Assessment of soil erosion and soil conservation practices in Angereb watershed, Ethiopia: Technological and land user context

Soil conservation technologies that fit well to local scale and are acceptable to land users are increasingly needed. To achieve this at small-holder farm level, there is a need for an understanding of specific erosion processes and indicators, the land users’ knowledge and their willingness, ability and possibilities to respond to the respective problems to decide on control options. This study was carried out to assess local erosion and performance of earlier introduced conservation terraces from both technological and land users’ points of view. The study was conducted during July to August 2008 at Angereb watershed on 58 farm plots from three selected case-study catchments. Participatory erosion assessment and evaluation were implemented along with direct field measurement procedures. Our focus was to involve the land users in the action research to explore with them the effectiveness of existing conservation measures against the erosion hazard. Terrace characteristics measured and evaluated against the terrace implementation guideline of Hurni (1986). The long-term consequences of seasonal erosion indicators had often not been known and noticed by farmers. The cause and effect relationships of the erosion indicators and conservation measures have shown the limitations and gaps to be addressed towards sustainable erosion control strategies. Less effective erosion control has been observed and participants have believed the gaps are to be the result of lack of landusers’ genuine participation. The results of both local erosion observation and assessment of conservation efficacy using different aspects show the need to promote approaches for erosion evaluation and planning of interventions by the farmers themselves. This paper describes the importance of human factor involving in the empirical erosion assessment methods towards sustainable soil conservation.

Synergistic User <-> Context Analytics

Various avours of a new research field on (socio-)physical or personal analytics have emerged, with the goal of deriving semantically-rich insights from people's low-level physical sensing combined with their (online) social interactions. In this paper, we argue for more comprehensive data sources, including environmental (e.g. weather, infrastructure) and application-specific data, to better capture the interactions between users and their context, in addition to those among users. To illustrate our proposed concept of synergistic user <-> context analytics, we first provide some example use cases. Then, we present our ongoing work towards a synergistic analytics platform: a testbed, based on mobile crowdsensing and the Internet of Things (IoT), a data model for representing the different sources of data and their connections, and a prediction engine for analyzing the data and producing insights.

Online privacy concerns and legal assurance: a user perspective

Since the emergence of the Internet and Social Media, privacy concerns and need for regulation in this area have been a frequent subject on the agenda of numerous stakeholders and policy-makers worldwide. Contributing to this debate, this paper builds on the responses of 553 Internet users to uncover users’ current privacy concerns and their attitudes towards legal assurances in this context. Our findings suggest that users have a complex attitude towards these issues. While they express strong concerns about privacy when asked directly, they often have difficulties formulating the exact nature of these concerns. In the Facebook context, Facebook itself is often mentioned as the primary source of threat, closely followed by marketing organizations. Users feel ill-protected by existing legal framework, especially when using Social Networking Sites. Reasons include common beliefs that the law is unable to address complexities of the Internet; local character of laws; possibilities to disregard the law, particularly since enforcement is difficult. Overall, positive changes in legal framework are desirable, with many respondents willing to pay more in taxes to ensure progress in this area.

Context-aware Adaptation Mechanism for Video Dissemination over Flying Ad-Hoc Networks

The user experience on watching live video se- quences transmitted over a Flying Ad-Hoc Networks (FANETs) must be considered to drop packets in overloaded queues, in scenarios with high buffer overflow and packet loss rate. In this paper, we introduce a context-aware adaptation mechanism to manage overloaded buffers. More specifically, we propose a utility function to compute the dropping probability of each packet in overloaded queues based on video context information, such as frame importance, packet deadline, and sensing relevance. In this way, the proposed mechanism drops the packet that adds the minimum video distortion. Simulation evaluation shows that the proposed adaptation mechanism provides real-time multimedia dissemination with QoE support in a multi-hop, multi-flow, and mobile network environments.