Witnessed Presence and the YUTPA Framework

This paper introduces the notion of witnessed presence arguing that the performative act of witnessing presence is fundamental to dynamics of negotiating trust and truth. As the agency of witnessed presence in mediated presence differs from natural presence orchestration between natural and mediated presences is needed. The YUTPA framework, introduced in this paper, depicts 4 dimensions to define witnessed presence: time, place, action and relation. This framework also provides a context for design of trust in products and services, as illustrated for a number of illustrative scenarios

City Rhythm

Rhythm is fundamental to life. Rhythm can be perceived in the movement of the sun, the moon and the stars. Rhythm makes our hearts tick and defines our breath, in and out. And even the smallest particle in a microbe is part of rhythmic movements. Rhythm in activities is important for culture, for religion, and for sports, schools and hospitals for example. Yet in social situations, social analyses and in social policymaking, rhythm is not considered as a space of analyses or a space of design. City Rhythm explores the potential of using rhythm analyses in the physical world and related data domain for enhancing social safety in neighbourhoods in the Netherlands. Rhythm in the physical world happens both in space as well as in time. Rhythm in data can connect to location (instead of persons), thus circumventing the issue of privacy. However, because the data addresses specific times and places, nonetheless the data still addresses significant social issues. Founded in the social sciences, humanities, arts and computer science, the interdisciplinary research team also includes civil servants of six cities in the Netherlands who have engaged throughout the research. With the help of students, nine case studies are carried out. Building upon methodologies from the social sciences and architecture, it is found that in seven cases rhythm analyses identified new design solution spaces. As a result, a methodology for doing rhythm analyses in the physical world is developed. More theoretical and artistic explorations are carried out. These enable the bridging of experience and insight from rhythm analyses to the data world. The interdisciplinary research team formulates the basic concept and terminology for the City Rhythm Data Model (CRDM). This consists of beats, base and street rhythms. Beats are defined by the state of specific area at a specific moment in time, As an example of a state, a street might have lots of cars, few cars, or no cars at all. Street rhythms show significant transitions over time for the specific area. The base rhythm of an area is defined by comparison to other areas. These derived rhythms are like a musical meter. In this specific context, individual street rhythms develop. Street rhythms represent a variation around a few specific themes. The City Rhythm Data Model (CRDM), based on mixtures of hidden Markov models, is built and run with open and linked data from the Central Bureau for Statistics (CBS) of the Netherlands. Areas can be represented using sizes in different datasets. City Rhythm worked with areas of 500 by 500 meters. The choice of datasets is defined by mapping upon the YUTPA framework which indicates trade-offs for trust. In the validation session of the City Rhythm Data Model it is concluded that the general experience of social safety of specific areas is reflected in CRDM base rhythms. For being able to understand which specific data constitute a beat (or “state”) and for understanding specific street rhythms, further research is necessary. In conclusion to the one year exploratory study, City Rhythm indicates that rhythm analyses, in the physical world as well as in the related data domain, offer a potential new approach for policymaking

City Rhythm

Rhythm is fundamental to life. Rhythm can be perceived in the movement of the sun, the moon and the stars. Rhythm makes our hearts tick and defines our breath, in and out. And even the smallest particle in a microbe is part of rhythmic movements. Rhythm in activities is important for culture, for religion, and for sports, schools and hospitals for example. Yet in social situations, social analyses and in social policymaking, rhythm is not considered as a space of analyses or a space of design. City Rhythm explores the potential of using rhythm analyses in the physical world and related data domain for enhancing social safety in neighbourhoods in the Netherlands. Rhythm in the physical world happens both in space as well as in time. Rhythm in data can connect to location (instead of persons), thus circumventing the issue of privacy. However, because the data addresses specific times and places, nonetheless the data still addresses significant social issues. Founded in the social sciences, humanities, arts and computer science, the interdisciplinary research team also includes civil servants of six cities in the Netherlands who have engaged throughout the research. With the help of students, nine case studies are carried out. Building upon methodologies from the social sciences and architecture, it is found that in seven cases rhythm analyses identified new design solution spaces. As a result, a methodology for doing rhythm analyses in the physical world is developed. More theoretical and artistic explorations are carried out. These enable the bridging of experience and insight from rhythm analyses to the data world. The interdisciplinary research team formulates the basic concept and terminology for the City Rhythm Data Model (CRDM). This consists of beats, base and street rhythms. Beats are defined by the state of specific area at a specific moment in time, As an example of a state, a street might have lots of cars, few cars, or no cars at all. Street rhythms show significant transitions over time for the specific area. The base rhythm of an area is defined by comparison to other areas. These derived rhythms are like a musical meter. In this specific context, individual street rhythms develop. Street rhythms represent a variation around a few specific themes. The City Rhythm Data Model (CRDM), based on mixtures of hidden Markov models, is built and run with open and linked data from the Central Bureau for Statistics (CBS) of the Netherlands. Areas can be represented using sizes in different datasets. City Rhythm worked with areas of 500 by 500 meters. The choice of datasets is defined by mapping upon the YUTPA framework which indicates trade-offs for trust. In the validation session of the City Rhythm Data Model it is concluded that the general experience of social safety of specific areas is reflected in CRDM base rhythms. For being able to understand which specific data constitute a beat (or “state”) and for understanding specific street rhythms, further research is necessary. In conclusion to the one year exploratory study, City Rhythm indicates that rhythm analyses, in the physical world as well as in the related data domain, offer a potential new approach for policymaking

