The Revival of Long Reading: A New Multimodal Narrative Format

The goal of this study is to specify nature, the "heart and soul" of a process referred to as a "long reading", to indentify reasons for the interest in the so-called longread narrative formats, unexpectedly going up in times of obviously reverse trends, such as, for example, short and speed reading techniques. The cyclic recurrence registered in case of ‘lengthy twist’ in the reading matters demonstrates that each transfer to shorter-size books gives a chance, probability, to become a step to long books. The key research findings indicate that longread formats are increasingly more and more popular, as these texts enable readers to keep out of the information pollution. The outcomes and conclusions are focusing on expanding the conceptional fields towards new policies stimulating reading and to more creative methods producing reading effects into the sphere of quality online journalism, education, publishing industries and popularization of science, at large. This article is the result of a collaboration made possible by the COST Action IS1404 E-READ (Evolution of Reading in the Age of Digitisation), supported by the EU Framework Programme Horizon 2020, and the research project DCOST 01/13 - 04.08.2017 of the National Scientific Fund of Bulgaria

Development, Evolution, and Teeth: How We Came to Explain The Morphological Evolution of the Mammalian Dentition

abstract: This dissertation begins to lay out a small slice of the history of morphological research, and how it has changed, from the late 19th through the close of the 20th century. Investigators using different methods, addressing different questions, holding different assumptions, and coming from different research fields have pursued morphological research programs, i.e. research programs that explore the process of changing form. Subsequently, the way in which investigators have pursued and understood morphology has witnessed significant changes from the 19th century to modern day research. In order to trace this shifting history of morphology, I have selected a particular organ, teeth, and traced a tendril of research on the dentition beginning in the late 19th century and ending at the year 2000. But even focusing on teeth would be impossible; the scope of research on this organ is far too vast. Instead, I narrow this dissertation to investigation of research on a particular problem: explaining mammalian tooth morphology. How researchers have investigated mammalian tooth morphology and what counts as an explanation changed dramatically during this period.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Biology 201

Conceptual Design Tool for Structural Layout Optimization in the Early Design Phase

This thesis develops a conceptual design tool capable of generating optimized structural layout suggestions for building design in the early design phase. The structural layout of a building is the arrangement and design of the load-bearing elements that support the weight of the building and resist external forces. The structural layout in this project solely consists of prefabricated reinforced (RC) elements. The use of prefabricated RC elements is embedded in the Danish construction industry and will likely remain so in the foreseeable future. Therefore, there is great potential for more effective use of concrete in terms of sustainability and decreasing cost. The proposed design tool can help fulfill this potential. Action Research (AR) is used to create the conceptual framework of the design tool. The AR analysis consists of semi-structured interviews and a co-creation workshop where architects, engineers, and contractors contribute to the development of the design tool to ensure that the final tool conforms to real-world practice. The final design tool is based on this framework and developed using four core principles: optimization, interactivity, dissemination, and automation. A novel parametric modeling method is developed in the design tool called Adjacent Polygon (APoly) representation. The APoly method creates a dynamic parametric representation of a given building plan to generate diverse yet feasible structural layout suggestions. The evaluation modules of different structural typologies are constructed using surrogate models in the form of Neural Networks. The surrogate models are combined in a hierarchical structure to create an algorithm capable of predicting the optimized geometry and corresponding cost for a structural element based on the external conditions inputted into the algorithm. The entire network of prediction models is then combined with a meta-heuristic optimization algorithm in the form of a Genetic Algorithm (GA) to create a surrogate-assisted optimization framework. A repair algorithm is incorporated into the GA to increase the number of valid solutions generated during each optimization iteration to decrease the convergence time. The performance and reliability of the design tool are validated through two groups of local and global case studies. The first group consists of parameter sensitivity studies on the local approximation modules for each structural typology. The second group of validation studies examines the design tool’s effectiveness across relevant building plans and scenarios. The corresponding results demonstrate that the tool can effectively adapt to these different settings and produce optimized structural layout suggestions. It is also demonstrated that the design tool can conduct multi-objective optimization and produce a front of Pareto optimal solutions

Mining Software Repositories to Assist Developers and Support Managers

This thesis explores mining the evolutionary history of a software system to support software developers and managers in their endeavors to build and maintain complex software systems. We introduce the idea of evolutionary extractors which are specialized extractors that can recover the history of software projects from software repositories, such as source control systems. The challenges faced in building C-REX, an evolutionary extractor for the C programming language, are discussed. We examine the use of source control systems in industry and the quality of the recovered C-REX data through a survey of several software practitioners. Using the data recovered by C-REX, we develop several approaches and techniques to assist developers and managers in their activities. We propose Source Sticky Notes to assist developers in understanding legacy software systems by attaching historical information to the dependency graph. We present the Development Replay approach to estimate the benefits of adopting new software maintenance tools by reenacting the development history. We propose the Top Ten List which assists managers in allocating testing resources to the subsystems that are most susceptible to have faults. To assist managers in improving the quality of their projects, we present a complexity metric which quantifies the complexity of the changes to the code instead of quantifying the complexity of the source code itself. All presented approaches are validated empirically using data from several large open source systems. The presented work highlights the benefits of transforming software repositories from static record keeping repositories to active repositories used by researchers to gain empirically based understanding of software development, and by software practitioners to predict, plan and understand various aspects of their project

Laws and principles of evolution

First, we note that Evolution is one of Brooks ' [1] essential characteristics of software systems: the only systems that are not evolving are the dead ones. Evolution is a basic fact of software life. The fact that we have evolution on multiple levels is often overlooked in considering the fact of evolution: local versus global, component versus system, internally versus externally motivated, etc. Second, we note that while we have masses of data about local and component level evolution buried in our change and version management systems, we have done relatively little with that data to determine software evolution principles or theories for the underpinnings of software engineering. Principles are foundational in providing guidance in the various levels of evolution that take place – they form the bedrock of the software engineering enterprise. Third, we note that we have very little data about software systems evolution- global evolution, evolution on a large scale. For our work on FEAST [2] we have had what amounts to a wealth of data: a mere handful of systems. The utility of these few sets of data is hampered further by the fact that there are at most about 25 data points (ie, 25 systems evolution instances) for each system. Fourth, we note that we have in this small amount of data only a few of the important attributes needed to understand evolution deeply- namely, we have basic attributes such as system size, release dates (in some cases), etc. To substantiate laws of evolution we need both more systems and instances as well as more attributes for those systems and instances. Fifth, we note that we need more than just (more) product data. We need process and organizational data to determine the fate of the FEAST hypothesis [3]. We need process and organizational data [4] in order to gain a deep understanding of the organizational processes and structures within which the systems are evolved. Determining the underlying correlations and causal mechanisms that show how feedback control work