Incoming Stream Research Articles

Tackling land’s ‘stubborn materiality’: the interplay of imaginaries, data and digital technologies within farmland assetization

The nature of farming is – still – an essentially biological, and thus volatile, system, which poses substantial challenges to its integration into financialized capitalism. Financial investors often seek stability and predictability of returns that are hardly compatible with agriculture – but which are increasingly seen as achievable through data and digital farming technologies. This paper investigates how farmland investment brokers engage with, perceive, and produce farming data for their investors within a co-constructive process. Tackling land’s ‘stubborn materiality’ for investment, I argue, has material and immaterial components: it includes the re-imagination of farming as a financial asset that delivers reliable income streams for investors; and the re-engineering of farmland’s concrete materialities with digital farming technologies. Farmland investment brokers develop investor-suitable farmland imaginaries, underpinned by storytelling as well as the calculative ‘evidence’ of (digital) data. At the same time, digital technologies have become a key tool for transforming farms into ‘investment grade assets’ endowed with the rich data on farm performance and financial returns requested by investors. I conclude that the assetization and digitization of farmland need to be seen as closely intertwined and mutually reinforcing processes and identify key areas for future research on this intersection.

Prospects for the bioeconomy in achieving a Just Transition: perspectives from Irish beef farmers on future pathways

Many beef farm systems in Irish and some global contexts have economic and environmental traits that threaten their future sustainability. In this context, the concept of Just Transition for economically vulnerable agricultural sectors is of interest, and, in particular, the bioeconomy is identified as potentially providing new sustainable income streams for farmers. This paper presents an analysis of six case-study beef farmers in Ireland, undertaken using a biographic narrative method. It examines the subjective experiences of beef farmers and their perspectives towards the bioeconomy as an option for farm diversification and its potential to deliver a Just Transition. The narrative data were analysed using Michel Foucault's framework of power, which was applied to be attentive to how existing normative knowledges, discourses, and subjectivities intersect with nascent concepts such as the bioeconomy and Just Transition. Through in-depth case-studies of beef farmers, we aim to understand how and whether they are likely to become involved in the bioeconomy. Our analysis shows that the case-study farmers are mainly concerned about power imbalances in beef value chains. Most participants were unfamiliar with the bioeconomy, which currently primarily involves a limited number of dairy farmers in Ireland. However, the bioeconomy was viewed by t case-study farmers as a development that could potentially generate new income streams for farmers. Several factors were identified as contextually relevant to achieving that potential. Collaborative bodies such as cooperatives or Producer Organisations were viewed as influential in enhancing the positioning of farmers within value chains and facilitating the inclusion of beef farmers in bioeconomy activities. Addressing the root causes of the economic vulnerability of beef farming was also identified by case-study farmers as necessary for advancing the bioeconomy; otherwise, it was perceived, existing power imbalances would be replicated.

An online and highly-scalable streaming platform for filtering trolls with transfer learning

The internet has reached a mature stage of development, and Online Social Media (OSM) platforms such as Twitter and Facebook have become vital channels for public communication and discussion on matters of public interest. However, these platforms are often plagued by improper statements or content, propagated by anonymous users and trolls, which negatively impact both the platforms and their users. Existing methods for dealing with inappropriate information rely on (semi)-manual offline assessments, which do not fully account for the streaming nature of OSM feeds. In this paper, we implement a robust and decoupled system that considers social media data as streaming data. With a publisher and consumer model, our system can process more than 179 MB of data per second with only 166.3 ms latency using Apache Kafka. Accordingly, we deploy a well-trained transfer learning model to classify incoming data streams, with an accuracy of 0.836. Our proposed architecture has the potential to assist online communities in developing more constructive and flawless OSM platforms. We believe that our contribution will help address the challenges associated with improper content on OSM platforms and pave the way for the development of more effective and efficient solutions.

Evolution of risk aversion over five years after a major natural disaster

The impact of exposure to a major unanticipated natural disaster on the evolution of survivors’ attitudes toward risk is examined, exploiting plausibly exogenous variation in exposure to the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami in combination with rich population-representative longitudinal survey data spanning the five years after the tsunami. Respondents chose among pairs of hypothetical income streams. Those directly exposed to the tsunami made choices consistent with greater willingness to take on risk relative to those not directly exposed to the tsunami. These differences are short-lived: starting a year later, there is no evidence of differences in willingness to take on risk between the two groups. These conclusions hold for tsunami-related exposures measured at the individual and community level. Apparently, tsunami survivors were inclined to assume greater financial risk in the short-term while rebuilding their lives after the disaster.

