Identifying Challenges and Solutions in Cultural Heritage Adaptive Reuse through the Historic Urban Landscape Approach in Amsterdam

Cultural heritage drives and enables sustainable urban development. The adaptive reuse of cultural heritage creates values while prolonging the lifespan of heritage. Similarly, circular economy creates value while extending the useful life of materials and elements through their reuse. Existing studies on adaptive reuse challenges seldom focus on cultural heritage properties, and they are often identified through the engagement of a limited variety of stakeholders, as compared to the actors normally involved in adaptive reuse. Filling this gap, this paper provides a preliminary baseline of challenges faced by the city of Amsterdam from the perspective of various involved stakeholders, and suggests solutions to address them. The participants represented the public, private, knowledge, and third sectors. The methods used were the following: for data collection, a multidisciplinary workshop using the steps of the Historic Urban Landscape approach as an assessment framework applied to multiple scales on adaptive reuse, and for data analysis, manifest content analysis. The results expanded the range of challenges and solutions reported by previous literature on the adaptive reuse of cultural heritage in content and scale by identifying 61 themes—e.g., knowledge and civic engagement. Tools and stakeholders were also identified. These findings provide a reference for future practice, policymaking, and decision-making, facilitating the adaptive reuse of cultural heritage to capitalize on its potential for sustainable development and circular economy.

In what sense should we talk about the perception of other minds?

By means of spontaneous and unconscious imitation, an observer may be able to directly experience the inner states of another person because the observer and the observed share similar neural pathways. This discovery of a common neural basis reveals the correlative mechanisms through which the intentions of others are perceived. While analysing the implications of this discovery, this paper notes that the correlation does not provide a complete explanation of our understanding of other minds. Instead, the correlation comes into play only to a minimal degree. The paper also explores the epistemological characteristic of the knowledge harboured by other minds. That is, as a kind of private knowledge, the experience of other minds can help us arrive at a relatively consistent understanding of others and engage in communication with them through public expression and the description of mental states. However, it is impossible to truly understand other minds because conscious experience in the strict sense resides only in its owner, and the unique qualia emerging inside the subject cannot be directly observed from a third-person perspective. In this sense, the so-called perception of other minds is not suited to seeking a causal explanation of the ways in which others act, but for reading the meanings expressed by them in a given situation.

Size Matters, So Does Duration: The Interplay Between Offer Size and Offer Deadline

This paper investigates the interplay between offer size and offer deadline in a Stackelberg game involving a proposer and a responder. The proposer acts first by making an offer to the responder with a deadline, and the responder, concurrently following a continuous-time finite-horizon search for alternative offers, has to respond to the proposer’s offer by the deadline. Taking into account the responder’s reaction, the proposer’s optimal strategy can vary from an exploding offer—an offer that has to be accepted or rejected on the spot—to an offer with an extended deadline under different market conditions, proxied by characteristics of the alternative offer distribution. In particular, the proposer should offer an exploding offer when the alternative offer market is unfavorable to the responder, and the harsher it is, the smaller will be the offer size. By contrast, when the alternative offer market is favorable to the responder, the proposer can benefit from making a smaller (compared with the exploding offer) nonexploding offer, and the more favorable the market, the smaller will be the offer size and the longer the deadline. Our analysis is further extended to the case where the responder has private knowledge of the alternative offers’ arrival rate, and we characterize the optimal strategy for the proposer when she makes either a single offer or a menu of offers that serves as a self-selection mechanism. In the latter case, the optimal menu of offers can be implemented as a sign-up bonus type of contract. This paper was accepted by Manel Baucells, decision analysis.

Information Design and Strategic Communication

I study sender-receiver games where the receiver can disclose information to the sender by designing an information structure. I show that by secretly randomizing over information structures, the receiver can virtually attain her complete information payoff even for large conflicts of interest. The key insight is that private knowledge of the information structure induces truthful communication because it allows the receiver to cross-check the consistency of the sender’s report. (JEL C72, D82, D83)

The spinner innovation model: understanding the knowledge creation, knowledge transfer and innovation process in SMEs

