A study of web ecology: The use of trackers on pro science climate change and climate denier websites

2021 ◽  
pp. 146144482110674
Author(s):  
Neil M Alperstein
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
User Behavior ◽  
Regulatory Environment ◽  
Website Development ◽  
User Attention ◽  
Front Stage ◽  
Website Content

In this article, the website infrastructures of both pro science climate change and climate denier websites are examined. The focus is on the backstage of the website, defined as the use of widgets, ad trackers, beacons, and analytics and not the website content, or what might be described as the front stage. This research addresses questions about the presence and use of trackers within the commodification of user attention, the audience economy. The study concludes that organizations on both sides of the climate issue use similar strategies in monetizing their websites and tracking user behavior. Moreover, the infrastructure that is created among the platforms reflects the major role that big tech plays in developing an interconnected web of tracker technologies. While website transparency may remain an ideal, the study advocates for a responsible approach to website development, one that acknowledges the complexity of the issue within a stronger regulatory environment.

scholarly journals Development and usability testing of an educational mobile learning app for climate change and health impacts

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Elif Aydoğan ◽  
Ali Derya Atik ◽  
Ergin Şafak Dikmen ◽  
Figen Erkoç
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
User Behavior ◽  
Learning Experience ◽  
Mobile App ◽  
Health Impacts ◽  
Health Providers ◽  
Learning Context ◽  
Smart Learning Environment ◽  
Post Test ◽  
Climate Change And Health

Abstract Objective Mobile applications, social media platforms are changing Internet user behavior; creating a new era of education in a connected world. We have previously reported training needs of health providers in the climate change. Aim is to develop and test an Android® Mobile app as an effective smart learning environment for climate change health impacts. Materials and methods The quasi-experimental design method was used in five phases: easy-to-reach, rich content Mobile app design and development for Android® operating system, scale development, finalizing scales to be used, implementation, data collection, analysis. Dependent t-test of pre-test and post-test awareness scores was analyzed. Usability and satisfaction were assessed with two scales; quantitative data with descriptive statistics. Results The developed Mobile app was effective in enhancing students’ learning experience, and well-received in terms of adopting and using such technology for educational purposes. Pre-test and post-test scores different statistically (p<0.05); increasing participants’ awareness level and were satisfied. Conclusion We conclude that our Mobile app, m-learning project, is successfully incorporated into the learning context; when tested, raised awareness about climate change and health effects for the public. To our knowledge, no currently existing tool to provide new mobile application for climate change education and promote awareness exists.

scholarly journals The GJU Website Development Process and Best Practices

2021 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-48
Author(s):  
Feras Al-Hawari ◽  
Mai Al-Zu'bi ◽  
Hala Barham ◽  
Wael Sararhah
Keyword(s):  
Best Practices ◽  
Development Process ◽  
Maintenance Phase ◽  
Marketing Channel ◽  
Design Development ◽  
Website Development ◽  
Development Framework ◽  
Survey Results ◽  
Different Characteristics ◽  
Website Content

This paper introduces a website development process comprised of six phases: requirements, content, design, development, launch, and maintenance. In this context, a website is considered the primary marketing channel for a university and has different characteristics than web-portals. In the content phase, a flat content structure with fielded content types has been defined to make the website content-rich and intuitive to navigate. In the design phase, reusable page templates and engaging UI components were proposed to improve website appearance, usability, and responsiveness. In the development phase, the development framework, technology stack, and development steps to build non-interactive websites have been suggested. Best practices to test, secure, and monitor the website before launching it were also covered in the launch phase. Hosting a website in-house requires addressing issues like quality assurance and system administration in the maintenance phase. Yet, the analytics reports and survey results showed that the suggested process enabled producing a high-quality website.

scholarly journals The future of pastoral farming in a changing climate

2009 ◽  
pp. 69-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.A. Palmer
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Public Policy ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
Climatic Conditions ◽  
Anthropogenic Climate Change ◽  
Regulatory Environment ◽  
Market Forces ◽  
Changing Climate ◽  
History Of ◽  
Pastoral Farming

Pastoral farming in New Zealand has always been a dynamic and uncertain business. Climatic conditions, market forces and the regulatory environment confronting pastoral farmers each have a long history of change, often rapidly and markedly. It is not surprising then that pastoral farmers are a resilient bunch. It is also not surprising that in respect of anthropogenic climate change some farmers are sceptical of what they see as another passing fashion in science, public policy and environmentalism - change to be weathered.