Dwell Regions: Generalized Stay Regions for Streaming and Archival Trajectory Data

A region ℛ is a dwell region for a moving objectOif, given a threshold distancerqand duration τq, every point of ℛ remains within distancerqfromOfor at least time τq. Points within ℛ are likely to be of interest toO, so identification of dwell regions has applications such as monitoring and surveillance. We first present a logarithmic-time online algorithm to find dwell regions in an incoming stream of object positions. Our method maintains the upper and lower bounds for the radius of the smallest circle enclosing the object positions, thereby greatly reducing the number of trajectory points needed to evaluate the query. It approximates the radius of the smallest circle enclosing a given subtrajectory within an arbitrarily small user-defined factor and is also able to efficiently answer decision queries asking whether or not a dwell region exists. For the offline version of the dwell region problem, we first extend our online approach to develop the ρ-Index, which indexes subtrajectories using query radius ranges. We then refine this approach to obtain the τ-Index, which indexes subtrajectories using both query radius ranges and dwell durations. Our experiments using both real-world and synthetic datasets show that the online approach can scale up to hundreds of thousands of moving objects. For archived trajectories, our indexing approaches speed up queries by many orders of magnitude.

Making a Living in the Creator Economy: A Large-Scale Study of Linking on YouTube

This article explores monetization and networking strategies within the consolidating creator economy. Through a large-scale study of linking practices on YouTube, we investigate how creators seek to build their online presence across multiple platforms and widen their income streams. In particular, we build on a near-complete sample of 153,000 “elite” YouTube channels with at least 100,000 subscribers, retrieved at the end of 2019, and investigate the URLs found in 137 million video descriptions to analyze traces of these strategies. We first situate our study within relevant literature around the creator economy, the role of platforms, and issues such as social capital building and economic precarity. We then outline our data and analytical approach, followed by a presentation of our findings. The article finishes with a discussion on how monetization and networking strategies via placing URLs in video descriptions have become more important over time, but also differ substantially between channel sizes, content categories, and geographic locations. Our empirical analysis shows that YouTube, as a highly unequal platformed media system, thrives on the economic pressures it exerts on its creators.

METHOD FOR INCREASING THE UNIFORMITY OF THE GAS-AIR MIXTURE IN INTERNAL COMBUSTION TRANSPORT ENGINES

Increasing the uniformity of the gas-air mixture in gas transport engines makes it possible to ensure more complete combustion of fuel, reduce its specific fuel consumption and exhaust gas toxicity. There are known ways to increase uniformity, but there is no generalization of their principles and applicability for various engines. The article analyzes the existing methods and identifies their shortcomings. A method has been developed to increase the uniformity of the gas-air mixture in gas transport engines by controlling the position of the gas fuel jet in the incoming air stream. The dependence for controlling the position of the gas jet in the air flow is described. The results of experiments performed by means of computer modeling with central and distributed gas supply with different gas and air pressures are analyzed. During the experiments, the coefficient of uniformity of the gas-air mixture was determined. Separately, the depth of penetration of the gas fuel jet into the incoming air stream is estimated. Based on the simulation results, the effectiveness of the method was justified.
 Purpose. Development of a method for increasing the uniformity of the gas-air mixture in internal combustion transport engines.
 Methodology. Modeling of the movement of a methane jet in an air stream by the finite element method was used in the work.
 Results. A method for increasing the uniformity of the gas-air mixture using the inlet pressure of the gas as the main variable parameter is formulated and justified.
 Practical implications. The obtained results should be used to improve the efficiency and environmental friendliness of gas transport engines.

Chunking up speech in real time: linguistic predictors and cognitive constraints

AbstractThere have been some suggestions in linguistics and cognitive science that humans process continuous speech by routinely chunking it up into smaller units. The nature of the process is open to debate, which is complicated by the apparent existence of two entirely different chunking processes, both of which seem to be warranted by the limitations of working memory. To overcome them, humans seem to both combine items into larger units for future retrieval (usage-based chunking), and partition incoming streams into temporal groups (perceptual chunking). To determine linguistic properties and cognitive constraints of perceptual chunking, most previous research has employed short-constructed stimuli modeled on written language. In contrast, we presented linguistically naïve listeners with excerpts of natural speech from corpora and collected their intuitive perceptions of chunk boundaries. We then used mixed-effects logistic regression models to find out to what extent pauses, prosody, syntax, chunk duration, and surprisal predict chunk boundary perception. The results showed that all cues were important, suggesting cue degeneracy, but with substantial variation across listeners and speech excerpts. Chunk duration had a strong effect, supporting the cognitive constraint hypothesis. The direction of the surprisal effect supported the distinction between perceptual and usage-based chunking.

