Refracting profiles and generalized holodiagrams

The recently developed concept of refracting profiles and that of refraction holodiagrams are combined so that the classical Abramson holodiagrams can be generalized taking into account a wider class of wave fronts and refraction at an interface, whenever regions of caustics are avoided. These holodiagrams are obtained as envelopes of specific families of Cartesian Ovals with an appropriate parametrization. Classical and reflecting holodiagrams are particular cases of this class. Several of the properties of the classical holodiagrams are shared by their richer generalized versionsComment: 12 pages, 7 figure

YouTube as a repository : the creative practice of students as producers of Open Educational Resources

In this paper we present an alternative view of Open Educational Resources (OERs). Rather than focusing on open media resources produced by expert practitioners for use by peers and learners, we examine the practice of learners as active agents, producing open media resources using the devices in their pockets: their mobile phones. In this study, students are the producers and operate simultaneously as legitimate members of the YouTube community and producers of educational content for future cohorts. Taking an Action Research approach we investigated how student’s engagement with open media resources related to their creativity. Using Kleiman’s framework of fives conceptual themes which emerged from academics experiences of creativity (constraint, process, product, transformation, fulfillment), we found that these themes revealed the opportunities designed into the assessed task and provided a useful lens with which to view students’ authentic creative experiences. Students’ experience of creativity mapped on to Kleiman’s framework, and was affected by assessment. Dimensions of openness changed across platforms, although the impact of authenticity and publication on creativity was evident, and the production of open media resources that have a dual function as OERs has clear benefits in terms of knowledge sharing and community participation.The transformational impacts for students were evident in the short term but would merit a longitudinal study. A series of conclusions are drawn to inform future practice and research

Redesigning architecture through photography

Abstract – This paper focuses on the possibility of (re)designing architecture virtually with the help of one of the most important representation tools: Photography. Various digital processes like stitching multiple photos together and mirroring images in image editing software like Photoshop, allow this virtual architecture to take place in virtual environments. Photography can be utilized in the process of ‘constructing’ a new space --that we can call ‘narrative space’-- from an existing spatial body. This narrative space can also be defined as a ‘manufactured metaspace’ which is a space beyond reality and representation: A constructed reality that exists solely in digital realms like Second Life

Converging institutions. Shaping the relationships between nanotechnologies, economy and society

This paper develops the concept of converging institutions and applies it to nanotechnologies. Starting point are economic and socialogical perspectives. We focus on the entire innovation process of nanotechnologies beginning with research and development over diffusion via downstream sectors until implementation in final goods. The concept is applied to the nano-cluster in the metropolitan region of Grenoble and a possible converging institution is identified.converging institutions, converging technologies, nanotechnologies, systemic risks

Reconfiguring architectural space through photography

Depending on facilities and technologies available at various periods of the world history, architects used various tools like drawings, paintings, miniatures, models, computers, fine arts platforms to represent their design before and after construction. “Representation includes everything people construct to be known as a visual record or figurative manifestation of that reality. […] Within this approach, architects usually reduce the definition of representation to the creation of such visual forms as drawings or models that selectively double or imitate the physical reality of a building. I would like to move beyond this traditional view to define representation as a culture-specific and dynamic process of establishing the relationships between reality and the signs created to symbolize this reality. In this process, reality becomes thinkable, and its meanings are symbolically assigned.” (Piotrowski and Robinson 2001: 42

Unpacking capabilities underlying design (thinking) process

Engineering graduates must know how to frame and solve non-routine problems. While design classes explicitly teach problem framing and solving, it is lacking throughout much of the rest of the engineering curriculum and is often relegated to capstone classes at the end of the students’ educational experience. This paper explores problem framing and solving through the lens of experiential learning theory. It captures core problem framing and solving approaches from critical, design and systems thinking and concludes with a table of learning outcomes that might be drawn upon in designing an engineering curriculum that more fully develops the problem framing and solving capabilities of its students

Mediating urban politics

Despite the turn to relational vocabularies in urban theory, most work on urban politics acknowledging the importance of media has tended to reproduce a centred image of ‘the media’ and a functionalist account of mediation. This essay suggests, by contrast, that media might be understood more phenomenologically, as those technologies embedded in the dispersed practices of urban life, and as assemblages of integrative practices (i.e. ‘the media’), both of which identify and subject to action a range of issues that are problematized as ‘urban’. Such a focus on media-in-practices is an important shift in perspective for research hoping to bring together the shared political concerns of urban and media studies, and to take advantage of the converging spatial imaginations and reconfigured understandings of mediation emerging across both fields

Collective Decision Dynamics in the Presence of External Drivers

We develop a sequence of models describing information transmission and decision dynamics for a network of individual agents subject to multiple sources of influence. Our general framework is set in the context of an impending natural disaster, where individuals, represented by nodes on the network, must decide whether or not to evacuate. Sources of influence include a one-to-many externally driven global broadcast as well as pairwise interactions, across links in the network, in which agents transmit either continuous opinions or binary actions. We consider both uniform and variable threshold rules on the individual opinion as baseline models for decision-making. Our results indicate that 1) social networks lead to clustering and cohesive action among individuals, 2) binary information introduces high temporal variability and stagnation, and 3) information transmission over the network can either facilitate or hinder action adoption, depending on the influence of the global broadcast relative to the social network. Our framework highlights the essential role of local interactions between agents in predicting collective behavior of the population as a whole.Comment: 14 pages, 7 figure

Exercise as Labour: Quantified Self and the Transformation of Exercise into Labour

The recent increase in the use of digital self-tracking devices has given rise to a range of relations to the self often discussed as quantified self (QS). In popular and academic discourse, this development has been discussed variously as a form of narcissistic self-involvement, an advanced expression of panoptical self-surveillance and a potential new dawn for e-health. This article proposes a previously un-theorised consequence of this large-scale observation and analysis of human behaviour; that exercise activity is in the process of being reconfigured as labour. QS will be briefly introduced, and reflected on, subsequently considering some of its key aspects in relation to how these have so far been interpreted and analysed in academic literature. Secondly, the analysis of scholars of “digital labour” and “immaterial labour” will be considered, which will be discussed in relation to what its analysis of the transformations of work in contemporary advanced capitalism can offer to an interpretation of the promotion and management of the self-tracking of exercise activities. Building on this analysis, it will be proposed that a thermodynamic model of the exploitation of potential energy underlies the interest that corporations have shown in self-tracking and that “gamification” and the promotion of an entrepreneurial selfhood is the ideological frame that informs the strategy through which labour value is extracted without payment. Finally, the potential theoretical and political consequences of these insights will be considered