4,957 research outputs found
Planetary Hinterlands:Extraction, Abandonment and Care
This open access book considers the concept of the hinterland as a crucial tool for understanding the global and planetary present as a time defined by the lasting legacies of colonialism, increasing labor precarity under late capitalist regimes, and looming climate disasters. Traditionally seen to serve a (colonial) port or market town, the hinterland here becomes a lens to attend to the times and spaces shaped and experienced across the received categories of the urban, rural, wilderness or nature. In straddling these categories, the concept of the hinterland foregrounds the human and more-than-human lively processes and forms of care that go on even in sites defined by capitalist extraction and political abandonment. Bringing together scholars from the humanities and social sciences, the book rethinks hinterland materialities, affectivities, and ecologies across places and cultural imaginations, Global North and South, urban and rural, and land and water
UMSL Bulletin 2023-2024
The 2023-2024 Bulletin and Course Catalog for the University of Missouri St. Louis.https://irl.umsl.edu/bulletin/1088/thumbnail.jp
Recommended from our members
Cancer Care in Pandemic Times: Building Inclusive Local Health Security in Africa and India
This is a book about improving cancer care in Africa and India that is a child of its pandemic times. It has been collaboratively researched and written by colleagues in Kenya, Tanzania, India and the UK, working within a cross-country, multidisciplinary research project, Innovation for Cancer Care in Africa (ICCA). Since this was a health-focused research project, ICCA researchers during the pandemic not only continued to work on the cancer research project but were also called upon by their governments to respond to immediate pandemic needs. In combining these two concerns, for improving cancer care and responding to pandemic needs, our original project aims have been challenged, deepened and reworked. ICCA’s initial collaborative research focus included—against the grain of most global health literature—the potential role of enhanced local production of essential healthcare supplies for improving cancer care in African countries. The pandemic experience has strikingly validated these earlier findings on the importance of industrial development for health care. The pandemic crystallised for researchers and policymakers an often overlooked phenomenon: global health security is built on the foundations of strong local health security. We argue in this book that new analytical thinking from social scientists and others is required on how to build local health security. We use the “lens” of original research on cancer care in East Africa and India to build up an understanding of the scope for the development of stronger synergies between local health industries and health care, in order to strengthen local health security and develop tools for policy making. The rethinking and reimagining presented here is required for different African countries, for India and the wider world, and this research on cancer care has taught us that this imperative goes much wider than infectious diseases
Absence of Information-Giving in Information Behavior Models
In addition to being utilized in areas such as Information Storage and Retrieval and Knowledge Management, investigating human information behavior as an independent field of knowledge has its issues. The concept of info-behavior somehow involves a reciprocal process: the info-giver and the info-receiver/seeker. On the other hand, in a logical analysis of information behavior, the elements required in this process are information and the source of information (i.e., the info-giver). Nevertheless, most of the discussions and the papers found in the literature on human information behavior (perhaps because of being interested in the applications mentioned above) are focused on info-seeking. And for any reason, little attention is paid to the role of the info-giver as the primary side in information behavior. However, the author's main idea in this paper is that the info-giver is central to realizing this process. The present article, having a glance at some of the most popular models on information behavior and the place of the info-seeker in the process, points to the absence of the info-giver in the mentioned models. Then, by providing some exemplary cases of information behavior initiated by the info-seeker/receiver in the absence, the paper emphasizes the information giver's central role in realizing the information behavior process
UMSL Bulletin 2022-2023
The 2022-2023 Bulletin and Course Catalog for the University of Missouri St. Louis.https://irl.umsl.edu/bulletin/1087/thumbnail.jp
In-memory Databases in Business Information Systems
In-memory databases are developed to keep the entire data in main memory. Compared to traditional database systems, read access is now much faster since no I/O access to a hard drive is required. In terms of write access, mechanisms are available which provide data persistence and thus secure transactions. In-memory databases have been available for a while and have proven to be suitable for particular use cases. With increasing storage density of DRAM modules, hardware systems capable of storing very large amounts of data have become affordable. In this context the question arises whether in-memory databases are suitable for business information system applications. Hasso Plattner, who developed the HANA in-memory database, is a trailblazer for this approach. He sees a lot of potential for novel concepts concerning the development of business information systems. One example is to conduct transactions and analytics in parallel and on the same database, i.e. a division into operational database systems and data warehouse systems is no longer necessary (Plattner and Zeier 2011). However, there are also voices against this approach. Larry Ellison described the idea of business information systems based on in-memory database as “wacko,” without actually making a case for his statement (cf. Bube 2010). Stonebraker (2011) sees a future for in-memory databases for business information systems but considers the division of OLTP and OLAP applications as reasonable. [From: Introduction
The Modernization Process of a Data Pipeline
Data plays an integral part in a company’s decision-making. Therefore, decision-makers must have the right data available at the right time. Data volumes grow constantly, and new data is continuously needed for analytical purposes. Many companies use data warehouses to store data in an easy-to-use format for reporting and analytics. The challenge with data warehousing is displaying data using one unified structure. The source data is often gathered from many systems that are structured in various ways.
A process called extract, transform, and load (ETL) or extract, load, and transform (ELT) is used to load data into the data warehouse. This thesis describes the modernization process of one such pipeline. The previous solution, which used an on-premises Teradata platform for computation and SQL stored procedures for the transformation logic, is replaced by a new solution. The goal of the new solution is a process that uses modern tools, is scalable, and follows programming best practises. The cloud-based Databricks platform is used for computation, and dbt is used as the transformation tool. Lastly, a comparison is made between the new and old solutions, and their benefits and drawbacks are discussed
Evaluating the sustainability and resiliency of local food systems
With an ever-rising global population and looming environmental challenges such as climate change and soil degradation, it is imperative to increase the sustainability of food production. The drastic rise in food insecurity during the COVID-19 pandemic has further shown a pressing need to increase the resiliency of food systems. One strategy to reduce the dependence on complex, vulnerable global supply chains is to strengthen local food systems, such as by producing more food in cities. This thesis uses an interdisciplinary, food systems approach to explore aspects of sustainability and resiliency within local food systems.
Lifecycle assessment (LCA) was used to evaluate how farm scale, distance to consumer, and management practices influence environmental impacts for different local agriculture models in two case study locations: Georgia, USA and England, UK. Farms were grouped based on urbanisation level and management practices, including: urban organic, peri-urban organic, rural organic, and rural conventional. A total of 25 farms and 40 crop lifecycles were evaluated, focusing on two crops (kale and tomatoes) and including impacts from seedling production through final distribution to the point of sale. Results were extremely sensitive to the allocation of composting burdens (decomposition emissions), with impact variation between organic farms driven mainly by levels of compost use. When composting burdens were attributed to compost inputs, the rural conventional category in the U.S. and the rural organic category in the UK had the lowest average impacts per kg sellable crop produced, including the lowest global warming potential (GWP). However, when subtracting avoided burdens from the municipal waste stream from compost inputs, trends reversed entirely, with urban or peri-urban farm categories having the lowest impacts (often negative) for GWP and marine eutrophication. Overall, farm management practices were the most important factor driving environmental impacts from local food supply chains.
A soil health assessment was then performed on a subset of the UK farms to provide insight to ecosystem services that are not captured within LCA frameworks. Better soil health was observed in organically-farmed and uncultivated soils compared to conventionally farmed soils, suggesting higher ecosystem service provisioning as related to improved soil structure, flood mitigation, erosion control, and carbon storage. However, relatively high heavy metal concentrations were seen on urban and peri-urban farms, as well as those located in areas with previous mining activity. This implies that there are important services and disservices on farms that are not captured by LCAs.
Zooming out from a focus on food production, a qualitative methodology was used to explore experiences of food insecurity and related health and social challenges during the COVID-19 pandemic. Fourteen individuals receiving emergency food parcels from a community food project in Sheffield, UK were interviewed. Results showed that maintaining food security in times of crisis requires a diverse set of individual, household, social, and place-based resources, which were largely diminished or strained during the pandemic. Drawing upon social capital and community support was essential to cope with a multiplicity of hardship, highlighting a need to develop community food infrastructure that supports ideals of mutual aid and builds connections throughout the food supply chain. Overall, this thesis shows that a range of context-specific solutions are required to build sustainable and resilient food systems. This can be supported by increasing local control of food systems and designing strategies to meet specific community needs, whilst still acknowledging a shared global responsibility to protect ecosystem, human, and planetary health
GECAMB 2022: proceedings of the 9th GECAMB Conference on Environmental Management and Accounting
No abstract available.publishe
- …