Hasil untuk "Information resources (General)"

Miguel Brilhante, Iain Darbyshire, Maria Cristina Duarte et al.

ABSTRACT Despite the extensive diversity of African flora, significant gaps remain in taxonomic research and biodiversity conservation, including under‐sampling in highly diverse regions, a shortage of taxonomic expertise, limited financial resources and delays in species descriptions. Type specimens act as effective proxies for tracking the discovery and description of species, providing a historical baseline for assessing taxonomic effort and our understanding of biodiversity. This study presents the first comprehensive analysis of Fabaceae species collected in Mozambique, one of the most diverse and ecologically important plant families in the region. It offers new insights into the taxonomic, spatial and temporal patterns shaping current botanical knowledge through an analysis of Fabaceae type specimens collected in Mozambique. We identified 273 type specimens, including 126 recognised taxa, with a notable proportion of endemism (44 strict‐endemic and 18 near‐endemic taxa) and a predominance of woody growth forms. Nearly 40% of these taxa lack IUCN conservation assessments, highlighting significant information gaps. The findings reveal that collection activity peaked during colonial botanical initiatives, driven by a small group of prolific collectors and influenced by spatial biases towards southern and central provinces. Using generalised linear modelling, we demonstrate that collection locations were significantly affected by elevation, slope, land cover and proximity to roads and harbours, reflecting the interaction between biogeographic patterns and accessibility. By identifying these historical and geographic biases, our study deepens understanding of Mozambique's botanical heritage and provides a crucial baseline for future floristic and conservation efforts in underexplored regions. Furthermore, this research underscores the vital role of herbarium type specimens as scientific resources supporting taxonomic research and conservation planning, emphasising the importance of preserving and digitising these collections to enhance their accessibility and utility.

Heming Jia, Marjan Kordani, Iman Ahmadianfar et al.

Precise forecasting of water quality indices (WQI) is essential for safeguarding ecosystems, human health, and sustainable water resource management. This study presents an innovative approach for evaluating river Water Quality Indices using advanced machine learning methods. The approach combines the least squares support vector machine (LSSVM) with the Sherman–Morrison–Woodbury (SMW) formula and local weighting techniques to improve the model's capacity to identify local trends and nonlinearities. The hybrid model, SMW-LSSVM-R, integrates the advantages of SMW-LSSVM with ridge regression to provide a balanced and resilient predictive framework. The model parameters are improved by a self-adaptive teaching-learning-based differential evolution (SATLDE) method, attaining optimal performance. Additionally, SATLDE is combined with a ridge feature selection model to identify the key input factors and boost accuracy. The model also employs optimized multivariate variational mode decomposition (OMVMD) using SATLDE algorithm to more effectively assess complex data patterns. When the models were tested at two Iranian stations, Farisat and Molasani, the SMW-LSSVM-R model with a testing R value of 0.975 and an RMSE of 0.990, exhibited better performance than the basic and OMVMD-enhanced models. These findings demonstrate the potential of the proposed hybrid model to offer valuable insights into environmental monitoring and management.

Alex Glynn

The tendency of generative artificial intelligence (AI) to ‘hallucinate’ false information is well known; AI-generated citations to non-existent sources have penetrated the bibliographies of peer-reviewed publications. Drawing from the Transparency and Openness Promotion guidelines, American judicial contention with generative AI, and the submission of prior art to the US Patent and Trademark Office, the author proposes that journals require authors to submit the full text of each cited source along with their manuscripts, thereby preventing authors from citing material whose full text they cannot produce. This solution requires limited additional work by authors or editors while effectively immunizing journals against hallucinated references.

Mariana Aristizábal

The COVID-19 pandemic shocked the world in 2020, altering almost every aspect of daily life. One of the areas that suffered the most during the pandemic was the education system. As urban areas transitioned to online platforms and software, rural towns lacked the technological resources to handle internet connectivity challenges that deepened the crisis. One such example is the city of Leticia, the capital of the Amazonas Department in Colombia. Located in the southern part of the country, Leticia can only be accessed by flight or boat. In 2020, Leticia was already facing significant educational inequalities, and teachers and students alike struggled with remote learning due to the limited access to technology and internet connectivity. Established offline teaching practices were barely modified for remote learning and the crisis was aggravated when the rapid spread of COVID-19 impacted entire families and communities. Unable to work and already facing financial issues that hindered access to food and services, residents witnessed the death of loved ones and community leaders before the arrival of vaccinations. Now that in-person classes have resumed, it is worthwhile to analyze the implications of the last year´s gap in students’ learning process, the role of administrators through government initiatives, and the current challenges that teachers and students face in their new classroom reality. This article provides valuable information to understand the urgent needs of the educational community in Leticia in the Post-COVID scenario.