Dynamic Load Balancing in Stream Processing Pipelines Containing Stream-Static Joins

Data stream processing systems are used to continuously run mission-critical applications for real-time monitoring and alerting. These systems require high throughput and low latency to process incoming data streams in real time. However, changes in the distribution of incoming data streams over time can cause partition skew, which is defined as an unequal distribution of data partitions among workers, resulting in sub-optimal processing due to an unbalanced load. This paper presents the first solution designed specifically to address partition skew in the context of joining streaming and static data. Our solution uses state-of-the-art principles to monitor processing load, detect load imbalance, and dynamically redistribute partitions, to achieve optimal load balance. To accomplish this, our solution leverages the collocation of streaming and static data, while considering the processing load of the join and the subsequent stream processing operations. Finally, we present the results of an experimental evaluation, in which we compared the throughput and latency of four stream processing pipelines containing such a join. The results show that our solution achieved significantly higher throughput and lower latency than the competing approaches.

Media diversification: Redefining reliance on advertising revenue and autonomy implications

The search for a media funding model has attracted scholarly attention over the years due to the growing strategic importance of the media in spearheading critical public debates in contemporary societies. With the recent global financial and economic turmoil, it has become imperative that the search for funding model continues, especially for a developing country like Ghana where there is limited body of literature on the subject without sacrificing its global significance. On the premise that media should be strengthened financially to survive in a competitive market to better execute its public mandate functions, media businesses, particularly newspapers, need to explore revenue generation sources to ensure that they do not lean on a lone income stream. The present study examines the extent to which newspapers have diversified into non-media ventures and argues that by this funding approach, print firms have a better chance of sustaining their businesses, publications and achieving autonomy. Overall, this work shows that majority of the print firms in Ghana have not diversified at all, the few diversified ones are within the media industry and only Daily Graphic has invested into non-media ventures to generate revenue.

Passive dynamics regulates aperiodic transitions in flapping wing systems.

Natural and artificial flapping wing flyers generally do not exhibit chaos or aperiodic dynamic modes, though several experimental and numerical studies with canonical models of flapping foils have reported inevitable chaotic transition at high ranges of dynamic plunge velocity ( ). Here we considered the idealized case of a pitching-plunging flapping foil and numerically investigated the effects of passive pitching dynamics on the fluid forces and dynamical states, and compared it with a fully actuated wing. We found that in comparison to fully actuated foils, aperiodic transition can be avoided even for high when passive oscillations are allowed. Passive pitching modulated the relative foil orientation with respect to the incoming free stream to maintain a lower effective angle-of-attack throughout the stroke and reduced the leading-edge-vortex (LEV) strength. Absence of aperiodic triggers such as flow separation and strong LEVs keep the wake periodic, and chaotic transition is averted. In the presence of fluctuating inflow conditions, passive pitching attenuated the fluid loads experienced by the airfoil thus improving the wing's gust mitigating potential. These findings highlight the favorable properties of passive dynamics in regularizing aerodynamic loads on flapping wing systems and presents viable solutions for artificial flying platforms.

THE TAXATION OF IMAGE RIGHTS IN SOUTH AFRICA: VALIDITY OF TAX MINIMISATION SCHEMES

Sport undeniably plays a major role in society today. Over the years, ithas developed into n free-standing industry and its players have becomeincreasingly valuable and earn income both on and off the field. Thisarticle addresses the income generated by sport stars off the field ofplay through the exploitation of their ‘image rights’. The use ofsomeone’s image rights can be explained as the practice ofappropriating someone’s personality. In modern society, people havebecome transfixed by sport stars. This has led to the image rights ofindividual sport stars such as Lionel Messi and Cristiano Ronaldo tobecome commodities exploited by their clubs and other third parties toenhance brand images and promote the sale of products.1 This use ofthe image rights of celebrities generates a whole new source of incomefor these sport stars. Due to the relatively high amounts of incomereceived for the use of a sport star’s image, these stars may be temptedto enter into creative schemes in an attempt to reduce high taxes leviedagainst these streams of income. The practice of the commercialexploitation of a sport star’s image rights is a relatively new development in South Africa and is not yet recognised to the same extent as in other jurisdictions, such as the UK and Spain. This article examines the existing South African sport, intellectual property, andtax laws governing image rights and specifically analyses whether SouthAfrica is sufficiently equipped, under tax legislation, to address theseminimisation schemes aimed at reducing the tax liability arising from aSouth African sport star’s image rights.

