The American company Amazon has made headlines several times for monitoring its workers in warehouses across Europe and beyond.1 What is new is that a national data protection authority has recently issued a substantial fine of €32 million to the e-commerce giant for breaching several provisions of the General Data Protection Regulation (gdpr) with its surveillance practices. On 27 December 2023, the Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés (cnil)—the French Data Protection Authority—determined that Amazon France Logistique infringed on, among others, Articles 6(1)(f) (principle of lawfulness) and 5(1)(c) (data minimization) gdpr by processing some of workers’ data collected by handheld scanner in the distribution centers of Lauwin-Planque and Montélimar.2 Scanners enable employees to perform direct tasks such as picking and scanning items while continuously collecting data on quality of work, productivity, and periods of inactivity.3 According to the company, this data processing is necessary for various purposes, including quality and safety in warehouse management, employee coaching and performance evaluation, and work planning.4 The cnil’s decision centers on data protection law, but its implications reach far beyond into workers’ fundamental right to health and safety at work. As noted in legal literature and policy documents, digital surveillance practices can have a significant impact on workers’ mental health and overall well-being.5 This commentary examines the cnil’s decision through the lens of European occupational health and safety (EU ohs). Its scope is limited to how the French authority has interpreted the data protection principle of lawfulness taking into account the impact of some of Amazon’s monitoring practices on workers’ fundamental right to health and safety.
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The carbon sink capacity of tropical forests is substantially affected by tree mortality. However, the main drivers of tropical tree death remain largely unknown. Here we present a pan-Amazonian assessment of how and why trees die, analysing over 120,000 trees representing > 3800 species from 189 long-term RAINFOR forest plots. While tree mortality rates vary greatly Amazon-wide, on average trees are as likely to die standing as they are broken or uprooted—modes of death with different ecological consequences. Species-level growth rate is the single most important predictor of tree death in Amazonia, with faster growing species being at higher risk. Within species, however, the slowest-growing trees are at greatest risk while the effect of tree size varies across the basin. In the driest Amazonian region species-level bioclimatic distributional patterns also predict the risk of death, suggesting that these forests are experiencing climatic conditions beyond their adaptative limits.These results provide not only a holistic pan-Amazonian picture of tree death but largescale evidence for the overarching importance of the growth–survival trade-off in driving tropical tree mortality.
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Tegenwoordig worden veel techbedrijven in Silicon Valley beschuldigd van het creëren van problemen in plaats van ze op te lossen. Er wordt bijv. gerefereerd aan de Russische inmenging in de presidentsverkiezingen in de VS. De macht en invloed van techbedrijven is zeer groot geworden. Amazon bepaalt hoe mensen winkelen, Google hoe ze kennis verwerven, Facebook hoe ze communiceren.
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Het bekende Amazon recept van "anderen die dit boek bestelden, kochten ook..." wordt ook steeds populairder voor persoonlijke verzamelingen van bookmarks: "anderen die dit artikel of deze website bookmarkten, vonden ook..." Zet je bookmarks online, op je naam of onder pseudoniem. Importeren vanuit Explorer of Firefox is geen probleem. En met iin klik kun je grasduinen door de verzamelingen van gelijkgeonteresseerden. De kans dat je kwalitatief goede bronnen vind is daardoor groot, en op basis van een annotatie, trefwoord of waarderingsscore kun je snel scannen of er iets voor je bij zit. Vergelijk dat eens met de zoekresultaten van bijvoorbeeld Google waarbij je zelf telkens het kaf weer van het koren moet scheiden. Social bookmarks: hoe werkt het precies, en wat kan dit betekenen voor het Hoger Onderwijs?
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Have you ever seen a place transformed beyond recognition? Maybe a local lake dried up, or a treasured tree blew down, leaving an empty space where there was once a landmark. Places change. Landscapes transform because of human intervention and events like extreme weather. Not every change needs to be a loss. But some changes are devastating. Why do we grieve for some losses, and not others? Why does it upset us when a stately local tree is cut down near, but not affect us when an area the size of Cyprus is deforested every year in the Amazon?
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Als 2009 het al niet was, dan wordt 2010 zeker het jaar waarin duidelijk zal worden hoe onze boekenkast er in de toekomst uit gaat zien: vol met dode bomen of in de vorm van een compact elektronisch apparaat. Column over de verschillende kanshebbers.
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We investigate hydrology during a past climate slightly warmer than the present: the last interglacial (LIG). With daily output of preindustrial and LIG simulations from eight new climate models we force hydrological model PCR‐GLOBWB and in turn hydrodynamic model CaMa‐Flood. Compared to preindustrial, annual mean LIG runoff, discharge, and 100‐yr flood volume are considerably larger in the Northern Hemisphere, by 14%, 25%, and 82%, respectively. Anomalies are negative in the Southern Hemisphere. In some boreal regions, LIG runoff and discharge are lower despite higher precipitation, due to the higher temperatures and evaporation. LIG discharge is much higher for the Niger, Congo, Nile, Ganges, Irrawaddy, and Pearl and lower for the Mississippi, Saint Lawrence, Amazon, Paraná, Orange, Zambesi, Danube, and Ob. Discharge is seasonally postponed in tropical rivers affected by monsoon changes. Results agree with published proxies on the sign of discharge anomaly in 15 of 23 sites where comparison is possible.
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Lemma. This article argues that for Knowledge Management it is not important how knowledge is defined but how it is conceptualized.
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