Viacheslav Davydenko, Anna Kavunska, Viacheslav Barba

The study focuses on the conceptual, theoretical, empirical and methodological foundations of a legal and economic nature, concerning the legal support for the activities of operational units of the National Police in preventing cybercrime, in the context of economic globalisation and existential challenges. Methodology. The present study employed both general and special methods of cognition. Utilising the dialectical method, the author evaluated the essence of countering cybercrime by operational police units in terms of its prevention and prevention of these offences in the legal and economic planes, according to a diverse range of parameters. The analysis established the foundations for a multidimensional study of all the characteristic features of cybercrime prevention in the context of economic integration, in terms of economic and legal etymology. The synthesis established the conditions necessary for the generalisation of the distinctive features of the activities of police operational units. The formal legal method enabled the correct interpretation of the content of legal acts defining the general and special legal regimes of preventive activities of operational police units within the context of economic globalisation and existential challenges. The purpose of the article is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the potential areas for improvement in the activities of the operational units of the National Police in order to prevent cybercrime in the context of economic globalisation and existential challenges. The results of the study demonstrated that the role of the operational units of the National Police in preventing cybercrime in the context of economic globalisation and existential challenges encompasses a range of complex measures in various areas of activity of the relevant police unit, primarily in ensuring cybersecurity. It has been determined that there are specific areas in which the operational units of the National Police can enhance their efforts to combat cybercrime. These areas have been identified in the context of economic globalisation and existential challenges. Conclusion. The advent of cybercrime can be attributed to the prevailing technological transformations in the economy, particularly with regard to the dissemination of information as the primary resource and catalyst for societal advancement. The author's position is that the implementation of economic policies aimed at curbing cybercrime should encompass the following measures: the establishment of a fair and balanced tax system, the formulation of a strategic economic development policy, the promotion of production-oriented initiatives, and the allocation of resources towards the enhancement of public services. From the standpoint of a company's economic security, measures to prevent cybercrime are crucial, due to both local and global economic factors. The analysis of cybercrime legislation enabled the identification of measures of general and special competence taken by the operational units of the National Police. Concurrently, within the legislative framework on national security, which encompasses cybersecurity, the National Police is delineated as a subject of counteraction to such crime, signifying a specialised competence. Concomitantly, the general competence in combating and preventing cybercrime is reflected in the primary function of the National Police, namely to ensure public safety and order, protect human rights and freedoms, the interests of society and the state, and combat crime, including in cyberspace. The primary focus of the implementation of the special competence of operational police units is the Cyber Police Department, which is an integral component of the National Police. The Cyber Police Department is responsible for conducting comprehensive operational and investigative activities as a component of the broader strategy to prevent cybercrime. The authors support the view that the following measures, carried out by operational police units, stand out as effective means of countering cybercrime under conditions of existential challenges associated with armed aggression. These measures include counterintelligence, operational and investigative work, and procedural work to counter relevant information threats; the introduction of incentive measures aimed at creating their own information product; the development of their own information and telecommunications infrastructure; and the establishment of communication between civil society and law enforcement agencies in this area.

Bo Han, Zhen Ma, Liang-jun Lin et al.

ABSTRACT: China established Xiong'an New Area in Hebei Province in 2017, which is planned to accommodate about 5 million people, aiming to relieve Beijing City of the functions non-essential to its role as China's capital and to expedite the coordinated development of the Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei region. From 2017 to 2021, the China Geological Survey (CGS) took the lead in multi-factor urban geological surveys involving space, resources, environments, and disasters according to the general requirements of “global vision, international standards, distinctive Chinese features, and future-oriented goals” in Xiong'an New Area, identifying the engineering geologic conditions and geologic environmental challenges of this area. The achievements also include a 3D engineering geological structure model for the whole area, along with “one city proper and five clusters”, insights into the ecology and the background endowment of natural resources like land, geothermal resources, groundwater, and wetland of the area before engineering construction, a comprehensive monitoring network of resources and environments in the area, and the “Transparent Xiong'an” geological information platform that is open, shared, dynamically updated, and three-dimensionally visualized. China's geologists and urban geology have played a significant role in the urban planning and construction of Xiong'an New Area, providing whole-process geological solutions for urban planning, construction, operation and management. The future urban construction of Xiong'an New Area will necessitate the theoretical and technical support of earth system science (ESS) from various aspects, and the purpose is to enhance the resilience of the new type of city and to provide support for the green, low-carbon, and sustainable development of this area.