Use of a formulated diet for mussel spat <i>Mytilus galloprovincialis</i> (Lamarck 1819) in a commercial hatchery

In the present study we evaluated the musselspat feed MySpat formulated by INVE Technologies (Dendermonde. Belgium) in combination with small quantities of microalgae as a complete diet for young mussel seed Mytilus galloprovincialis (Lamarck 1819). Three different food levels were tested: a continuous algae supply over a period of 24 h of, 150 cells µl-1(Control diet 1, C 1), 75 µl-1 (C 2) and 24 cells µl-1 (C 3). In three additional treatments C 2 was supplemented with 2.8% and C 3 with 2.8% and 4.3% MySpat respectively. Percentage was calculated on life weight (LW). Mussel spat belonging to treatments C 3 + 2.8% MySpat and C 3 + 4.3% MySpat gained almost twice as much weight as the mussels fed the nonsupplemented algae diet C 3. There was no significant difference between the two supplementation levels, indicating that a level of 2.8% Was sufficient. The mussel spat that received the supplement MySpat grew as fast as file animals that received 75 cells µl-1 being 702% increase in wet weight (WW) in 3 wk, so the same result was obtained with only 1/3 of the algae. This is interesting when one considers that file mussel spat in the last week of the experiment received 95% dry weight (DW) formulated feed and only 5% DW algae. The growth was well balanced between shell growth and increase of tissue weight, because the organic matter content of the animals was equal to or even higher than the positive control animals. Mussel seed on the C 3 diet had a fatty acid methyl ester (FAME) content of 6.6 mg g DW-1 whereas this content quadrupled to 28.1 mg g DW-1 when 2.8% MySpat was given in addition to the algae diet, reaching levels even higher than for the positive control treatment. The fatty acid composition reflected the diet-composition. hereby proving the ingestion and assimilation of the diet. It is suggested that Mussel seed regulate arachidonic acid (ARA) levels and keep the absolute amount in their tissues at 0.4 mg gDW-1

Participatory Demand-supply Systems

AbstractIntroducing the notion of Participatory Demand-Supply (PDS) systems as socio-technical systems, this paper focuses on a new approach to coordinating demand and supply in dynamic environments. A participatory approach to demand and supply provides a new frame of reference for system design, for which the engagement of all stakeholders plays an important role, as does distributed ICT. This approach has been applied to an industrial case to explore new opportunities enabled by distributed ICT for communication, negotiation, joint decision-making, and collective learning required for coordinating demand and supply. The application results in a platform as a test-bed for collecting relevant information to study the participation of stakeholders (actors) in coordinating a PDS system

City Science for Urban Challenges

Between January 2019 and July 2020, over 35 European cities formed the City Science Initiative (CSI) to explore how the science-policy interface operates in light of the emergent urban challenges and crises. It seems that the impact of current national and EU funded research funded programs needs to be enhanced for tackling cities urban challenges. This report aims to inspire people in municipalities, universities, networks, different layers of government and the European Commission to develop a variety of science-policy interfaces for handling of urban challenges in the near future. The CSI pilot collaboration has brought together European small, medium and large sized cities, different services of the European Commission, different networks of cities and funding programmes. The gathered City Science Officers reflected on what they need and exchanged current practice and insight. To bridge the existing gap between science and policy, new methodologies need to be developed in all phases of the research process. The report argues that design as a discipline can help to build bridges, solutions and communication strategies for such science-policy interfaces. The CSI concludes that the science-policy interface needs to improve significantly and soon. Cities are not rich and need to be efficient in how they develop policy for making people’s living environment healthy and safe. Collaboration between cities, facilitated by European institutions and networks, is crucial for handling urban challenges and unanticipated crises as also the COVID 19 pandemic indicates