de la Bellacasa 2017) towards the forest as an inhabitant of our common world, instead of perpetuating the image of the forest as a space outside the delimited boundaries of the city? Through a case study research, introducing the Vișeu Valley in northern Romania as both a site engaged in the circulation of the global timber flow, a part of what Brenner and Schmid (2014) name “planetary urbanisation”, where the extractive logging operations beginning in the late XVIIIth century have constructed it as an extractive landscape, and a more than human landscape inhabited by a multitude of beings (animal, plant, and human) the thesis argues towards the importance of forest care and indigenous knowledge in landscape management understood as a trans-generational transmission of knowledge, that is interdependent with the persistence of the landscape as such. Having a trans-scalar approach, the thesis investigates the ways in which the extractive projects of the capitalist-colonial paradigm have and still are shaping forested landscapes across the globe in order to situate the case as part of a planetary forest landscape and the contemporary debates it is engaged in. By engaging with emerging paradigms within the fields of plant communication, forestry, legal scholarship and landscape urbanism that present trees and forests as intelligent beings, and look at urbanisation as a way of inhabiting the landscape in both indigenous and modern cultures, the thesis argues towards viewing forested landscapes as more than human living spaces. Thinking urbanisation through the case of the Vișeu Valley’s urbanised forested landscape, the thesis aligns with alternate ways of viewing urbanisation as co-habitation with more than human beings, particularly those emerging from interdisciplinary research in the Amazon river basin (Tavares 2017, Heckenberger 2012) and, in light of emerging discourses on the rights of nature, proposes an expanded concept of planetary citizenship, to include non-human personhood
Assessing Atmospheric Pollution and Its Impacts on the Human Health
This reprint contains articles published in the Special Issue entitled "Assessing Atmospheric Pollution and Its Impacts on the Human Health" in the journal Atmosphere. The research focuses on the evaluation of atmospheric pollution by statistical methods on the one hand, and on the other hand, on the evaluation of the relationship between the level of pollution and the extent of its effect on the population's health, especially on pulmonary diseases
ONLINE CONSUMER PURCHASING DURING THE PANDEMIC OF COVID-19: AN APPLIED STUDY IN LEBANON
Technological development essentially transformed the foundation of global businesses. Business operations started to move from traditional to advance digitalized practices which gave rise to the e-commerce business, making the online environment more competitive. Despite such changes, there remains a consumer that is not involved in online shopping especially in developing countries. The spread of COVID-19 pandemic has caused radical changes to the way the consumer form intention and behavior toward digitalized solutions. This paper analyzes the impact of buying impulse, attitude, subjective norms, enjoyment and trust on consumer purchasing intention during the pandemic using a sample of 306 Lebanese citizens. SPSS version 24.0 is applied as a statistical technique used; results found positive effect of all factors on consumer purchasing intention. Then, discussions, conclusions and recommendations are presented
International Academic Symposium of Social Science 2022
This conference proceedings gathers work and research presented at the International Academic Symposium of Social Science 2022 (IASSC2022) held on July 3, 2022, in Kota Bharu, Kelantan, Malaysia. The conference was jointly organized by the Faculty of Information Management of Universiti Teknologi MARA Kelantan Branch, Malaysia; University of Malaya, Malaysia; Universitas Pembangunan Nasional Veteran Jakarta, Indonesia; Universitas Ngudi Waluyo, Indonesia; Camarines Sur Polytechnic Colleges, Philippines; and UCSI University, Malaysia. Featuring experienced keynote speakers from Malaysia, Australia, and England, this proceeding provides an opportunity for researchers, postgraduate students, and industry practitioners to gain knowledge and understanding of advanced topics concerning digital transformations in the perspective of the social sciences and information systems, focusing on issues, challenges, impacts, and theoretical foundations. This conference proceedings will assist in shaping the future of the academy and industry by compiling state-of-the-art works and future trends in the digital transformation of the social sciences and the field of information systems. It is also considered an interactive platform that enables academicians, practitioners and students from various institutions and industries to collaborate
Board gender diversity and corporate social responsibility: A bibliometric analysis.
