434 research outputs found

    Metaverse. Old urban issues in new virtual cities

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    Recent years have seen the arise of some early attempts to build virtual cities, utopias or affective dystopias in an embodied Internet, which in some respects appear to be the ultimate expression of the neoliberal city paradigma (even if virtual). Although there is an extensive disciplinary literature on the relationship between planning and virtual or augmented reality linked mainly to the gaming industry, this often avoids design and value issues. The observation of some of these early experiences - Decentraland, Minecraft, Liberland Metaverse, to name a few - poses important questions and problems that are gradually becoming inescapable for designers and urban planners, and allows us to make some partial considerations on the risks and potentialities of these early virtual cities

    "Every small action helps towards the greater cause" : online communities scaling up online community-led citizen science in addressing litter challenges in Scotland

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    Social media is now a new means of engagement and a catalyst for citizen science; still, less attention has been paid to understanding the influence of online communities on community-led citizen science projects. This study used the Fife Street Champions public Facebook group as a case study to explore how online community-led citizen science projects generate citizen science data to understand littering challenges in Scotland and to examine the impact of the group’s activities and the challenges they face. Data driven-content analysis was used to analyse Facebook user-generated data of 337 posts with comments and images to identify key themes that emerge in the data. Results indicate that group members develop their own data collection tools, share, analyse and present their litter-picking activities to understand the magnitude of littering and the impact of their litter-picking activities. However, the findings highlight inconsistencies in how group members collect and record data from their litter-picking activities. The group also provides informational support, environmental awareness and advocacy, and environmental citizenship. Members also share concerns about eco-anxiety. Lastly, safety and health concerns, COVID-19, and seagulls are challenges experienced by online-based litter pickers. The results contribute to our understanding of the opportunity that social media platforms can provide to build more robust online community-driven citizen science projects that can inform further research. Key stakeholders need to collaborate with such communities to improve on collecting scientifically meaningful data.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

    Living in the Plastic Age: Perspectives from Humanities, Social Sciences and Environmental Sciences

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    PlastikmĂŒll ist ĂŒberall auf unserem Planeten zu finden. Er hinterlĂ€sst einen augenscheinlichen Fußabdruck des menschlichen Konsumverhaltens und der Massenproduktion. Unser ungebremster Plastikkonsum und dessen Auswirkungen prĂ€gen die gesellschaftlichen NaturverhĂ€ltnisse in einer so tiefgreifenden Weise, dass wir vom Plastikzeitalter sprechen. Um AnsĂ€tze fĂŒr einen Umgang mit diesem Problem zu entwickeln, mĂŒssen wir das PhĂ€nomen umfassend verstehen: Die Autor:innen beleuchten es aus interdisziplinĂ€rer Perspektive. Sie zeigen, welche Rolle Kunststoffe in unserer Gesellschaft spielen und welche Auswirkungen sie auf die Umwelt und die menschliche Gesundheit haben

    Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics, XXV, 2023, 2

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    Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics is an open access philosophical journal, being published only in an electronic format. The journal aims at promoting research and reflection, both historically and theoretically, in the field of moral and political philosophy, with no cultural preclusion or adhesion to any cultural current. Contributions should be submitted in one of these languages: Italian, English, French, German, Portuguese, Spanish. All essays should include an English abstract of max. 200 words. The editorial staff especially welcomes interdisciplinary contributions with special attention to the main trends of the world of practice. The journal has an anonymous double peer review referee system. Three issues per year are expected. The copyright of the published articles remain to the authors. We ask that in any future use of them Etica & Politica / Ethics & Politics be quoted as a source. All products on this site are released with a Creative Commons license (CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 IT

    Geographic information extraction from texts

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    A large volume of unstructured texts, containing valuable geographic information, is available online. This information – provided implicitly or explicitly – is useful not only for scientific studies (e.g., spatial humanities) but also for many practical applications (e.g., geographic information retrieval). Although large progress has been achieved in geographic information extraction from texts, there are still unsolved challenges and issues, ranging from methods, systems, and data, to applications and privacy. Therefore, this workshop will provide a timely opportunity to discuss the recent advances, new ideas, and concepts but also identify research gaps in geographic information extraction

    The MacKenzie Earls of Seaforth and the Stuart dynasty, 1651-1719

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    Clan MacKenzie was a dominant force in Ross-shire throughout the seventeenth century and in the early eighteenth century. Its chiefly line was the MacKenzies of Kintail/Seaforth, who at times were the earls of Seaforth and Jacobite marquesses of Seaforth, sheriffs of Ross-shire, provosts of Fortrose, Scottish Privy Councillors and Jacobite secretary of state for Scotland. However, the noble house of Seaforth remains under-analysed in scholarship for the period after 1639. Instead, scholarship tends to approach the Scottish Highlands and Highland nobility during the temporal span of this thesis (1651-1719) from an Edinburgh- and London-centric perspective and, therefore, through nobles and clans who engaged more regularly with the Scottish and British central authorities, such as the house of Argyll, consecutively chiefs of Clan Campbell. This has led to skewed understanding of Highland nobility and clanship during this period. Taking inspiration from successful noble- and Highland-centred approaches to historical research, this thesis describes and analyses the change in the strength of the house of Seaforth through focused studies on the political careers of Kenneth MĂČr MacKenzie, third earl of Seaforth (1651-78), Kenneth Òg MacKenzie, fourth earl of Seaforth (1678-1701), and William Dubh MacKenzie, fifth earl of Seaforth (1701-19). To accomplish this, this thesis utilises source material irrespective of its genre or the language in which it was written, painting a multi-layered picture. This thesis uses a mixture of family papers and correspondence, governmental records, Gaelic poetry and genealogical histories to assess how the nature of Highland noble power changed from the perspective of the chief, revealing his apparent strategy. More broadly, this thesis provides a local, Seaforth-centred perspective of the years 1651-1719 in order to challenge and complement long-held historiographical beliefs on national phenomena, such as on minority and absentee lordship, Highland nobles and their gentry, clans and royalism and Jacobitism, clans and religion, and clans and politics