Olena V. Kardashova, Tetiana F. Filchuk

This article attempts a comprehensive discourse analysis of the metaphor using the lexeme “вкусный” (tasty) as an example. Considering that metaphor can be viewed from the perspective of its ability to create social reality, and that reality images are discursively conditioned, the authors explore metaphor as a discursive agent that implies information about the basic parameters of discursive instances: metasubject, metaobject, and meta-addressee. The tasks of discourse analysis of metaphor in the article include: 1) consecutive explication of metaphorically conditioned components of meaning; 2) reconstruction of the constitutive parameters of discursive instances of subject, object, and addressee, based on these components; 3) reconstruction of the worldview and articulatory possibilities of the speaker who occupies the position of discursive subject. The study was conducted on the material of the National Corpus of the Russian Language using descriptive, contextual, interpretative methods, and the method of component analysis. Discourse analysis of linguistic material allows for the reconstruction of two possible types of discursive subject. The first one (nominally designated as DS1) represents the subject as a prepared listener, viewer, appreciator, or expert. Its discursive orientation realizes such intentions as: recognition of the complexity and intrinsic value of objects in the surrounding world; readiness to expend one`s own resources to interact with them; existential needs to act as a subject of love, care, and knowledge; and transfer of the value center from one`s own “self” to the surrounding world. With such a focus, the source of positive emotions (“satisfaction”) becomes the discursive subject itself, which is characterized by the ability to valorize objects and endow them with meaning. These constitutive parameters of discursive subject DS1 are implicated in such metaphorical constructions as “tasty music”, “tasty picture”, “tasty space”, “tasty design solution”, “tasty movie”, “tasty goal”, “tasty opponent”, and so on. The second type of discursive subject (DS2) can be reconstructed based on metaphors like “tasty assets”, “tasty prices”, “tasty discounts”, “tasty offer”, “tasty text”, “tasty position”, “tasty option”, “tasty life”. Unlike DS1, its attitude towards things, phenomena, and events in the surrounding world is determined by the ratio of “resources spent – satisfaction received”, which characterizes the subject of this type as a consumer. The main intentional characteristics of DS2 are: a primary desire for satisfaction of their own needs and desires (receiving positive emotions, material benefits, achieving an attractive social status); the devaluation of the sovereign value of objects and the unwillingness to make an effort to interact with them; the devaluation of all qualities and properties inherent in an object, except for the consumer ones (capable of bringing satisfaction to the speaker); a fundamental unwillingness to expend their own resources, avoidance of novelty, and a desire to maintain the stability of their own internal and external space. These two configurations of discursive subject allow the speaker to articulate almost diametrically opposed attitudes towards the surrounding world. In general terms, they correspond to two worldviews: modernist and postmodernist.

Mohamed Mahmoud Sebbab, Abdelhadi El Ouahidi, Mehdi Ousbih et al.

The purpose of this paper is to identify, quantify and delineate the areas with suitable aggregate resources in the Precambrian massif of Ifni and the limestone plateau of Lakhssas (southwest Morocco). To fulfill this objective, a study was undertaken on the geotechnical parameters of the various geological outcrops of the region based on the analysis of 42 rock samples (carbonate, magmatic, detritic and volcano-detritic). Initially, we subjected these samples to a series of laboratory tests (impact resistance (L.A), wear resistance (MDE), density, porosity, absorption), to classify them according to geotechnical standards. Then, a geospatial database was created, to exploit these geotechnical data, from a geographical information system (GIS) to produce various thematic maps. Based on the results of this study, all geotechnical classes according to the standards (A to E for the European standard and 1A to 6D for the Moroccan standard) are present with good to very good geomechanical properties (L.A between 12% and 35%, MDE between 5% and 30%). This classification allowed us to use GIS to identify and quantify potential areas for exploitation by assigning five categories of geotechnical suitability levels (high (4), medium (3), low (2), very low (1) and others (0)) and to show that approximately 72% of the study area belongs to the categories high, medium and low. The combination of laboratory results and GIS has allowed us to carry out geotechnical mapping that will be used by regional authorities and actors for good management of the field of quarrying to rationalize the national natural heritage.

