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From Satellite to Supply Chain: New Approaches Connect Earth Observation to Economic Decisions. Commentary
Get PDFGlobal supply chains shift environmental and social impacts of consumption to remote locations. This opacity challenges many sustainability goals. To help businesses and governments realize more sustainable supply chains, new approaches are using spatial data and machine-learning techniques to connect Earth observation data to conventional economic tools
Common Factors Underlying the Five Facets of Mindfulness and Proposed Mechanisms: a Psychometric Study Among Meditators and Non-meditators
Get PDFObjectives: This study investigated whether common factors underlie the established mindfulness facets, as assessed by the Five Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ) and some of the mechanisms, which have been previously proposed to explain the beneficial effects of mindfulness on mental health.
Methods: Multigroup exploratory structural equation models (ESEM) were fitted to samples of non-meditators and meditators (total N = 3265) to (1) identify the number of factors that underlie the facets and mechanisms of mindfulness, (2) establish measurement invariance, and (3) conduct path analyses to determine the associations of extracted factors with psychological symptoms.
Results: Five measurement-invariant common factors were found to underlie the mechanisms and facets of mindfulness. The FFMQ facets loaded distinctly, but none of them highest, on these common factors. The common factors represented different ways of focusing, dealing with distress, and relating towards one’s own thoughts, feelings, emotions, and body sensations. Three of the common factors appeared to specifically reflect meditation experience. The FFMQ facets accounted for less variance of depression, anxiety, somatization, and stress scores than marker scales of the five common factors, all of which derived from the proposed mechanisms.
Conclusions: The common factors appear to be elements of the supporting mechanisms and psychological faculties of mindfulness. Their existence may explain the mutual interrelations between mechanisms and self-reported mindfulness but also suggests that self-reported mindfulness may not be factorially distinct from its assumed mechanisms. Longitudinal studies as well as behavioral data are needed to probe the generalizability and causality of these psychometric results
Reputationsmanagement von öffentlichen und zivilgesellschaftlichen Organisationen und die damit verbundenen Konzepte Leistung, Transparenz und Rechenschaftspflicht
Get PDFContext-Aware Process Performance Indicator Prediction
Get PDFIt is well-known that context impacts running instances of a process. Thus, defining and using contextual information may help to improve the predictive monitoring of business processes, which is one of the main challenges in process mining. However, identifying this contextual information is not an easy task because it might change depending on the target of the prediction. In this paper, we propose a novel methodology named CAP3 (Context-aware Process Performance indicator Prediction) which involves two phases. The first phase guides process analysts on identifying the context for the predictive monitoring of process performance indicators (PPIs), which are quantifiable metrics focused on measuring the progress of strategic objectives aimed to improve the process. The second phase involves a context-aware predictive monitoring technique that incorporates the relevant context information as input for the prediction. Our methodology leverages context-oriented domain knowledge and experts’ feedback to discover the contextual information useful to improve the quality of PPI prediction with a decrease of error rates in most cases, by adding this information as features to the datasets used as input of the predictive monitoring process. We experimentally evaluated our approach using two-real-life organizations. Process experts from both organizations applied CAP3 methodology and identified the contextual information to be used for prediction. The model learned using this information achieved lower error rates in most cases than the model learned without contextual information confirming the benefits of CAP3
Revisiting the Right to the City, Rethinking Urban Environmentalism: From Lifeworld Environmentalism to Planetary Environmentalism
Get PDFIn the environmental politics literature, cities are commonly framed as key sites for a shift towards greater sustainability and urban grassroots initiatives, such as food co-ops, urban gardening initiatives, repair cafés, and libraries of things, are commonly portrayed as such a shift’s key drivers. This paper develops a critical perspective on both common portrayals. It does so by drawing on critical urban theory, especially Lefebvre’s Right to the City. First, inspired by Lefebvre’s critique of city-centrism, the paper argues that the scope and limits of urban environmentalism hinge not only on the goals pursued but also on how the urban is framed. Urban environmentalism may mean mere lifeworld environmentalism: the greening of cities as if there were (relatively) bounded sites. Yet urban environmentalism may also mean planetary environmentalism: the mapping, problematization, and transformation of unsustainable urbanization processes that underpin given sites and lifeworlds, but also operate at beyond the latter—at a societal and planetary scale. Second, inspired by Lefebvre’s reformulation of right claims as a transformative political tool, this paper takes issue with environmental practices and discourses that present society’s niches, cracks, and margins as a key fermenting ground for radical environmental change. Since not only institutional but also bottom-up pursuits of more sustainable nature-society relations often remain stuck in mere lifeworld reform, this paper foregrounds heterodox right claims as an underexplored modus operandi in active pursuits of and discourses on radical environmental change. Heterodox right claims mean the active appropriation of dominant political languages, such as the language of right, while seeking to change the latter’s grammar. What this may mean in the realm of environmental politics, will be spelled out at hand of the example of claims to a right to public transport
