Modernisation of foresight methodology: reflexivity and the social construction of knowledge. A note to authors in COSTA22

Following a very interesting discussion during and after the Final MC in Brussels this week, We offer you some thoughts of guidance on how you might take account of the Action in your publications that are COSTA22-inspired. We refer in particular to the planned books and special editions. The key idea from COSTA22 was a modernisation of methodology in support of the wider use of foresight methods amongst a diversity of contexts. The aphorism > underlies an overt recognition of the socially constructed nature of > and the reflexivity that operates in constructing meaning from this knowledge. The guidance note takes this discussion further

Succession in harvestman (Opiliones) communities within an abandoned sand quarry in Belgium

Sand mining strongly alters the existing landscape, transforming an area into a mosaic of native (sand deposits) and foreign soils, strongly influencing biotic development. The method of restoration of such excavated areas is often debated: natural succession or active restoration. We investigated how natural succession shapes harvestman communities, as part of the soil-dwelling community. We sampled harvestmen over a continuous period of 14 months in 25 plots in an abandoned sand quarry in Belgium using pitfall traps. We found significant increases in harvestman activity-density, species richness and diversity with time since abandonment of the various sections of the quarry. After about 15 years, a drastic change in species composition was observed with the establishment of forest species that more strongly depend on humid conditions to complete their life cycle. Colonisation of harvestmen closely followed vegetation succession despite their limited mobility. We argue that natural succession could be a good management tool for restoring harvestman communities as well as those of other soil-dwelling invertebrates in abandoned sand quarries

Automatic Detection of Online Jihadist Hate Speech

We have developed a system that automatically detects online jihadist hate speech with over 80% accuracy, by using techniques from Natural Language Processing and Machine Learning. The system is trained on a corpus of 45,000 subversive Twitter messages collected from October 2014 to December 2016. We present a qualitative and quantitative analysis of the jihadist rhetoric in the corpus, examine the network of Twitter users, outline the technical procedure used to train the system, and discuss examples of use.Comment: 31 page

Beneficial effects of zeolites on plant photosynthesis

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Metastable states of the Ising chain with Kawasaki dynamics

We consider a ferromagnetic Ising chain evolving under Kawasaki dynamics at zero temperature. We investigate the statistics of the metastable configurations in which the system gets blocked (statistics of energy, spin correlations, distribution of domain sizes). A systematic comparison is made with analytical predictions for the ensemble of all blocked configurations taken with equal a priori weights (Edwards approach).Comment: 22 pages, 3 Tables, 6 Figure