The Shift of Techno-Economic Paradigm and Its Effects on Regional Disparities

During the 1900?s we first lived thorough shift from the agricultural era to the industrial era. Nowadays, we are in the middle of the shift from the industrial era to the information era. The new era has several definitions based on different theories. At the same time, we talk about information society (knowledge is forming the main productivity factor), network society (new communication technology is connecting people), post-industrial society (change in production paradigm), service society (emphasis on services instead of production), expert society (increasing importance of skilled people and experts), learning society (learning ability becomes a critical factor), postmodern society (modernisation leads to individualism), innovation society (innovation is the driving force of economic growth), risk society (risks and uncertainty are increasing in society) and consumer society (consumer needs steer economic activities) These definitions reflect the different points of view of assessing the development we have been experiencing during the recent years. Each of these definitions emphasises different phenomena embedded in the change of present techno-economic paradigm, and each of them builds a basis for the assessment of the requirements of the changing environment. Although the definitions and theories describing the present change are mostly very abstract, some concrete indicators can be determined to describe the phase of the trajectory in the changing process of the society. The changes in the society should be assessed at regional level, especially as regional dimension is gaining importance in the development policies at the European level. In the regional context the question to rise first is, how the shift of techno-economic paradigm appears in the regional level and what its effect is on emerging regional disparities. Secondly, is it possible to evaluate, how the region?s adaptability to the shift of techno-economic paradigm correlates to its economical success. In the current study, an indicator is created to describe a regions? adaptability to the shift of techno-economic paradigm. The variables included in the adaptability indicator are derived from the theories describing the present society. The Finnish urban regions are used as the source of empirical data in this study. All Finnish urban regions are assessed based on the adaptability indicator and further on, the values of the adaptability indicator are compared to the respective values of indicators describing the economic success of the same regions.. Admittedly, the adaptability indicator does not describe the studied phenomenon completely, it might even be considered provocative. However, it gives some interesting results about the different kinds of development trajectories of urban regions, and gives valuable information for regional decision-making.

A Service Discovery Solution for Edge Choreography-Based Distributed Embedded Systems

[EN] This paper presents a solution to support service discovery for edge choreography based distributed embedded systems. The Internet of Things (IoT) edge architectural layer is composed of Raspberry Pi machines. Each machine hosts different services organized based on the choreography collaborative paradigm. The solution adds to the choreography middleware three messages passing models to be coherent and compatible with current IoT messaging protocols. It is aimed to support blind hot plugging of new machines and help with service load balance. The discovery mechanism is implemented as a broker service and supports regular expressions (Regex) in message scope to discern both publishing patterns offered by data providers and client services necessities. Results compare Control Process Unit (CPU) usage in a request¿response and datacentric configuration and analyze both regex interpreter latency times compared with a traditional message structure as well as its impact on CPU and memory consumption.The choreography engine was developed and supported by the SABIEN research group of the Universitat Politecnica de Valencia (http://www.sabien.upv.es/en/).Blanc Clavero, S.; Bayo-Monton, JL.; Palanca-Barrio, S.; Arreaga-Alvarado, NX. (2021). A Service Discovery Solution for Edge Choreography-Based Distributed Embedded Systems. Sensors. 21(2):1-19. https://doi.org/10.3390/s21020672S11921

Distributed Localization Algorithms for Wireless Sensor Networks: From Design Methodology to Experimental Validation

Recent advances in the technology of wireless electronic devices have made possible to build ad–hoc Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) using inexpensive nodes, consisting of low–power processors, a modest amount of memory, and simple wireless transceivers. Over the last years, many novel applications have been envisaged for distributed WSNs in the area of monitoring, communication, and control. Sensing and controlling the environment by using many embedded devices forming a WSN often require the measured physical parameters to be associated with the position of the sensing device. As a consequence, one of the key enabling and indispensable services in WSNs is localization (i.e., positioning). Moreover, the design of various components of the protocol stack (e.g., routing and Medium Access Control, MAC, algorithms) might take advantage of nodes’ location, thus resulting in WSNs with improved performance. However, typical protocol design methodologies have shown signiï¬cant limitations when applied to the ï¬eld of embedded systems, like WSNs. As a matter of fact, the layered nature of typical design approaches limits their practical usefulness for the design of WSNs, where any vertical information (like, e.g., the actual node’s position) should be efï¬ciently shared in such resource constrained devices. Among the proposed solutions to address this problem, we believe that the Platform–Based Design (PBD) approach Sangiovanni-Vincentelli (2002), which is a relatively new methodology for the design of embedded systems, is a very promising paradigm for the efï¬cient design of WSNs

Understanding gendered influences on women's reproductive health in Pakistan: Moving beyond the autonomy paradigm

Recent research and policy discourse commonly view the limited autonomy of women in developing countries as a key barrier to improvements in their reproductive health. Rarely, however, is the notion of women's autonomy interrogated for its conceptual adequacy or usefulness for understanding the determinants of women's reproductive health, effective policy formulation or program design. Using ethnographic data from 2001, including social mapping exercises, observation of daily life, interviews, case studies and focus group discussions, this paper draws attention to the incongruities between the concept of women's autonomy and the gendered social, cultural, economic and political realities of women's lives in rural Punjab, Pakistan. These inadequacies include: the concept's undue emphasis on women's independent, autonomous action; a lack of attention to men and masculinities; a disregard for the multi-sited constitution of gender relations and gender inequality; an erroneous assumption that uptake of reproductive health services is an indicator of autonomy; and a failure to explore the interplay of other axes of disadvantage such as caste, class or socio-economic position. This paper calls for alternative, more nuanced, theoretical approaches for conceptualizing gender inequalities in order to enhance our understanding of women's reproductive wellbeing in Pakistan. The extent to which our arguments may be relevant to the wider South Asian context, and women's lives in other parts of the world, is also discussed

Development of an Extended Product Lifecycle Management through Service Oriented Architecture.

Organised by: Cranfield UniversityThe aim of this work is to define new business opportunities through the concept of Extended Product Lifecycle Management (ExtPLM), analysing its potential implementation within a Service Oriented Architecture. ExtPLM merges the concepts of Extended Product, Avatar and PLM. It aims at allowing a closer interaction between enterprises and their customers, who are integrated in all phases of the life cycle, creating new technical functionalities and services, improving both the practical (e.g. improving usage, improving safety, allowing predictive maintenance) and the emotional side (e.g. extreme customization) of the product.Mori Seiki – The Machine Tool Company; BAE Systems; S4T – Support Service Solutions: Strategy and Transitio