What Do Crowd Equity Investors Do? Exploring Post-Investment Activities in Equity Crowdfunding
Get PDFEquity crowdfunding has become a viable alternative to the traditional forms of financing technology startups. This survey-based two-study article aims to shed light on the prevalence of crowd equity investors’ postinvestment activities and the antecedents to these engagement activities. Our first study finds that most crowd equity investors engage with the startups in which they invest in some way. While the majority engage in low-involvement activities (e.g., word of mouth), a smaller number of crowd equity investors also engage in high-involvement activities (e.g., strategic advice). Our second study reveals that engagement in these activities is driven by investment-, investor-, and proximity-related factors. In particular, the amount of investment—despite its smallness compared with that in the traditional forms of funding—is a reliable antecedent of crowd equity investors’ engagement in postinvestment activities. Furthermore, age and geographic proximity are positively associated with low-involvement activities, whereas intrinsic motivation and personal proximity are positively linked to high-involvement activities. By providing insights into the prevalence of postinvestment activities in equity crowdfunding and their antecedents, this article contributes to the debate on the potential of equity crowdfunding to complement or even replace the traditional forms of funding technological innovation
Real-time Inflation Forecasting Using Non-linear Dimension Reduction Techniques
Get PDFIn this paper, we assess whether using non-linear dimension reduction techniques pays off for forecasting inflation in real-time. Several recent methods from the machine learning literature are adopted to map a large dimensional dataset into a lower dimensional set of latent factors. We model the relationship between inflation and these latent factors using state-of-the-art time-varying parameter (TVP) regressions with shrinkage priors. Using monthly real-time data for the US, our results suggest that adding such non-linearities yields forecasts that are on average highly competitive to ones obtained from methods using linear dimension reduction techniques. Zooming into model performance over time moreover reveals that controlling for non-linear relations in the data is of particular importance during recessionary episodes of the business cycle
Eigentum und Miete: Finanzielle Belastung durch Wohnkosten in Österreich
Get PDFDie vorliegende Studie präsentiert eine empirische Analyse zu den Wohnkosten österreichischer Haushalte und
deren unterschiedliche Belastung für WohnungseigentümerInnen und MieterInnen. EigenheimbesitzerInnen haben
im Durchschnitt deutlich höhere Einkommen als Haushalte, die ihren Hauptwohnsitz mieten. Zusätzlich fallen für
WohnungseigentümerInnen die Wohnkosten auch absolut niedriger aus, selbst wenn noch ein laufender Kredit abbezahlt
wird. Somit ist die relative Wohnkostenbelastung als Anteil am verfügbaren Einkommen für WohnungseigentümerInnen
wesentlich geringer als jene für MieterInnen. Folglich führt die Berücksichtigung der Wohnkosten zu
einer erhöhten Ungleichheit der (nach Abzug der Wohnkosten) verbleibenden verfügbaren Einkommen. Die Daten
zeigen weiters, dass geförderte MieterInnen eine vergleichsweise geringere Wohnkostenbelastung aufweisen als nicht
geförderte MieterInnen, und unterstreichen somit die verteilungspolitische Wirksamkeit dieser Politik. Dieser Befund
wird auch durch ökonometrische Analysen bestätigt, wobei sich hier zeigt, dass vor allem für junge Haushalte, Singles
und Alleinerziehende die Wohnkosten eine deutlich überdurchschnittliche Belastung darstellen. Wohnungspolitische
Maßnahmen, die die Belastungen für jene Haushalte senken sollen, die am stärksten von hohen Aufwendungen für
das Wohnen betroffen sind, sollten somit in erster Linie bei einer Entlastung von MieterInnen ansetzen
Measuring the Use of the Active and Assisted Living Prototype CARIMO for Home Care Service Users: Evaluation Framework and Results
Get PDFTo address the challenges of aging societies, various information and communication technology (ICT)-based systems for older people have been developed in recent years. Currently, the evaluation of these so-called active and assisted living (AAL) systems usually focuses on the analyses of usability and acceptance, while some also assess their impact. Little is known about
the actual take-up of these assistive technologies. This paper presents a framework for measuring the take-up by analyzing the actual usage of AAL systems. This evaluation framework covers detailed information regarding the entire process including usage data logging, data preparation, and usage data analysis. We applied the framework on the AAL prototype CARIMO for measuring
its take-up during an eight-month field trial in Austria and Italy. The framework was designed to guide systematic, comparable, and reproducible usage data evaluation in the AAL field; however, the general applicability of the framework has yet to be validated