The objective of this study to analyze developments in relating to board gender diversity (BGD) and corporate social responsibility (CSR) research and provide future researchers with new avenues for research in the field. A bibliometric analysis was conducted by focusing on the most productive articles, authors, journals, institutions, sponsors, and countries and as co-occurrence analyses based on 1961 peer-reviewed articles published between January 1966 and April 2021 in the Scopus database. Results revealed that the number of publications relevant to BGD and CSR has been gradually increasing, and a significant increase has been observed since 2010. Keywords such as "gender," "gender equality," "sustainable development," and "corporate social responsibility" reveal the key themes in BGD and CSR research. Cluster analysis revealed three clusters: Cluster 1 focused primarily on the board composition and board structure, Cluster 2 focused on board composition and its connection to CSR or philanthropy, and Cluster 3 (comprising more recent articles) mainly stressed the impact of gender diversity on CSR or sustainability initiatives. Results also provided different implications with future research directions. It reveals the collaboration between authors in conducting research in the domain of BGD and CSR is still lacking, suggesting further research in collaboration different authors in CSR and BGD. Journal of business ethics, Corporate governance: an international review, and Academy of management journal were the top-ranking journals in term of source co-citation, and thus journals ought to be further expanded more research in CSR and BGD to enhance their source co-citations. The most productive sponsors and institutions were in developed countries, while country co-authorship analysis revealed more research need to cooperatively be undertaken in developing countries
Using Crowd-Based Software Repositories to Better Understand Developer-User Interactions
Software development is a complex process. To serve the final software product to the end user, developers need to rely on a variety of software artifacts throughout the development process. The term software repository used to denote only containers of source code such as version control systems; more recent usage has generalized the concept to include a plethora of software development artifact kinds and their related meta-data.
Broadly speaking, software repositories include version control systems, technical documentation, issue trackers, question and answer sites, distribution information, etc. The software repositories can be based on a specific project (e.g., bug tracker for Firefox), or be crowd-sourced (e.g., questions and answers on technical Q&A websites). Crowd-based software artifacts are created as by-products of developer-user interactions which are sometimes referred to as communication channels. In this thesis, we investigate three distinct crowd-based software repositories that follow different models of developer-user interactions. We believe through a better understanding of the crowd-based software repositories, we can identify challenges in software development and provide insights to improve the software development process.
In our first study, we investigate Stack Overflow. It is the largest collection of programming related questions and answers. On Stack Overflow, developers interact with other developers to create crowd-sourced knowledge in the form of questions and answers. The results of the interactions (i.e., the question threads) become valuable information to the entire developer community. Prior research on Stack Overflow tacitly assume that questions receives answers directly on the platform and no need of interaction is required during the process. Meanwhile, the platform allows attaching comments to questions which forms discussions of the question. Our study found that question discussions occur for 59.2% of questions on Stack Overflow. For discussed and solved questions on Stack Overflow, 80.6% of the questions have the discussion begin before the accepted answer is submitted. The results of our study show the importance and nuances of interactions in technical Q&A.
We then study dotfiles, a set of publicly shared user-specific configuration files for software tools. There is a culture of sharing dotfiles within the developer community, where the idea is to learn from other developers’ dotfiles and share your variants. The interaction of dotfiles sharing can be viewed as developers sources information from other developers, adapt the information to their own needs, and share their adaptations back to the community. Our study on dotfiles suggests that is a common practice among developers to share dotfiles where 25.8% of the most stared users on GitHub have a dotfiles repository. We provide a taxonomy of the commonly tracked dotfiles and a qualitative study on the commits in dotfiles repositories. We also leveraged the state-of-the-art time-series clustering technique (K-shape) to identify code churn pattern for dotfile edits. This study is the first step towards understanding the practices of maintaining and sharing dotfiles.
Finally, we study app stores, the platforms that distribute software products and contain many non-technical attributes (e.g., ratings and reviews) of software products. Three major stakeholders interacts with each other in app stores: the app store owner who governs the operation of the app store; developers who publish applications on the app store; and users who browse and download applications in the app store. App stores often provide means of interaction between all three actors (e.g., app reviews, store policy) and sometimes interactions with in the same actor (e.g., developer forum). We surveyed existing app stores to extract key features from app store operation. We then labeled a representative set of app store collected by web queries. K-means is applied to the labeled app stores to detect natural groupings of app stores. We observed a diverse set of app stores through the process. Instead of a single model that describes all app stores, fundamentally, our observations show that app stores operates differently. This study provide insights in understanding how app stores can affect software development.
