Agile Professional Virtual Community Inheritance via Adaptation of Social Protocols

Support for human-to-human interactions over a network is still insufficient, particularly for professional virtual communities (PVC). Among other limitations, adaptation and learning-by-experience capabilities of humans are not taken into account in existing models for collaboration processes in PVC. This paper presents a model for adaptive human collaboration. A key element of this model is the use of negotiation for adaptation of social protocols modelling processes. A second contribution is the proposition of various adaptation propagation strategies as means for continuous management of the PVC inheritance.Comment: 15 pages, 3 figure

Australian best practice guide to collecting cultural material

INTRODUCTION Australia’s public collecting institutions enrich public life by displaying, interpreting, making accessible and preserving the world’s shared cultural, scientific and historic heritage. Acquisitions to collections and loans to institutions play a vital role in increasing our society’s understanding of culture. They also increase education and outreach activities and are an important impetus for research. Australian institutions safeguard and protect the cultural property of Australia and other nations. They also develop their collections according to the highest ethical standards and legal requirements. To uphold this commitment, institutions should undertake due diligence to ensure they only acquire or borrow cultural material that has legal title, established provenance, is authentic and not identified as having been looted or illegally obtained or exported. The Australian Best Practice Guide to Collecting Cultural Material outlines principles and standards to assist Australia’s institutions when considering acquiring cultural material, whether through purchase, gift, bequest or exchange. This guide can be used by collecting institutions when developing their policies and setting out their principles for due diligence research and other processes required when considering an acquisition. Sections of this guide may also apply to cultural material being considered for inward loan

Context-awareness for mobile sensing: a survey and future directions

The evolution of smartphones together with increasing computational power have empowered developers to create innovative context-aware applications for recognizing user related social and cognitive activities in any situation and at any location. The existence and awareness of the context provides the capability of being conscious of physical environments or situations around mobile device users. This allows network services to respond proactively and intelligently based on such awareness. The key idea behind context-aware applications is to encourage users to collect, analyze and share local sensory knowledge in the purpose for a large scale community use by creating a smart network. The desired network is capable of making autonomous logical decisions to actuate environmental objects, and also assist individuals. However, many open challenges remain, which are mostly arisen due to the middleware services provided in mobile devices have limited resources in terms of power, memory and bandwidth. Thus, it becomes critically important to study how the drawbacks can be elaborated and resolved, and at the same time better understand the opportunities for the research community to contribute to the context-awareness. To this end, this paper surveys the literature over the period of 1991-2014 from the emerging concepts to applications of context-awareness in mobile platforms by providing up-to-date research and future research directions. Moreover, it points out the challenges faced in this regard and enlighten them by proposing possible solutions

The Centre of Memories: work in progress. Case of the Michel Giacometti Labour Museum, Setúbal, Portugal

The work on Social Memory, focused on the biographic method and the paths of immaterial Heritage, are the fabric that we have chosen to substantiate the idea of museum. The social dimensions of memory, its construction and representation, are the thickness of the exhibition fabric. The specificity of museological work in contemporary times resembles a fine lace, a meticulous weaving of threads that flow from time, admirable lace, painstaking and complex, created with many needles, made up of hollow spots and stitches (of memories and things forgotten). Repetitions and symmetries are the pace that perpetuates it, the rhythmic grammar that gives it body. A fluid body, a single piece, circumstantial. It is always possible to create new patterns, new compositions, with the same threads. Accurately made, properly made, this lace of memories and things forgotten is always an extraordinary creation, a web of wonder that expands fantasy, generates value and feeds the endless reserve of the community’s knowledge, values and beliefs

The Centre of Memories: work in progress. Case of the Michel Giacometti Labour Museum, Setúbal, Portugal

The work on Social Memory, focused on the biographic method and the paths of immaterial Heritage, are the fabric that we have chosen to substantiate the idea of museum. The social dimensions of memory, its construction and representation, are the thickness of the exhibition fabric. The specificity of museological work in contemporary times resembles a fine lace, a meticulous weaving of threads that flow from time, admirable lace, painstaking and complex, created with many needles, made up of hollow spots and stitches (of memories and things forgotten). Repetitions and symmetries are the pace that perpetuates it, the rhythmic grammar that gives it body. A fluid body, a single piece, circumstantial. It is always possible to create new patterns, new compositions, with the same threads. Accurately made, properly made, this lace of memories and things forgotten is always an extraordinary creation, a web of wonder that expands fantasy, generates value and feeds the endless reserve of the community’s knowledge, values and beliefs

