Social Media Geographic Information: Current developments and opportunities in urban and regional planning

This paper deals with the convergence of Social Media and Geographic Information and discusses its potential as useful source of knowledge in spatial planning. With the underlying assumption of the acknowledgement of the innovation that digital geographic information- including Spatial Data Infrastructures (SDI) and Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI)- is already bringing to urban and regional planning, the authors argue Social Media may also play an important role due to both their pervasiveness in content exchange and their emerging spatial convergence. To support this thesis, a review of best practice examples in different domain is presented in order to understand what tools are currently available and what kind of knowledge can be extracted from Social Media. On the base of this analysis, the paper present an original user-friendly tool developed by the authors to extract information from Social Media and to perform Spatial-Temporal Textual (STTx) analysis. The paper ends with some brief conclusions on the opportunities for the application of STTx analysis in urban and regional planning

Focal points: affecting undergraduates' scientific literacy through a three-skill intervention

Undergraduate science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) education has been receiving a great deal of attention. Stakeholders in government as well as academic institutions recognize the significance of educational reform in STEM fields to improve student engagement, retention and proficiency. Boston University, through partnership with the Center for the Integration of Research, Teaching and Learning (CIRTL), offers graduate students the opportunity to perform an educational research project in a STEM course in the Teaching-as-Research (TAR) Fellowship. The main goal of a TAR project is to identify educational interventions that improve student outcomes. This study, being a TAR project, examines how scientific literacy of undergraduates enrolled in Introduction to Neuroscience (NE 101) at Boston University changes over the course of a semester in response to a three-skill intervention. Scientific literacy, broadly defined as the ability to leverage evidence and data to interpret scientific research and evaluate the significance of conclusions, has been promoted by academic institutions by some time. Be that as it may, best practices for teaching scientific literacy and standardized methods of measurement have yet to be explicitly outlined. There are, however, validated paradigms that are gaining momentum: The integrated STEM education model and the Test of Scientific Literacy Skills (TOSLS). Integrated STEM education incorporates multiple academic disciplines (within and outside STEM fields) and promotes application of knowledge to solving real-world problems. The TOSLS is an assessment tool in sync with this educational model; its purpose is to gauge students’ proficiency in nine key skills of scientific literacy by posing questions that require students to implement these skills in meaningful scenarios. In this study, I used a subset of the scientific literacy skills outlined in the TOSLS to design curriculum for the discussion component of NE 101. I also used pre- and post-intervention adaptations of the TOSLS for measuring students’ achievement of scientific literacy in addition to weekly quiz questions. However, another focus of this study was to highlight changes in students’ motivation and attitudes toward scientific inquiry pre- to post-intervention. Research conducted by Carberry et al. suggests that employing a variety of quantitative and qualitative measurements provides a more holistic picture of students’ learning. To this end, two focus groups were held and a post-course discussion survey was deployed at the end of the course. The quantitative and qualitative data collected from these instruments indicate vital points for STEM educators to consider when designing and implementing course curriculum, especially those courses oriented toward promoting scientific literacy in their student population. Major considerations include: 1. Design problem-based activities that integrate multiple scientific literacy skills 2. Incorporate scientific literature from non-primary sources and that is representative of students’ interests 3. Develop students’ competency in reading primary scientific literature by gradually increasing the difficulty of material 4. Provide students with an intuitive and explicit framework for deciphering primary scientific literature 5. Use formative assessment to identify students’ strengths and challenges; leverage strengths to improve upon areas of difficult

The nature of volunterreed geographic information

This contribution starts from the assumption that volunteered geographic information is a technological, cultural and scientific innovation. It therefore offers first some general background on the context that has fuelled the development of VGI and the lively scientific debates that have accompanied its success. The paper then focuses on the nature of this data by describing the main elements of VGI: the geographical reference (coordinates, geotag, etc.), the contents (texts, images, etc.) and the producers’ profiles. The opportunities and the criticalities offered by this data are described with examples drawn from recent literature and applications to highlight both the research challenges and the current state of the subject. The chapter aims to provide a guide to and a reference picture of this rapidly evolving subject

