Foundations for Sustainability: A Coherent Framework of Life-Environment Relations

Foundations for Sustainability: A Coherent Framework of Life-Environment Relations challenges existing assumptions on environmental issues and lays the groundwork for a new paradigm, bringing a greater understanding of what is needed to help create an environmentally and economically sustainable future, which to date has been an uphill battle and not an obvious choice. The book presents the case for a paradigm based on a multi-model of life as organism, life as ecosystem, and life as biosphere, as opposed to the singular assumption that life can be viewed solely as an organism. All backed with well-cited research from top investigators from around the world, this book is a must-have resource for anyone working in ecology, environmental science or sustainability

The TNO Speaker Diarization System for NIST RT05s Meeting Data

The TNO speaker speaker diarization system is based on a standard BIC segmentation and clustering algorithm. Since for the NIST Rich Transcription speaker dizarization evaluation measure correct speech detection appears to be essential, we have developed a speech activity detector (SAD) as well. This is based on decoding the speech signal using two Gaussian Mixture Models trained on silence and speech. The SAD was trained on only AMI development test data, and performed quite well in the evaluation on all 5 meeting locations, with a SAD error rate of 5.0 %. For the speaker clustering algorithm we optimized the BIC penalty parameter ? to 14, which is quite high with respect to the theoretical value of 1. The final speaker diarization error rate was evaluated at 35.1 %

Flourishing Within Limits to Growth: Following nature's way

Decades of research and discussion have shown that the human population growth and our increased consumption of natural resources cannot continue - there are limits to growth. This volume demonstrates how we might modify and revise our economic systems using nature as a model. The book describes how nature uses three growth forms: biomass, information, and networks, resulting in improved overall ecosystem functioning and co-development. As biomass growth is limited by available resources, nature uses the two other growth forms to achieve higher resource use efficiency. Through a universal application of the three 'R's: reduce, reuse, and recycle, nature thus shows us a way forward towards better solutions. However, our current approach, dominated by short-term economic thinking, inhibits full utilization of the three 'R's and other successful approaches from nature. Building on ecological principles, the authors present a global model and futures scenario analyses which show that implementation of the proposed changes will lead to a win-win situation. In other words, we can learn from nature how to develop a society that can flourish within the limits to growth with better conditions for prosperity and well-being

Evaluating the Future of HCI: Challenges for the Evaluation of Emerging Applications

Current evaluation methods are inappropriate for emerging HCI applications. In this paper, we give three examples of these applications and show that traditional evaluation methods fail. We identify trends in HCI development and discuss the issues that arise with evaluation. We aim at achieving increased awareness that evaluation too has to evolve in order to support the emerging trends in HCI systems