Risk Perception through Exemplarity: Hurricanes as Climate Change Examples and Counterexamples in Norwegian News Media

This article explores how hurricanes are used in news media to exemplify the consequences of climate change. This is done by a close reading of Norwegian newspaper articles on the hurricanes Katrina (2005), Sandy (2012), Harvey and Irma (both 2017). The geographical distance between the disaster areas and the media audience enables an exploration of how these weather events are made meaningful across long distances, as global concerns. The article shows how these hurricanes are textualized and turned into signs in nature that are pointing towards a climate-changed future, and how they work as modelling examples for imagining the possible disastrous state of such a future. It further argues that reasoning with hurricane examples is a certain kind of risk perception involving a temporal and spatial entwining of the future and the present, that represents a notion of cultural catastrophization by calling upon a fear of an uncontrollable disastrous future. The uses of the hurricane example in news media imply an epistemological shift from probability to exemplarity. This shift provides an argumentative space for climate change skeptics to perform counterarguments that juggle between probability and exemplarity. The article explores how this is done, and how statistics and mentioning of other hurricanes are used to argue that hurricanes Sandy, Harvey and Irma were not extraordinary events in terms of intensity, and thus that they cannot possibly be fueled by climate change. The climate change skeptics’ attempts to claim these hurricanes to be local and normal phenomena, independent of human action, may be regarded as attempts to de-catastrophize contemporary society.publishedVersio

The Role of the Library Web Site

Article describes issues, resources, and technologies on the Web that impacts reference and user services

Digital Social Innovation and Urban Space: A Critical Geography Agenda

Digital Social Innovation (DSI) is a new concept referring to social innovation initiatives that leverage digital technologies potentiality to co-create solutions to a wide range of social needs. These initiatives generally take place in urban contexts. However, in the existing literature, scarce attention is devoted to the spatial dimensions and the social, cultural or political space-related effects of DSI practices. This article suggests that a critical geography perspective can address these gaps. After a review of existing relevant contributes, the article elaborates a research agenda for a critical geography of DSI. This articulates along four research lines, including the emergence of DSI networks, the (re)production of DSI processes and socio-cultural urban space, the representations of DSI practices and the power relationships these mobilise

Implementing Electric Consent Aimed at People Living with Dementia and Their Caregivers: Did We Forget Those Who Forget?

As policy flows down from law/regulation (e.g. GDPR) and/or individual privacy concerns give rise to demands on improving accessibility, awareness and comprehension, the topic of electronic consent (or eConsent) is becoming more prevalent. We provide a critical voice by considering, but also challenging, the underlying assumptions that the status quo of eConsent design and implementation is appropriate for all people in society. While on-going efforts are focusing on enhancing the eConsent process, there is still room for improvement. The “one size fits all” ethos is not applicable in every context. This paper makes us aware of the different ethical, legal, social and technical implications of ICT use by senior citizens and provides an opportunity to create discourse in this area. It argues that future research examining the effectiveness of innovative ICTs must take the eConsent process into account

The feast project book and photographic installation: "Christy Johnson & 33 Confessors" Video Installation: "The Set"