Refugees as new Europeans, and the fragile line between crisis and solidarity

This piece draws on recent research focused on the humanitarian politics of the refugee ‘crisis’ and its relationship with European futures. Our aim is three-fold: first, we contextualise the rise of right-wing populism and the politicisation of refugees in Europe. Second, we reflect on how state austerities place precarious refugees alongside marginalised European citizens, with under-explored consequences and tensions. Third, we point to the hopeful practices around the ‘experimental humanitarianism’ that we encountered across the four capital cities in which we conducted research. The paper highlights the limitations of state-centric provisioning and the potential pathways that existing experiments of solidarity can build on the margins of European cities. These are often unseen or off-grid nodes of hope set against a backdrop of generalised European political malaise

A Report on the Chicago Region's Health and Human Services Sector

Looks at how major demographic shifts, policy changes, and funding trends are affecting the performance of individual agencies and Chicago's health and human services sector as a whole, and makes recommendations for improving the sector

Assessing the positional accuracy of perceptual landscape data: A study from Friuli Venezia Giulia, Italy

Online GIS-based applications that combine mapping and public participation to collect citizens' voices on their surrounding environment are a way to collect original spatial data that do not already figure in authoritative data sets. However, these applications, relying on non-expert users, might produce spatial data of insufficient quality for the purpose for which they are collected. This article presents an approach for assessing the positional accuracy of vague landscape features, using the results from a map-based survey completed by a group of volunteers in the Friuli Venezia Giulia region of Italy. The spatial section of the survey, gathering both georeferenced data and textual information on the mapping activity, allows the assessment of whether there is a correspondence between the mapped features and the intended map locations. The findings reveal a greater accuracy among participants in completing the mapping activity relating to degraded sites than to those of beauty

Clark County Cultural Site Stewardship Program: Final Project Report

Cooperative Conservation: Increasing Capacity through Community Partnerships – Cultural Site Stewardship Program is a Round 4 Southern Nevada Public Land Management Act (SNPLMA)- funded project implemented by the University of Nevada, Las Vegas Public Lands Institute on behalf of and in cooperation with four Federal agencies. This project resulted in the design, development, and implementation of an Interagency Cultural Site Stewardship Program. The program: Was recognized with Department of the Interior Cooperative Conservation Service Award (2007). Was modeled after the successful Arizona Site Steward Program developed and implemented with the following components: ─ recruitment activities ─ required classroom and field training and optional courses ─ recognition events ─ volunteer service totaling 10,929 hours by 288 Cultural Site Stewards and seven regional coordinators who identified, documented, and reported 94 significant impacts and 200 lesser impacts Developed Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) describing recruitment, training, recognition, and retention of volunteers, site steward operations, relevant laws, and a protocol for interfacing with law enforcement personnel. Conducted research on the viability of establishing a certificate program for cultural site stewards. Developed, distributed, and analyzed training program effectiveness survey. Designed, developed and implemented a hybrid relational database for the Cultural Site Stewardship Program. Built and maintained relationships with the public through: ─ outreach activities at community events ─ membership and participation in professional societies ─ multiple formal and informal presentations ─ timely response to inquiries through telephone, electronic, and mail correspondenc

A Utility-Theoretic Approach to Privacy in Online Services

Online offerings such as web search, news portals, and e-commerce applications face the challenge of providing high-quality service to a large, heterogeneous user base. Recent efforts have highlighted the potential to improve performance by introducing methods to personalize services based on special knowledge about users and their context. For example, a user's demographics, location, and past search and browsing may be useful in enhancing the results offered in response to web search queries. However, reasonable concerns about privacy by both users, providers, and government agencies acting on behalf of citizens, may limit access by services to such information. We introduce and explore an economics of privacy in personalization, where people can opt to share personal information, in a standing or on-demand manner, in return for expected enhancements in the quality of an online service. We focus on the example of web search and formulate realistic objective functions for search efficacy and privacy. We demonstrate how we can find a provably near-optimal optimization of the utility-privacy tradeoff in an efficient manner. We evaluate our methodology on data drawn from a log of the search activity of volunteer participants. We separately assess users’ preferences about privacy and utility via a large-scale survey, aimed at eliciting preferences about peoples’ willingness to trade the sharing of personal data in returns for gains in search efficiency. We show that a significant level of personalization can be achieved using a relatively small amount of information about users