An Analysis of issues against the adoption of Dynamic Carpooling

Using a private car is a transportation system very common in industrialized countries. However, it causes different problems such as overuse of oil, traffic jams causing earth pollution, health problems and an inefficient use of personal time. One possible solution to these problems is carpooling, i.e. sharing a trip on a private car of a driver with one or more passengers. Carpooling would reduce the number of cars on streets hence providing worldwide environmental, economical and social benefits. The matching of drivers and passengers can be facilitated by information and communication technologies. Typically, a driver inserts on a web-site the availability of empty seats on his/her car for a planned trip and potential passengers can search for trips and contact the drivers. This process is slow and can be appropriate for long trips planned days in advance. We call this static carpooling and we note it is not used frequently by people even if there are already many web-sites offering this service and in fact the only real open challenge is widespread adoption. Dynamic carpooling, on the other hand, takes advantage of the recent and increasing adoption of Internet-connected geo-aware mobile devices for enabling impromptu trip opportunities. Passengers request trips directly on the street and can find a suitable ride in just few minutes. Currently there are no dynamic carpooling systems widely used. Every attempt to create and organize such systems failed. This paper reviews the state of the art of dynamic carpooling. It identifies the most important issues against the adoption of dynamic carpooling systems and the proposed solutions for such issues. It proposes a first input on solving the problem of mass-adopting dynamic carpooling systems.Comment: 10 pages, whitepaper, extracted from B.Sc. thesis "Dycapo: On the creation of an open-source Server and a Protocol for Dynamic Carpooling" (Daniel Graziotin, 2010

Preparing millennials as digital citizens and socially and environmentally responsible business professionals in a socially irresponsible climate

As of 2015, a millennial born in the 1990's became the largest population in the workplace and are still growing. Studies indicate that a millennial is tech savvy but lag in the exercise of digital responsibility. In addition, they are passive towards environmental sustainability and fail to grasp the importance of social responsibility. This paper provides a review of such findings relating to business communications educators in their classrooms. The literature should enable the development of a millennial as an excellent global citizen through business communications curricula that emphasizes digital citizenship, environmental sustainability and social responsibility. The impetus for this work is to provide guidance in the development of courses and teaching strategies customized to the development of each millennial as a digital, environmental and socially responsible global citizen

Exploring the importance of reflection in the control room

While currently difficult to measure or explicitly design for, evidence suggests that providing people with opportunities to reflect on experience must be recognized and valued during safety-critical work. We provide an insight into reflection as a mechanism that can help to maintain both individual and team goals. In the control room, reflection can be task-based, critical for the 'smooth' day-to-day operational performance of a socio-technical system, or can foster learning and organisational change by enabling new understandings gained from experience. In this position paper we argue that technology should be designed to support the reflective capacity of people. There are many interaction designs and artefacts that aim to support problem-solving, but very few that support self-reflection and group reflection. Traditional paradigms for safety-critical systems have focussed on ensuring the functional correctness of designs, minimising the time to complete tasks, etc. Work in the area of user experience design may be of increasing relevance when generating artefacts that aim to encourage reflection

Can Big Media do "Big Society"?: A Critical Case Study of Commercial, Convergent Hyperlocal News

The UK Government is committed to helping ‘nurture a new generation of local media companies’. Changes to local media ownership rules allowing companies to follow their customers from platform to platform are supposed to assist in this by encouraging economies of scale. This paper provides a timely case study examining a UK-based commercial local news network owned by Daily Mail & General Trust that leverages economies of scale: Northcliffe Media’s network of 154 Local People websites. The study evaluates the level of audience engagement with the Local People sites through a user survey, and by looking at the numbers of active users, their contributions and their connections with other users. Interviews with ten of the ‘community publishers’ who oversee each site on the ground were conducted, along with a content survey. Although the study reveals a demand for community content, particularly of a practical nature, the results question the extent to which this type of ‘big media’ local news website can succeed as a local social network, reinvigorate political engagement, or encourage citizen reporting. The Government hopes that communities, especially rural ones, will increasingly use the Internet to access local news and information, thereby supporting new, profitable local media companies, who will nurture a sense of local identity and hold locally-elected politicians to account. This case study highlights the difficulties inherent in achieving such outcomes, even using the Government’s preferred convergent, commercial model

Living in America: Challenges Facing New Immigrants and Refugees

Explores the hurdles immigrants and refugees face and the social factors behind them. Recommends restructuring services, targeting school- and healthcare-related needs, creating new programs, and providing better information. Highlights best practices

De los Derechos Humanos: Reimagining Civics in Bilingual & Bicultural Settings

Dominant approaches to teaching social studies often marginalize bilingual and bicultural students. This is particularly troubling because the explicit goal of the social studies is to cultivate civic participation. Educational inequalities are thus tied to political inequalities. In light of this, this article shares a narrative case study of the author\u27s own bilingual and bicultural approach to teaching middle school civics at a dual-language American school in Mexico. Through the illustration of a comparative civics curriculum that incorporates translanguaging practices, the author argues that embracing bilingualism and biculturalism in the social studies can lead to more expansive possibilities for justice-oriented civic education

Sensing as a Service Model for Smart Cities Supported by Internet of Things

The world population is growing at a rapid pace. Towns and cities are accommodating half of the world's population thereby creating tremendous pressure on every aspect of urban living. Cities are known to have large concentration of resources and facilities. Such environments attract people from rural areas. However, unprecedented attraction has now become an overwhelming issue for city governance and politics. The enormous pressure towards efficient city management has triggered various Smart City initiatives by both government and private sector businesses to invest in ICT to find sustainable solutions to the growing issues. The Internet of Things (IoT) has also gained significant attention over the past decade. IoT envisions to connect billions of sensors to the Internet and expects to use them for efficient and effective resource management in Smart Cities. Today infrastructure, platforms, and software applications are offered as services using cloud technologies. In this paper, we explore the concept of sensing as a service and how it fits with the Internet of Things. Our objective is to investigate the concept of sensing as a service model in technological, economical, and social perspectives and identify the major open challenges and issues.Comment: Transactions on Emerging Telecommunications Technologies 2014 (Accepted for Publication

Include 2011 : The role of inclusive design in making social innovation happen.

Include is the biennial conference held at the RCA and hosted by the Helen Hamlyn Centre for Design. The event is directed by Jo-Anne Bichard and attracts an international delegation

Why Information Matters: A Foundation for Resilience

Embracing Change: The Critical Role of Information, a research project by the Internews' Center for Innovation & Learning, supported by the Rockefeller Foundation, combines Internews' longstanding effort to highlight the important role ofinformation with Rockefeller's groundbreaking work on resilience. The project focuses on three major aspects:- Building knowledge around the role of information in empowering communities to understand and adapt to different types of change: slow onset, long-term, and rapid onset / disruptive;- Identifying strategies and techniques for strengthening information ecosystems to support behavioral adaptation to disruptive change; and- Disseminating knowledge and principles to individuals, communities, the private sector, policymakers, and other partners so that they can incorporate healthy information ecosystems as a core element of their social resilience strategies