Pragmatic Knowledge Services

Peer reviewe

Openness in participation, assessment, and policy making upon issues of environment and environmental health: a review of literature and recent project results

Issues of environment and environmental health involve multiple interests regarding e.g. political, societal, economical, and public concerns represented by different kinds of organizations and individuals. Not surprisingly, stakeholder and public participation has become a major issue in environmental and environmental health policy and assessment. The need for participation has been discussed and reasoned by many, including environmental legislators around the world. In principle, participation is generally considered as desirable and the focus of most scholars and practitioners is on carrying out participation, and making participation more effective. In practice also doubts regarding the effectiveness and importance of participation exist among policy makers, assessors, and public, leading even to undermining participatory practices in policy making and assessment

Evaluating effectiveness of open assessments on alternative biofuel sources

Biofuels have raised controversy regarding their environmental, social, and economic sustainability. The complexity of biofuel decisions and investments by both industry and society requires integration of scientific knowledge, public information, and values from a diversity of sources. Environmental assessments can identify multiple impacts of different options. Open and collaborative knowledge creation can support decisions in two ways: by building trust and credibility and by developing more robust understanding of key issues. Open assessment is a decision-support method that allows widespread participation in a transparent and freely accessible process. In this article, we evaluate two open assessment case studies concerning biodiesel production. The evaluation compiles the participants’ views regarding the potential of the assessment process to influence decisions in terms of quality of content, applicability, efficiency, and openness. According to the evaluation, openness can be feasibly implemented and is much appreciated by participants. More experience using broad and active participation is needed for further development of methods and tools. However, the currently common practices of closed and disengaged processes limit decision making. In addition, suitable tools and practices, as well as the inclusion of participants with appropriate skills, are needed to facilitate open collaboration.Peer reviewe

Dimension bounds in monotonicity methods for the Helmholtz equation

Abstract The article [B. Harrach, V. Pohjola, and M. Salo, Anal. PDE] established a monotonicity inequality for the Helmholtz equation and presented applications to shape detection and local uniqueness in inverse boundary problems. The monotonicity inequality states that if two scattering coefficients satisfy q₁ ≤ q₂, then the corresponding Neumann-to-Dirichlet operators satisfy Λ(q₁) ≤ Λ(q₂) up to a finite-dimensional subspace. Here we improve the bounds for the dimension of this space. In particular, if q₁ and q₂ have the same number of positive Neumann eigenvalues, then the finite-dimensional space is trivial

Estimating stress in online meetings by remote physiological signal and behavioral features

Abstract Work stress impacts people’s daily lives. Their well-being can be improved if the stress is monitored and addressed in time. Attaching physiological sensors are used for such stress monitoring and analysis. Such approach is feasible only when the person is physically presented. Due to the transfer of the life from offline to online, caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, remote stress measurement is of high importance. This study investigated the feasibility of estimating participants’ stress levels based on remote physiological signal features (rPPG) and behavioral features (facial expression and motion) obtained from facial videos recorded during online video meetings. Remote physiological signal features provided higher accuracy of stress estimation (78.75%) as compared to those based on motion (70.00%) and facial expression (73.75%) features. Moreover, the fusion of behavioral and remote physiological signal features increased the accuracy of stress estimation up to 82.50%