Outlaw Community Innovations

Recent studies of outlaw communities provide qualitative evidence of their existence and the organisation of the underlying innovation processes. We provide descriptive results from a large scale survey of two online outlaw communities focussing on Microsoft's XBox. In line with previous findings, we identify two types of participants in outlaw communities - user innovators and adopters. Based on 2,256 responses, we find that users modify their XBox mainly to be able to increase the set of available functions of their XBox. Users are also motivated to modify their XBox for the sake of having fun and to conduct pirate behaviour. Finally, the results from our survey suggest that user innovators are largely intrinsically motivated by fun and the intellectual stimulation of writing code for homebrew software

The Quantum Symplectic Cayley-Klein Groups

The contraction method applied to the construction of the nonsemisimple quantum symplectic Cayley-Klein groups $Fun(Sp_q(n;j))$. This groups has been realised as Hopf algebra of the noncommutative functions over the algebra with nilpotent generators. The dual quantum algebras $sp_q(n;j)$ are constructed.Comment: 6 pages, LaTeX, submitted to Proceedings of ' II International Workshop on Classical and Quantum Integrible Systems' (Dubna, 8-12 July,1996), to be published in Int.J.Mod.Phy

Outlaw Community Innovations

Recent studies of outlaw communities provide qualitative evidence of their existence and the organisation of the underlying innovation processes. We provide descriptive results from a large scale survey of two online outlaw communities focussing on Microsoft's XBox. In line with previous findings, we identify two types of participants in outlaw communities - user innovators and adopters. Based on 2,256 responses, we find that users modify their XBox mainly to be able to increase the set of available functions of their XBox. Users are also motivated to modify their XBox for the sake of having fun and to conduct pirate behaviour. Finally, the results from our survey suggest that user innovators are largely intrinsically motivated by fun and the intellectual stimulation of writing code for homebrew software.Outlaw community innovation; video game consoles; homebrew software

Evaluating naturalness and functioning of urban green infrastructure

Evaluating the state of urban green infrastructure (UGI) is a basic step to reach urban sustainability. Two indicators were used to evaluate 89 UGI sites in Zaragoza, a medium-sized city in NE Spain: Naturalness (Nat), related to the area covered by natural components; Functioning (Fun), related to the area showing natural hydro-geomorphological features. Complementarily, 15 biophysical and social variables were used to characterize these sites. A principal component analysis (PCA) was performed to group variables and types of UGI, while linear regressions and ANOVAs were applied to identify relationships between UGI characteristics, Nat and Fun. The Zaragoza UGI was dominated by artificial regular sites. Most sites (73%) have low-medium values of Nat and Fun. They were mostly flat urban parks with very regular forms located in the most densely urbanized zones, and 20% of the sites have high values of Nat and Fun, corresponding to well-conserved natural areas, either unchanged or slightly transformed. Only 3 sites displayed high Nat values and low Fun values. No sites had high Fun values and low Nat values. These groups of UGI sites were mostly distributed along the first axis of the PCA which represented the natural and heterogeneous forms versus regularity and flatness features. The UGI sites scattered throughout the second axis represented a gradient from paved to vegetated sites. Both Nat and Fun were positively correlated with area, natural subsoil and the area covered by vegetation but negatively with artificial soil, regularity and flatness after the linear regressions and ANOVAs. These results show that Nat and Fun are effective indicators to assess UGI sites. Minimizing regularity of design, preserving the natural topological relief, and restricting the area covered by artificial components are suggested to achieve a balanced representation of ecosystem processes, functions, and services within the UGI network of a city

Code Park: A New 3D Code Visualization Tool

We introduce Code Park, a novel tool for visualizing codebases in a 3D game-like environment. Code Park aims to improve a programmer's understanding of an existing codebase in a manner that is both engaging and intuitive, appealing to novice users such as students. It achieves these goals by laying out the codebase in a 3D park-like environment. Each class in the codebase is represented as a 3D room-like structure. Constituent parts of the class (variable, member functions, etc.) are laid out on the walls, resembling a syntax-aware "wallpaper". The users can interact with the codebase using an overview, and a first-person viewer mode. We conducted two user studies to evaluate Code Park's usability and suitability for organizing an existing project. Our results indicate that Code Park is easy to get familiar with and significantly helps in code understanding compared to a traditional IDE. Further, the users unanimously believed that Code Park was a fun tool to work with.Comment: Accepted for publication in 2017 IEEE Working Conference on Software Visualization (VISSOFT 2017); Supplementary video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUiy1M9hUK

Laughing at Cancer Online: a corpus-based investigation of irreverent humour as coping

In the context of illnesses like cancer, humour and joking, especially gallows humour “that treats serious, frightening, or painful subject matter in a light or satirical way” (Watson 2011: 38), can still be socially unacceptable. Yet people with cancer and their carers amongst themselves, can sometimes find much needed comfort and relief in breaking social taboos and making light of their often life-threatening situations. Such naturally occurring interactions, however, can be difficult to capture in the physical world. This paper therefore explores the role of irreverent humour used by patients and carers in the digital world, on a UK-based online forum dedicated to cancer. Specifically, the focus is on a thread called “For those with a warped sense of humour WARNING- no punches pulled here”, consisting of half a million words, over 2500 posts, contributed by 68 individuals. A statistical comparison of this thread with other threads on the same forum using Wmatrix (Rayson 2009) reveals that the key humorous utterances make fun of cancer and its consequences, such as embarrassing bodily functions and paraphernalia required as part of treatment: If baggy had farted lots then HB would have shot across the pool... jet propulsion! Focusing on such examples identified through combined corpus and qualitative methods, I discuss potential functions of this kind of humour in the cancer context, such as community building, support and empowerment in a situation where people otherwise feel powerless. I also reflect on the affordances of digital environments, both as facilitating such risqué interactions and in enabling researchers to capture them