In The Guardian, Alan Rushbridger compared the future of newspapers to climate change. Five years ago, many climatologists were sceptical whether climate change was a real and serious issue. Today, most scientists agree that global warm ing is a fact of life. In the world of newspapers, at present, almost everyone agrees that the traditional, particularly quality, newspapers are facing huge problems. The blog ‘Print is dead’ chose a fitting title for Rushbridger’s article: Print is dead: an inconvenient truth. Another traditional icon of the information society, the public library, is facing similar problems as the newspaper industry. The information function, the core business of the library, is under threat. People tend to use search engines at home instead of visiting and accessing the (virtual) library and ask for professional advice. It is important to note that these search engines are more and more driven by commercial interests than by a genuine concern of quality information. Ranking algorithms are more beauty contests and quality stamps. (Local) governments tend to demand more and more new social services included in the library. Commercial publishers’ concerns are understandable. In the United States and Europe the world of the press faces a real crisis, and the battle to survive is a race against the clock. Newspapers, especially the quality press, will only survive if they can persuade the audience of generation Z to read them on the Web. Failure to do this will signal their demise. We will discuss the tensions in this field by addressing the mutual relationships between the stock market driven economic business model and the traditional characteristics of quality journalism as well as the cultural changes in consuming news stories and analyses in print and on the web. The key question is: how these societal tendencies will affect the quality of information consumed by the public and hence the public quality of discourse? This paper aims to address both issues by asking whether quality is really under siege and to what extent can the new, convergent media improve the quality of the information society by fostering the interaction of the roles of journalists and librarians. In the new world of journalism and librarianship both will prove their roles and functions by engagement, enrichment, empowerment and entertainment for both readers and library users.
“Hoe kunnen bedrijfsregel management systemen geclassificeerd worden?” Voor bedrijven kan deze classificatie een belangrijke rol spelen in het selectieproces van een BRMS. Er bestaan meerdere classificatieschema’s van BRMS’en. Drie veelgebruikte schema’s zijn: 1) een classificatie naar de variabiliteit van een bedrijfsregel, 2) een classificatie naar de levenscyclus van een bedrijfsregel en 3) een classificatie naar de waardepropositie van een bedrijfsregel. In dit artikel gaan we dieper in op het tweede classificatieschema: de classificatie naar de levenscyclus van een bedrijfsregel.
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Hoofdstuk 12 uit deel III: Uses of cultural technologies. The essays in this volume discuss both the culture of technology that we live in today, and culture as technology. Within the chapters of the book cultures of technology and cultural technologies are discussed, focussing on a variety of examples, from varied national contexts. The book brings together internationally recognised scholars from the social sciences and humanities, covering diverse themes such as intellectual property, server farms and search engines, cultural technologies and epistemology, virtual embassies, surveillance, peer-to-peer file-sharing, sound media and nostalgia and much more. It contains both historical and contemporary analyses of technological phenomena as well as epistemological discussions on the uses of technology.
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The research, supported by our partners, sets out to understand the drivers and barriers to sustainable logistics in port operations using a case study of drone package delivery at Rotterdam Port. Beyond the technical challenges of drone technology as an upcoming technology, it needs to be clarified how drones can operate within a port ecosystem and how they could contribute to sustainable logistics. KRVE (boatmen association), supported by other stakeholders of Rotterdam port, approached our school to conduct exploratory research. Rotterdam Port is the busiest port in Europe in terms of container volume. Thirty thousand vessels enter the port yearly, all needing various services, including deliveries. Around 120 packages/day are delivered to ships/offices onshore using small boats, cars, or trucks. Deliveries can take hours, although the distance to the receiver is close via the air. Around 80% of the packages are up to 20kg, with a maximum of 50kg. Typical content includes documents, spare parts, and samples for chemical analysis. Delivery of packages using drones has advantages compared with traditional transport methods: 1. It can save time, which is critical to port operators and ship owners trying to reduce mooring costs. 2. It can increase logistic efficiency by streamlining operations. 3. It can reduce carbon emissions by limiting the use of diesel engines, boats, cars, and trucks. 4. It can reduce potential accidents involving people in dangerous environments. The research will highlight whether drones can create value (economic, environmental, social) for logistics in port operations. The research output links to key national logistic agenda topics such as a circular economy with the development of innovative logistic ecosystems, energy transition with the reduction of carbon emissions, societal earning potential where new technology can stimulate the economy, digitalization, key enabling technology for lean operations, and opportunities for innovative business models.
The scientific publishing industry is rapidly transitioning towards information analytics. This shift is disproportionately benefiting large companies. These can afford to deploy digital technologies like knowledge graphs that can index their contents and create advanced search engines. Small and medium publishing enterprises, instead, often lack the resources to fully embrace such digital transformations. This divide is acutely felt in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Scholars from these disciplines are largely unable to benefit from modern scientific search engines, because their publishing ecosystem is made of many specialized businesses which cannot, individually, develop comparable services. We propose to start bridging this gap by democratizing access to knowledge graphs – the technology underpinning modern scientific search engines – for small and medium publishers in the arts, humanities and social sciences. Their contents, largely made of books, already contain rich, structured information – such as references and indexes – which can be automatically mined and interlinked. We plan to develop a framework for extracting structured information and create knowledge graphs from it. We will as much as possible consolidate existing proven technologies into a single codebase, instead of reinventing the wheel. Our consortium is a collaboration of researchers in scientific information mining, Odoma, an AI consulting company, and the publisher Brill, sharing its data and expertise. Brill will be able to immediately put to use the project results to improve its internal processes and services. Furthermore, our results will be published in open source with a commercial-friendly license, in order to foster the adoption and future development of the framework by other publishers. Ultimately, our proposal is an example of industry innovation where, instead of scaling-up, we scale wide by creating a common resource which many small players can then use and expand upon.
The drive to reduce the carbon intensity of the energy system has generated much interest in applying carbon-free fuels such as ammonia (NH3) in combustion systems. The high hydrogen density and well-established production processes make NH3 a valuable chemical energy carrier to address and sustain the energy shift toward renewable energy source integration. However, some difficulties can be highlighted in the NH3 practical application. The combustion of NH3 is prone to producing harmful nitric oxides. In addition, NH3 has lower reactivity than most hydrocarbon fuels, which makes ignition challenging. Also, admixing NH3 with highly reactive fuels such as DME will facilitate ignition. The partnerships of this proposal are very interested in applying renewable NH3 as fuel in combined heat and power engines, and this research proposal suggests simulating a dual-fuel engine with NH3 as its primary fuel. The results of this research will help determine the optimum operating conditions for performing an experimental study.
