This essay presents the concept of sustainability intelligence as a possible response to the current unsustainable course of society. We expound on the three components shaping this concept – naive intelligence, native intelligence, and narrative intelligence – and argue why they could thus serve as inspiration and key reference points for rising to our collective sustainability challenge. The essay ends with a brief exploration of the wider practical, policy and political implications of the concept.
LINK
Some Native Peoples didn 't want to be photographed because they believed that with every copy of their image, a part of their souls would disappear.By making a copy of an aspect of my existence - a photo, a film, a sound recording, or even a text - my existence goes beyond the immediate here and now. The copy will lead a life of its own. In addition there are young people who process a photo of themselves by smart algorithms in an image-processing app and take this to the plastic surgeon with a request to be operated on this image. Thus we are either lived by producing soulless images, or we strive to become an image of an image. All those soulless images ruin your here and now. Only now I understand that those Native Peoples were right!
MULTIFILE
The study evaluated two speech recognition systems, Wav2vec2 and Whisper, for potential biases for Dutch speakers.Results obtained by evaluating on the JASMIN corpus revealed biases against non-native speakers, children, and the elderly,with (slightly) better performance for women. The study emphasizes the need for ASR systems to handle variations in speakingin order to reach equal performance among all users.
Carboxylated cellulose is an important product on the market, and one of the most well-known examples is carboxymethylcellulose (CMC). However, CMC is prepared by modification of cellulose with the extremely hazardous compound monochloracetic acid. In this project, we want to make a carboxylated cellulose that is a functional equivalent for CMC using a greener process with renewable raw materials derived from levulinic acid. Processes to achieve cellulose with a low and a high carboxylation degree will be designed.
Currently, many novel innovative materials and manufacturing methods are developed in order to help businesses for improving their performance, developing new products, and also implement more sustainability into their current processes. For this purpose, additive manufacturing (AM) technology has been very successful in the fabrication of complex shape products, that cannot be manufactured by conventional approaches, and also using novel high-performance materials with more sustainable aspects. The application of bioplastics and biopolymers is growing fast in the 3D printing industry. Since they are good alternatives to petrochemical products that have negative impacts on environments, therefore, many research studies have been exploring and developing new biopolymers and 3D printing techniques for the fabrication of fully biobased products. In particular, 3D printing of smart biopolymers has attracted much attention due to the specific functionalities of the fabricated products. They have a unique ability to recover their original shape from a significant plastic deformation when a particular stimulus, like temperature, is applied. Therefore, the application of smart biopolymers in the 3D printing process gives an additional dimension (time) to this technology, called four-dimensional (4D) printing, and it highlights the promise for further development of 4D printing in the design and fabrication of smart structures and products. This performance in combination with specific complex designs, such as sandwich structures, allows the production of for example impact-resistant, stress-absorber panels, lightweight products for sporting goods, automotive, or many other applications. In this study, an experimental approach will be applied to fabricate a suitable biopolymer with a shape memory behavior and also investigate the impact of design and operational parameters on the functionality of 4D printed sandwich structures, especially, stress absorption rate and shape recovery behavior.
The denim industry faces many complex sustainability challenges and has been especially criticized for its polluting and hazardous production practices. Reducing resource use of water, chemicals and energy and changing denim production practices calls for collaboration between various stakeholders, including competing denim brands. There is great benefit in combining denim brands’ resources and knowledge so that commonly defined standards and benchmarks are developed and realized on a scale that matters. Collaboration however, and especially between competitors, is highly complex and prone to fail. This project brings leading denim brands together to collectively take initial steps towards improving the ecological sustainability impact of denim production, particularly by establishing measurements, benchmarks and standards for resource use (e.g. chemicals, water, energy) and creating best practices for effective collaboration. The central research question of our project is: How do denim brands effectively collaborate together to create common, industry standards on resource use and benchmarks for improved ecological sustainability in denim production? To answer this question, we will use a mixed-method, action research approach. The project’s research setting is the Amsterdam Metropolitan Area (MRA), which has a strong denim cluster and is home to many international denim brands and start-ups.