Christian Kurtz, Florian Wittner, Martin Semmann et al.

Billions of people interact within platform-based ecosystems containing the personal data of their daily lives. Data which have become rigorously creatable, processable, and shareable. Here, platform providers facilitate interactions between three types of relevant actors: users, service providers, and third parties. Research in the information systems field has shown that platform providers influence their platform ecosystems to promote the contributions of service providers and exercise control by utilizing boundary resources. Through a socio-techno-legal analysis of two high-profile cases and their application on the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) we show that the boundary resource design, arrangement, and interplay can influence whether and to what extent platform providers are accountable for platform providers unlawful personal data processing in platform ecosystems. The findings can have a huge impact to account actors for personal data misusage in platform ecosystems and, thus, the protection of personal liberty and rights in such socio-technical systems.

Mojtaba Pakparvar, Gholamali Nekooeian, Gholamreza Ghahari et al.

Introduction Water scarcity due to climate change and growing water demand in different consumption sectors is a major environmental crisis that drives arable lands to a state of degradation, especially in dry regions. Artificial recharge of groundwater (ARG) through floodwater spreading (FWS) which is a potential measure for reversing this emerging trend is investigated in this research. Floodwater harvesting has become an increasingly important technique to improve water security and caused a renewed interest in research and implementation. According to the diverse objectives and methods of implementing artificial recharge of groundwater (ARG) systems, various factors must be considered when choosing a method for quantifying recharge. Therefore, the rate of aquifer recharge is one of the most difficult items to measure in groundwater (GW) resources evaluation. In the soil water balance method (and in the Zero Flux Plane method), soil water movement is inferred by measuring the changes in water content of the soil profile by gravimetric sampling or automatic devices. These methods have not been proven satisfactory in low flow conditions, as there is often insufficient resolution to detect the movement of small quantities of water. Therefore, other methods, based on hydraulic conductivity, potential gradients, and directly calculated water fluxes for unsaturated flow were developed. The Buckingham-Darcy law can be used under the steady flow condition where water contents and fluxes change with depth but do not vary as a function of time. It has been employed in arid and semiarid conditions for recharge estimation. or for assessing the exchange flow between the surface water reservoir and GW. The method requires measurements or estimates of the vertical total head gradient and the unsaturated hydraulic conductivity at the ambient soil water content following the Buckingham-Darcy equation. The overall objective is to evaluate a floodwater spreading system that was installed in 1981 at the Gareh Bygone Plain, southern Iran for recharging the groundwater table.   Materials and Methods To assess the artificial recharge of groundwater through turbid floodwater spreading, three wells, ~30 m deep, were dug in a 37-year-old recharge basin in planted Acacia forest, bare soil, and pasture land uses, respectively. Soil hydraulic parameters of the vadose zone layers (30 m thickness) were measured in the field and laboratory. One well was equipped with pre-calibrated TDR sensors throughout the well profile for measuring the changes in soil water content along the vadose zone. The volumetric soil-water content was measured continuously from Sep. 2010 to Sep. 2020 with closer temporal increments after floodwater spreading events. Rainfall, ponding water depth, and duration were also measured. Recharge through the vadose zone was assessed by the soil-water balance (SWB) method, as measured in the field as well as by calibrating the Hydrus-1D (H1D) model through the inverse solution.   Results and discussion Results showed that the wetting front was interrupted at a layer with fine soil accumulation over a coarse-textured gravely layer at a depth of ~4 m. The large differences in hydraulic conductivity of the two successive layers seemed to cause the transformation of the wetting front water movement into fingering flow. The changes in downward water flux complicated TDR measurement after the depth of 4 m. However, noticeable but temporary changes in the soil water content were detected in some of the layers below the 4 m was evidence for fingering flow after the flood events. Validation of the simulated flow by the H1D model vs. the one observed by SWB (with RMSE 3.45; R2 0.994) showed that the model performed well in flux estimation. The recharge ratio was calculated for the 2010 to 2020 events as 26 to 84 average of 55 % for all events and 63 to 84 average of 75 % for large impounded floodwater in the basin, respectively.   Conclusion Although a reliable set of data is obtained for calculating recharge at the very location of this study, up-scaling of the results for the entire floodwater systems and for the other flooding events with extreme volume and flow rate needs an extended investigation period and thorough identification of the underlying layers. The determined hydraulic properties of the RLs obtained in this study will be utilized in future research works in the FWS systems in our study site. The contributions of this thesis can be summarized as a) development of approaches for application, calibration, and validation of existing models with limited available data, b) the incorporation of new concepts into the models used, c) generating a unique and robust field data set to support the modeling approaches and d) provision of new information in the context of floodwater harvesting and its impact on groundwater recharge. Floodwater harvesting, especially in the form of FWS, is an emerging issue in water management in dry regions, which needs a better understanding and evaluation of its impact on the surrounding environment. Small-scale but nature-friendly water management plans, such as FWS systems, are seriously criticized since there are numerous methods, which are more attractive in terms of investments and money return to investors. However, they are rarely investigated. This study provided quantitative evidence that proves the effectiveness of FWS systems.

