Practitioners’ perceptions of the Brazilian environmental impact assessment system: results from a survey

Practitioners play a key role in implementing environmental impact assessment (EIA) policies. Gauging their perception can help in designing legislation or regulation reforms and signals what needs more attention in research. The Brazilian EIA system is under review by lawmakers, but there is scant information about the views of professionals. A survey was conducted to inquiry on practitioners’ perception of the Brazilian EIA system regarding: (1) quality of the process, (2) quality of the environmental impact studies (EIS), and (3) proposals to change the system. Four hundred and fourteen professionals participated in an online survey responding to 44 questions. Results show positive perceptions about some aspects of current practice, but there is a clear predominance of negative appraisal both about the quality of the process and the quality of EIS. The poorest practices are the consideration of cumulative impacts and determination of impact significance. As for proposals to change the system, respondents defend the continuity of specific characteristics of the Brazilian system. Essentially, practitioners are calling for incremental changes that do not require any modification in the legislation.     

Modeling of solar-radiation transfer in the spherical system of atmosphere-earth’s surface

The study gives a characteristic of the developed model of solar-radiation transfer in the spherical system atmosphere-earth’s surface. Account is taken of the vertical profiles of the aerosol and gas components of the atmosphere, the anisotropy of the reflection of the earth’s mantle, the properties of the relief of the earth’s surface, the characteristics of the wind wave, and the optical properties of the aqueous medium. The problem of radiation transfer is considered in the approximation of the small-angle modification of the method of spherical harmonics. The polar and azimuthal distributions of the components of the Stokes vector are obtained. The integral radiation characteristics and the temperature and rate of heating of the medium at various levels are determined within the framework of a general calculation scheme.     

A new carbon structure in annealed film coatings of the carbon–lead system

Carbon–lead solid solutions coexisting with amorphous carbon have been obtained for the first time in a film coating deposited by ion-plasma sputtering. During subsequent vacuum annealing of carbon–lead films containing more than 68.5 at % Pb, this element almost completely evaporates to leave an amorphous carbon coating on a substrate. During annealing at 1100°C, this amorphous carbon crystallizes into a new hexagonal lattice with unit cell parameters a = 0.7603 nm and c = 0.8168 nm. Characteristic X-ray diffraction data for the identification of this phase are determined.

     

Ethanol’s most recent breakthrough in the United States: A case of socio-technical transition

Applying insights from the field of science and technology studies (STS), this paper helps explain the meteoric rise of ethanol in recent years in the United States. The term socio-technical system is a conceptual reminder that technologies affect and are an effect of their broader infrastructural, organizational, regulatory, and symbolic environments. As explained, there was no single “cause” driving this transition. Rather, dynamics at different levels came together and reinforced each other. When taken together, these transitions had the cumulative effect of propelling the ethanol juggernaut to the heights of today. The author analytically breaks down the automobile socio-technical system and examines transitions that occurred in its various dimensions. While not predictive, the socio-technical framework reminds us of influential path-dependent logics. The paper concludes with a brief discussion of where, in light of these realities, the biofuels trajectory may be headed in the not-too-distant future.     

Multiple regression analysis of a patent’s citation frequency and quantitative characteristics: the case of Japanese patents

Although many studies have been conducted to clarify the factors that affect the citation frequency of “academic papers,” there are few studies where the citation frequency of “patents” has been predicted on the basis of statistical analysis, such as regression analysis. Assuming that a patent based on a variety of technological bases tends to be an important patent that is cited more often, this study examines the influence of the number of cited patents’ classifications and compares it with other factors, such as the numbers of inventors, classifications, pages, and claims. Multiple linear, logistic, and zero-inflated negative binomial regression analyses using these factors are performed. Significant positive correlations between the number of classifications of cited patents and the citation frequency are observed for all the models. Moreover, the multiple regression analyses demonstrate that the number of classifications of cited patents contributes more to the regression than do other factors. This implies that, if confounding between factors is taken into account, it is the diversity of classifications assigned to backward citations that more largely influences the number of forward citations.     

Ethics as an enabler and a constraint – Narratives on technology development and artificial intelligence in military affairs through the case of Project Maven

Project Maven is an AI-induced information technology for military applications initiated by the United States Department of Defence (DoD) in 2017 and originally signed on to a civilian contractor, namely Google. However, this initiative raised massive resistance from a substantial amount of Google employees, eventually leading to the contract's annulation. This article uses narrative analysis to investigate enabling and constraining arguments of AI for military purposes that appeared in the debate following the public announcement of Project Maven. In addition, the article highlights the co-production of ethics, technology, and the complex issues that arise from civilian-military exchanges in technology development. Enabling arguments associated with consequentialist ethics are identified as narratives of accuracy and maintenance. Accuracy constitutes a guiding principle for saving civilian lives, while maintenance is directed at keeping the power balance intact. In contrast, constraining arguments proceed from deontological ethics that emphasize disengagement and ambivalence. Disengagement amplifies a civilian/military divide, while ambivalence exhibits conflicting views concerning the prospect of supplementing technological solutions that have the potential to contribute to war and civilian casualties. Conclusively, security narratives and technological storytelling are important aspects to consider since they hold a performative function that influences the framing and mobilization of security and technology development.     

