112 research outputs found

    Data-driven Economies in Central and Eastern Europe. Challenges and Perspectives

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    The recently published Communication on “Building a European Data Economy” (COM(2017)9) clearly highlights the increasing importance of data as a driver for growth, innovation and job creation. It is estimated that by year 2020, the value the EU data economy will increase to EUR 643 billion, representing over 3% of the EU GDP. At the same time there is no comparable and quantifiable evidence on the current state and the future perspectives of the data driven economy in the European Union neighbouring countries. It can however safely be assumed that the role of data will be following a similar pattern, and is therefore expected to be contribution to an increasing relative share of GDP. Furthermore, some European neighbouring countries, most notably those in Central and Eastern Europe, are a recognised destination for IT businesses that grow two to three times faster than in their economy of origin. Within this context, a workshop was co-organized by the World Bank, the UN Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the Joint Research Centre of the European Commission (JRC). The workshop took place on 05 September as part of the annual INSPIRE Conference in 2017 (co-organised in Strasbourg and Kehl by France and Germany). The workshop explored the challenges and possibilities related with Data driven economy in Central and Eastern Europe. All the presentation of attendees are available online. The rapidly emerging spatial data infrastructures (SDI) were used as a use case to have a better insight into the data economy as they address a broad spectrum of topics that relate to the legal, technological and organisational challenges towards the use and reuse of data. Particular emphasis was put on good practices that if re-used and extended, can further foster innovation and intensify growth. This JRC technical report summarises the outcomes of the WB/UNECE/FAO/JRC workshop. It includes (i) overview of relevant processes on the global and European agenda, (ii) good practices from countries in the target region on the value-added from data that provide indications future policy directions and emerging opportunities.JRC.B.6-Digital Econom

    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

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    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

    Developing a Spatial Data Infrastructure for Archaeological and Built Heritage

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    Although the INSPIRE Directive provides a roadmap and technical specifications for providing interoperability of spatial information created and held by public bodies across Europe, its relevance to archaeological and built heritage information is unclear. Whilst there is a clear need for access to information about the historic environment by a range of audiences actively engaged in the management of Europe’s rich heritage, delivery of relevant services is restricted to a narrow interpretation of the Annex I Protected Sites theme that focuses on statutory designations. This paper explores business reasons for adopting a more expansive interpretation of what information should be considered as and distributed as part of the Protected Sites theme in order to support policies and activities that impact upon the wider historic environment. The paper also considers the range and potential of information created through investigation and recording of the historic environment, often at public expense or interest. The potential for data reuse generating savings, inspiring smarter working practices, and developing sustainable datasets is explored through case studies from Scotland and Ireland and proposals to establish a thematic geo-portal, web services and applications through the EU Culture funded project ArchaeoLandscapes Europe (ArcLand), are discussed

    The lads from New Ireland :a textual and audience analysis of marginalised masculinities in contemporary Irish film.

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    In the mid- to late-1990s, Irish Cinema underwent a radical shift, which entailed, among other significant features, a thematic trajectory from the rural to the urban, from the historical to the contemporary and from the local to the universal. This shift also involved a radical reconfiguration of cinematic masculinities, not only in relation to the representation of male characters but also in terms of how masculinity as discourse was being addressed. The earlier critiques of traditional patriarchal masculinity, which emerged from a more politically-engaged and less commercial period in Irish filmmaking, began to give way to more ambiguous, male-centered narratives, whose protagonists resist unequivocal ideological categorisation. What is most striking about this new cycle of male-themed and male-oriented films is their preoccupation with underclass, criminal and socially-marginalised masculinities at the height of the Celtic Tiger, a time of unprecedented economic prosperity in Ireland. Although Ireland’s increased prosperity has also brought forth a number of urban, middle-class films featuring new, gay and reconstructed men {About Adam, Goldfish Memory and When Brendan Met Trudy), the enduring centrality and popularity over the past decade of ‘indigenised’ versions of a number of male-oriented (sub)genres from elsewhere merits particular attention. This thesis explores the changing discursive constructions of masculinity which characterise this strand of contemporary Irish filmmaking and the varying meanings and pleasures which they offer to different subsections of the male audience

    Research and Sponsored Programs Records (University of Maine), 1978-2013

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    The Office of Research and Sponsored Programs (ORSP) at the University of Maine assists members of the campus community in seeking outside grants and contracts to fund their research. This collection contains technical reports and project summaries of grant-funded projects undertaken at the University of Maine from 1978 to the present. The reports are arranged by year and within each year alphabetically by the name of the principal investigator(s). The name of the granting agency is also given when indicated on the report. Visit selected ORSP reports in Digital Commons.https://digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/findingaids/1323/thumbnail.jp