Environmental bargaining in Australia

2019 ◽  
Vol 61 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-104 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raymond Markey ◽  
Joseph McIvor
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Collective Bargaining ◽  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
Regulatory Environment ◽  
Emissions Reduction ◽  
Employment Relations ◽  
Or Management ◽  
Collective Agreements ◽  
Strategic Initiatives

An emerging body of research addresses the link between environmental issues, especially climate change, and employment relations. In this article, we examine the ways in which employment relations actors are addressing climate change, particularly focusing on collective bargaining. We begin by surveying the literature linking climate change and employment relations, especially analysing union strategies in this sphere, and develop a conceptual framework linking these threads. We then examine the incidence and content of collective enterprise bargaining over environmental issues in Australia for 2011–2016, applying and adapting Goods' concepts of embedded institutional and voluntary multilateral approaches. The former inserts environmental commitments into formal collective agreements; the latter involves unions and workers more directly in developing emissions-reduction activities in the workplace. We address the potential links between these and the different actors (unions or management) that drive them. We find that environmental clauses in Australian agreements are rare, and that they are as likely to be driven by management as by unions. The institutional, organisational, and particularly the regulatory environment seem responsible. However, exceptions – notably in universities – provide exemplars for substantial, class-based union agency. We also find that collective bargaining may facilitate more ongoing, strategic initiatives of the voluntary multilateral type.

scholarly journals Subjective and Objective User Behavior Disparity: Towards Balanced Visual Design and Color Adjustment

Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (24) ◽  
pp. 8502
Author(s):  
Anna Lewandowska ◽  
Agnieszka Olejnik-Krugly ◽  
Jarosław Jankowski ◽  
Malwina Dziśko
Keyword(s):  
User Experience ◽  
User Behavior ◽  
User Preferences ◽  
Eye Tracker ◽  
User Friendliness ◽  
Visual Objects ◽  
Trade Offs ◽  
User Attention ◽  
Accessibility Guidelines ◽  
Color Combinations

Interactive environments create endless possibilities for the design of websites, games, online platforms, and mobile applications. Their visual aspects and functional characteristics influence the user experience. Depending on the project, the purpose of the environment can be oriented toward marketing targets, user experience, or accessibility. Often, these conflicting aspects should be integrated within a single project, and a search for trade-offs is needed. One of these conflicts involves a disparity in user behavior concerning declared preferences and real observed activity in terms of visual attention. Taking into account accessibility guidelines (WCAG) further complicates the problem. In our study, we focused on the analysis of color combinations and their contrast in terms of user-friendliness; visual intensity, which is important for attracting user attention; and recommendations from the Web Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG). We took up the challenge to reduce the disparity between user preferences and WCAG contrast, on one hand, and user natural behavior registered with an eye-tracker, on the other. However, we left the choice of what is more important—human conscious reaction or objective user behavior results—to the designer. The former corresponds to user-friendliness, while the latter, visual intensity, is consistent with marketing expectations. The results show that the ranking of visual objects characterized by different levels of contrast differs when considering the perspectives of user experience, commercial goals, and objective recording. We also propose an interactive tool with the possibility of assigning weights to each criterion to generate a ranking of objects.

scholarly journals Countries’ regulatory context and voluntary carbon disclosures

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 383-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
Antonio J. Mateo-Márquez ◽  
José M. González-González ◽  
Constancio Zamora-Ramírez
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Design Methodology ◽  
Regulatory Environment ◽  
Tobit Regression ◽  
Voluntary Reporting ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Institutional Contexts ◽  
Analyse Data ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Practical Implications