Climate-Related Adaptations in the Human Skull: A Review of the Different Contemporary Theoretical Models and Methods

Questions regarding our ancestral species have always appealed to our curious side. Our first ancestral species lived in arboreal settings before gradually adapting to a more open, terrestrial environment. It can be observed in the fossil record that hominins began to show a greater degree of adaptations towards anatomical traits that would be beneficial in such environments. Significant changes can be seen as hominins migrated out of Africa and were subsequently exposed to different climates and ecological niches. Accordingly, gaining further knowledge about these climate-related adaptations is of prime interest for understanding the context from which our ancestors emerged and evolved. However, to understand these events it is important to develop useful theoretical frameworks which can aid researchers in tying such links between human morphological variation and climate. Theoretical frameworks are used to make sense of data and more focus must be on developing such frameworks. The conclusion of this thesis is that there are only two theoretical frameworks that can be useful to climate adaptation research: modern evolutionary theory and the ecological rules of Bergmann and Allen. However, more in-depth theoretical models are needed to bridge the gap between morphological variation and climate. This study will present theoretical models and methods, compare and discuss these theoretical frameworks and methodologies, and investigate any consistencies in the use of theories within the field. This thesis also aims to critically analyse and highlight the limitations of the discipline by addressing present issues. The final aim and purpose of this thesis is to better understand the need and significance of well-built theoretical frameworks and methods in achieving a better understanding of the links between climate and morphological variation.Arkeologi mastergradsoppgaveARK350MAHF-AR

An Emergent Architecture for Scaling Decentralized Communication Systems (DCS)

With recent technological advancements now accelerating the mobile and wireless Internet solution space, a ubiquitous computing Internet is well within the research and industrial community's design reach - a decentralized system design, which is not solely driven by static physical models and sound engineering principals, but more dynamically, perhaps sub-optimally at initial deployment and socially-influenced in its evolution. To complement today's Internet system, this thesis proposes a Decentralized Communication System (DCS) architecture with the following characteristics: flat physical topologies with numerous compute oriented and communication intensive nodes in the network with many of these nodes operating in multiple functional roles; self-organizing virtual structures formed through alternative mobility scenarios and capable of serving ad hoc networking formations; emergent operations and control with limited dependency on centralized control and management administration. Today, decentralized systems are not commercially scalable or viable for broad adoption in the same way we have to come to rely on the Internet or telephony systems. The premise in this thesis is that DCS can reach high levels of resilience, usefulness, scale that the industry has come to experience with traditional centralized systems by exploiting the following properties: (i.) network density and topological diversity; (ii.) self-organization and emergent attributes; (iii.) cooperative and dynamic infrastructure; and (iv.) node role diversity. This thesis delivers key contributions towards advancing the current state of the art in decentralized systems. First, we present the vision and a conceptual framework for DCS. Second, the thesis demonstrates that such a framework and concept architecture is feasible by prototyping a DCS platform that exhibits the above properties or minimally, demonstrates that these properties are feasible through prototyped network services. Third, this work expands on an alternative approach to network clustering using hierarchical virtual clusters (HVC) to facilitate self-organizing network structures. With increasing network complexity, decentralized systems can generally lead to unreliable and irregular service quality, especially given unpredictable node mobility and traffic dynamics. The HVC framework is an architectural strategy to address organizational disorder associated with traditional decentralized systems. The proposed HVC architecture along with the associated promotional methodology organizes distributed control and management services by leveraging alternative organizational models (e.g., peer-to-peer (P2P), centralized or tiered) in hierarchical and virtual fashion. Through simulation and analytical modeling, we demonstrate HVC efficiencies in DCS structural scalability and resilience by comparing static and dynamic HVC node configurations against traditional physical configurations based on P2P, centralized or tiered structures. Next, an emergent management architecture for DCS exploiting HVC for self-organization, introduces emergence as an operational approach to scaling DCS services for state management and policy control. In this thesis, emergence scales in hierarchical fashion using virtual clustering to create multiple tiers of local and global separation for aggregation, distribution and network control. Emergence is an architectural objective, which HVC introduces into the proposed self-management design for scaling and stability purposes. Since HVC expands the clustering model hierarchically and virtually, a clusterhead (CH) node, positioned as a proxy for a specific cluster or grouped DCS nodes, can also operate in a micro-capacity as a peer member of an organized cluster in a higher tier. As the HVC promotional process continues through the hierarchy, each tier of the hierarchy exhibits emergent behavior. With HVC as the self-organizing structural framework, a multi-tiered, emergent architecture enables the decentralized management strategy to improve scaling objectives that traditionally challenge decentralized systems. The HVC organizational concept and the emergence properties align with and the view of the human brain's neocortex layering structure of sensory storage, prediction and intelligence. It is the position in this thesis, that for DCS to scale and maintain broad stability, network control and management must strive towards an emergent or natural approach. While today's models for network control and management have proven to lack scalability and responsiveness based on pure centralized models, it is unlikely that singular organizational models can withstand the operational complexities associated with DCS. In this work, we integrate emergence and learning-based methods in a cooperative computing manner towards realizing DCS self-management. However, unlike many existing work in these areas which break down with increased network complexity and dynamics, the proposed HVC framework is utilized to offset these issues through effective separation, aggregation and asynchronous processing of both distributed state and policy. Using modeling techniques, we demonstrate that such architecture is feasible and can improve the operational robustness of DCS. The modeling emphasis focuses on demonstrating the operational advantages of an HVC-based organizational strategy for emergent management services (i.e., reachability, availability or performance). By integrating the two approaches, the DCS architecture forms a scalable system to address the challenges associated with traditional decentralized systems. The hypothesis is that the emergent management system architecture will improve the operational scaling properties of DCS-based applications and services. Additionally, we demonstrate structural flexibility of HVC as an underlying service infrastructure to build and deploy DCS applications and layered services. The modeling results demonstrate that an HVC-based emergent management and control system operationally outperforms traditional structural organizational models. In summary, this thesis brings together the above contributions towards delivering a scalable, decentralized system for Internet mobile computing and communications

