44 research outputs found

    CONUL Research Support Task and Finish Group

    Get PDF
    The Group’s remit was to prepare a three year strategy to develop the research support capacity of CONUL libraries. The group identified key areas around which a tool kit was to be developed in the form of briefing documents. The briefing documents are collated together in thechapters and appendices of this report

    Monitoring, managing and transferring marine and maritime knowledge for sustainable Blue Growth. Portals and repositories and their role in knowledge transfer to support Blue Growth

    Get PDF
    This report focuses primarily on marine data portals and repositories as important providers of knowledge in the form of data, metadata and derived data-products. In addition, these data and information systems are also important users of knowledge outputs from research projects. As such, they have a unique position and role to play by: (i) fostering direct transfer of data or products from repositories to intermediate and end-users; and (ii) taking up outputs from monitoring activities and projects to data repositories (users in this scenario) to fill data gaps or to contribute to better architecture, services or data products. Successive European marine research projects such as the SeaDataNet, SeaDataNet II, the series of MyOcean projects, Jerico, ODIP and numerous others have contributed significantly to the development of the current European marine data and information sharing landscape. As a result of huge efforts over the last decades, there is a wealth of marine observations and data with a wide range of potential applications currently available via various marine data repositories and portals in Europe. Despite their potential, this report highlights that there is still a huge gap between the knowledge that can be derived from available European data resources and actual uptake by users resulting in tangible contributions to Blue Growth, marine environmental management and knowledge-based policy making

    Exploring the effects of a classroom-based climate change intervention on secondary students in Ireland

    Get PDF
    Objective: This research considers the degree to which participation in an 8–10-hour interactive climate change education (CCE) module affects secondary school students’ knowledge, attitude, behaviour, and values about climate change. Methods: This study utilises a one-group pre-, post-, and six-month follow up test repeated measures design, with 82 students (ages 12-15). The CCE programme is the independent variable. The dependent variables included self-reported pro-climate behaviours, climate behaviour intentions, environmental efficacy, worry about climate change and environmental values. Baseline and post-test measurements were completed by September 2022 and a follow-up assessment was completed by January 2023. Results: Preliminary results show significant positive effects within the experimental group in relation to positive attitudes towards climate change behaviour, climate change behavioural intentions and climate change knowledge. Biospheric values also increased while egotistical values decreased significantly. The six-month follow-up suggests additional intervention may be needed to maintain positive effects. Conclusion: Findings support the short-term effectiveness of the CCE programme as a useful educational intervention to promote climate change knowledge, environmental behaviours and biospheric values among groups of secondary school students. Follow up surveys suggest limited lasting effects in the medium term, with the exception of changes in egotistical values.N

    Attention and Social Cognition in Virtual Reality:The effect of engagement mode and character eye-gaze

    Get PDF
    Technical developments in virtual humans are manifest in modern character design. Specifically, eye gaze offers a significant aspect of such design. There is need to consider the contribution of participant control of engagement. In the current study, we manipulated participants’ engagement with an interactive virtual reality narrative called Coffee without Words. Participants sat over coffee opposite a character in a virtual café, where they waited for their bus to be repaired. We manipulated character eye-contact with the participant. For half the participants in each condition, the character made no eye-contact for the duration of the story. For the other half, the character responded to participant eye-gaze by making and holding eye contact in return. To explore how participant engagement interacted with this manipulation, half the participants in each condition were instructed to appraise their experience as an artefact (i.e., drawing attention to technical features), while the other half were introduced to the fictional character, the narrative, and the setting as though they were real. This study allowed us to explore the contributions of character features (interactivity through eye-gaze) and cognition (attention/engagement) to the participants’ perception of realism, feelings of presence, time duration, and the extent to which they engaged with the character and represented their mental states (Theory of Mind). Importantly it does so using a highly controlled yet ecologically valid virtual experience

    Trends in European Climate Change Perception: Where the Effects of Climate Change go unnoticed

    Full text link
    Climate change threatens global impacts in a variety of domains that must be limited by adaptation and mitigation measures. The successful implementation of such policies can strongly benefit from the general public’s cooperation motivated by their own risk perceptions. Public participation can be promoted by tailoring policies to the populations they affect, which in turn results in the need for a deeper understanding of how different communities interact with the issue of climate change. Social media platforms such as the microblogging service Twitter have opened unprecedented opportunities for research on public perception in recent years, offering a continuous stream of user-generated data. Simultaneously, they represent a crucial discursive space in which members of the public develop and discuss their opinions and concerns about climate change. Subsequently, this thesis gains insight into the characteristics of public reactions to individual climate change effects and processes by investing corresponding corpora of tweets spanning a decade. For seven western European countries, the spatial, temporal, and thematic reaction patterns are determined with a further assessment of the drivers behind each finding. Tweets are collected, classified, georeferenced, and clustered using a selection of Geographic Information Retrieval as well as Natural Language Processing methods before being analysed regarding thematic trends in their content, spatial distributions and influences of environmental factors, as well temporal distributions and impacts of real-world events. The findings illustrate diverse climate change perceptions that vary across spatial, temporal, and thematic dimensions. Communities tend to focus more on issues relevant to their local or national environment, leading populations to develop a certain degree of specialisation for these aspects of climate change. This typically coincides with a substantially more domestic discourse on the subject and a decrease in interest for corresponding international events. In a similar sense, the tangibility of an event drives the magnitude of reactions. However, while more tangible events are more frequently recognised and discussed, less tangible events tend to be more frequently attributed to climate change as the public shifts their focus from immediate impacts on the personal scale to impacts on the global scale. Additionally, traditional news media are shown to retain a high level of control over science communication and the climate change discourse on Twitter, likely influencing the public’s perspective on global warming. Individual real-world events such as major climate conferences and scientific releases only occasionally elicit strong public reactions when they are topically related to an event type, whereas global protests can lead to significant discussion across various event types. Inversely, global crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic significantly reduce public concern about climate change processes

    ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks: a literature review

    Get PDF
    Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) implementation is a complex and vibrant process, one that involves a combination of technological and organizational interactions. Often an ERP implementation project is the single largest IT project that an organization has ever launched and requires a mutual fit of system and organization. Also the concept of an ERP implementation supporting business processes across many different departments is not a generic, rigid and uniform concept and depends on variety of factors. As a result, the issues addressing the ERP implementation process have been one of the major concerns in industry. Therefore ERP implementation receives attention from practitioners and scholars and both, business as well as academic literature is abundant and not always very conclusive or coherent. However, research on ERP systems so far has been mainly focused on diffusion, use and impact issues. Less attention has been given to the methods used during the configuration and the implementation of ERP systems, even though they are commonly used in practice, they still remain largely unexplored and undocumented in Information Systems research. So, the academic relevance of this research is the contribution to the existing body of scientific knowledge. An annotated brief literature review is done in order to evaluate the current state of the existing academic literature. The purpose is to present a systematic overview of relevant ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks as a desire for achieving a better taxonomy of ERP implementation methodologies. This paper is useful to researchers who are interested in ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Results will serve as an input for a classification of the existing ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks. Also, this paper aims also at the professional ERP community involved in the process of ERP implementation by promoting a better understanding of ERP implementation methodologies and frameworks, its variety and history
    corecore