Maine Shared Collections Strategy

Libraries are facing fundamental changes in user demands for new services and spaces to support the use of digital collections, and new opportunities to offer digital content through large scale e-book collections such as Google Books and the Open Content Alliance. Simultaneously, libraries feel pressures to responsibly steward sizeable, historic print collections. These challenges, together with scarce funding to build new stacks and the increasing cost of housing legacy print collections require libraries to rethink management of print collections and delivery of e-book collections to their users. Print on demand services and delivery of e-book content provide opportunities to plan for managing legacy print collections and delivery of content in new ways. These tasks exceed the capacity of any single library or organization. The MSCS is a statewide project among all the major libraries in Maine to coordinate the management of legacy print collections in a way that takes advantage of these emerging opportunities and is sustainable in the long run. See About the Project for additional information and resources

COMFORTABLE URBAN ENVIRONMENT: TRENDS AND PROBLEMS OF THE ORGANIZATION

At present, the formation of a modern comfortable urban environment in Russian cities acquires a special socio-economic significance. It is one of the priority state large-scale programs. The development of fundamentally new approaches to the organization of an integrated improvement of urban areas on the basis of broad participation of the population in projects for the arrangement of courtyard territories and public spaces is envisaged. It leads to a number of organizational and information problems connected with interaction with territorial authorities of the public and municipal administration. That problems are considered in the article

Deciphering the functional organization of molecular networks via graphlets-based methods and network embedding techniques

[eng] Advances in capturing technologies have yielded a massive production of large-scale molecular data that describe different aspects of cellular functioning. These data are often modeled as networks, in which nodes are molecular entities, and the edges connecting them represent their relationships. These networks are a valuable source of biological information, but they need to be untangled by new algorithms to reveal the information hidden in their wiring patterns. State-of-the-art approaches for deciphering these complex networks are based on graphlets and network embeddings. This thesis focuses on the development of novel algorithms to overcome the limitations of the current graphlet and network embedding methodologies in the field of biology. Graphlets are a powerful tool for characterizing the local wiring patterns of molecular networks. However, current graphlet-based methods are mostly applicable to unweighted networks, whereas real-world molecular networks may have weighted edges that represent the probability of an interaction occurring in the cell. This probabilistic information is commonly discarded when applying thresholds to generate unweighted networks, which may lead to information loss. To address this challenge, we introduce probabilistic graphlets, a novel approach that can capture the local wiring patterns of weighted networks and uncover hidden probabilistic relationships between molecular entities. We use probabilistic graphlets to generalize the graphlet methods and apply these to the probabilistic representation of real-world molecular interactions. We show that probabilistic graphlets robustly un- cover relevant biological information from the molecular networks. Furthermore, we demonstrate that probabilistic graphlets exhibit a higher sensitivity to identifying condition-specific functions compared to their unweighted counterparts. Network embedding algorithms learn a low-dimensional vectorial representation for each gene in the network while preserving the structural information of the molecular network. Current, available embedding approaches strictly focus on clustering the genes’ embedding vectors and interpreting such clusters to reveal the hidden information of the biological networks. Thus, we investigate new perspectives and methods that go beyond gene-centric approaches. First, we shift the exploration of the embedding space’s functional organization from the genes to their functions. We introduce the Functional Mapping Matrix and apply it to investigate the changes in the organization of cancer and control network embedding spaces from a functional perspective. We demonstrate that our methodology identifies novel cancer-related functions and genes that the currently available methods for gene-centric analyses cannot identify. Finally, we go even further and switch the perspective from the organization of the embedded entities (genes and functions) in the embedding space to the space itself. We annotate axes of the network embedding spaces of six species with both, functional annotations and genes. We demonstrate that the embedding space axes represent coherent cellular functions and offer a functional fingerprint of the cell’s functional organization. Moreover, we show that the analysis of the axes reveals new functional evolutionary connections between species

Geospatial analysis and living urban geometry

This essay outlines how to incorporate morphological rules within the exigencies of our technological age. We propose using the current evolution of GIS (Geographical Information Systems) technologies beyond their original representational domain, towards predictive and dynamic spatial models that help in constructing the new discipline of "urban seeding". We condemn the high-rise tower block as an unsuitable typology for a living city, and propose to re-establish human-scale urban fabric that resembles the traditional city. Pedestrian presence, density, and movement all reveal that open space between modernist buildings is not urban at all, but neither is the open space found in today's sprawling suburbs. True urban space contains and encourages pedestrian interactions, and has to be designed and built according to specific rules. The opposition between traditional self-organized versus modernist planned cities challenges the very core of the urban planning discipline. Planning has to be re-framed from being a tool creating a fixed future to become a visionary adaptive tool of dynamic states in evolution

International sport federations in the world city network

In this article, we analyze the transnational urban geographies produced by international sport federations (ISFs) through their global, regional, and national headquarter locations. Data on the global urban presence of 35 major ISFs are examined through connectivity analysis and principal component analysis. The connectivity analysis reveals the relative dominance of cities in Europe and Pacific Asia, whereby Seoul, Tokyo, Kuala Lumpur, Cairo, and Lausanne stand out. The principal component analysis reveals the main subnetworks produced through ISF location decisions, which includes inter alia a "winter sports subnetwork" centered on Ankara, Belgrade, Helsinki, and Stockholm; an "Olympic subnetwork" centered on Lausanne; and a decentered subnetwork with truly "global sports."

The computer revolution in science: steps towards the realization of computer-supported discovery environments

The tools that scientists use in their search processes together form so-called discovery environments. The promise of artificial intelligence and other branches of computer science is to radically transform conventional discovery environments by equipping scientists with a range of powerful computer tools including large-scale, shared knowledge bases and discovery programs. We will describe the future computer-supported discovery environments that may result, and illustrate by means of a realistic scenario how scientists come to new discoveries in these environments. In order to make the step from the current generation of discovery tools to computer-supported discovery environments like the one presented in the scenario, developers should realize that such environments are large-scale sociotechnical systems. They should not just focus on isolated computer programs, but also pay attention to the question how these programs will be used and maintained by scientists in research practices. In order to help developers of discovery programs in achieving the integration of their tools in discovery environments, we will formulate a set of guidelines that developers could follow

Networked learning environments

This chapter introduces the idea of networked learning environments and argues that these environments provide the totality of surrounding conditions for learning in digital networks. It provides illustrative vignettes of the ways that students appropriate networked environments for learning. The chapter then examines the notion of networked learning environments in relation to the idea of infrastructure and infrastructures for learning and sets out some issues arising from this perspective. The chapter suggests that students and teachers selectively constitute their own contexts and that design can only have an indirect effect on learning. The chapter goes on to argue that design needs to be located at the meso level of the institution and that a solution to the problem of indirect design lies in refocusing design at the meso level and on the design of infrastructures for learning

Disentangling Achievement Orientation and Goal Setting: Effects on Self-Regulatory Processes

Creativity has been underscored as a key factor to organizational adaptability and competitiveness in today\u27s rapidly changing business environment. Designing as well as managing work environments that facilitate creativity have therefore received growing attention, resulting in a multitude of research examining the social-psychological work environment. Few studies, however, have focused on the contribution of the physical work environment to supporting creativity in the workplace. This study focuses on the role of the physical environment in supporting creativity in organizations by identifying specific physical features and attributes of the work environment perceived to promote or inhibit creativity. The research design compares four organizations publicly acclaimed for their innovative social-psychological work environments, but which are distinctly different in terms of the physical work environment. Quantitative and qualitative data were collected by means of survey questionnaires [N = 1 30). Results indicate that the physical work environment exerts indirect influence on creativity by contributing to two significant social-psychological conditions that are conducive to creativity, namely dynamism and freedom. The study specifies attributes of the physical work environment perceived to be positively and negatively associated with both of these conditions