In summary, we investigated software repositories containing software artifacts created from different developer-user interactions. These software repositories are essential for software development in providing referencing information (i.e., Stack Overflow), improving development productivity (i.e., dotfiles), and help distributing the software products to end users (i.e., app stores)
What is going on in entrepreneurship research? A bibliometric and SNA analysis
Entrepreneurship is a highly dynamic and fast-growing academic research field with a long intellectual tradition. It attracts scholars with different backgrounds and theoretical frameworks, and with different levels of analyses and methodological orientations. But where is the field headed next? What is going on in entrepreneurship research? The purpose of this paper is to take stock of the current research in the field, to map it using bibliometric methods and social network analysis (SNA), and to offer directions for future research. Bibliographic coupling analysis (BCA) is used in this study, due to its ability to unveil current trends and future priorities as they are reflected at the forefront of research (i.e., active research fronts). Data were collected from the WoS, comprising 5,393 peer-reviewed journal articles published in 273 journals and containing 470,262 cited references. The results provide an overall perspective of the research in the field, identifying 16 different research fronts. We believe that this study significantly contributes to the entrepreneurship field by revealing the advancement of the literature and some of the most active research fronts in this domain, providing insights not previously fully grasped or evaluated by previous literature reviews
A Monte Carlo Language Model Pipeline for Zero-Shot Sociopolitical Event Extraction
We consider dyadic zero-shot event extraction (EE) to identify actions
between pairs of actors. The \emph{zero-shot} setting allows social scientists
or other non-computational researchers to extract any customized,
user-specified set of events without training, resulting in a \emph{dyadic}
event database, allowing insight into sociopolitical relational dynamics among
actors and the higher level organizations or countries they represent.
Unfortunately, we find that current zero-shot EE methods perform poorly for the
task, with issues including word sense ambiguity, modality mismatch, and
efficiency. Straightforward application of large language model prompting
typically performs even worse. We address these challenges with a new
fine-grained, multi-stage generative question-answer method, using a Monte
Carlo approach to exploit and overcome the randomness of generative outputs. It
performs 90\% fewer queries than a previous approach, with strong performance
on the widely-used Automatic Content Extraction dataset. Finally, we extend our
method to extract affiliations of actor arguments and demonstrate our method
and findings on a dyadic international relations case study
Internal and external social dimensions of linguistic legacy materials
Linguistische Nachlassmaterialien sind Artefakte der modernen Wissensgesellschaft, die Einblicke in die Sprach- und die Wissenschaftspraxis früherer Generationen geben. Für die Rekonstruktion ihrer Dokumentationskontexte fungieren sie oft als primäre Quellen, für Beteiligte durch ihre mnemonische Funktion oder in Ermangelung dieser als Zeitzeugnisse. Die vorliegende Arbeit beschäftigt sich mit der Dynamik des Wissensverlusts am Beispiel linguistischer Nachlassmaterialien, sowie der benötigten Rekonstruktion und Aufarbeitung im Umgang mit diesen Artefakten. Die Arbeit stellt hierzu einen hermeneutischen Beschreibungsrahmen vor, in dem der menschliche Faktor als soziale Dimension zwischen Wissen und Artefakt vermittelt. Dieses Modell unterscheidet zwischen einer internen und externen Referenzebene und den mental-abstrakten und materiellen Repräsentationen von Wissen. Die Kombination dieser Ebenen spannt vier Beschreibungsfelder auf, wobei der Transfer von Wissen zwischen diesen Bereichen durch menschliche Handlungen zu Erkenntnisgewinnen führt.
Im Fallbeispiel der Nachlassmaterialien des südestnischen Kraasna-Dialekts liegen aus-schließlich Artefakte von drei größeren und zwei kleineren philologischen Dokumentations-projekten vor, die zwischen 1849 und 1968 entstanden sind. In diese Zeit fällt der Übergang von einer aktiven alltäglichen Sprachnutzung zum Vergessen des linguistischen Erbes der um die russische Stadt Krasnogorodsk (Oblast' Pskov) ansässigen Sprachgemeinschaft. Die Zielsetzung bei der Bearbeitung dieser Nachlassmaterialien war die Aufarbeitung dieser Materialien, die Beleuchtung der diversen gesellschaftlichen wie wissenschaftlichen Kontexte zu dieser Zeit, sowie die Untersuchung der Rezeptiongeschichte zum Kraasna-Dialekt und seinen Sprecher:innen. Im Zuge dieser Arbeit sind neue Einblicke in die Wissenschaftsgeschichte entstanden, insbesondere bei den wiederentdeckten Tonaufnahmen aus dem Jahr 1914, welche im Rahmen dieser Dissertation neu transkribiert und erstmalig analysiert wurden.