PurposeThe objective of this article is to empirically study the influence of the characteristics of small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the processes of knowledge creation, knowledge transfer and innovation in conjunction with the utilisation of private and public knowledge (KM) in accordance with the “spinner innovation model” (SIM).Design/methodology/approachThe article deploys a sample of primary data generated by a questionnaire applied to the managers of hotel SMEs in Portugal. This involved the application of the covariance and multiple regression analytical methods.FindingsThe results demonstrate that some of the SME characteristics return significant impacts on private and public KM: the processes of knowledge creation, transfers of knowledge and innovation. The results also identify how private KM statistically predicts the processes of knowledge creation and transfer and innovation while public KM shapes and influences the creation of knowledge.Research limitations/implicationsAs with any other such study, the key limitation stems from the sample made up of 82 hotel directors, which represents only a low rate of response even though the project deployed all of the procedures available to avoid such an outcome.Practical implicationsThe SIM approach to the innovation process may assist strategic decision-makers to improve their tools and relations, avoid repeated working overlaps in existing processes as well as enabling more competitive approaches in terms of innovation.Social implicationsFurthermore, the responses ascertained reflect only the universe of study, conditioned by the context that produced them; hence, any generalisation of the results requires due caution.Originality/valueThis is the first study to empirically analyse the influence of the characteristics of SMEs over the processes of creating and transferring knowledge and innovation based upon applying the SIM and observing the extent of public and private knowledge in the hotel sector of Europe, more specifically, Portugal.

Attribution and Knowledge Creation Assemblages in Cybersecurity Politics

Attribution is central to cybersecurity politics. It establishes a link between technical occurrences and political consequences by reducing the uncertainty about who is behind an intrusion and what the likely intent was, ultimately creating cybersecurity “truths” with political consequences. In a critical security studies’ spirit, we purport that the “truth” about cyber-incidents that is established through attribution is constructed through a knowledge creation process that is neither value-free nor purely objective but built on assumptions and choices that make certain outcomes more or less likely. We conceptualize attribution as a knowledge creation process in three phases – incident creation, incident response, and public attribution – and embark on identifying who creates what kind of knowledge in this process, when they do it, and on what kind of assumptions and previous knowledge this is based on. Using assemblage theory as a backdrop, we highlight attribution as happening in complex networks that are never stable but always shifting, assembled, disassembled and reassembled in different contexts, with multiple functionalities. To illustrate, we use the intrusions at the US Office of Personnel Management (OPM) discovered in 2014 and 2015 with a focus on three factors: assumptions about threat actors, entanglement of public and private knowledge creation, and self-reflection about uncertainties. When it comes to attribution as knowledge creation processes, we critique the strong focus on existing enemy images as potentially crowding out knowledge on other threat actors, which in turn shapes the knowledge structure about security in cyberspace. One remedy, so we argue, is to bring in additional data collectors from the academic sector who can provide alternative interpretations based on independent knowledge creation processes.

A Fuzzy-Based Customisation of Healthcare Knowledge to Support Clinical Domestic Decisions for Chronically Ill Patients

The development of customised healthcare systems is becoming an important issue in the healthcare industry due to the rapid increase in the number of chronically ill patients. These systems aim to deliver effective care to patients having chronic diseases through customised services. However, knowledge bases need also to be customised since systems are confronted with huge amount of personalised and imprecise medical knowledge. Therefore, we propose in this paper a new system to customise medical knowledge according to progressive disease phases and pathological cases. A rule management process first customises rules according to the specificities of every disease phase, and then matches a private knowledge base with each enrolled patient. This base contains only the patient’s customised knowledge. After reasoning, another customisation process is carried out by the component, Result Manager, which ensures the validation of the system outcomes by the pathological case experts, before being recommended. This will better ensure the recommendation of the generated results to the non-professional users. In addition, Result Manager offers fuzzy semantic queries to the experts. In conclusion, our new decision support system makes medical aid decisions not only addressed to physicians, but also to chronically ill patients and persons regarded as caregivers.

Collaborative Barriers Among University - Industry - Policy (U-I-P) Entities on Environmental Matters: A Case Study in Sarawak, Malaysia

Realizing the importance of practicing environmental concern, it is needed to understand the tools used to tackle the issues. In this study, university – industry – policy (U-I-P) entities collaboration is a significant approach that was viewed to be the success factor towards the efforts of tackling environmental issues. Collaboration work, which involves different entities benefit in a way that pushes the entities to move towards shared objectives and goals which is to improve the environmental condition. However, although the significance of U-I-P entities collaboration was known and the linkages among U-I-P entities has started, there are still limited information on the practice of collaboration specifically on the U-I-P entities linkage structures on environmental matters in Sarawak. Thus, there is a need to identify the barriers and success factor in order to develop successful collaboration. This study addressed the gap through a mixed method of qualitative and quantitative approaches which the data were collected from 199 respondents based on a face to face interview using structured questionnaires in the major divisions of Sarawak. Drawing from a large scale of study, the study explores the status of collaboration and the barriers of collaboration in Sarawak. Findings indicated that cost, private knowledge and knowledge barrier to be a major hurdle that inhibit the development of collaboration. The assessment suggested that more efforts to increase awareness on collaboration be disseminated.