Farming with future: making crop protection sustainable

The project Farming with future works with parties with a vested interest to promote sustainable crop protection in practice. Besides developing new knowledge, it spends a good deal of its energy in the embedding of sustainable practices within relevant organisations, businesses and agrarian entrepreneurs in order to make these practices permanent features of their activities

Data degradation to enhance privacy for the Ambient Intelligence

Increasing research in ubiquitous computing techniques towards the development of an Ambient Intelligence raises issues regarding privacy. To gain the required data needed to enable application in this Ambient Intelligence to offer smart services to users, sensors will monitor users' behavior to fill personal context histories. Those context histories will be stored on database/information systems which we consider as honest: they can be trusted now, but might be subject to attacks in the future. Making this assumption implies that protecting context histories by means of access control might be not enough. To reduce the impact of possible attacks, we propose to use limited retention techniques. In our approach, we present applications a degraded set of data with a retention delay attached to it which matches both application requirements and users privacy wishes. Data degradation can be twofold: the accuracy of context data can be lowered such that the less privacy sensitive parts are retained, and context data can be transformed such that only particular abilities for application remain available. Retention periods can be specified to trigger irreversible removal of the context data from the system

The Internet as a Service Channel in the Public Sector : A substitute or complement of traditional service channels?

The Internet has been used as a channel for public service delivery since the mid 1990’s. During the first years of its existence it was believed to be the service channel of the future, making all other channels obsolete. But until now, the telephone and face-to-face contact remain being used more frequently and are rated higher. By comparing various studies that have recently been conducted in a number of countries, this paper suggests that the characteristics of the channel make it a suitable channel for basic transactions and simple information provision, and that the telephone and face-to-face contact remain prevalent for at least ambiguous and complex tasks. Therefore the Internet might be a complementary channel rather than a substitute of traditional channels. Research findings are interpreted by means of Media Richness Theory, the Social Influence model and Channel Expansion Theory

Seesaw and Lepton Flavour Violation in SUSY SO(10)

That $\mu \to e, \gamma$ and $\tau \to \mu,\gamma$ are sensitive probes of SUSY models with a see-saw mechanism is a well accepted fact. Here we propose a `top-down' approach in a general SUSY SO(10) scheme. In this framework, we show that at least one of the neutrino Yukawa couplings is as large as the top Yukawa coupling. This leads to a strong enhancement of these leptonic flavour changing decay rates. We examine two `extreme' cases, where the lepton mixing angles in the neutrino Yukawa couplings are either small (CKM-like) or large (PMNS-like). In these two cases, we quantify the sensitivity of leptonic radiative decays to the SUSY mass spectrum. In the PMNS case, we find that the ongoing experiments at the B-factories can completely probe the spectrum up to gaugino masses of 500 GeV (any tan $\beta$). Even in the case of CKM-like mixings, large regions of the parameter space will be probed in the near future, making these two processes leading candidates for indirect SUSY searches.Comment: 22 pages with 2 figures. Figures for \tau -> \mu \gamma decay corrected after typo found in the program. Decay \mu -> e gamma completely unchanged and conclusions basicaly unchange

Future making and visual artefacts : an ethnographic study of a design project

Current research on strategizing and organizing has explored how practitioners make sense of an uncertain future, but provides limited explanations of how they actually make a realizable course of action for the future. A focus on making rather than sensemaking brings into view the visual artefacts that practitioners use in giving form to what is ‘not yet’ – drawings, models and sketches. We explore how visual artefacts are used in making a realizable course of action, by analysing ethnographic data from an architectural studio designing a development strategy for their client. We document how visual artefacts become enrolled in practices of imagining, testing, stabilizing and reifying, through which abstract imaginings of the future are turned into a realizable course of action. We then elaborate on higher-order findings that are generalizable to a wide range of organizational settings, and discuss their implications for future research in strategizing and organizing. This paper contributes in two ways: first, it offers future making as an alternative perspective on how practitioners orient themselves towards the future (different from current perspectives such as foreseeing, future perfect thinking and wayfinding). Second, it advances our understanding of visual artefacts and their performativity in the making of organizational futures

To Be or Not to Be – A Research Subject

Most people do not know there are different kinds of medical studies; some are conducted on people who already have a disease or medical condition, and others are performed on healthy volunteers who want to help science find answers. No matter what sort of research you are invited to participate in, or whether you are a patient when you are asked, it’s entirely up to you whether or not to do it. This decision is important and may have many implications for your health and well-being, as well as those of other patients now and in the future. Making a good decision – the right one for you – requires you to become educated about topics you may not have thought about before, some of which may be quite complicated. This chapter explains the key issues to help you make a good decision