Research Methodology: Some Illustrative Studies. ESRI Memorandum Series No. 102 1974

The two previous speakers in this series, Dr. Kennedy and Professor O'Connor, have covered both the practical and theoretical aspects of Research Methodology extremely well. In my comments I will focus on some illustrative studies which may help to exemplify some of these points. Dr. Kennedy, in his talk of two weeks ago, focussed on the "Nuts and Bolts" of the organisation of research, without dealing directly with questions such as objectivity, causality, creativity, inspiration, induction, and deduction. We an know that he is quite capable of dealing with these latter "exciting intellectual questions", as revealed in his Discourse given to the Royal Irish Academy (Kennedy, 1973) and his other publications. However, I could not agree more with Dr. Kennedy in stressing the importance of the "Nuts and Bolts" of the organisation of research. I would definitely agree with his statement that "far more people go astray because of ignorance or neglect of the more mundane matters.

Socio-hydrological modelling: a review asking “why, what and how?”

Interactions between humans and the environment are occurring on a scale that has never previously been seen; the scale of human interaction with the water cycle, along with the coupling present between social and hydrological systems, means that decisions that impact water also impact people. Models are often used to assist in decision-making regarding hydrological systems, and so in order for effective decisions to be made regarding water resource management, these interactions and feedbacks should be accounted for in models used to analyse systems in which water and humans interact. This paper reviews literature surrounding aspects of socio-hydrological modelling. It begins with background information regarding the current state of socio-hydrology as a discipline, before covering reasons for modelling and potential applications. Some important concepts that underlie socio-hydrological modelling efforts are then discussed, including ways of viewing socio-hydrological systems, space and time in modelling, complexity, data and model conceptualisation. Several modelling approaches are described, the stages in their development detailed and their applicability to socio-hydrological cases discussed. Gaps in research are then highlighted to guide directions for future research. The review of literature suggests that the nature of socio-hydrological study, being interdisciplinary, focusing on complex interactions between human and natural systems, and dealing with long horizons, is such that modelling will always present a challenge; it is, however, the task of the modeller to use the wide range of tools afforded to them to overcome these challenges as much as possible. The focus in socio-hydrology is on understanding the human–water system in a holistic sense, which differs from the problem solving focus of other water management fields, and as such models in socio-hydrology should be developed with a view to gaining new insight into these dynamics. There is an essential choice that socio-hydrological modellers face in deciding between representing individual system processes or viewing the system from a more abstracted level and modelling it as such; using these different approaches has implications for model development, applicability and the insight that they are capable of giving, and so the decision regarding how to model the system requires thorough consideration of, among other things, the nature of understanding that is sought

Implementing feedback in creative systems : a workshop approach

One particular challenge in AI is the computational modelling and simulation of creativity. Feedback and learning from experience are key aspects of the creative process. Here we investigate how we could implement feedback in creative systems using a social model. From the field of creative writing we borrow the concept of a Writers Workshop as a model for learning through feedback. The Writers Workshop encourages examination, discussion and debates of a piece of creative work using a prescribed format of activities. We propose a computational model of the Writers Workshop as a roadmap for incorporation of feedback in artificial creativity systems. We argue that the Writers Workshop setting describes the anatomy of the creative process. We support our claim with a case study that describes how to implement the Writers Workshop model in a computational creativity system. We present this work using patterns other people can follow to implement similar designs in their own systems. We conclude by discussing the broader relevance of this model to other aspects of AI

Aspects of the genetics of bovine blood systems : linkage, heterosis, gene frequency and association with production traits