This artist’s project represents four years of research (in part funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the British Council, UCR California Museum of Photography, and UCCA, UK (now titled University for the Creative Arts). The work has developed across platforms and resulted in a number of linked pieces, which extend and expand Johnson’s interests in the interface between the archive, the book, the screen, and the museum. The project has three distinct components: photographic site-specific installation, video triptych (projection/dual monitor work) and a published artist’s book distributed by Art Data, London. The Feast Project was previewed and launched in April 2007 in the Oculorium Gallery/Project Space at the UCR California Museum of Photography in the USA. This work represents a convergence of three strands of inquiry: identity and the body, sites of memory, and the archive. The work as a whole aims to explore how the female body is socially and sexually constructed through transformative religious ritual; contemporary practices of intervention and the museum; collecting, re(collecting) and the relationship of artefact and memory; and the archive as a site of reclamation and narration. Through critical intervention, found material has been mobilised and the ’record’ put in question. The Feast Project operates as a set of interchanges between then and now, and reclaims a space for the reactivation of identity. ARTIST’S BOOK © 2007 Feast: Christy Johnson and 33 Confessors Publication ISBN 978-1-870522-49-6 208 pages, b/w Hardback Edition of 1,000 27.5 x 22 x 2 cm Distribution: Art Data, London, UK USA Book Launch and Artist’s Talk 28 April 2007 University of California Riverside, California Museum of Photography UK Book Launch and window work "Missal" 20 September 2007, bookartbookshop, London Feast: Christy Johnson and 33 Confessors is a performative proposition, where levels of enactment and re-enactment are in dialogue. Johnson is particularly interested in the document as a ritual space, and how the book form can become a site for discursive interplay. She has created and drawn upon two distinct but related archives: found photographic imagery (the appropriated record) and contemporary spoken narratives whereby the past and present are brought into contact with each other. She has sought and collected hundreds of First Communion photographic images from various countries in the Americas and Europe. The anonymous portraits span the years 1877-1970. The bookwork features the photographs of prepubescent girls and explores their performative staging as 'virginal brides' for the public communal event, as well as the private photographic record. Alongside the visual archive, Johnson has conducted interviews with thirty-three women of differing social backgrounds and nationalities, ages and current involvement and position to religion. The edited text excerpts have been taken from the audio archive and juxtaposed with the found images in order to oppose, support, challenge, complement, contradict, subvert, or go beyond the meanings offered by the photographs themselves. At the end of the work, three essays provide an interdisciplinary perspective on the project: •Archival Memories: Between History and Experience (pp.182-89) Margherita Sprio, Lecturer and Scheme Director MA Art and Film, Department of Art History and Theory, University of Essex, UK •Retrieval and Transmittal in a Fictive Photographic Experience (pp.190-97) Catherine Clinger, Visiting Professor of Art History, Department of Art and Art History, University of New Mexico, USA •All in White for the Feast: Whiteness in the Christian Imaginary (pp.198-205) Jenny Daggers, Senior Lecturer in Theology and Religious Studies, Liverpool Hope University, UK PHOTOGRAPHIC INSTALLATION Oculorium Gallery UCR/ California Museum of Photography, USA Curated by Ciara Ennis Feast: Christy Johnson and 33 Confessors 108 - 92 h x 61 w cm Lambda prints on Fugi archival paper This floor to ceiling installation plundered the Feast archive, a depository of more than 400 found First Communion commemorative pictures from Europe and the Americas (1877-1970). A selection of 108 images enlarged and printed in colour (digital photographic Lambda prints) were presented in a three-row grid format on four walls that literally enveloped and surrounded the viewer - an army of pre-teen girls dressed in white. The anonymous photographic portraits explore and critique the initiatory performance of gender in ritual contexts (both sacred and secular), particularly addressing notions of purity and contamination. These monumentalised images become celebratory markers of an emergent prepubescent sexuality and desire. The fetishised ‘virginal bride’ motif once safely and happily in place, now reaches the challenging excesses of the fantastically bizarre. The size is a renunciation of where these photographs were originally placed, and the spectator confronted by a re-viewing. The sheer scale of the work exposes the physical nature of the First Communion event (both in the church and photographer’s studio) and sets out to deconstruct this important symbolic moment. Female sexuality is not located in a comfortable place … it is not clear where it is … it is not fixed. Confronting the images, two voices emerge in dialogue (wall texts) where amnesia and sharp recall explore the flux of denial and excess. VIDEO INSTALLATION Project Space UCR/ California Museum of Photography, USA Curated by Ciara Ennis The Set Video triptych with continuous sound (projection/two 382 cm monitors)& prayer cushion seating 32 minute, synchronized loop (5 x 5 minutes sequences) This installation explores the authorial nature of the First Communion rituals - rote performances in the Church move seamlessly to mock performances in the studio. The Set draws on the artifice of the recorded climatic moment (fixed image). This video work is a continuous re-enactment of five photographic portraits drawn from the Feast archive, and points to the absent, unseen event that is re-done (staged) for the photographer. The representational conventions that are to be adhered to (as with wedding photography) are exposed simply through a reflexive approach where the children hold their performances in the anticipation of the release. Gender as performance is explored in terms of how boys and girls are expected to behave. Being good and acting as you are told breaks down in each of the five sequences with each child monitoring the other. The sound of a cough, sneeze, whisper or movement of the body reverberates in the studio, breaking and punctuating the monotonous real-time action

