Proceedings of the ECCS 2005 satellite workshop: embracing complexity in design - Paris 17 November 2005

Embracing complexity in design is one of the critical issues and challenges of the 21st century. As the realization grows that design activities and artefacts display properties associated with complex adaptive systems, so grows the need to use complexity concepts and methods to understand these properties and inform the design of better artifacts. It is a great challenge because complexity science represents an epistemological and methodological swift that promises a holistic approach in the understanding and operational support of design. But design is also a major contributor in complexity research. Design science is concerned with problems that are fundamental in the sciences in general and complexity sciences in particular. For instance, design has been perceived and studied as a ubiquitous activity inherent in every human activity, as the art of generating hypotheses, as a type of experiment, or as a creative co-evolutionary process. Design science and its established approaches and practices can be a great source for advancement and innovation in complexity science. These proceedings are the result of a workshop organized as part of the activities of a UK government AHRB/EPSRC funded research cluster called Embracing Complexity in Design (www.complexityanddesign.net) and the European Conference in Complex Systems (complexsystems.lri.fr). Embracing complexity in design is one of the critical issues and challenges of the 21st century. As the realization grows that design activities and artefacts display properties associated with complex adaptive systems, so grows the need to use complexity concepts and methods to understand these properties and inform the design of better artifacts. It is a great challenge because complexity science represents an epistemological and methodological swift that promises a holistic approach in the understanding and operational support of design. But design is also a major contributor in complexity research. Design science is concerned with problems that are fundamental in the sciences in general and complexity sciences in particular. For instance, design has been perceived and studied as a ubiquitous activity inherent in every human activity, as the art of generating hypotheses, as a type of experiment, or as a creative co-evolutionary process. Design science and its established approaches and practices can be a great source for advancement and innovation in complexity science. These proceedings are the result of a workshop organized as part of the activities of a UK government AHRB/EPSRC funded research cluster called Embracing Complexity in Design (www.complexityanddesign.net) and the European Conference in Complex Systems (complexsystems.lri.fr)

Classifying Information Technologies: A Multidimensional Scaling Approach

Information technologies are an integral part of any organization and are constantly emerging and evolving. Theories explaining the impact of technological innovations on organizations and the individuals that populate them are developed as new technologies emerge, and future business applications are explored. Despite this richness of research, we have a fairly narrow view of how these technologies are related. Furthermore, new technologies are often assigned labels that strongly connote disconnect from existing technologies despite the fact that few true evolutionary leaps exist and, for the most part, information technologies evolve from each other and share many similarities. Consequently, our ability to apply knowledge gained from the application of one technology to interactions with another is limited. Developing general theories of information technologies require strong understanding of the different technologies that exist and how they are related. To this end, this article puts forward a concise classification of information technologies. Using a multidimensional scaling approach and survey data from IS academics, we identify three dimensions which capture the commonalities and differences among information technologies. We believe that the resultant classification will enable researchers to better integrate existing and future theories, and to move away from technology-specific theories toward more general ones

EU accession and Poland's external trade policy

No description supplie

A Hilbert Space Geometric Representation of Shared Awareness and Joint Decision Making

Two people in the same situation may ascribe very different meanings to their experiences. They will form different awareness, reacting differently to shared information. Various factors can give rise to this behavior. These factors include, but are not limited to, prior knowledge, training, biases, cultural factors, social factors, team vs. individual context, time, resources, and technology. At the individual level, the differences in attaining separate actions by accessing shared information may not be considered as an anomaly from the perspective of rational decision-making. But for group behavior, reacting differently to the shared information can give rise to conflicts and deviations from an expected behavior, and are categorized as an anomaly or irrational behavior. The lack of proper recognition of the reasons for differences can even impede the shared action towards attaining a common objective. The manifestation of differences becomes noticeable in complex situations. The shared awareness approaches that originate from available situational awareness models fail to recognize the reasons of an unexpected decision in these situations. One reason for this is that in complex situations, incompatible events can become dominant. Human information processing is sensitive to the compatibility of the events. This, and various other human psychological characteristics, require models to be developed that include comprehensive formalisms for both compatible and incompatible events in complex situations. Quantum probability provides a geometrical probabilistic formalism to study the decision and the dynamic cognitive systems in complex situations. The event representation in Hilbert space provides the necessary foundation to represent an individual\u27s knowledge of a situation. Hilbert space allows representing awareness as a superposition of indefinite states. These states form a complete N-dimensional Hilbert space. Within the space generated, events are represented as a subspace. By using these characteristics of Hilbert space and quantum geometrical probabilities, this study introduces a representation of self and other-than-self in a situation. An area of awareness with the possibility of projection onto the same event allows representing shared awareness geometrically. This formalism provides a coherent explanation of shared awareness for both compatible and incompatible events. Also, by using the superposition principles, the dissertation introduces spooky action at a distance concept in studying shared awareness