The evolution of Early Music

Early Music has evolved. It was launched by John Thomson as ‘A new quarterly devoted to medieval, Renaissance and Baroque music’. The invitation to contribute to a celebration of 50 years of Early Music prompted me to look back at the very first issue, January 1973, a single stapled gathering with a total of 64 pages, fully ten of which were devoted to a listing by location of early music performers (mostly teachers and amateurs, with addresses and phone numbers) who might want to get together. I counted 36 advertisements, mostly for instruments and sheet music, an important income stream in pre-internet days. There was a check-list of recordings and a concert diary. That issue contained five articles of three to seven pages each, all on some aspect of performance, three of them on instruments and instrument-makers. It was directed very specifically towards performers and those concerned with instruments and performance practice. The July 1974 issue, typically, included an article by Bernard Thomas: ‘Playing the crumhorn: first steps’. An early editorial by John Thomson was eager that the journal should not be intimidating to amateurs, seeing its primary mission as the dissemination of information about resources and particularly about instruments—makers, restoration, playing techniques, prices and so on—to the community of amateur performers internationally. His editorial in January 1975 promised a consumer’s guide to instruments. The early issues always included a pull-out octavo music supplement—in the first issue a Busnoys song edited by Howard Mayer Brown, a strong supporter of the venture, and a regular contributor.

Not WEIRD at all! Towards More Pluralistic Economies and Sustainable Livelihoods

Sustainability discourses are dominated by Western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic (WEIRD) perspectives. Critics call for remedies to patriarchy, capitalism, and colonialism; and for work that is inclusive of women, non-market influences, and epistemologies of the global South. Focusing on women's work, this paper interrogates the epistemic and practical injustices of geography and gender. The empirical domain is a middle-income economy, offering insight from the space between WEIRD and subsistence extremes. 15 case studies of Malay female micro-entrepreneurs draw on interview, observational and secondary data, tracing the effects of market formalization on market actors. Despite subordinate social status, the women provide reliable income streams for their families. However, their livelihoods are threatened by rapidly formalizing markets. Market formalization crowds out the small and diverse in favor of the large and multinational. To address that problem, a pro-social systems view is required, based on pluralistic conceptions of economies and markets. Drawing on Gibson-Graham's diverse economies perspective we derive 12 propositions supporting sustainable livelihoods. Sustainable livelihoods support quality of life and wellbeing, are embedded in less damaging and more inclusive (vs patriarchal, colonial and capitalistic) provisioning systems, in turn embedded in epistemologies that are reflexively conscious of power dynamics and the WEIRD hegemony. In line with the paradoxes and tensions in sustainability thinking we call for pluralism: Conscious acceptance of all economic approaches, formal and informal, state and non-state, global and local, capitalist and planned; with an emphasis on physical, emotional and social well-being, self-determination, diversity, health, and happiness for the many rather than wealth for the few.

A Game-Theoretic Approach for Rendering Immersive Experiences in the Metaverse

The metaverse is an upcoming computing paradigm aiming towards blending reality seamlessly with the artificially generated 3D worlds of deep cyberspace. This giant interactive mesh of three-dimensional reconstructed realms has recently received tremendous attention from both an academic and commercial point of view owing to the curiosity instilled by its vast possible use cases. Every virtual world in the metaverse is controlled and maintained by a virtual service provider (VSP). Interconnected clusters of LiDAR sensors act as a feeder network to these VSPs which then process the data and reconstruct the best quality immersive environment possible. These data can then be leveraged to provide users with highly targeted virtual services by building upon the concept of digital twins (DTs) representing digital analogs of real-world items owned by parties that create and establish the communication channels connecting the DTs to their real-world counterparts. Logically, DTs represent data on servers where postprocessing can be shared easily across VSPs, giving rise to new marketplaces and economic frontiers. This paper presents a dynamic and distributed framework to enable high-quality reconstructions based on incoming data streams from sensors as well as to allow for the optimal allocation of VSPs to users. The optimal synchronization intensity control problem between the available VSPs and the feeder network is modeled using a simultaneous differential game, while the allocation of VSPs to users is modeled using a preference-based game-theoretic approach, where the users give strict preferences over the available VSPs.

A Test for the Welfare-Partnership: Austria’s Nonprofit Human Service Organizations in Times of Covid-19

ABSTRACT The pandemic has impeded Austrian NPHSOs on multiple levels: service delivery, income streams, costs, and human resources. To analyze the consequences, we tackle two questions: How has the neo-corporatist welfare-partnership between the government and NPHSOs passed this stress-test? What are the potential effects on the overall composition of the sector? Theoretically, we draw on social origins theory to explain the welfare-partnership in Vienna. Empirically, we analyze online-survey-data and interviews with NPHSO-executives from 2021. The results indicate that Vienna’s welfare-partnership has passed this stress-test successfully, but overall in favor of large NPHSOs, thus forwarding concentration in the sector.