Sevda Fotovvat, Habib Izadkhah , Javad Hajipour

Social network research analyzes the relationships between interactions, people, organizations, and entities. With the developing reputation of social media, community detection is drawing the attention of researchers. The purpose of community detection is to divide social networks into groups. These communities are made of entities that are very closely related. Communities are defined as groups of nodes or summits that have strong relationships among themselves rather than between themselves. The clustering of social networks is important for revealing the basic structures of social networks and discovering the hyperlink of systems on human beings and their interactions. Social networks can be represented by graphs where users are shown with the nodes of the graph and the relationships between the users are shown with the edges. Communities are detected through clustering algorithms. In this paper, we proposed a new clustering algorithm that takes into account the extent of relationships among people. Outcomes from particular data suggest that taking into account the profundity of people-to-people relationships increases the correctness of the aggregation methods.

Susanna Priest

The phrase citizen science is certainly appealing, especially for many of us who have championed the notion of increasing public engagement in science. Citizen science refers most often to projects in which non-scientists provide some of the labor needed for the collection of scientific data, often in environmental research contexts. This involvement provides volunteer workers in support of science while in turn, ideally, offering rewarding and educational participation opportunities for the volunteers. An early U.S. model for citizen participation has been the Cornell University ornithology laboratory, where the recruitment of a widely dispersed army of bird watchers and other non-scientist citizens continues to assist with bird population research and related studies. But the specific phrase citizen science also conjures up the idea of a sort of participatory democracy operating in the service of science, allowing fresh ideas to bubble up and their policy implications to receive thoughtful attention and popular feedback early on (or, as we later learned to say, «upstream»). It might also suggest science that operates more clearly in the service of society, taking research direction from what its citizens (as community members) actually have to say. This train of thought brings citizen science closer to the idea of community-based participatory research, in which scientific goals are defined in part by communities outside of science itself. The emergence of university-based «science shops», more a European than an American phenomenon, is another close cousin in which scientists allow communities to suggest research problems that reflect community needs. This issue of Metode presents a series of cases that illustrate both the concept and its divergent objectives: facilitating communication between scientists and non-scientists, raising public interest in science and levels of science literacy, empowering the pursuit of public policy goals, and even pushing the boundaries of social science theory. Younger participants in particular might be motivated to consider alternative career paths, potentially increasing diversity among scientific professionals. Collectively, these goals represent an ambitious agenda for the future through the advancement of frontiers in communication, education, and politics – as well as science itself. And these intriguing cases are still only a handful among many. Who is a «citizen» and in what sense can they actually «do science»? In the early days of scientific journals, most authors were gentlemen of status. Must a citizen scientist of our own time likewise be a gentleman of status? That certainly does not seem right or fair. Yet, at the same time, the idea that «just anyone» can do science is just not quite right either. Both scientific expertise and scientific authority still matter, especially in the era of climate and COVID where misinformation is often said to be rampant – and is potentially deadly. Given that, what exactly is the role of «citizen scientists»? How do we balance the need for scientific rigor with the need for community involvement (in both directions)? This is a question with no obvious answer. The idea of citizen science (or amateur science before it) brings with it tensions about the social nature of scientific truth, both the «citizen» part and the «science» part. As Bryan Wynne’s well-known 1989 paper on post-Chernobyl sheep farming argued, radiation scientists had one form of expertise but others (the farmers) had other forms, such as their knowledge of sheep lifecycles, seasons, pastures, and markets. Solutions to managing radiation pollution on sheep farms required both forms. And yet scientific truth is still established by scientific consensus, not by public opinion or even public participation. In this era of «alternative facts», where it almost seems as though everyone gets to make up their own reality, assisted in no small measure by the dynamics of social media, we are regularly pushed to defend the authority of science. To do that, we need allies. I believe that one productive way of thinking about «citizen scientists» is that they are, or can become, exactly those needed allies, linking communities and societies to the fruits of scientific expertise in the form of knowledge. We should think of the role of citizen scientists not only as gathering data for the «actual» scientists to make use of, but also serving as community opinion leaders on science-related topics.

