The Lumberjack, August 22, 2007

The student newspaper of Humboldt State University.https://digitalcommons.humboldt.edu/studentnewspaper/2439/thumbnail.jp

Image and Video Forensics

Nowadays, images and videos have become the main modalities of information being exchanged in everyday life, and their pervasiveness has led the image forensics community to question their reliability, integrity, confidentiality, and security. Multimedia contents are generated in many different ways through the use of consumer electronics and high-quality digital imaging devices, such as smartphones, digital cameras, tablets, and wearable and IoT devices. The ever-increasing convenience of image acquisition has facilitated instant distribution and sharing of digital images on digital social platforms, determining a great amount of exchange data. Moreover, the pervasiveness of powerful image editing tools has allowed the manipulation of digital images for malicious or criminal ends, up to the creation of synthesized images and videos with the use of deep learning techniques. In response to these threats, the multimedia forensics community has produced major research efforts regarding the identification of the source and the detection of manipulation. In all cases (e.g., forensic investigations, fake news debunking, information warfare, and cyberattacks) where images and videos serve as critical evidence, forensic technologies that help to determine the origin, authenticity, and integrity of multimedia content can become essential tools. This book aims to collect a diverse and complementary set of articles that demonstrate new developments and applications in image and video forensics to tackle new and serious challenges to ensure media authenticity

The political ecology of soybean farming systems in Mato Grosso, Brazil: a cross-scale analysis of farming styles in Querência-MT

Over the past two decades the expansion of soybean production in Brazil has been assessed and used as an example of the success or failure of large-scale, mechanized agricultural production. Indeed, the economic, social and environmental implications of this agricultural expansion are highly contested. Nevertheless, the complexity behind this process is rarely depicted. Instead simplistic and monolithic notions of agronegocio (agribusiness), and linear interpretations of soybean expansion are offered. These general accounts reduce agrarian dynamics, diversity of farming styles and differences in livelihoods to a homogenous phenomenon in all soybean production regions in Brazil. This limits the scope to understand processes of socio-technical, socio-economic and socio-environmental transformations and the existence of diverse pathways related to the soybean agri-food systems. This study therefore rejects the simple narratives, and argues for a more nuanced understanding of the diverse processes and dynamics between soybean farming styles and its actors' interactions as part of fast‐changing agri‐food systems. This is done through a case study approach in the municipality of Querência in the state Mato Grosso, Brazil. An examination of narratives (the ways different people talk about and construct farming and its objectives) and practices (the different farming styles and livelihood strategies) informs this analysis. In particular, the research explores how a heterogeneity of soybean farming styles – contrasting large-scale, medium-scale and smallholder soybean farmers – is constructed in a particular place, offering in turn a more nuanced account of the standard, highly polarised assessment of farming styles and their implications. It then contributes to an understanding of how policies and practices related to diverse soybean agri-food systems in Mato Grosso state are played out. This sheds light on how notions of rural development are constructed and how pathways to sustainable development are seen

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse