‘Engage the World’: examining conflicts of engagement in public museums

Public engagement has become a central theme in the mission statements of many cultural institutions, and in scholarly research into museums and heritage. Engagement has emerged as the go-to-it-word for generating, improving or repairing relations between museums and society at large. But engagement is frequently an unexamined term that might embed assumptions and ignore power relationships. This article describes and examines the implications of conflicting and misleading uses of ‘engagement’ in relation to institutional dealings with contested questions about culture and heritage. It considers the development of an exhibition on the Dead Sea Scrolls by the Royal Ontario Museum, Toronto in 2009 within the new institutional goal to ‘Engage the World’. The chapter analyses the motivations, processes and decisions deployed by management and staff to ‘Engage the World’, and the degree to which the museum was able to re-think its strategies of public engagement, especially in relation to subjects,issues and publics that were more controversial in nature

Common sense common safety

"A report by Lord Young of Graffham to the Prime Minister following a Whitehall‑wide review of the operation of health and safety laws and the growth of the compensation culture" - Cover

Towards Building a Knowledge Base of Monetary Transactions from a News Collection

We address the problem of extracting structured representations of economic events from a large corpus of news articles, using a combination of natural language processing and machine learning techniques. The developed techniques allow for semi-automatic population of a financial knowledge base, which, in turn, may be used to support a range of data mining and exploration tasks. The key challenge we face in this domain is that the same event is often reported multiple times, with varying correctness of details. We address this challenge by first collecting all information pertinent to a given event from the entire corpus, then considering all possible representations of the event, and finally, using a supervised learning method, to rank these representations by the associated confidence scores. A main innovative element of our approach is that it jointly extracts and stores all attributes of the event as a single representation (quintuple). Using a purpose-built test set we demonstrate that our supervised learning approach can achieve 25% improvement in F1-score over baseline methods that consider the earliest, the latest or the most frequent reporting of the event.Comment: Proceedings of the 17th ACM/IEEE-CS Joint Conference on Digital Libraries (JCDL '17), 201

CHORUS Deliverable 2.2: Second report - identification of multi-disciplinary key issues for gap analysis toward EU multimedia search engines roadmap

After addressing the state-of-the-art during the first year of Chorus and establishing the existing landscape in multimedia search engines, we have identified and analyzed gaps within European research effort during our second year. In this period we focused on three directions, notably technological issues, user-centred issues and use-cases and socio- economic and legal aspects. These were assessed by two central studies: firstly, a concerted vision of functional breakdown of generic multimedia search engine, and secondly, a representative use-cases descriptions with the related discussion on requirement for technological challenges. Both studies have been carried out in cooperation and consultation with the community at large through EC concertation meetings (multimedia search engines cluster), several meetings with our Think-Tank, presentations in international conferences, and surveys addressed to EU projects coordinators as well as National initiatives coordinators. Based on the obtained feedback we identified two types of gaps, namely core technological gaps that involve research challenges, and “enablers”, which are not necessarily technical research challenges, but have impact on innovation progress. New socio-economic trends are presented as well as emerging legal challenges

FORECASTING IN TOURISM - IMPORTANT COMPONENT OF THE PLANNING PROCESS

Forecasting is a very complex concept which is to meet people's curiosity about the systematic knowledge of the future. Forecast predicts probable development of processes and phenomena from the achievements of the previous period, the trends outlined and taking into account changes expected to occur. The purpose of the paper is to capture the importance of interest made in macroeconomic forecasts that focus on aspects of tourism demand and some aspects of supply.globalization, production, strategies, relationship, transition

ECONOMIC PROCESS OPTIMIZATION DEPLOYED BY COMPANIES WITH COMPLEX ACTIVITY PRODUCTION – TRADE – SERVICES USING INFORMATICS SYSTEMS WITH INTEGRATED DATA MINING TECHNIQUES

There are many economic processes deployed by companies with a complex activity that can be optimized, among the most common being: supply, production/service, distribution, sales, suppliers/customers relationships, inventory management, human resources management, financial management, etc. After the deployment of business processes related data is obtained. The analysis of the related data must be the starting point in any attempt to optimize the economic processes because this data best reflects the actual situation of the company. In order to carry out such an analysis, several approaches have emerged to extract knowledge from the data accumulated. The first solution is to use specific software to analyze the available data. Another solution that can be successfully used is the implementation of data mining techniques within the database management software available supposing it is a new generation one.optimization; informatics system; economic process; data mining; data analysis

Implications of Web 2.0 for financial institutions: Be a driver, not a passenger

Web 2.0 heralds a new era of communication with a massive increase in information supply and where news, opinion and services flow directly from user to user. Financial institutions can take advantage if they stay abreast of this development. However, any Web 2.0 presence of a financial institution must be authentic and consistent with the institution’s brand and corporate culture. To leverage the potential, the need for an immaculate reputation and the right type of brand is becoming ever more important.information- and communication technology; ICT technology; P2P; Web 2.0; banking; blog; virtual worlds; wiki; lending; e-business; e-commerce; B2C-e-commerce; internet; e-payments

Bankers and the Performance of German Firms

In this paper we analyze the impact of banks on German non-financial companies through ownership stakes and board representation. We find that the correlation between firm value and bank representation is negative and highly significant. By exploring the time series dimension of our dataset, we show that bank presence causes lower performance while there is no evidence of causality in the opposite direction. Our results suggest that bankers are attracted to the boards of those companies where they can extract larger benefits of control: Banks are systematically more represented on the boards of companies that are larger, have more intangible assets and offer higher board remuneration. There is little evidence that banks facilitate lending or monitor existing debt contracts. Whereas block ownership by non-banks is associated with better performance, there is no such relationship for banks.