    Methods and Models for Industrial Internet of Things-based Business Process Improvement

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    Over the last three decades, the Internet of Things (IoT) has gained significant importance and has been implemented in many private, public, and business contexts. Leveraging and combining the IoT's capabilities enables far-reaching transformations and disruptive innovations that are increasingly recognized, especially by industrial organizations. In this regard, the Industrial IoT (IIoT) paradigm has emerged, describing the use of IIoT technology in the industrial domain. One key use of the IIoT is the incremental or radical improvement of business processes. This goal-oriented change of business processes with IIoT technology to accomplish organizational goals more effectively is called IIoT-based Business Process Improvement (BPI). Many use cases demonstrate the benefits of IIoT-based BPI for all types of industrial organizations. However, the interconnection between IIoT and BPI lacks theoretical knowledge and applicable artifacts that support practitioners. Moreover, a significant number of related projects fail or do not achieve the anticipated benefits. This issue has drawn attention in recent scholarly literature, which calls for further research. The dissertation at hand approaches this research gap by extending and advancing existing knowledge and providing valuable contributions to managerial practice. Three critical challenges for conducting IIoT-based BPI projects are addressed in particular: First, the essential characteristics of IIoT-based BPI applications are explored. This enables their classification and a foundational comprehension of the research field. Second, the required capabilities to leverage IIoT for BPI are identified. On this basis, industrial organizations can assess their maturity and readiness for implementing corresponding applications. Third, the identification, specification, and selection of appropriate applications are addressed. These activities enable the successful practical execution of IIoT projects with BPI potential

    'Ane end of an auld song?': macro and micro perspectives on written Scots in correspondence during the union of parliaments debates

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    This thesis examines the relationship between political identity and variation from a diachronic perspective. Specifically, it explores the use of written Scots features in the personal correspondence of Scottish politicians active during the Union of the Parliaments debates. Written Scots by 1700 had steadily retreated from most text-types in the face of ongoing anglicisation, but simultaneously the Union debates sparked heated discussion around questions of nationality and Scotland's separate identity. I consider the extent to which the use of Scots features may have been influenced by such discourse, but also how they may have become indexical markers used to lay claim to these ideologies. Drawing from the frameworks of First, Second and Third Wave perspectives on variation, and combining quantitative, macro-social methods with micro-social analysis, broad socio-political factors are explored alongside plausible stylistic intentions in conditioning or influencing the linguistic behaviour of these writers. The first analysis examines variation in the corpus temporally, using the chronologically-organised clustering technique VNC - Variability-based Neighbor Clustering (Gries and Hilpert, 2008), to measure Scots features over time. The crucial years of the debates (1700-1707) are compared with correspondence either side, and the VNC analysis identifies heightened use of Scots falling within the key years of the debates. The following macro-social analysis explores the factors driving this variation quantitatively, using a number of different statistical models to examine the data from various perspectives. Probabilities of Scots are found to correlate with certain political factors, though in complex and multilayered ways that reflect the composite nature of the historical figures operating in the Scottish parliament. The third analysis focuses on the features of written Scots itself and how these pattern in aggregate and across the individual authors who comprise the corpus. Findings suggest the persistence of written Scots was not being driven by a singular feature or set of tokens, rather, authors varied widely in their range and proportion of different variants. Finally, the micro-analysis examines the intra-writer variation of four individuals representing different political interests, exploring their Scots use across various recipients. Close-up inspection of features within particular extracts and letters suggests the subtle social and stylistic functions Scots had acquired for these writers. Its occurrence was found to reflect but also constitute the macro-social patterns identified earlier. Taken together, results indicate the use of Scots features was both influenced by, and contributed to, the political and ideological loyalties these writers harboured. Moreover, they tentatively suggest a process of reinterpretation was underway, in which Scots features were becoming a resource that could be selectively employed for particular indexical and communicative purposes

    Methods and Models for Industrial Internet of Things-based Business Process Improvement

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    Over the last three decades, the Internet of Things (IoT) has gained significant importance and has been implemented in many private, public, and business contexts. Leveraging and combining the IoT's capabilities enables far-reaching transformations and disruptive innovations that are increasingly recognized, especially by industrial organizations. In this regard, the Industrial IoT (IIoT) paradigm has emerged, describing the use of IIoT technology in the industrial domain. One key use of the IIoT is the incremental or radical improvement of business processes. This goal-oriented change of business processes with IIoT technology to accomplish organizational goals more effectively is called IIoT-based Business Process Improvement (BPI). Many use cases demonstrate the benefits of IIoT-based BPI for all types of industrial organizations. However, the interconnection between IIoT and BPI lacks theoretical knowledge and applicable artifacts that support practitioners. Moreover, a significant number of related projects fail or do not achieve the anticipated benefits. This issue has drawn attention in recent scholarly literature, which calls for further research. The dissertation at hand approaches this research gap by extending and advancing existing knowledge and providing valuable contributions to managerial practice. Three critical challenges for conducting IIoT-based BPI projects are addressed in particular: First, the essential characteristics of IIoT-based BPI applications are explored. This enables their classification and a foundational comprehension of the research field. Second, the required capabilities to leverage IIoT for BPI are identified. On this basis, industrial organizations can assess their maturity and readiness for implementing corresponding applications. Third, the identification, specification, and selection of appropriate applications are addressed. These activities enable the successful practical execution of IIoT projects with BPI potential
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