Social aspects of Siggiewi : 1530-1798

This paper presents an overview of developments in the life of the village of Siggiewi - a typical Maltese village - during the Knights' period with special emphasis on how the villagers' life is affected. It places these developments in the context of the principal events that moulded the islands' history- the arrival of the Order, the Great Siege, visitations of plague, improved economic conditions - and how these left their mark and were reflected in village life.peer-reviewe

Economic and Social Aspects of Palm Oil IndustryL Indonesia\u27s Palm Oil Trade in the Context of Economic Liberalization

This paper aims to assess the palm oil trade in the world market, factors affecting Indonesia\u27s palm oil industry and trade, and how it can contribute to and benefit the sustainable agriculture development. Palm oil and palm kernel oil make up a third of total world production of oils and fats. During the last decade, the stock-production-import-export of palm oil in the world trade has increased to more than double in volumes and values. Other than being main producers, Indonesia and Malaysia are the two major exporters of palm oil in the world market with total shares of more than 80 percent of the total world export. Coupled with increasing demand for cooking oils, growing demand for palm oil derivatives-products has created a new challenge and opportunity for Indonesia to increase its competitiveness in the world market. Indonesia has and could continue to seize the opportunity to meet the increasing world market demand provided it can increase the ability to translate the new world market demand and adjust it to its domestic production facilities. The Indonesian policies of palm oil development must be directed, implemented and enforced with the focus to the downstream industries. The world concern of environmental degradation has triggered an RSPO forum and Indonesia responded through the ISPO to support the sustainable development. As the main producer, it is only fitting if Indonesia becomes and sets a price reference for sustainable palm oil traded in the world market

Woodland clearance in the Mesolithic: the social aspects.

Did Mesolithic people regard the woodland as a wilderness or park? Previous models have portrayed the hunter-gatherers of the Mesolithic as in tune with nature and making use of clearings to attract game. Using equally valid analogies, the authors propose a more hostile landscape that was conceived and managed with clearings and paths to help allay its menacing character

Mesoscopic structure and social aspects of human mobility

The individual movements of large numbers of people are important in many contexts, from urban planning to disease spreading. Datasets that capture human mobility are now available and many interesting features have been discovered, including the ultra-slow spatial growth of individual mobility. However, the detailed substructures and spatiotemporal flows of mobility - the sets and sequences of visited locations - have not been well studied. We show that individual mobility is dominated by small groups of frequently visited, dynamically close locations, forming primary "habitats" capturing typical daily activity, along with subsidiary habitats representing additional travel. These habitats do not correspond to typical contexts such as home or work. The temporal evolution of mobility within habitats, which constitutes most motion, is universal across habitats and exhibits scaling patterns both distinct from all previous observations and unpredicted by current models. The delay to enter subsidiary habitats is a primary factor in the spatiotemporal growth of human travel. Interestingly, habitats correlate with non-mobility dynamics such as communication activity, implying that habitats may influence processes such as information spreading and revealing new connections between human mobility and social networks.Comment: 7 pages, 5 figures (main text); 11 pages, 9 figures, 1 table (supporting information

Ethical and Social Aspects of Self-Driving Cars

As an envisaged future of transportation, self-driving cars are being discussed from various perspectives, including social, economical, engineering, computer science, design, and ethics. On the one hand, self-driving cars present new engineering problems that are being gradually successfully solved. On the other hand, social and ethical problems are typically being presented in the form of an idealized unsolvable decision-making problem, the so-called trolley problem, which is grossly misleading. We argue that an applied engineering ethical approach for the development of new technology is what is needed; the approach should be applied, meaning that it should focus on the analysis of complex real-world engineering problems. Software plays a crucial role for the control of self-driving cars; therefore, software engineering solutions should seriously handle ethical and social considerations. In this paper we take a closer look at the regulative instruments, standards, design, and implementations of components, systems, and services and we present practical social and ethical challenges that have to be met, as well as novel expectations for software engineering.Comment: 11 pages, 3 figures, 2 table