Nancy Sanchez Tarrago

A través de los conceptos de colonialidades, geopolítica y corpo-politica del conocimiento se reflexiona sobre algunos desafíos de la publicación científica latinoamericana en acceso abierto. Aunque América Latina es pionera en iniciativas de acceso abierto y en la creación de sistemas regionales cooperativos para compartir conocimiento como bien común, las revistas “internacionales”, refrendadas por factor de impacto, continúan a ser priorizadas en los sistemas de evaluación y financiamiento de la ciencia de la mayoría de los países de la región. Adicionalmente, estrategias de mercantilización del acceso abierto se hacen cada vez más penetrantes y amenazan con subvertir algunos de los propósitos iniciales del Movimiento de acceso abierto y crear brechas más profundas entre el Norte y el Sur. Por detrás de estos aspectos se sitúa la naturalización y perpetuación de jerarquías y exclusiones ontológicas y epistémicas con trasfondos de racismo sistémico que autores decoloniales caracterizan como colonialidades. Se requiere una desobediencia epistémica, como actitud decolonial, y una concertación de esfuerzos a nivel regional que transforme sistemas de evaluación, preserve el carácter público y académico de la ciencia y garantice equidad y justicia social

Keyong Wang, Mengyao Tong, Dequan Yang et al.

IPv6 is a next-generation IP protocol that replaces IPv4. It not only expands the number of network address resources but also solves the problem of multiple access devices connected to the Internet. While IPv6 has brought excellent convenience to the public, related security issues have gradually emerged, and an assessment of the security situation in IPv6 has also become more important. Unlike passive defense, the honeypot is a security device for active defense. The real network application and the fake network application, disguised by the honeypot, are located on a similar subnet, and provide a network application service; but, in both cases, behavior logs from unauthorized users are caught. In this manner, and to protect web-based applications from attacks, this article introduces the design and implementation of a web-based honeypot that includes a weak password module and an SQL inject module, which supports the IPv6 network to capture unauthorized access behavior. We also propose the Security Situation Index (SSI), which can measure the security situation of the network application environment. The value of SSI is established according to the different parameters that are based on honeypots. There is a firewall outside the test system environment, so the obtained data should be used as the real invasion data, and the captured behavior is not a false positive. Threats can be spotted smartly by deploying honeypots; this paper demonstrates that the honeypot is an excellent method of capturing malicious requests and can be measured with the SSI of the whole system. According to the information, the administrator can modify the current security policy, which can improve the security level of a whole IPv6 network system.

Ebtsam Mohamed, Samir Elmougy, Mostafa Aref

We introduce a method for measuring the quantity of online content of a set of languages at domain level. This measurement is used for building a Multi-Lingual Information Retrieval (MLIR) system that identifies which languages are strongly represented on the internet about a specific query topic. The system architecture includes two modules; the off-line module builds a linguistic diversity index for languages at topic level and the on-line module, where the suitable language for search is identified based the index for retrieving the relevant documents to the user query in that language. The conducted experiments explore the usefulness of building such an index and its usage effect on both of monolingual and traditional MLIR system. From the obtained results, it has been proven that the more internet resources, the better the accuracy of the retrieved results, and therefore the better the system performance. Keywords: Multi-Lingual Information Retrieval (MLIR), Online content availability, Search language, Linguistic diversity index

