TY - JOUR A1 - Puri, Manish A1 - Varde, Aparna S. A1 - Melo, Gerard de T1 - Commonsense based text mining on urban policy JF - Language resources and evaluation N2 - Local laws on urban policy, i.e., ordinances directly affect our daily life in various ways (health, business etc.), yet in practice, for many citizens they remain impervious and complex. This article focuses on an approach to make urban policy more accessible and comprehensible to the general public and to government officials, while also addressing pertinent social media postings. Due to the intricacies of the natural language, ranging from complex legalese in ordinances to informal lingo in tweets, it is practical to harness human judgment here. To this end, we mine ordinances and tweets via reasoning based on commonsense knowledge so as to better account for pragmatics and semantics in the text. Ours is pioneering work in ordinance mining, and thus there is no prior labeled training data available for learning. This gap is filled by commonsense knowledge, a prudent choice in situations involving a lack of adequate training data. The ordinance mining can be beneficial to the public in fathoming policies and to officials in assessing policy effectiveness based on public reactions. This work contributes to smart governance, leveraging transparency in governing processes via public involvement. We focus significantly on ordinances contributing to smart cities, hence an important goal is to assess how well an urban region heads towards a smart city as per its policies mapping with smart city characteristics, and the corresponding public satisfaction. KW - Commonsense reasoning KW - Opinion mining KW - Ordinances KW - Smart cities KW - Social KW - media KW - Text mining Y1 - 2022 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1007/s10579-022-09584-6 SN - 1574-020X SN - 1574-0218 VL - 57 SP - 733 EP - 763 PB - Springer CY - Dordrecht [u.a.] ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Przybylla, Mareen A1 - Romeike, Ralf T1 - Empowering learners with tools in CS education BT - physical computing in secondary schools JF - it - Information Technology N2 - In computer science, computer systems are both, objects of investigation and tools that enable creative learning and design. Tools for learning have a long tradition in computer science education. Already in the late 1960s, Papert developed a concept which had an immense impact on the development of informal education in the following years: his theory of constructionism understands learning as a creative process of knowledge construction that is most effective when learners create something purposeful that they can try out, show around, discuss, analyse and receive praise for. By now, there are numerous learning and programming environments that are based on the constructionist ideas. Modern tools offer opportunities for students to learn in motivating ways and gain impressive results in programming games, animations, implementing 3D models or developing interactive objects. This article gives an overview of computer science education research related to tools and media to be used in educational settings. We analyse different types of tools with a special focus on the categorization and development of tools for student adequate physical computing activities in the classroom. Research around the development and evaluation of tools and learning resources in the domain of physical computing is illustrated with the example of "My Interactive Garden", a constructionist learning and programming environment. It is explained how the results from empirical studies are integrated in the continuous development of the learning material. KW - tools KW - media KW - resources KW - computer science education KW - physical computing Y1 - 2018 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1515/itit-2017-0032 SN - 1611-2776 SN - 2196-7032 VL - 60 IS - 2 SP - 91 EP - 101 PB - De Gruyter CY - Berlin ER - TY - JOUR A1 - Bösch, Frank T1 - Taming Nuclear Power BT - the Accident near Harrisburg and the Change in West German and International Nuclear Policy in the 1970s and early 1980s JF - German history : the journal of the German History Societ N2 - In 2011 a broad majority in the German Federal Parliament voted to abandon nuclear energy. This article explores the origins of the change in attitude towards nuclear energy and argues that seven years before the Chernobyl disaster, the accident at the U.S. power plant Three Mile Island near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, in 1979, had a profound impact which nowadays seems to be largely forgotten in Europe. The article identifies the structural causes underlying the transnational reception of the Three Mile Island accident and explores international reactions, particularly in the Federal Republic of Germany. The accident near Harrisburg led to a loss of public confidence and created unease about nuclear expansion in many industrialized nations. Reactions to the accident can be understood as an attempt to tame nuclear energy both technically, by increasing safety measures and abandoning plans for new nuclear power stations, and politically, with a more critical appraisal of nuclear energy and with semantics that encouraged a long-term withdrawal from nuclear power. Critics were now also accepted as experts. Nuclear policy in all countries became closely dependent on public opinion, indicating a high level of political responsiveness. Various factors, however, including the contemporaneous oil crisis put the brakes on this critical approach to nuclear power, while safety improvements and the limited expansion of nuclear power created new confidence in the early 1980s. KW - Nuclear energy KW - experts KW - social movements KW - media KW - 1970s KW - Germany Y1 - 2017 U6 - https://doi.org/10.1093/gerhis/ghw143 SN - 0266-3554 SN - 1477-089X VL - 35 IS - 1 SP - 71 EP - 95 PB - Oxford Univ. Press CY - Oxford ER -