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This article discusses how residents in a local area contributed to the construction of knowledge in regard to scientific assessments in relation to a fire in a storage dump of burnable waste. Building on analytical concepts primarily from Social Worlds theory as well as some concepts from Actor-Network Theory, the analysis shows how dissent and a number of scientific controversies were initiated by some residents living nearby the waste dump who proved to be excellent network builders and who built a number of alliances with media and independent scientists, thus questioning the authorities' and their experts' legitimacy. Furthermore, the situated analysis identifies how a few persons--not very organized--were able to create a debate about scientific matters using their combined resources and strong alliance-building abilities, thus proving that in some cases there is no need for a higher level of organization.

This chapter explores how newspapers in Denmark and Norway both verbally and visually framed and personalized risk and crisis assessments and scenarios following the Ebola outbreak in West Africa in 2014. Our point of departure is media samples from the two Nordic countries in two different periods of the outbreak. We investigate how authorities, non-governmental organizations and victims were used as sources and personalized in the mediated narratives. Whereas health authority sources provide risk assessments based on statistical predictions, NGOs such as Médecins Sans Frontières's coverage rather build on narrative evidence and personalization that focus on victims in stricken African nations. However, although the ways in which health authorities and NGOs frame risk differ, they testify to how the news media in Denmark and Norway tend to support and convey the crisis communication strategies of the institutions that the actors portrayed represent.

The design of today's electronic embedded systems is an increasingly complicated task. This is especially problematic for Small and Medium Enterprises (SMEs) which have limited resources. In this work, we identify a set of common design practices used in industry, with a special focus on problems faced by smaller companies, and formulate them as design scenarios. We show how SMEs can benefit from a system-level design approach by customizing a formal heterogeneous system modeling framework for each scenario. The applicability of this approach is demonstrated by two industrial use cases, an impulseradio radar and a UART-based protocol.

This article presents an analysis of communication processes between residents, between residents and people in the broader societal context, as well as of media coverage of a fireworks disaster in a Danish suburb. It demonstrates how residents (all members of the Danish middle class) were able to have their situation—their affectedness— acknowledged in interactions with others and gain considerable attention immediately after the accident. In addition, it demonstrates how the initial acknowledgement decreased over time. In this case, the axes of differentiation did not relate to questions of gender, ethnicity, class or other social categories normally recognized as influential in case of disasters. Since the population in the area was very homogenous, the axis of differentiation was instead linked to the social category of affectedness, and a hierarchy of affectedness was identified within the population.