Understanding and predicting the dissemination of scientific papers on social media: a two-step simultaneous equation modeling–artificial neural network approach

Scientometrics - Social media platforms have had an enormous impact on the dissemination of scientific work and have fared well in covering scientific papers. However, little is known about the...     

A Big-Data-based platform of workers’ behavior: Observations from the field

Behavior-Based Safety (BBS) has been used in construction to observe, analyze and modify workers’ behavior. However, studies have identified that BBS has several limitations, which have hindered its effective implementation. To mitigate the negative impact of BBS, this paper uses a case study approach to develop a Big-Data-based platform to classify, collect and store data about workers’ unsafe behavior that is derived from a metro construction project. In developing the platform, three processes were undertaken: (1) a behavioral risk knowledge base was established; (2) images reflecting workers’ unsafe behavior were collected from intelligent video surveillance and mobile application; and (3) images with semantic information were stored via a Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS). The platform was implemented during the construction of the metro-system and it is demonstrated that it can effectively analyze semantic information contained in images, automatically extract workers’ unsafe behavior and quickly retrieve on HDFS as well. The research presented in this paper can enable construction organizations with the ability to visualize unsafe acts in real-time and further identify patterns of behavior that can jeopardize safety outcomes.     

Digital inequality in Austria: Empirical evidence from the survey of the OECD “Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies”

Digitisation and rapidly emerging new technologies are transforming many aspects of life such as education, work, and leisure. These changes lead to a growing demand for new skills related to ICT use, computer literacy, internet use, or technical digital skills. However, the extensive literature on digital inequality provides evidence for significant differences in computer skills along the usual dimensions of social inequality. Due to the omnipresence of digital technologies in everyday life, it is all the more important to know the extent of digital inequality to be able to take appropriate measures to ensure that social participation does not degenerate into a question of social stratification in the Digital Age. In this paper, we provide empirical evidence for socio-economic digital inequality in Austria using survey data from the “Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies” (PIAAC) conducted in 2011/2012.¹ We show, for Austria, that higher socio-economic background is positively related to digital problem-solving while being female is negatively correlated. However, when controlling for ICT engagement in everyday life, the positive effect of the socio-economic background only remains significant for groups of people with a very high socio-economic background while the effect of gender becomes statistically insignificant. Furthermore, based on Eurostat data we cannot identify a uniform trend towards a decline of digital inequality since 2012. Our results indicate that disadvantaged population groups in Austria should be encouraged and enabled to integrate ICT usage in their everyday life to reduce digital inequality.     

Stability of Bingham flows: from the earliest works of A.A. Il’yushin to the present

A review of the works devoted to stability of Bingham flows with respect to perturbations of various kinds is presented. Both hydrodynamic aspects and bifurcation approaches to stability are affected. Much attention is given to Il’yushin’ articles in the late 1930s and the early 1940s of the twentieth century which had been pioneer in these subjects.     

Influence of the deposition pressure on the preparation of μc-Si:H thin films in hot-wire-assisted MWECR-CVD system

Considering the important influence of the deposition pressure on the growth of thin films, such as deposition rate, crystalline volume fraction and density, etc., and based on the analysis of the advantages and disadvantages on the mono-pressure method, we proposed a new method of high- and low-pressure combination to prepare hydrogenated microcrystalline silicon (μc-Si:H) films, i.e. at first we used high pressure to deposit film in 2 min in order to minish the thickness of incubation layer from the amorphous phase transition to crystalline phase, and then used low pressure to deposit film in 18 min to improve the density and decrease the oxidation of the film. The experimental results showed that using this new method the thin film with high crystalline volume fraction of 61% and low light-induced degradation ratio of 5.6% at 210 min was obtained, and meanwhile, it also possessed higher density and better photoelectronic properties than mono-pressure method.     

Understanding Infrastructure Resiliency in Chennai,India Using Twitter’s Geotags and Texts: A Preliminary Study

Geotagging is the process of labeling data and information with geographical identification metadata, and text mining refers to the process of deriving information from text through data analytics. Geotagging and text mining are used to mine rich sources of social media data, such as video, website, text, and Quick Response (QR) code. They have been frequently used to model consumer behaviors and market trends. This study uses both techniques to understand the resilience of infrastructure in Chennai, India using data mined from the 2015 flood. This paper presents a conceptual study on the potential use of social media (Twitter in this case) to better understand infrastructure resiliency. Using feature-extraction techniques, the research team extracted Twitter data from tweets generated by the Chennai population during the flood. First, this study shows that these techniques are useful in identifying locations, defects, and failure intensities of infrastructure using the location metadata from geotags, words containing the locations, and the frequencies of tweets from each location. However, more efforts are needed to better utilize the texts generated from the tweets, including a better understanding of the cultural contexts of the words used in the tweets, the contexts of the words used to describe the incidents, and the least frequently used words.     