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

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    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

    Connecting science with policy for sustainable development of urban ecosystems

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    Challenges remain to sustainably develop urban ecosystems, in part because sustainable development has many environmental, societal and economic dimensions which are intertwined. As part of this challenge, urban ecosystems are increasingly considered to deliver human health benefits, but the association between human health benefits and urban ecosystems, and how this knowledge can inform decision-making remains unclear. Here, I explored how to sustainably develop urban ecosystems by addressing a subset of this challenge, focusing on existing scientific knowledge gaps between human health and urban ecosystem exposure, the barriers to integrate this information into urban ecosystem accounting, and use of these outputs in public policy to inform decision-making related to urban ecosystems. First, I reviewed evidence using the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals as an analytical framework to show that development of urban ecosystems cannot be addressed without addressing other non-environmental policy objectives and that cross-disciplinary work is needed to resolve the above-mentioned knowledge gaps. Then, using a health dataset of approximately 6,600 children in the London metropolitan area, United Kingdom, I showed that natural environments, particularly woodland, were associated with children’s cognition and mental health, while other types of natural environments had no or weaker associations. Using these insights, I then reviewed international environmental accounting rules and found that these frameworks do not facilitate integration of cognitive and mental health benefits into urban environmental accounts. Finally, I assessed the relevance of environmental accounting to the broader public policy community and showed that environmental accounts have cross-cutting relevance for public sector decision-making. Although progress has been made to understand the role of urban ecosystems for cognition and mental health, key impediments also remain within the science, environmental accounting and public policy blocking progress to sustainably develop these. I see cross-disciplinary coordination structures as indispensable to support sustainable development of urban ecosystems globally

    Multidimensional Epidemiological Transformations: Addressing Location-Privacy in Public Health Practice

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    The following publications arose directly from this research: AbdelMalik P, Boulos MNK: Multidimensional point transform for public health practice. Methods of Information in Medicine. (In press; ePub ahead of print available online) http://dx.doi.org/10.3414/ME11-01-0001 AbdelMalik P, Boulos MNK, Jones R: The Perceived Impact of Location Privacy: A web-based survey of public health perspectives and requirements in the UK and Canada. BMC Public Health, 8:156 (2008) http://www.biomedcentral.com/1471-2458/8/156 The following papers were co-authored in relation to this research: Khaled El Emam, Ann Brown, Philip AbdelMalik, Angelica Neisa, Mark Walker, Jim Bottomley, Tyson Roffey: A method for managing re-identification risk from small geographic areas in Canada. BMC Medical Informatics and Decision Making. 10:18 (2010) http://www.biomedcentral.com/1472-6947/10/18 Maged N. Kamel Boulos, Andrew J. Curtis, Philip AbdelMalik: Musings on privacy issues in health research involving disaggregate geographic data about individuals. International Journal of Health Geographics. 8:46 (2009) http://www.ij-healthgeographics.com/content/pdf/1476-072X-8-46.pdf Khaled El Emam, Ann Brown, Philip AbdelMalik: Evaluating predictors of geographic area population size cut-offs to manage re-identification risk. Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association, 16:256-266 (2009)The ability to control one’s own personally identifiable information is a worthwhile human right that is becoming increasingly vulnerable. However just as significant, if not more so, is the right to health. With increasing globalisation and threats of natural disasters and acts of terrorism, this right is also becoming increasingly vulnerable. Public health practice – which is charged with the protection, promotion and mitigation of the health of society and its individuals – has been at odds with the right to privacy. This is particularly significant when location privacy is under consideration. Spatial information is an important aspect of public health, yet the increasing availability of spatial imagery and location-sensitive applications and technologies has brought location-privacy to the forefront, threatening to negatively impact the practice of public health by inhibiting or severely limiting data-sharing. This study begins by reviewing the current relevant legislation as it pertains to public health and investigates the public health community’s perceptions on location privacy barriers to the practice. Bureaucracy and legislation are identified by survey participants as the two greatest privacy-related barriers to public health. In response to this clash, a number of solutions and workarounds are proposed in the literature to compensate for location privacy. However, as their weaknesses are outlined, a novel approach - the multidimensional point transform - that works synergistically on multiple dimensions, including location, to anonymise data is developed and demonstrated. Finally, a framework for guiding decisions on data-sharing and identifying requirements is proposed and a sample implementation is demonstrated through a fictitious scenario. For each aspect of the study, a tool prototype and/or design for implementation is proposed and explained, and the need for further development of these is highlighted. In summary, this study provides a multi-disciplinary and multidimensional solution to the clash between privacy and data-sharing in public health practice.Partially sponsored by the Public Health Agency of Canad
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