Creating A Sustainable Social Ecology Using Technology Driven Solutions

"This book highlights matters that relate to technology driven solutions toward the combination of social ecology and sustainable development, addressing the issues of development in advancing and transitioning economies through creating new ideas and solutions"--Provided by publisher.

As advancements in technology continue to influence all facets of society, its aspects have been utilized in order to find solutions to emerging ecological issues. Creating a Sustainable Ecology Using Technology-Driven Solutions highlights matters that relate to technology driven solutions towards the combination of social ecology and sustainable development. This publication addresses the issues of development in advancing and transitioning economies through creating new ideas and solutions; making it useful for researchers, practitioners, and policy makers in the socioeconomic sectors.

Social ecology is a philosophy rooted in deep-seated social problems, particularly in hierarchical political and social systems. Social ecologists throughout the world maintain a theory that present, ecological problems cannot be clearly understood, much less resolved, without resolutely dealing with problems within society. Therefore, social ecology locates the roots of these ecological crises firmly in the relations of domination between people. Sustainable Policy Applications for Social Ecology and Development establishes a new set of platforms for intellectual discourse and identification of critical and strategic emerging issues, the formulation of cogent and useful policies, and practice recommendations. This publication highlights provocative, but scholarly, views that diverge from the current “conventional wisdom” taking into consideration the concepts of robust competitiveness, sustainable entrepreneurship, and democratic capitalism, central to its philosophy and objectives. The aim of this book is to highlight emerging research and practice at the dynamic intersection of these fields, where individuals, organizations, industries, regions, and nations are harnessing creativity and invention to achieve and sustain growth.

Through this book, readers will gain a comprehensive overview of transdisciplinary knowledge co-production in local contexts as an issue-driven and solution-oriented process, and will come to understand its relationship to societal transformation processes toward sustainability. In a single volume, the theory, approaches and academic implications of this novel type of knowledge production are addressed, together with its societal impacts. In the midst of global anthropogenic impacts that affect various environments, over the past few decades we have observed autonomous initiatives in local communities around the world to tackle these environmental challenges. It is vital that such local actions be scaled up to achieve sustainable societies, which requires societal transformation on larger scales. Thanks to numerous collaborative actions in local communities, transdisciplinary knowledge co-production among diverse stakeholders has successfully been mobilized, resulting in the development of Integrated Local Environmental Knowledge (ILEK); knowledge that can inform and support decisions and actions promoting the sustainable transformation of society. This book uses comparative case studies in communities around the world to illuminate and clarify processes and factors promoting the co-production and utilization of ILEK to facilitate decision-making. In addition, readers will gain deeper insights into the science-society interactions that can contribute to finding collaborative solutions to a wide range of critical environmental problems. Though the book is ideally suited for researchers and students, it also offers a valuable resource for practitioners, government agencies, and stakeholder agencies.

The hypercomplex digital-technological environment is exponential and revolutionary. Our social mindset adaptation, instead, is slower and evolutionary, as an individual’s or an organization culture needs time to transform. This book offers students, institutions, and organisations innovative and interdisciplinary digital sociology tools to help build an adaptive, flexible, imaginative social mindset in order to cope with such a gap and to match a sustainable digital transformation (DT). By disrupting traditional linear approaches to understand the context into which business models are designed, institutions and students are challenged with innovative transdisciplinary holistic models grounded into business case studies. If the book stimulates students to learn how purposefully and autonomously to explore the web, to grasp the deeper meaning of DT and its social impact, institutions are solicited to answer to direct quests that go right to the core of their transformative DNA as: ‘How effectively are you carrying on DT in a sustainable, people-centred way? Which is your socio-cultural DT profile and what are your DT areas of strength and areas of improvement?' In this frame of work, the innovative Four Paradigm Model indicates new coordinates and provides original tools to profile an institution’s digital transformation strategy, to analyse it, and measure the level of sustainable socio-economic value. Sample syllabi, PowerPoint slides and quizzes are available online to assist in the teaching experience.

Across a variety of disciplines, data and statistics form the backbone of knowledge. To ensure the reliability and validity of data appropriate measures must be taken in conducting studies and reporting findings. Innovations in Measuring and Evaluating Scientific Information provides emerging research on the theoretical base of scientific research and information literacy. While highlighting topics, such as bibliographical databases, forensic research, and trend analysis, this book explores visualization tools, software, and techniques for science mapping and scientific literature. This book is an important resource for scientific researchers, policy makers, research funding agencies, and students.

The purpose of this book is to offer innovative applications of the distillation process. The book is divided in two main sections, one containing chapters that deal with process design and calculations, and the other, chapters that discuss distillation applications. Moreover, the chapters involve wide applications as in fruit spirits production, in organic liquid compounds produced by oil and fats cracking, energy evaluation in distillation processes, and applicability of solar membrane distillation. I believe that this book will provide new ideas and possibilities of the development of innovative research lines for the readers.