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Over the past half century, the global environment has become subject to an accelerated pace of mediation and datafication. This ongoing transition has become so comprehensive that the knowledge, management and governance of the Earth system is dependent on enormous flows of data from a “vast machine” of measuring tools. These processes combined have formed what we call a “mediated planet,” subject to interpretation and shared human decision-making – that should ideally be democratic, inclusive and accountable. As environmental datafication continues to accelerate, private corporations are gaining increasing influence on and power over the associated collections of data. This is a cause for concern, as the global environmental commons are a public interest of concern to all people. This article argues for the need to critically research the challenges and risks associated with the rapid datafication of the environment, specifically in relation to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for climate change (13), the ocean (14), biodiversity (15) and inclusive and accountable institutions (16). More knowledge is needed of how the SDGs and their supporting networks influence data-generation on a mediated planet, and how issues of access to and use of environmental data, as well as data ownership and AI implementation, can best be navigated. We contend that such knowledge can help enhance the democratic potential of the SDGs to build public trust and secure broad participation in global environmental governance in ways that also support peaceful and inclusive societies, as promised by SDG 16. QC 20240115

Sports historians have argued that the type of ball games common in the British Isles, which were practiced by two teams and in which the ball was driven with sticks towards predetermined goals – i.e., hurling, shinty, bandy and hockey – were never played in early modern Sweden. By highlighting descriptions of ballgames in Johannes Schefferus’s The History of Lapland (1674), a source previously ignored by sports historians, this article challenges such a claim. One of the games described by Schefferus has some similarities with the violent stick-and-ball game known in Icelandic sagas as knattleikr. Even greater similarities (such as the start of the game with a face-off and the goals consisting of lines on the short edges) emerge when the game is compared with the Scottish game of shinty. Thus, pre-modern Scandinavia does not appear to have been as isolated in terms of sports and games as has been suggested by Swedish sports historians. QC 20240223

Research background: Digital ecosystems in Europe are heterogenous organizations involving different economies, industries, and contexts. Among them, Digital Innovation Hubs (DIHs) are considered a policy-driven organization fostered by the European Commission to push companies’ digital transition through a wide portfolio of supporting services. Purpose of the article: There are DIHs existing in all European economies, but literature needs more precise indications about their status and nature. The purpose is to study a distribution of DIHs and differences in portfolios of DIHs’ services across European economies. Therefore, the paper wants to deliver more precise data on effects on national and European policies. This is required to define their final role and scope in the complex dynamics of the digital transition, depending on regional context and heterogeneity of industries. Methods: Data on 38 economies was collected from the S3 platform (on both existing and in preparation DIHs) and further verified by native speaking researchers using manual web scrapping of websites of DIHs identified from S3. To find potential similarities of digital ecosystems in different economies as emanated by the existence of DIHs, clusterization (Ward’s method and Euclidean distances) was applied according to the services offered. Economies were clustered according to the number of DIHs and the spread of DIHs intensity in different cities. The results were further analyzed according to the scope of the provided services. Findings & value added: The applied clustering classified European economies in four different sets, according to the types of services offered by the DIHs. These sets are expression of the different digitalization statuses and strategies of the selected economies and, as such, the services a company can benefit from in a specific economy. Potential development-related reasons behind the data-driven clustering are then conjectured and reported, to guide companies and policy makers in their digitalization strategies. QC 20240221

Skidvallans historia framstår som en spegelbild av samhällets utveckling, där svensk ingenjörskonst länge ledde jakten på en universalvalla. När fluorvallan nu av ekologiska skäl förbjudits kanske vi åter börjar söka fästet i tjärdalen och glidet i talg? QC 20240223

The increasing number of scientific publications in acoustics, in general, presents difficulties in conducting traditional literature surveys. This work explores the use of a generative pre-trained transformer (GPT) model to automate a literature survey of 117 articles on data-driven speech enhancement methods. The main objective is to evaluate the capabilities and limitations of the model in providing accurate responses to specific queries about the papers selected from a reference human-based survey. While we see great potential to automate literature surveys in acoustics, improvements are needed to address technical questions more clearly and accurately. QC 20240111

