85,734 research outputs found
Limits of stakeholder participation in sustainable development : "where facts are few, experts are many"
Extract from: The Mediterranean coastal areas from watershed to the sea : interactions and changes / by L.F. Cassar ... [et al.]. Proceedings of the MEDCORE International conference, Florence, 10th-14th November 2005The notion of including stakeholders, those affected (positively or negatively)
by a sustainable development programme in both its design and implementation,
has become a central concern for those implementing such programmes.
Such an approach is often referred to as âstakeholder participationâ, as âparticipatory
developmentâ or more simply still as âparticipationâ. How best to
achieve this has been the topic of a substantial literature, with a host of different
methodologies presented and promoted. Each has its own advantages
and disadvantages, but there has been surprisingly little discussion in the
sustainable development literature as to the limits and dangers of participation
irrespective of the approach employed to âbestâ facilitate it. Inter-linked
with the limits of participation is the role of specialists and expert opinion
in sustainable development. This paper discusses the results of participatory
exercises conducted in Gozo (Malta) between 2003 and 2005. On the positive
side, participation yielded many useful and interesting insights and invoked
a sense of âinvolvementâ in sustainable development, but there were
problems and these are discussed in this paper. For example, the outcome of
the exercise crucially depends upon representation, and a simplified vision of
âcommunityâ often employed in participation to make it practicable can load
the process in favour of certain stakeholder groups at the expense of others.peer-reviewe
Application of artificial neural network in market segmentation: A review on recent trends
Despite the significance of Artificial Neural Network (ANN) algorithm to
market segmentation, there is a need of a comprehensive literature review and a
classification system for it towards identification of future trend of market
segmentation research. The present work is the first identifiable academic
literature review of the application of neural network based techniques to
segmentation. Our study has provided an academic database of literature between
the periods of 2000-2010 and proposed a classification scheme for the articles.
One thousands (1000) articles have been identified, and around 100 relevant
selected articles have been subsequently reviewed and classified based on the
major focus of each paper. Findings of this study indicated that the research
area of ANN based applications are receiving most research attention and self
organizing map based applications are second in position to be used in
segmentation. The commonly used models for market segmentation are data mining,
intelligent system etc. Our analysis furnishes a roadmap to guide future
research and aid knowledge accretion and establishment pertaining to the
application of ANN based techniques in market segmentation. Thus the present
work will significantly contribute to both the industry and academic research
in business and marketing as a sustainable valuable knowledge source of market
segmentation with the future trend of ANN application in segmentation.Comment: 24 pages, 7 figures,3 Table
Identifying Heavy-Flavor Jets Using Vectors of Locally Aggregated Descriptors
Jets of collimated particles serve a multitude of purposes in high energy
collisions. Recently, studies of jet interaction with the quark-gluon plasma
(QGP) created in high energy heavy ion collisions are of growing interest,
particularly towards understanding partonic energy loss in the QGP medium and
its related modifications of the jet shower and fragmentation. Since the QGP is
a colored medium, the extent of jet quenching and consequently, the transport
properties of the medium are expected to be sensitive to fundamental properties
of the jets such as the flavor of the parton that initiates the jet.
Identifying the jet flavor enables an extraction of the mass dependence in
jet-QGP interactions. We present a novel approach to tagging heavy-flavor jets
at collider experiments utilizing the information contained within jet
constituents via the \texttt{JetVLAD} model architecture. We show the
performance of this model in proton-proton collisions at center of mass energy
GeV as characterized by common metrics and showcase its
ability to extract high purity heavy-flavor jet sample at various jet momenta
and realistic production cross-sections including a brief discussion on the
impact of out-of-time pile-up. Such studies open new opportunities for future
high purity heavy-flavor measurements at jet energies accessible at current and
future collider experiments.Comment: 18 pages, 6 figures and 3 tables. Accepted by JINS
Collaborative knowledge management - A construction case study
Due to the new threats and challenges faced by the construction industry today, construction companies must seek new solutions in order to remain ahead of the competition. Knowledge has been identified to be a significant organisational resource, which if used effectively can provide competitive advantage. A lot of emphasis is being put on how to identify, capture and share knowledge in today's organisations. It has been argued over the years that due to the fragmented nature of the construction industry and ad-hoc nature of the construction projects, capture and reuse of valuable knowledge gathered during a construction project pose a challenge. As a result critical mistakes are repeated on projects and construction professionals have to kee
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