Data from two separate beef cattle herds, the University of Tennessee (UT) Plateau Experiment Station Angus herd and the Virginia Polytechnic Institute (VPI) and State University herd at Front Royal, Virginia, containing Angus, Shorthorns, and Herefords, were utilized to investigate some of the genetic aspects of bovine blood systems. Analyses for linkage revealed that genes responsible for blood groups are not located on the sex chromosome. Attempts to find linkage between genes responsible for the F-V and R\u27-S\u27 blood systems proved inconclusive. Studies of heterozygosity in the UT Angus herd using combinations of double homozygotes and heterozygotes between the F-V and R\u27-S\u27 blood systems found heterozygotes in most cases to have higher least-squares means for production traits than homozygotes. More significant differences (.003 \u3c P \u3c .10) were found between double homozygotes and heterozygotes when sire effects were removed from models than when sire effects were included, indicating that confounding of blood type and sire can be extreme. Gene frequency analyses revealed that random drift caused drastic changes in the frequency of blood type genes of the VPI herd as several significant Differences (P \u3c .05 or P \u3c .01) in gene frequencies between years were observed. Analyses of variance were performed on various body and weight production traits to determine if associations of these existed with blood types within a system or with combinations of blood types of two systems. The Z and J systems were found involved with the majority of the associations revealed in the VPI herd. The phenotypes Z0/Z0 and J0/J1 occurred most frequently. Numerously more associations were found in the analyses involving combinations of blood types of two systems than in analyses dealing with blood systems separately. The transferrin system and the R\u27-S\u27 and F-V blood systems were found in the majority of associations in the UT herd. In a comparison of observed and expected heterozygosis of the F-V blood system in the VPI herd, significant differences (P \u3c .05 or P \u3c .005) were found in three of the seven years studied in Angus and in one of the seven years studied in Herefords. Expected values were almost always less than observed values, but the intensity of inbreeding was probably not sufficient to reduce the frequency of heterozygotes appreciably, if at all

FESTivE: an information system method to improve product designers and environmental experts information exchanges

Effective collaboration between product designers and environmental experts is an important driver for the ecodesign practice in industry. This paper investigates the principal functions required for such an e ective collaboration and aims at facilitating them. Product designers should be able to integrate the environmental parameters into their activities, and to exchange information dynamically with the environmental expert whenever needed during the design process. Therefore, the IT system should be in itself dynamic and exible to the integration of new concepts (knowledge, software). Recent developments in Model Driven Engineering (MDE) are showing some interesting results to gain exibility and dynamism in the IT system. Combining software interoperability using model federation based on MDE with the speci city of ecodesign practice in industry this paper proposes the FESTivE method for Federate EcodeSign Tool modEls. Experimented in two different industrial contexts the practical feasibility of FESTivE has been validated with practitioners. Results on the e ects of using FESTivE in industry shows that product designers and environmental experts are more equipped to anticipate and to respond to each other's needs at each stage of the design process of product or service

The big five: Discovering linguistic characteristics that typify distinct personality traits across Yahoo! answers members

Indexación: Scopus.This work was partially supported by the project FONDECYT “Bridging the Gap between Askers and Answers in Community Question Answering Services” (11130094) funded by the Chilean Government.In psychology, it is widely believed that there are five big factors that determine the different personality traits: Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness and Neuroticism as well as Openness. In the last years, researchers have started to examine how these factors are manifested across several social networks like Facebook and Twitter. However, to the best of our knowledge, other kinds of social networks such as social/informational question-answering communities (e.g., Yahoo! Answers) have been left unexplored. Therefore, this work explores several predictive models to automatically recognize these factors across Yahoo! Answers members. As a means of devising powerful generalizations, these models were combined with assorted linguistic features. Since we do not have access to ask community members to volunteer for taking the personality test, we built a study corpus by conducting a discourse analysis based on deconstructing the test into 112 adjectives. Our results reveal that it is plausible to lessen the dependency upon answered tests and that effective models across distinct factors are sharply different. Also, sentiment analysis and dependency parsing proven to be fundamental to deal with extraversion, agreeableness and conscientiousness. Furthermore, medium and low levels of neuroticism were found to be related to initial stages of depression and anxiety disorders. © 2018 Lithuanian Institute of Philosophy and Sociology. All rights reserved.https://www.cys.cic.ipn.mx/ojs/index.php/CyS/article/view/275