Museums, heritage agencies and other institutions responsible for managing archaeological cultural heritage across Europe are engaged in developing digital platforms to better open their collections to the public as a common resource for the purposes of discovering, learning about, and sharing our common past. This paper explores the potential of new semantic computing technologies in democratising not only public access to digital cultural heritage records, but also to computational and Linked Open Data -assisted data analysis and knowledge discovery. As a case study, we consider archaeological and numismatic Open Data services in Finland, and discuss the research results obtained during the ongoing development work for the CoinSampo framework for opening Finnish and international numismatic data. Existing digital cultural heritage services are often built with the needs of professional collections management in mind. The presentation of the records is typically structured after the familiar format established for the printed catalogues of yesteryear, with few analytical tools that would take advantage of the potential of digital data to probe and visualize internal relationships and patterns within the full body of the opened material. CoinSampo, however, will provide scientific tools to new audiences among the non-professional public who have not enjoyed such a level of access to numismatic data. The broad range of target audiences we envisage includes collections managers, who will benefit from enhanced access to their own data for updating records and for error detection and correction, as well as academic researchers interested in using the material in scientific analysis. Importantly, it also includes non-professional groups such as coin collectors, educators, local historians, and the archaeological hobby metal-detectorists who produce most of the new coin finds entering Finnish and European collections. By adopting a citizen science and participatory heritage approach in the development of Open Data services, we aim to promote a technological model for cultural heritage dissemination that addresses the needs of a wide spectrum of different user audiences inside and outside the professional sphere. Peer reviewed

BACKGROUND: This research extends prior studies by the Finnish Institute for Health and Welfare on pandemic-related risk perception, concentrating on the role of trust in health authorities and its impact on public health outcomes. OBJECTIVE: The paper aims to investigate variations in trust levels over time and across social media platforms, as well as to further explore 12 subcategories of political mistrust. It seeks to understand the dynamics of political trust, including mistrust accumulation, fluctuations over time, and changes in topic relevance. Additionally, the study aims to compare qualitative research findings with those obtained through computational methods. METHODS: Data were gathered from a large-scale data set consisting of 13,629 Twitter and Facebook posts from 2020 to 2023 related to COVID-19. For analysis, a fine-tuned FinBERT model with an 80% accuracy rate was used for predicting political mistrust. The BERTopic model was also used for superior topic modeling performance. RESULTS: Our preliminary analysis identifies 43 mistrust-related topics categorized into 9 major themes. The most salient topics include COVID-19 mortality, coping strategies, polymerase chain reaction testing, and vaccine efficacy. Discourse related to mistrust in authority is associated with perceptions of disease severity, willingness to adopt health measures, and information-seeking behavior. Our findings highlight that the distinct user engagement mechanisms and platform features of Facebook and Twitter contributed to varying patterns of mistrust and susceptibility to misinformation during the pandemic. CONCLUSIONS: The study highlights the effectiveness of computational methods like natural language processing in managing large-scale engagement and misinformation. It underscores the critical role of trust in health authorities for effective risk communication and public compliance. The findings also emphasize the necessity for transparent communication from authorities, concluding that a holistic approach to public health communication is integral for managing health crises effectively. Publisher Copyright: ©Ali Unlu, Sophie Truong, Tuukka Tammi, Anna-Leena Lohiniva. Originally published in the Journal of Medical Internet Research (https://www.jmir.org), 20.10.2023. Peer reviewed

Funding Information: Interviewees are from the consortium of PETRUS (Project for Education, Training and Research for Underground Storage), supported by the European Commission, with the objective to promote Education and Training in geological disposal of radioactive nuclear waste. Since 2005, PETRUS has coordinated universities, radioactive waste management organizations, training providers, and research institutes to develop cooperative approach to nuclear waste disposal. The PETRUS consortium proposes strategies to ensure the continuation, renewal and improvement of professional skills by sharing resources from both academia and industries, and includes 21 representatives from 12 different countries around Europe [ 20 ]. As such, PETRUS provides ample real-world knowledge and experts in the nuclear field to validate the practical relevance of our research. Furthermore, the PETRUS agenda deals with the modelling and linking of transferable skills and competences across different organizations and sectors,thus it provides good reference point for understanding the challenges and implications of linking of communities of practice in the nuclear domain. Publisher Copyright: © 2023 Korean Nuclear Society Bridging traditional experts’ disciplinary boundaries is important for nuclear knowledge management systems. However, expert competences are often described in unstructured texts and require substantial human effort to link related competences across disciplines. The purpose of this research is to develop and evaluate a natural language processing approach, based on Latent Semantic Analysis, to enable the automatic linking of related competences across different disciplines and communities of practice. With datasets of unstructured texts as input training data, our results show that the algorithm can readily identify nuclear domain-specific semantic links between words and concepts. We discuss how our results can be utilized to generate a quantitative network of links between competences across disciplines, thus acting as an enabler for identifying and bridging communities of practice, in nuclear and beyond. Peer reviewed