Collaborative design : managing task interdependencies and multiple perspectives

This paper focuses on two characteristics of collaborative design with respect to cooperative work: the importance of work interdependencies linked to the nature of design problems; and the fundamental function of design cooperative work arrangement which is the confrontation and combination of perspectives. These two intrinsic characteristics of the design work stress specific cooperative processes: coordination processes in order to manage task interdependencies, establishment of common ground and negotiation mechanisms in order to manage the integration of multiple perspectives in design

Embryo futures and stem cell research: The management of informed uncertainty

This article is available open access and is distributed under a Creative Commons license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/). Copyright @ 2011 The Authors.In the social worlds of assisted conception and stem cell science, uncertainties proliferate and particular framings of the future may be highly strategic. In this article we explore meanings and articulations of the future using data from our study of ethical and social issues implicated by the donation of embryos to human embryonic stem cell research in three linked assisted conception units and stem cell laboratories in the UK. Framings of the future in this field inform the professional management of uncertainty and we explore some of the tensions this involves in practice. The bifurcation of choices for donating embryos into accepting informed uncertainty or not donating at all was identified through the research process of interviews and ethics discussion groups. Professional staff accounts in this study contained moral orientations that valued ideas such as engendering patient trust by offering full information, the sense of collective ownership of the National Heath Service and publicly funded science and ideas for how donors might be able to give restricted consent as a third option.The Wellcome Trus

Personalized Temporal Medical Alert System

International audienceThe continuous increasing needs in telemedicine and healthcare, accentuate the need of well-adapted medical alert systems. Such alert systems may be used by a variety of patients and medical actors, and should allow monitoring a wide range of medical variables. This paper proposes Tempas, a personalized temporal alert system. It facilitates customized alert configuration by using linguistic trends. The trend detection algorithm is based on data normalization, time series segmentation, and segment classification. It improves state of the art by treating irregular and regular time series in an appropriate way, thanks to the introduction of an observation variable valid time. Alert detection is enriched with quality and applicability measures. They allow a personalized tuning of the system to help reducing false negatives and false positives alert

Special Session on Industry 4.0

No abstract available

Unknotting the Heart: Unemployment and Therapeutic Governance

[Excerpt] Since the mid-1990s, as China has downsized and privatized its state-owned enterprises, severe unemployment has created a new class of urban poor and widespread social and psychological disorders. In Unknotting the Heart, Jie Yang examines this understudied group of workers and their experiences of being laid off, counseled, and then reoriented to the market economy. Using fieldwork from reemployment programs, community psychosocial work, and psychotherapy training sessions in Beijing between 2002 and 2013, Yang highlights the role of psychology in state-led interventions to alleviate the effects of mass unemployment. She pays particular attention to those programs that train laid-off workers in basic psychology and then reemploy them as informal “counselors” in their capacity as housemaids and taxi drivers. These laid-off workers are filling a niche market created by both economic restructuring and the shortage of professional counselors in China, helping the government to defuse intensified class tension and present itself as a nurturing and kindly power. In reality, Yang argues, this process creates both new political complicity and new conflicts, often along gender lines. Women are forced to use the moral virtues and work ethics valued under the former socialist system, as well as their experiences of overcoming depression and suffering, as resources for their new psychological care work. Yang focuses on how the emotions, potentials, and “hearts” of these women have become sites of regulation, market expansion, and political imagination

Emergent techno-environmental phenomena

Environmental problems, and human attempts to manage them, can be conceptualised as evolutionary complex systems, involving interlinked processes of physical, knowledge, technological, institutional, perceptual and behavioural change. Issues such as traffic pollution and asthma may be viewed as emergent systems, embedded within overlapping hierarchical systems. A distinction may be made beween changes in physical systems (“physical emergence”), changes in human knowledge about those systems (“knowledge emergence”) and changes in human perceptions (“perceptual emergence”). While processes of physical and knowledge emergence are important, it is through perceptual emergence that a phenomenon comes to be regarded as a “problem” or “issue”, potentially leading to changes in policy, institutional arrangements or behaviour. Physical changes may have impacts on human beings, which may be measurable and predictable in the mass. However, the outcome of such an impact, from the point of view of a particular individual, is mediated by that individual’s perception, which is dictated by his or her personal experience, understanding and interests (“appreciative system”). These perceptions in turn will determine the individual’s behaviour, which may feed back into the collective appreciative system, policy system, and the base physical system. The distinction between policy based on measurement and control of impacts and individual perceptions and behaviour dependent on outcomes leads to incongruity between the “institutional” and “individual” views of an issue. The thesis investigates this incongruity in the case of the “traffic pollution and asthma” emergent system. The perceptions of “institutional” and “individual” actors involved in the system were elicited by means of unstructured and semi-structured interviews, and analysed in terms of a number of key concepts (perceptions of measurement, risk and spatiality) across a number of dimensions (different actors in the same location, the same hierarchical position in different locations, and between a specific institution and individuals). The empirical investigation demonstrates differences between multiple institutions managing different aspects of the problem and a lack of understanding and communication between institutions and individuals, despite the fact that an expressed aim of policy in this area is directed at communicating with individuals with the intention of changing individual behaviour

Information methods for predicting risk and outcome of stroke

Stroke is a major cause of disability and mortality in most economically developed countries. It is the second leading cause of death worldwide (after cancer and heart disease) [55.1, 2] and a major cause of disability in adults in developed countries [55.3]. Personalized modeling is an emerging effective computational approach, which has been applied to various disciplines, such as in personalized drug design, ecology, business, and crime prevention; it has recently become more prominent in biomedical applications. Biomedical data on stroke risk factors and prognostic data are available in a large volume, but the data are complex and often difficult to apply to a specific person. Individualizing stroke risk prediction and prognosis will allow patients to focus on risk factors specific to them, thereby reducing their stroke risk and managing stroke outcomes more effectively. This chapter reviews various methods–conventional statistical methods and computational intelligent modeling methods for predicting risk and outcome of stroke

Biosocial Worlds

Biosocial Worlds presents state-of-the-art contributions to anthropological reflections on the porous boundaries between human and non-human life – biosocial worlds. Based on changing understandings of biology and the social, it explores what it means to be human in these worlds. Growing separation of scientific disciplines for more than a century has maintained a separation of the ‘natural’ and the ‘social’ that has created a space for projections between the two. Such projections carry a directional causality and so constitute powerful means to establish discursive authority. While arguing against the separation of the biological and the social in the study of human and non-human life, it remains important to unfold the consequences of their discursive separation. Based on examples from Botswana, Denmark, Mexico, the Netherlands, Uganda, the UK and USA, the volume explores what has been created in the space between ‘the social’ and ‘the natural’, with a view to rethink ‘the biosocial’. Health topics in the book include diabetes, trauma, cancer, HIV, tuberculosis, prevention of neonatal disease and wider issues of epigenetics. Many of the chapters engage with constructions of health and disease in a wide range of environments, and engage with analysis of the concept of ‘environment’. Anthropological reflection and ethnographic case studies explore how ‘health’ and ‘environment’ are entangled in ways that move their relation beyond interdependence to one of inseparability. The subtitle of this volume captures these insights through the concept of ‘health environment’, seeking to move the engagement of anthropology and biology beyond deterministic projections. ; Biosocial Worlds brings together state-of-the-art contributions to critical anthropological reflection on, and ethnographic exploration of, human and non-human life in the light of our changing understandings of biology and what it means to be human