Learning, Arts, and the Brain: The Dana Consortium Report on Arts and Cognition

Reports findings from multiple neuroscientific studies on the impact of arts training on the enhancement of other cognitive capacities, such as reading acquisition, sequence learning, geometrical reasoning, and memory

Prospective mathematics teachers' technological pedagogical content knowledge of geometry in a GeoGebra-based environment

A thesis submitted to the School of Education, Faculty of Humanities, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy January 2017.This research study focused on exploring prospective teachers’ knowledge of geometric reasoning in teacher preparation. Premised on the claims that learning mathematics is profoundly influenced by the tasks, by the learning context and by the tools that are used in mathematics instruction, mathematics prospective teachers’ technological pedagogical content knowledge was examined. The technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPACK) framework was employed to study the prospective teacher’s knowledge of circle geometry as proposed by Mishra & Koehler (2006). The main focus of the research was on investigating the empirical and theoretical questions of what characterizes aspects of prospective teachers’ technological pedagogical content knowledge. These aspects were geometry content knowledge (CK), geometry pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) and geometry technological content knowledge (TCK). This exploratory multiple case study explores the TPACK of six mathematics prospective teachers enrolled in a second-year undergraduate mandatory mathematics methodology course in an urban South African university. Data was collected through prospective teachers’ (PTs) responses to circle geometry tasks, interviews and screen cast recordings. Rubrics were employed as analytical tools. Duval’s (1995) cognitive apprehensions and processes were engaged as interpretative tools to understand how the PTs responded to the CK, TCK and PCK tasks. The results suggest that prospective teachers’ circle geometry technological pedagogical content knowledge constructed in a GeoGebra-based environment is characterized as weak emanating from weak geometry content knowledge (CK), weak technological content knowledge (TCK) and weak pedagogical content knowledge (PCK). The study has shown that a weak geometry CK was evidenced from the participating PTs’ weak display of cognitive apprehensions and geometry reasoning processes. This study contributes to the current debates on teacher professional knowledge and on an understanding of frameworks for which teacher knowledge can be premised in South Africa. A model was developed for classifying and describing forms of mathematics connections in geometry knowledge at teacher preparation levelLG201

On the psychological origins of tool use

The ubiquity of tool use in human life has generated multiple lines of scientific and philosophical investigation to understand the development and expression of humans' engagement with tools and its relation to other dimensions of human experience. However, existing literature on tool use faces several epistemological challenges in which the same set of questions generate many different answers. At least four critical questions can be identified, which are intimately intertwined-(1) What constitutes tool use? (2) What psychological processes underlie tool use in humans and nonhuman animals? (3) Which of these psychological processes are exclusive to tool use? (4) Which psychological processes involved in tool use are exclusive to Homo sapiens? To help advance a multidisciplinary scientific understanding of tool use, six author groups representing different academic disciplines (e.g., anthropology, psychology, neuroscience) and different theoretical perspectives respond to each of these questions, and then point to the direction of future work on tool use. We find that while there are marked differences among the responses of the respective author groups to each question, there is a surprising degree of agreement about many essential concepts and questions. We believe that this interdisciplinary and intertheoretical discussion will foster a more comprehensive understanding of tool use than any one of these perspectives (or any one of these author groups) would (or could) on their own

Enabling collaboration in virtual reality navigators

In this paper we characterize a feature superset for Collaborative Virtual Reality Environments (CVRE), and derive a component framework to transform stand-alone VR navigators into full-fledged multithreaded collaborative environments. The contributions of our approach rely on a cost-effective and extensible technique for loading software components into separate POSIX threads for rendering, user interaction and network communications, and adding a top layer for managing session collaboration. The framework recasts a VR navigator under a distributed peer-to-peer topology for scene and object sharing, using callback hooks for broadcasting remote events and multicamera perspective sharing with avatar interaction. We validate the framework by applying it to our own ALICE VR Navigator. Experimental results show that our approach has good performance in the collaborative inspection of complex models.Postprint (published version