International Conference of Territorial Intelligence, Alba Iulia 2006. Vol.1, Papers on region, identity and sustainable development (deliverable 12 of caENTI, project funded under FP6 research program of the European Union), Aeternitas, Alba Iulia, 2007

GIRARDOT J.-J., PASCARU M., ILEANA I., 2007A.deliverable 12 of caENTIThese acts gather the communications of the International Conference of Territorial Intelligence that took place in ALBA IULIA in Romania, from September, the 20th to September, the 22nd 2006. This conference was the fourth conference of territorial intelligence, but the conference of ALBA IULIA is the first one that took place in the CAENTI, Coordination Action of the European Network of Territorial Intelligence, framework. Consequently, it has a particular organization. A part is devoted to the presentation of the CAENTI research activities and of their prospects. The CAENTI specific communications are published in another volume

Strategies for Achieving Entrepreneurial Success in the Food Industry in Nigeria

Small and medium enterprise (SME) food owners’ ineffective entrepreneurship strategies lead to their business failure within the first 5 years of establishment. SME food owners who fail to implement appropriate entrepreneurship strategies can experience poor business performance, low staff morale, reduced productivity, and potential for business failure. Grounded in Schumpeter’s economic theory of entrepreneurship, the purpose of this qualitative multiple-case study was to explore the entrepreneurship strategies SME food owners use to survive in business beyond 5 years of establishment. The participants were three SME food owners from three SMEs in FCT Nigeria who successfully used entrepreneurship strategies to survive in business beyond 5 years of establishment. Data were collected from semistructured interviews, company archival documents, and field notes and were analyzed using thematic analysis. Four themes emerged: people management and training, financial support, government policy and trade union, and quality of service. A key recommendation for SME food owners is to identify their customers’ wants and provide services that meet their expectations. The implications for positive social change include the potential to improve the entrepreneurial success of small business owners, thereby creating job opportunities, providing social amenities and welfare, and supporting the economic development of the regional communities

Balance rehabilitation with a virtual reality protocol for patients with hereditary spastic paraplegia: protocol for a clinical trial

info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio