Value of Information in Bayesian Environments

The last several decades have seen an unprecedented increase in the types and amount of information pertaining to the military environment. For the military commander and his staff, separating the important information from the routine has become a primary challenge in calculating the Value of Information (VOI). Wrought with uncertainty and contradiction, new methodologies are required to confront this significant issue. This paper presents an approach for calculating the VOI in complex military environments using fuzzy logic as a method for managing uncertain and imprecise information.

The value of environmental decision and information support tools (DISTs) and technologies is located in the impacts that the use of such technologies have on the behaviour of individuals and organisations, and consequently on our collective ability to negotiate the difficult interfaces between human social and economic activity, and environmental impact.There are significant, but as yet insufficiently exploited opportunities for improving the value of these tools and technologies through the use of assessment and evaluation practices.Iterative and evolutionary tool development processes offer the opportunity to deliberately incorporate user assessment information into design.Doing so can improve adoption and use impacts through better tailoring of tool functionality, output and interfaces to user needs.Managing such processes successfully is demanding and we do not possess sufficient, generalised or published practical understanding of what works and what does not in terms of user interaction.However, there is an emerging understanding of how environmental DIST teams should be structured and a wide body of knowledge yet to be imported from the software, product and interaction design communities, so the future is promising.The evaluation of the impact of using environmental DISTs is more problematic and less well understood, both methodologically and empirically.Our conceptual frameworks for characterising use and identifying where impacts arising from tool use might lie are nascent and require refinement, both to reflect the variety of developmental routes and eventual end-use destinations for those tools, and the complicated chain of influences amongst which the use of DISTs is only one on decision processes, be they individual or organisational in scale and character.Further, our empirical understanding of the range of impact types which might occur at either individual or organisational scales across different stages of the life cycle of an environmental DIST is in need of development both conceptually and in measurement terms.This paper presents a critical discussion of our conceptual and empirical understanding of how to use evaluation and assessment practices to improve the value of environmental decision and information support tools.Matthews et al. (2011) 1 framework for understanding the life cycle of DISTs from to basic science to use within wider societal governance and media processes is used as the basis for identifying points where additional evaluation and assessment might offer benefits.Difficulties in evaluating the ultimate outcomes of using DISTs are subject to critique, and the current lack of an accepted framework for conceptualising organisations and the kinds of impacts that DISTs might have within them discussed.What we know about how to conduct evaluation and assessment at each point is briefly reviewed alongside what we know empirically about tool impacts.The paper ends with some recommendations regarding both the framing and measurement of impact across the DIST lifecycle from adoption to outcome.

Cooperative search for dynamic targets by multiple UAVs with communication data losses

Economic value of environmental and weather information for agricultural decisions – A case study for Oklahoma Mesonet

Implicit in prior research has been the assumption that any judgment about the credibility and value of information is made in an individualistic and socially isolated fashion. This assumption is no longer tenable in a social media environment wherein people are exposed to a great deal of information selectively fed to them by others with whom they have relationships. The current study examines the moderating effects of cognitive social structures manifested in the minds of social media users. The findings reveal that consideration of individuals regarding source expertise for credibility assessment and information-sharing decisions varies depending on their particular online social circumstances and how the individuals perceive these circumstances. This suggests that the manner in which people assess and share information in the social media environment is partly a function of how they make sense of their local social worlds.

The Chinese government places significant emphasis on high-quality, sustainable economic development, with the value of environmental information becoming increasingly prominent. Corporate stakeholders are paying greater attention to environmental disclosures. This study analyzes data from Chinese A-share listed companies in Shanghai and Shenzhen from 2008 to 2023, exploring the relationships and influence mechanisms among environmental information disclosure, profitability, and corporate sustainable development through multiple regression models. The results indicate that environmental information disclosure promotes corporate sustainable development (with an effect coefficient of 1.441, p < 0.01), while also enhancing profitability (with an effect coefficient of 0.009, p < 0.01). Moreover, profitability serves as a mediator in the relationship between environmental information disclosure and corporate sustainable development (with an effect coefficient of 1.089, p < 0.01). These findings remain robust after a series of tests. Heterogeneity studies further reveal that the positive impact of environmental disclosure on corporate sustainability performance is more pronounced among non-state-owned firms and firms with high leverage ratios. Overall, the research findings help encourage enterprises to prioritize environmental impact, practice sustainable operations, and enhance profitability, long-term competitiveness, and market adaptability.

Good news for environmental self-regulation? Finding the right link

How does tunnel interior color environment influence driving behavior? Quantitative analysis and assessment experiment

This contribution is focused on the analysis of the role of virtual worlds and immersive realities1 in relation with the impact and relevance they can have in the digital communication and management of heritage. I will discuss Virtual Heritage (VH), in relation to the principles of second cybernetics (Bateson, 1972). According to Bateson ‘without context there is no communication’ and the ‘map is not territory’ (Bateson, 1972). This means that any communication process has to be contextualized and that we need a code for any informational transmission. These principles can be applicable to VH, in the sense that VH represents the cybernetic ‘map’, the code of cultural heritage and its context of communication. A VH process is intended as the capacity of learning and transmitting information in a virtual environment, which depends on the feedback generated by differences between actor/user and the environment (Forte and Bonini, 2010). In this domain of overlapping of technological, social, cultural and economic issues, it is very important to distinguish between ‘cultural value’ and ‘economic’ in relation to heritage. Both terms are difficult to consider in an absolute way: the informational cultural value depends on the process of feedback, dissemination, communication and elearning; the economic value of the benefits produced by a VH circuit (in relation with territory, local context, media, cultural presence and social communication). The economic value can be estimated: for example, museum fees, tickets, merchandising, exhibits, local economy, events and related activities. The same is not true for the cultural value, since it embraces different and complex circuits of valorization, consumption and communication of heritage.2 VH has to be studied as a process able to communicate, transmit and catalyze networks of cultural information. The first part of the chapter focuses on the discussion of the theoretical approach and definition of a process of VH. The second part is more

With the popularization and development of the Internet, the network environment has become an important part of the daily life of adolescents. The network environment, with its unique information dissemination mode, social mode, and value concept, has an impact on the formation of adolescents’ gender role identity concept. Research at home and abroad shows that the vividness and visualization of gender information and gender imitation objects in the network environment are more likely to affect individual gender identity. The purpose of this paper is to deeply explore the influence of the Internet environment on adolescents’ gender role identity through the method of interview and observation and to analyze certain countermeasures, to provide a useful reference for further research and education.

There is a growing awareness in the chemical industry that environmental aspects need to be incorporated more fully into the design and operation of chemical processes. There are several recently developed methodologies to perform environmental assessments of chemical process designs. However, the value of the environmental information is dependent upon the level of uncertainty in the predictions of these impacts. This paper presents an uncertainty analysis for toxicity assessment of chemical process designs. This uncertainty analysis generated representative normalized standard errors for several measured environmental properties (Henry's law constant, octanol−water partition coefficient, hydroxyl radical reaction rate constant, and lethal concentration for human inhalation toxicity) from a subset of the high production volume chemicals. Then, the propagation of these property uncertainties in the calculation of an inhalation toxicity index was conducted. This method of uncertainty analysis has been applied to the environmentally conscious design of a process for volatile organic compound recovery and recycle from a gaseous waste stream.

Socio‐Economic Benefits From the Use of Earth Observation; Ispra, Italy, 11–13 July 2011 Many large space‐or ground‐based Earth observation systems, such as Global Monitoring for Environment and Security (GMES) and Landsat, are justified by citing their benefits to scientific knowledge and their impacts on government decisions about environmental issues. These justifications attempt to quantify the lives saved, losses avoided, or economic benefits gained. Each justification is made on an ad hoc basis, and the approach used in one case rarely applies to another. In July 2011 a workshop was held at the European Commission Joint Research Centre in Italy to consider whether broadly applicable methodologies could be developed that could be consistently used for assessing the value of large‐scale observation and information systems.

Plant induced responses to environmental stressors are increasingly studied in a behavioral ecology context. This is particularly true for plant induced responses to herbivory that mediate direct and indirect defenses, and tolerance. These seemingly adaptive alterations of plant defense phenotypes in the context of other environmental conditions have led to the discussion of such responses as intelligent behavior. Here we consider the concept of plant intelligence and some of its predictions for chemical information transfer in plant interaction with other organisms. Within this framework, the flow, perception, integration, and storage of environmental information are considered tunable dials that allow plants to respond adaptively to attacking herbivores while integrating past experiences and environmental cues that are predictive of future conditions. The predictive value of environmental information and the costs of acting on false information are important drivers of the evolution of plant responses to herbivory. We identify integrative priming of defense responses as a mechanism that allows plants to mitigate potential costs associated with acting on false information. The priming mechanisms provide short- and long-term memory that facilitates the integration of environmental cues without imposing significant costs. Finally, we discuss the ecological and evolutionary prediction of the plant intelligence hypothesis.

The ubiquitous pig farm monitoring system is designed so that it can be applied to modern agriculture and attached MAC Protocol that the Link Quality based Transmit Power Control MAC(LPMAC) protocol, which is becoming bigger and more advanced. In the immediate previous research, a large scale ubiquitous pig farm monitoring system was designed and it was applied to actual pig farms. It was possible to realize the system, where the raising efficiency of pig was maximized by installing the temperature/humidity sensors and video camera, transmitting the measured information to caretaker in real time. When the measured environmental information values detected by the sensor would get out of optimum raising environment of pigs, the system transmitted the content to the caretaker. Simultaneously, the environment control facilities such as humidifier, air conditioner and window opener/closer were activated in order to maintain the environmental information at uniform and pleasant values. And, it was found that the LPMAC protocol is proper as the MAC to be applied to the livestock farming.