Artikel II widmet sich der linguistischen Beschreibung der acht Phonographenwalzen, welche eine unschätzbare Quelle für die linguistische Beschreibung des Kraasna-Dialekts darstellen. Die Analyse bezieht dabei auch bereits veröffentlichte Beschreibungen ein und gelangt zu einer umfassenden Darstellung der Sprache, wobei sich verschiedene linguistische Annahmen bestätigen oder widerlegen lassen. Artikel I resümiert die notwendige philologische Rekonstruktion, um die diversen Nachlassmaterialien in ihren Kontexten der Erstellung und Rezeption zu begreifen. Hierbei ist eine reflexive Haltung vonnöten, die nicht nur Positionalität und menschlichen Einfluss in den Materialien untersucht, sondern auch die eigenen Spuren des Kurators transparent hält. Artikel III überträgt das Konzept der Kuratierung auf die wissenschaftliche Tätigkeit und Ausbildung. Diese Arbeit bedarf interdisziplinären Austauschs, einer holistischen geisteswissenschaftlichen Perspektive und vielseitigen Karrierewegen in der Aufarbeitung sprachlicher Daten und Dokumentationserzeugnisse. In Artikel IV stehen Archivinfrastrukturen im Fokus, die auf die Bedürfnisse von linguistischen Nachlassmaterialien und deren Aufarbeitung zugeschnitten sind. Die empfohlene partizipative Archivform kann die Gedächtnisinstitutionen zum Ort des Austauschs und der Verhandlung zwischen verschiedenen Interessengruppen erheben, bei der durch die Nachlassmaterialien auch eine historische Aussöhnung und ein Dialog zwischen Generationen ermöglicht wird.
Die vorliegende Arbeit verknüpft die Thematik der Nachlassmaterialien mit wissenschaftstheoretischen und -geschichtlichen Ansätzen und stellt eine metawissenschaftliche Perspektive auf diese Artefakte der linguistischen und anthropologischen Forschungsarbeit dar. Für die estnische Dialektologie bietet die Arbeit eine umfassende Aufarbeitung der Forschungsgeschichte und der diversen Nachlassmaterialien, welche in den südestnischen Kontext eingeordnet werden. Darüber hinaus bietet die Fallstudie einen Referenzpunkt für die Reflexion und Theoriebildung im Bereich Sprachdokumentation bzw. Metadokumentation, sowie Anhaltspunkte für die linguistische Arbeit mit Nachlassmaterialien. Des Weiteren illustriert die Arbeit Ansätze und Entwicklungsmöglichkeiten für moderne partizipative Infrastrukturen in Wissens- und Gedächtnisorganisationen, die auf die Besonderheiten im Umgang mit Nachlassmaterialien ausgerichtet sind. Die Aufarbeitung und Kuratierung dieser Artefakte verdient größere Aufmerksamkeit und die gleiche Anerkennung wie andere Forschungsarbeiten, da sie einen wertvollen Beitrag zur vielfältigen Beschreibung und selbstreflektierten Wissenschaft bildet.
Der Umgang mit Nachlassmaterialien stellt einen Diskurs dar, bei dem Wissen verhandelt und konstruiert wird. Im Hinblick auf diese soziale Konstruktion von Erkenntnissen von der Dokumentation über die Aufbereitung bis hin zu modernen Veröffentlichungen ist ein Fokus auf die sozialen Dimensionen wissenschaftlicher Artefakte und damit verbundenen Praktiken notwendig. Hierbei geht es nicht nur um einen kritischen und selbst-reflektierten Blick, sondern auch um Respekt und Anerkennung für die menschliche Arbeit in der Wissensgenese. Heutige Generationen können aus der Arbeit vergangener Gene-rationen lernen und auf dieselbe Weise nachfolgenden Wissenschaffenden aus Gesellschaft, Bildungswesen und Verwaltung helfen, ihre eigenen Perspektiven und Prozesse in der Dokumentation und Kommunikation von Wissen nahezubringen. Transparenz bildet ein verbindendes Element zwischen den Generationen und ermöglicht es, Kontexte zu rekonstruieren und Prozesse nachzuvollziehen
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