Web Data Extraction, Applications and Techniques: A Survey

Web Data Extraction is an important problem that has been studied by means of different scientific tools and in a broad range of applications. Many approaches to extracting data from the Web have been designed to solve specific problems and operate in ad-hoc domains. Other approaches, instead, heavily reuse techniques and algorithms developed in the field of Information Extraction. This survey aims at providing a structured and comprehensive overview of the literature in the field of Web Data Extraction. We provided a simple classification framework in which existing Web Data Extraction applications are grouped into two main classes, namely applications at the Enterprise level and at the Social Web level. At the Enterprise level, Web Data Extraction techniques emerge as a key tool to perform data analysis in Business and Competitive Intelligence systems as well as for business process re-engineering. At the Social Web level, Web Data Extraction techniques allow to gather a large amount of structured data continuously generated and disseminated by Web 2.0, Social Media and Online Social Network users and this offers unprecedented opportunities to analyze human behavior at a very large scale. We discuss also the potential of cross-fertilization, i.e., on the possibility of re-using Web Data Extraction techniques originally designed to work in a given domain, in other domains.Comment: Knowledge-based System

UNLOCKing creative & innovative teaching in higher education extended abstracts

No abstract available.publishe

Unions and the City: Negotiating Urban Change

[Excerpt] Labor unions remain the largest membership-based organizations in major North American cities, even after years of decline. Labor continues to play a vital role in mobilizing urban residents, shaping urban conflict, and crafting the policies and regulations that are transforming our urban spaces. As unions become more involved in the daily life of the city, they find themselves confronting the familiar dilemma of how to fold union priorities into broader campaigns that address nonunion workers and the lives of union members beyond the workplace. If we are right to believe that the future of the labor movement is an urban one, union activists and staffers, urban policymakers, elected officials, and members of the public alike will require a fuller understanding of what impels unions to become involved in urban policy issues, what dilemmas structure the choices unions make, and what impact unions have on the lives of urban residents, beyond their members.Unions and the City serves as a road map toward both a stronger labor movement and a socially just urbanism. The book presents the findings of a collaborative project in which a team of labor researchers and labor geographers based in New York City and Toronto investigated how and why labor unions were becoming more involved in urban regulation and urban planning. The contributors assess the effectiveness of this involvement in terms of labor goals―such as protecting employment levels, retaining bargaining relationships with employers, and organizing new workforces―as well as broader social consequences of union strategies, such as expanding access to public services, improving employment equity, and making neighborhoods more affordable. Focusing on four key economic sectors (film, hospitality, green energy, and child care), this book reveals that unions can exert a surprising level of influence in various aspects of urban policymaking and that they can have a significant impact on how cities are changing and on the experiences of urban residents

New governing experts in education: Self-learning software, policy labs and transactional pedagogies

The governance of education is increasingly intertwined with database technologies.This chapter examines the emergence of the ‘public policy lab’ as a new actor ineducational governance with governing expertise in data technologies and techniques. Drawing on a study of the think tank Demos, the social enterprise the Innovation Unit, and Nesta (the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts) in England, the chapter shows how these organizations promote themselves as intermediary governing experts. Utilising new software technologies, they exercise the capacity to diagnose the problems of contemporary schooling, and to activate the competencies of learners as governing resources to solve those problems