Challenges and opportunities for integrated environmental assessment : proceedings of the First Workshop of the European Forum on Integrated Environmental Assessment, Amsterdam, 12-14 March 1998

The first workshop of the European Forum on Integrated Environmental Assessment (EFIEA) took place in Amsterdam on 12-14 March 1998. Integrated Environmental Assessment is loosely defined as policy-relevant, multi-disciplinary research into complex environmental issues. The workshop provided an opportunity for EFIEA members to get acquainted with one another and one another’s work, and to discuss the goals and challenges in the field of Integrated Environmental Assessment for the next five years. The meeting was hosted by the Institute for Environmental Studies (IVM) of the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam. Over 45 members of the EFIEA participated in the workshop and all contributed to the discussions and planning activities. Participants included researchers from the natural and social sciences as well as policy makers, DG’s and EEA representatives. These various contributions provided the basis of the workshop report. The keynote speeches of the workshop will be published in a special issue of the journal Environmental Modelling and Assessment (EMA)

Is sustainability performance comparable? : a study of GRI reports of mining organizations

The objective of this study is to analyze the measurability and interfirm comparability of sustainability performance through the qualitative content analysis of 12 sustainability reports of mining firms using the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) guidelines. The systematic comparison of information disclosed in 92 GRI indicators sheds light on the reasons underlying the impossibility of rigorously measuring and comparing the sustainability performance of firms from the same sector, which are supposed to be strictly following the same reporting guideline. These reasons include qualitative aspects of sustainability, lack of compliance with GRI protocols, indicator contingency, ambiguous or incomplete information, data heterogeneity, and report opacity. The study makes it possible to return to the very notion of sustainability, its meaning, and flexible application by organizations. The results are discussed from three different theoretical perspectives (functionalist, critical, and postmodern), each of which proposes possible and complementary explanations of the main findings

Trade and the accumulation and diffusion of knowledge

The author examines the properties of a dynamic disequilibrium model focused on trade specialization and the accumulation of knowledge. Steady state analysis shows that: a) under perfectly balanced growth international diffusion of knowledge is irrelevant for growth; and b) under unbalanced growth, the process of structural change may be enhanced by the effects on the domestic accumulation of knowledge of domestic spillover. The growth of foreign knowledge has an ambivalent effect on domestic performance because it is both a complement to, and a substitute for, domestic knowledge. Whenever these two effects do not perfectly match, the diffusion of international knowledge is associated with unbalanced growth. Imports of knowledge intensive goods may not lead to higher growth unless there is sufficiently strong trade performance in the knowledge -intensive sectors. Unbalanced growth is also associated with"output catching up"."Technological catching up"is necessary but not sufficient for balanced growth. Parameter estimates were obtained for France, Germany, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom. Results appear to be consistent with theoretical expectations about the importance of"price"and"nonprice"determinants of trade performance in the four sectors as well as with the distribution of revealed comparative advantages. Simulation exercises confirm steady-state results on the relevance of country differences in trade specialization and in the domestic accumulation of knowledge as they affect growth. They also clarify the relationship between growth and changes in the structure of trade specialization.Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Environmental Economics&Policies,Public Health Promotion,Economic Theory&Research,Educational Sciences,Environmental Economics&Policies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Economic Theory&Research,Educational Sciences,Innovation

Journal of Telecommunications and Information Technology, 2012, nr 3

kwartalni

Understanding the factors influencing public transport mode choice in Taiwan

Promoting public transport use, which has become an important part of government strategies to reduce carbon emissions from the transport sector worldwide, requires a good understanding of the factors that influence public transport mode choice including the policy implementation process. Previous studies have identified a range of factors influencing public transport use while few have brought all these factors together in a single study. Additionally, few studies have sought to understand public transport mode choice and public transport policy implementation processes in East and Southeast Asian countries. This is of concern as conditions in East and Southeast Asia are significantly different from those in many parts of the Western world with typical features of higher population density, a higher proportion of motorbike use and evolving governance structures. This study explores public transport policy implementation and public transport mode choice in Taiwan – a country that bridges East and Southeast Asia. A number of interviews with transport policymakers and planners were conducted to understand how the current governance structure impacts public transport policy implementation. A conceptual model was developed based on the COM-B model (Capability, Opportunity, Motivation-Behaviour) proposed by Michie et al (2011) which allows a comprehensive range of factors influencing travel mode choice to be considered. This conceptual model was tested using a variety of modelling approaches including multi-level regression analysis and structural equation modelling. The study finds the relationships between objective and subjective walking environment measures, walkability and walking to access public transport, and gives evidence that the COM-B model can apply to public transport mode choice. It was also found that land use variables have a stronger relationship with intention to use public transport for motorbike user than car users and has a greater effect at the trip destination than at the trip origin. The key factors influencing public transport policy implementation identified in this study can be a good reference for Southeast Asian countries if they are going to implement public transport plan. From the results obtained by the analysis of capability, opportunity and motivation influence travel mode choice, implementing effective strategies and build up a well-function public transport service to ensure a favoured environment for public transport over motorbike and car use is critical for a sustainable future

Towards highly informative learning analytics

Among various trending topics that can be investigated in the field of educational technology, there is a clear and high demand for using artificial intelligence (AI) and educational data to improve the whole learning and teaching cycle. This spans from collecting and estimating the prior knowledge of learners for a certain subject to the actual learning process and its assessment. AI in education cuts across almost all educational technology disciplines and is key to many other technological innovations for educational institutions. The use of data to inform decision-making in education and training is not new, but the scope and scale of its potential impact on teaching and learning have silently increased by orders of magnitude over the last few years. The release of ChatGPT was another driver to finally make everyone aware of the potential effects of AI technology in the digital education system of today. We are now at a stage where data can be automatically harvested at previously unimagined levels of granularity and variety. Analysis of these data with AI has the potential to provide evidence-based insights into learners’ abilities and patterns of behaviour that, in turn, can provide crucial action points to guide curriculum and course design, personalised assistance, generate assessments, and the development of new educational offerings. AI in education has many connected research communities like Artificial Intelligence in Education (AIED), Educational Data Mining (EDM), or Learning Analytics (LA). LA is the term that is used for research, studies, and applications that try to understand and support the behaviour of learners based on large sets of collected data

Use of latent semantic indexing for content based searching and routing of mobile agents on P2P network

The peer-to-peer (P2P) system has a number of nodes that are connected to each other in an unstructured or a structured overlay network. One of the most important problems in a P2P system is locating of resources that are shared by various nodes. Techniques such as Flooding and Distributed Hash-Table (DHT) have been proposed to locate resources shared by various nodes. Flooding suffers from saturation as number of nodes increase, while DHT cannot handle multiple keys to define and search a resource. Various further research works including multi agent systems (MAS) have been pursued that take unstructured or structured networks as a backbone and hence inherently suffer from problems. We present the solution that is more efficient and effective for discovering shared resources on a network that is influenced by content shared by nodes. Our solution presents use of multiple agents that manage the shared information on a node and a mobile agent called Reconnaissance Agent (RA) that is responsible for querying various nodes. To reduce the search load on nodes that have unrelated content, an efficient migration route is proposed for RA that is based on cosine similarity of content shared by nodes and user query. Results show reduction in search load and traffic due to communication, and increase in recall value for locating of resources defined by multiple keys using RA that are logically similar to user query. Furthermore, the results indicate that by use of our technique the relevance of search results is higher; that is obtained by minimal traffic generation/communication and hops made by RA