Purpose This study aims to analyse the relationship between countries’ regulatory context and voluntary carbon disclosures. To date, little attention has been paid to how specific climate change-related regulation influences companies’ climate change disclosures, especially voluntary carbon reporting. Design/methodology/approach The New Institutional Sociology perspective has been adopted to examine the pressure of a country’s climate change regulation on voluntary carbon reporting. This research uses Tobit regression to analyse data from 2,183 companies in 12 countries that were invited to respond to the Carbon Disclosure Project (CDP) questionnaire in 2015. Findings The results show that countries’ specific climate change-related regulation does influence both the participation of its companies in the CDP and their quality, as measured by the CDP disclosure score. Research limitations/implications The sample is restricted to 12 countries’ regulatory environment. Thus, caution should be exercised when generalising the results to other institutional contexts. Practical implications The results are of use to regulators and policymakers to better understand how specific climate change-related regulation influences voluntary carbon disclosure. Investors may also benefit from this research, as it shows which institutional contexts present greater regulatory stringency and how companies in more stringent environments take advantage of synergy to disclose high-quality carbon information. Social implications By linking regulatory and voluntary reporting, this study sheds light on how companies use voluntary carbon reporting to adapt to social expectations generated in their institutional context. Originality/value This is the first research that considers specific climate change-related regulation in the study of voluntary carbon disclosures.

Averting robo-bees: why free-flying robotic bees are a bad idea

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 723-729
Author(s):  
Roslyn Gleadow ◽  
Jim Hanan ◽  
Alan Dorin
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Computer Simulation ◽  
Food Security ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Plant Interactions ◽  
Plant Insect Interactions ◽  
Native Habitat ◽  
Insect Pollinators ◽  
Insect Interactions

Food security and the sustainability of native ecosystems depends on plant-insect interactions in countless ways. Recently reported rapid and immense declines in insect numbers due to climate change, the use of pesticides and herbicides, the introduction of agricultural monocultures, and the destruction of insect native habitat, are all potential contributors to this grave situation. Some researchers are working towards a future where natural insect pollinators might be replaced with free-flying robotic bees, an ecologically problematic proposal. We argue instead that creating environments that are friendly to bees and exploring the use of other species for pollination and bio-control, particularly in non-European countries, are more ecologically sound approaches. The computer simulation of insect-plant interactions is a far more measured application of technology that may assist in managing, or averting, ‘Insect Armageddon' from both practical and ethical viewpoints.

Modelling ecosystem adaptation and dangerous rates of global warming

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-231 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Millington ◽  
Peter M. Cox ◽  
Jonathan R. Moore ◽  
Gabriel Yvon-Durocher
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Global Warming ◽  
Diffusion Rate ◽  
Individual Species ◽  
Genetic Evolution ◽  
Rates Of Change ◽  
Rapid Climate Change ◽  
Warming Climate ◽  
Intraspecies Competition ◽  
High Trait

Abstract We are in a period of relatively rapid climate change. This poses challenges for individual species and threatens the ecosystem services that humanity relies upon. Temperature is a key stressor. In a warming climate, individual organisms may be able to shift their thermal optima through phenotypic plasticity. However, such plasticity is unlikely to be sufficient over the coming centuries. Resilience to warming will also depend on how fast the distribution of traits that define a species can adapt through other methods, in particular through redistribution of the abundance of variants within the population and through genetic evolution. In this paper, we use a simple theoretical ‘trait diffusion’ model to explore how the resilience of a given species to climate change depends on the initial trait diversity (biodiversity), the trait diffusion rate (mutation rate), and the lifetime of the organism. We estimate theoretical dangerous rates of continuous global warming that would exceed the ability of a species to adapt through trait diffusion, and therefore lead to a collapse in the overall productivity of the species. As the rate of adaptation through intraspecies competition and genetic evolution decreases with species lifetime, we find critical rates of change that also depend fundamentally on lifetime. Dangerous rates of warming vary from 1°C per lifetime (at low trait diffusion rate) to 8°C per lifetime (at high trait diffusion rate). We conclude that rapid climate change is liable to favour short-lived organisms (e.g. microbes) rather than longer-lived organisms (e.g. trees).

Climate change and breeding success: decline of the capercaillie in Scotland

2001 ◽  
Vol 70 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Moss ◽  
James Oswald ◽  
David Baines
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Breeding Success
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