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An ever-growing body of knowledge demonstrates the correlation among real-world phenomena and search query data issued on Google, as showed in the literature survey introduced in the following. The purpose of this paper is to introduce a pipeline, implemented as a web service, which, starting with recent Google Trends, allows a decision maker to monitor Twitter’s sentiment regarding these trends, enabling users to choose geographic areas for their monitors. In addition to the positive/negative sentiments about Google Trends, the pipeline offers the ability to view, on the same dashboard, the emotions that Google Trends triggers in the Twitter population. Such a set of tools, allows, as a whole, monitoring real-time on Twitter the feelings about Google Trends that would otherwise only fall into search statistics, even if useful. As a whole, the pipeline has no claim of prediction over the trends it tracks. Instead, it aims to provide a user with guidance about Google Trends, which, as the scientific literature demonstrates, is related to many real-world phenomena (e.g. epidemiology, economy, political science).

The proposed experimental framework allows the integration of Google search query data and Twitter social data. As new trends emerge in Google searches, the pipeline interrogates Twitter to track, also geographically, the feelings and emotions of Twitter users about new trends. The core of the pipeline is represented by a sentiment analysis framework that make use of a Bayesian machine learning device exploiting deep natural language processing modules to assign emotions and sentiment orientations to a collection of tweets geolocalized on the microblogging platform. The pipeline is accessible as a web service for any user authorized with credentials.

The employment of the pipeline for three different monitoring task (i.e. consumer electronics, healthcare, and politics) shows the plausibility of the proposed approach in order to measure social media sentiments and emotions concerning the trends emerged on Google searches.

The proposed approach aims to bridge the gap among Google search query data and sentiments that emerge on Twitter about these trends.

One of the longest running protests in recent American history was a Sing-Along in the Wisconsin State Capitol Building. This daily informal gathering to sing protest songs began in 2011, then prompted a sudden wave of arrests beginning in 2013. Instead of dwindling, the protest grew in response as participants celebrated resistance, treating arrest as a local in-group status symbol. This chapter uses extended participant observation, a methodological approach rarely found in the social movement literature on repression, to study the attempted repression of this Solidarity Sing-Along. To a remarkable extent, arrests and court prosecutions were ineptly executed. This ineptitude had consequences for the protest's development. This repression was also generally mild. Examining mild repression, less often studied than severe forms, helps elaborate the range of repression's potential consequences. By showing mild repression in ethnographic detail, this chapter reveals an underappreciated messiness on the part of both repressors and repressed. The movement evolved in a messy way in response to messy repression, an evolution that is not well captured with dichotomous categories of increase versus decrease or failure versus success.

Merges the latest results obtained by the holonic manufacturing systems (HMS) consortium with the latest developed standards for platform interoperability released by the Foundation for Intelligent Physical Agents (FIPA) to propose a novel e‐business model: the holonic e‐enterprise (HE). The HE extends both the HMS and FIPA models. On one side it extends the holonic manufacturing paradigm with one top level, the inter‐enterprise one. On the other side it extends the multi‐agent system (MAS) paradigm to the hardware (physical machine) level.

This paper aims to describe a two-stage sustainability curriculum assessment, providing tools and strategies for other faculty to use in implementing their own sustainability assessments.

In the first stage of the five-year curriculum assessment, the authors used an anonymous survey of sustainability faculty and requested data that would verify the survey’s self-reporting: updated sustainability syllabi, and answers to the question, “where have you integrated the three aspects of sustainability – biological systems, social systems, economic systems – into this course?” Finding that the self-reporting results did not match the evidence on the syllabi, the authors interrogated their methods from the faculty workshop trainings for sustainability curriculum transformation.

The authors’ workshops had not provided clear definitions for “sustainability” and the learning outcomes expected in sustainability courses. They had also not addressed the role of transformative pedagogy in teaching a holistic approach to sustainability. The research identified and transcended five key barriers to implementing sustainability curriculum: an over-reliance on faculty volunteers, unclear and unenforced expectations about sustainability implementations, a failure to recognize and circumvent institutional and philosophical barriers to teaching sustainability’s interdisciplinary approach through disciplinary-based curriculum, conceiving of sustainability pedagogy as transmission rather than transformation, and overlooking the ecology of educational systems as nested within the larger sociopolitical environment.

This study confirms the limitations of faculty self-reporting unless augmented with verifiable data.

Sustainability educators can use this research to devise curriculum or program assessment on their campuses: the mixed-methods approach to data collection, the inquiry into sustainability workshop trainings, the elements required on sustainability syllabi for building a coherent sustainability studies program, the resources for practicing a transformative sustainability pedagogy, and the barriers to sustainability implementation along with strategies for surmounting these barriers will all be of use.

This paper explores and combats root causes for an all-too-common disconnection between positive faculty self-assessment and syllabi that do not fully integrate sustainability across the disciplines.

This chapter examines the potential significance of the ‘Occupy’ movement across Europe and North America. It argues that an understanding of the movement is necessary in order to locate its significance (or not) in the broader reaction to the banking collapse.

The chapter draws on the literature and is intentionally speculative in its approach.

The chapter argues that the Occupy movement is one manifestation of the alter-globalisation movement. This movement has been explicitly opposed to neoliberal ideas. This chapter suggests that the current crisis represents a much more systematic challenge for global capitalism.

This chapter represents an original and important contribution to our understanding of the conceptual and theoretical ideas present amongst those resisting the impacts of the financial crisis.