Photography in the Szondi Test: ‘The Analysis of Fate’

Léopold Szondi invented a projective test using photographs of people with mental pathologies to determine the unconscious, ancestral illnesses (or aptitudes) of his subjects. Szondi’s images were garnered from psychiatric textbooks published around 1900. Such photographs presumably revealed unconscious thoughts, desires, and destinies in the course of a test session. If a patient responded positively to a photo-portrait of a diagnosed ‘hysteric’, for instance, this indicated that the subject herself had unconscious, inherited hysterical traits. Szondi’s reasoning was predicated upon two commonly held fallacies: first that an individual’s physical appearance is the external marker of mental life, and second that photography is a transparent means of revealing true facts. In spite of (or maybe even because of) such problematic assumptions, Szondi’s use of photographs can be located historically in a tradition of reading human character from portraiture. The test was widespread, and was even administered to Adolf Eichmann at the time of his trial in Jerusalem – an ironic cultural development as Szondi himself would have been among the thousands of Jews deported from Hungary directly to Auschwitz by Eichmann had the Szondi family not been rescued by the Kastner train of 1944.     

A methodology to evaluate the usability of digital socialization in ‘‘virtual’’ engineering design

We develop a methodology to evaluate the usability of prototypes for supporting digital socialization within geographically dispersed, or “virtual”, engineering design teams. Socialization converts individual into group tacit knowledge to enhance collaborative work. Extant theory in computer-supported collaborative work (CSCW) underpins IDRAK, a proof-of-concept prototype of a rich Internet application to promote socialization. Our methodology employs an engineering design exercise (Delta design, as in Bucciarelli (Delta design game, MIT, Cambridge, 1994) to simulate, in a computer lab, a virtual team undertaking a project feasibility stage. We apply this methodology to evaluate the usability of IDRAK to support “virtual” four-people teams (architect, project manager, thermal and structural engineers). Our findings yield few statistically significant differences between the performance of virtual and co-located teams. The experiments suggest that IDRAK encourages individuals to work collaboratively. It allows for a leveling of status and eases communication since individuals’ accents are not an issue. However, IDRAK makes it difficult for the project manager to exercise authority and it cannot capture nuances in speech such as tone and expression. The experiments suggest that more research is needed to explore the ways to enhance the performance of virtual teams by: first, alternating between voice/video and text-based chat; second, documenting chat-based conversations; and third, enforcing communication and design process protocols.

Music industry intermediation in the digital era and the resilience of the Majors’ oligopoly: the role of transactional capability

The digital revolution has significantly impacted the music industry by lowering barriers to entry. This change is usually depicted as endangering the big incumbent firms, the so-called ‘Majors’ (Universal, Sony, and Warner). Yet, market indicators show that the majors’ leadership has not declined. In part thanks to the application of a 360° business model made possible by digitization, they have been able to sustain their position. However, there is still a lack of theoretical account as well as empirical evidence for understanding how this model has been implemented by the Majors. This paper uses the concept of transactional capabilities in order to explain this switch towards 360° business model : majors have relied on a new type of competences, more oriented towards the completion of multiple transactions in parallel with heterogeneous actors. We illustrate this point with the case study of the French arm of Sony Music Entertainment.     

Who is in control of road safety? A STAMP control structure analysis of the road transport system in Queensland,Australia

Despite significant progress, road trauma continues to represent a global safety issue. In Queensland (Qld), Australia, there is currently a focus on preventing the ‘fatal five’ behaviours underpinning road trauma (drug and drink driving, distraction, seat belt wearing, speeding, and fatigue), along with an emphasis on a shared responsibility for road safety that spans road users, vehicle manufacturers, designers, policy makers etc. The aim of this article is to clarify who shares the responsibility for road safety in Qld and to determine what control measures are enacted to prevent the fatal five behaviours. This is achieved through the presentation of a control structure model that depicts the actors and organisations within the Qld road transport system along with the control and feedback relationships that exist between them. Validated through a Delphi study, the model shows a diverse set of actors and organisations who share the responsibility for road safety that goes beyond those discussed in road safety policies and strategies. The analysis also shows that, compared to other safety critical domains, there are less formal control structures in road transport and that opportunities exist to add new controls and strengthen existing ones. Relationships that influence rather than control are also prominent. Finally, when compared to other safety critical domains, the strength of road safety controls is brought into question.