Создание внутренних источников экономического развития

The article reveals the specifics of the economic model of Russia, which has been formed over thirty years after the reforms of the 90s. The article addresses the new reality associated with challenges and threats to the national economy. Modern geopolitical events actualize the problem of stability and efficiency of the existing Russian economic model. The article reveals two main approaches to assessing the current model. According to the first approach, a normal market economy has been formed in Russia over thirty years, and further development consists in improving market institutions and following the vector laid down by the reforms of the 1990s: “doliberalization”, including the “second wave of privatization”. The second approach is the opposite of the first. On the basis of the author’s calculations, a deep failure in economic growth and development, which arose as a result of the radical reforms of the 1990s, is substantiated. The proposition about the “failure of private property” has been put forward and proved on the basis of the concrete material of Russian reforms. Implementing a systematic approach in their study, the authors propose significant changes in the foundations of the Russian economic model. Analyzing the strategic goal of technological development based on the principles of security and self-sufficiency, put forward at the SPIEF on June 17, 2022 by the President of the Russian Federation V.V. Putin, the authors come to the conclusion that without the active and purposeful participation of the state, this task cannot be solved, just as it has not been solved for thirty years. The authors believe that the task set is comparable in scale and complexity to the industrialization of the 1930s. Its solution requires: the development of a comprehensive and promising program of scientific and technological development of the country; strategic planning for the development of the national economy at the expense of the state budget and indicative planning for private investment using targeted incentives. It also proposes a redistribution of income streams with the transformation of foreign “leaks” into domestic “injections”.

STRATEGIES THROUGHOUT THE DILEMMA: HIGHER EDUCATION INSTITUTION’S INCOME GENERATING PRACTICES AS BASIS FOR EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT ASSESSMENT

Income-generating enterprises help to combat issues like poverty, unemployment, and a lack of employment possibilities. State colleges are accustomed with using several income streams to generate income and solve budget gaps. The capacity of SUCs to generate additional sources of funding is increased through their involvement in income-generating projects and businesses. The external environment of Quirino State University's income enterprises is the subject of this study's analysis of various recognized aspects. The study employs a quantitative and qualitative data collection approach and a descriptive-evaluative research methodology. Through comparative external factor analysis and strategic factor analysis, the identified results were quantified and assessed. The study found that major issues, concerns, and constraints had a significant impact on IGE's performance. The majority of these issues originated from production and marketing management because of substandard record-keeping, insufficient infrastructure and facility maintenance, and a dearth of promotional strategies, all of which led to the manifestation of low profit and net loss. The study also suggests that the university adjust and adopt competitive strategies to address identified external environmental factors. Finally, this study made the suggestion that addressing external environmental factors with highly negative impacts be given priority by the IGE's management, together with the implementation of rules and regulations to create precise operational policies.

Global economic meltdown and healthcare financing in Ghana.

Global economic meltdown and healthcare financing in Ghana.

Revenue diversification strategies of online news organisations: subscriptions and memberships

The funding model crisis for newspapers is a matter of public concern; and it is not only a business issue, but also a social and political one, as news organisations are considered to have an irreplaceable function in democratic systems. Technological and social changes have transformed the business model of news organisations so that, in a digital scenario with a strong competition for consumers’ attention, they have had to diversify their portfolio of income streams. In such a context, this study analyses the state of the diversification of revenue streams in the Spanish digital media market, using the available data from the total universe of digital media in the country. The article focusses on the two most common revenue streams related to user payment -subscriptions and memberships- and analyses the importance of four variables in this diversification of revenue strategies: their nature (digital native versus traditional), thematic scope (general versus specialised), territorial scope (local versus national), and the type of organisation that promotes it (traditional, new, or independent groups). The data obtained suggest that there are no universal formulae in the implementation of payment models for Spanish digital media. Specifically, there are significant differences in the revenue models between native and non-native digital media. Thus, payment strategies are more prevalent among non-native digital media than among native media. Furthermore, the non-native media that have opted for paid models tend to diversify their sources of income more than the non-native ones based on free model. Additionally, data show that paywalls and memberships are more usual among specialised non-native digital media and generalist native outlets. Also, payments are more often required by local and regional media than national outlets. From the ownership point of view, although the main Spanish media corporations are developing their revenue models, the pay-per-content model is also quite extended among organisations, associations, and foundations not linked with the traditional publishing groups. This study, due to its exhaustiveness, dimensions, and novelty, identifies in detail the current state of the implementation of the pay model for digital media in Spain, which can help and facilitate media managers in their decision-making.