Thomas Kunz, Dru Lavigne, François Lefebvre

Open source software and hardware has become an accepted way of developing new and interesting applications in many information and communication technology domains: operating systems, databases, Web infrastructure, and applications. It's not surprising that with the increasing popularity of mobile handheld devices, users and researchers have explored the power of open approaches to providing innovative new applications and services in this domain. However, unlike personal computers and the Internet, mobile handsets were tightly controlled by mobile network operators (MNOs) who developed a vertical ecosystem by integrating the communication infrastructure, the handheld device hardware, and often the applications installed on those devices. The software and protocols running the mobile communications infrastructure and devices are often standardized by membership-only bodies, where large MNOs and manufacturers have a predominant influence. These players invest significant financial resources into shaping the industry along their vision to gain a competitive advantage. A current example is the ongoing battle about the dominant radio access technology for 4G cellular systems: LTE vs. Wimax. These trends have changed recently. Companies such as Google, Nokia, or Openmoko and Industry Alliances such as the Open Handset Alliance are providing the core building blocks, both in hardware as well as software, of increasingly open mobile devices. This issue of the OSBR reviews the relevant trends in the open mobile platform space from a number of perspectives. As the articles in these issue show, there is a lot of exciting ongoing work that brings the power of open source development to the mobile space. This trend is not just confined to the mobile devices as there are also efforts in the development of open mobile infrastructure elements and whole systems.

Robert B. Todd

Senra Nelson de Castro

Tendo como foco a informação estatística, procura-se destacar as polêmicas que vicejam no entorno de suas dimensões sociopolíticas, que define a demanda, e técnico-científica, que define a oferta, fazendo-o através de uma evolução histórica. Procura-se mostrar que a definição e a harmonia entre ambas, a demanda e a oferta da informação estatística, não passa pelo livre jogo das forças de mercado, locus natural da espontânea coordenação econômica, de modo que se faz vital haver uma coordenação especializada, apropriada e adequadamente institucionalizada em alguma esfera oficial de governo (em se tratando de um bem que se quer público). Assim, a algum agente público caberá o exercício dessa coordenação institucional, fazendo-o nos limites do mandato que se queira ou se possa atribuir-lhe, dessa forma praticando-se uma cuidadosa regulação de todo o processo, cognitivo e social, a partir dos princípios integrantes de uma política de informação. Dessa forma, associa-se a política de informação, como parece correto, ao equacionar das polêmicas que impedem ou dificultam um certo bem (no caso a informação estatística) de se tornar público, fazendo-o no contexto de alguma agência de poder (no caso uma coordenação especializada), assentando-se um conjunto de seis pilares (utilidade, pertinência, validade, visibilidade, continuidade, integridade), capazes de a substanciar e a sustentar.

Edson Nery da Fonseca

As enciclopédias brasileiras e suas características. O precursor Alarico Silveira e a aventura do Instituto Nacional do Livro. Iniciativas de editores estrangeiros estabelecidos no Brasil. A mais recente enciclopédia: seus erros técnicos, inexatidões e lacunas. Incompetência do jornalista Carlos Lacerda como redator-chefe de enciclopédias. Abstract Brazilian encyclopaedias, its history and characteristics. The pioneer work of Alarico Silveira and the adventure of the National Institute of the Book.Activities of foreign publishers established in Brazil in the field of encyclopaedias. The most recent work: its technical mistakes, inexactness, and omissions. Incapacity of the journalist Carlos Lacerda as editor of encyclopaedias.

Sarita Albagli

Discute-se a emergência recente da problemática da biodiversidade, de modo associado com a passagem de um paradigma tecno-econômico intensivo em energia fóssil e recursos naturais para um outro baseado em informação e no uso crescente de ciência e tecnologia no processo produtivo. Nesse contexto, é por intermédio das biotecnologias avançadas que se busca agregar valor à biodiversidade no mercado globalizado, valorizando-se não os organismos vivos em si, mas a informação genética neles contidas.<br>This article analyses the recent emergence of biodiversity issue in the context of the decline of a techno-economical paradigme intensive in the use of fuel energy and natural resources and the emergence of a techno-economical paradigme based in the use of information, science and technology in the productive system. In such a context, it is through advanced biotechnologies that biodiversity has its value added in the globalized market, which does not valorize living organisms, but the information they contain.