Third sector employment and training initiatives: an analysis of institutional influences on success and failure

This thesis presents a multi-scalar analysis of the institutional influences upon Third Sector Employment and Training Initiatives (TSEIs) which have become de rigueur as a response to the seemingly intractable unemployment problems of many localities in the UK. To address the efficacy of third sector initiatives in the development of local economies, previous evaluations have attempted to define the features of 'best practice' initiatives in the UK. However, such analyses focus upon the internal organisation of TSEIs and are biased towards what are regarded as successful organisations while neglecting the impacts of failure. Consequently, this thesis addresses the institutional influences upon TSEIs within a comparative analysis of successful and failing initiatives, while recognising that 'success' and 'failure' are relative rather than absolute concepts. The thesis combines approaches from the social sciences in order to create an informed theoretical basis which is able to incorporate broader explanatory issues of social change and structure that are explored through empirical study. An approach is therefore applied which emphasises the multiple scales at which theories operate, from the essentially grand meta-theories of the regulation approach to the more locally contingent theories of governance and institutions. This subsequently informs the debate into changes in economic, social, political and governance structures which affect labour markets and job creation strategies in the UK. The thesis suggests a number of common factors which influence the development of TSEIs, allied to a number of specific factors which are related to the aims of particular initiatives. The need for flexibility within frameworks leads to a conceptualisation of the key organisational factor influencing TSEIs as Structured Flexibility. From this, I suggest a number of policy directions which ought to facilitate the third sector’s attempts to develop local economic growth

SoK: Diving into DAG-based Blockchain Systems

Blockchain plays an important role in cryptocurrency markets and technology services. However, limitations on high latency and low scalability retard their adoptions and applications in classic designs. Reconstructed blockchain systems have been proposed to avoid the consumption of competitive transactions caused by linear sequenced blocks. These systems, instead, structure transactions/blocks in the form of Directed Acyclic Graph (DAG) and consequently re-build upper layer components including consensus, incentives, \textit{etc.} The promise of DAG-based blockchain systems is to enable fast confirmation (complete transactions within million seconds) and high scalability (attach transactions in parallel) without significantly compromising security. However, this field still lacks systematic work that summarises the DAG technique. To bridge the gap, this Systematization of Knowledge (SoK) provides a comprehensive analysis of DAG-based blockchain systems. Through deconstructing open-sourced systems and reviewing academic researches, we conclude the main components and featured properties of systems, and provide the approach to establish a DAG. With this in hand, we analyze the security and performance of several leading systems, followed by discussions and comparisons with concurrent (scaling blockchain) techniques. We further identify open challenges to highlight the potentiality of DAG-based solutions and indicate their promising directions for future research.Comment: Full versio

Human Factors in Agile Software Development

Through our four years experiments on students' Scrum based agile software development (ASD) process, we have gained deep understanding into the human factors of agile methodology. We designed an agile project management tool - the HASE collaboration development platform to support more than 400 students self-organized into 80 teams to practice ASD. In this thesis, Based on our experiments, simulations and analysis, we contributed a series of solutions and insights in this researches, including 1) a Goal Net based method to enhance goal and requirement management for ASD process, 2) a novel Simple Multi-Agent Real-Time (SMART) approach to enhance intelligent task allocation for ASD process, 3) a Fuzzy Cognitive Maps (FCMs) based method to enhance emotion and morale management for ASD process, 4) the first large scale in-depth empirical insights on human factors in ASD process which have not yet been well studied by existing research, and 5) the first to identify ASD process as a human-computation system that exploit human efforts to perform tasks that computers are not good at solving. On the other hand, computers can assist human decision making in the ASD process.Comment: Book Draf

Genre and ...

Genres are everywhere and we all know how to use them. However, they are also elusive and hard to describe. We act and interact through genre, understand through genre, and organize through genre, but we have a hard time defining individual genres, and an even harder time understanding what a genre is and what a genre does. Therefore, genre is a central concept in many areas of scholarship today and is interlinked with many other central scholarly concepts, but its core function is still a subject of debate, and its connections with other core concepts remain sorely under-examined. Genre and … explores these connections in a series of articles that each analyzes the relationship between genre and one other central scholarly concept: conversation, rhetoric, categorization, paratext, interpretation etc., with examples spanning from Sherlock Holmes and avantgardistic literature to car commercials. The authors of the present volume have a common starting point in Scandinavian Studies, but span a wide field of scholarly tradition. Thus, taken together the articles in Genre and … are representative of an expanding and intriguing professional genre network

Partial Minds: The Strategic Underrepresentation of Consciousness in Postwar American Novels

Partial Minds argues that contemporary American novels strategically break conventionally-defined norms for the representation of fictional minds to highlight unusual character thoughts. Certain states of mind—including traumatic experiences, conflicting feelings, some memories, and the simultaneous possession of multiple identities—are more difficult to represent than others, and so some authors or narrators reject conventional cognitive representations, such as naming feelings, if they seem poor tools for effectively communicating that character’s exceptional quality to the reader. For example, the trauma of Marianne in Joyce Carol Oates’s We Were the Mulvaneys is represented by the narrator, her brother Judd. But in attempting to represent the state of Marianne’s mind on the night she was raped, Judd finds that simply turning to a verbalized account of her thoughts, such as “I felt terrible,” or a seeming-omniscient gloss of her mental state, such as “She suffered incredible mental turmoil,” is insufficient and incommensurate with the traumatic and painful mental state she must have endured. In cases like these, authors and narrators reject conventional models of representation and turn to partial minds to effectively articulate to the reader the mental state that the character experiences. These more effective representations are pivotal in communicating to the reader a more adequate—whether from a mimetic, synthetic, or thematic perspective—understanding of characters’ experiences. Partial minds are often the very required conditions for readers to empathize with a character. By looking at several different instantiations of partial minds in recent American novels, I show how this technique both heightens the value of cognitive narrative criticism and revises the way we read many of literature’s most interesting characters