Observational models of requirements evolution

Requirements Evolution is one of the main issues that affect development activities as well as system features (e.g., system dependability). Although researchers and practitioners recognise the importance of requirements evolution, research results and experience are still patchy. This points out a lack of methodologies that address requirements evolution. This thesis investigates the current understanding of requirements evolution and explores new directions in requirements evolution research. The empirical analysis of industrial case studies highlights software requirements evolution as an important issue. Unfortunately, traditional requirements engineering methodologies provide limited support to capture requirements evolution. Heterogeneous engineering provides a comprehensive account of system requirements. Heterogeneous engineering stresses a holistic viewpoint that allows us to understand the underlying mechanisms of evolution of socio-technical systems. Requirements, as mappings between socio-technical solutions and problems, represent an account of the history of socio-technical issues arising and being solved within industrial settings. The formal extension of a heterogeneous account of requirements provides a framework to model and capture requirements evolution. The application of the proposed framework provides further evidence that it is possible to capture and model evolutionary information about requirements. The discussion of scenarios of use stresses practical necessities for methodologies addressing requirements evolution. Finally, the identification of a broad spectrum of evolutions in socio-technical systems points out strong contingencies between system evolution and dependability. This thesis argues that the better our understanding of socio-techn..

Injury and Skeletal Biomechanics

This book covers many aspects of Injury and Skeletal Biomechanics. As the title represents, the aspects of force, motion, kinetics, kinematics, deformation, stress and strain are examined in a range of topics such as human muscles and skeleton, gait, injury and risk assessment under given situations. Topics range from image processing to articular cartilage biomechanical behavior, gait behavior under different scenarios, and training, to musculoskeletal and injury biomechanics modeling and risk assessment to motion preservation. This book, together with "Human Musculoskeletal Biomechanics", is available for free download to students and instructors who may find it suitable to develop new graduate level courses and undergraduate teaching in biomechanics

Speculative experience and history: Walter Benjamin’s Goethean Kantianism.

My thesis explicates and defends what I term an implicit Goetheanism present in the philosophy of Walter Benjamin. It begins by examining Benjamin’s early critique of the Kantian and neo-Kantian concept of experience and argues that a Goethean theory of the primal phenomenon provides the phenomenological model for Benjamin’s radical transformation of the neo-Kantian Idea. I analyse the importance of Goethe’s aesthetics of science for Benjamin’s critical development of Early German Romanticism and suggest that Goethe’s tender empiricism provides the intellectual backdrop to Benjamin’s later materialism. The chromatic-linguistic model of experience which informs Benjamin’s earliest writings is shown to develop into a dialectics of refractive expression, one that has import consequences for his concept of history and his unorthodox version of cultural materialism. My final chapter examines the influence of Goethe upon what it argues is Benjamin’s quasi-Jungian criticism of Marxism, defending the importance of Jung’s semiotic critique of Freud’s theory of dream symbolism and its relevance for a materialist interpretation of ideology. The relationship between the Goethean and Jungian concepts of synthesis explains Benjamin’s proximity to a Jungian concept of the unconscious, it is argued, which is justified on the condition that a critique of Jung distinguishes the archaic image from Benjamin’s dialectical image. This is performed in the final chapter through a consideration of the allegorical and the technological in Jung and Benjamin’s differing receptions of Goethe’s Faust. The existential component of Goethe’s speculative concept of experience provides Benjamin with the resources for thinking of a dialectic of historical completion and incompletion, it is concluded, which is necessary for a philosophical informed cultural materialism

Marine Natural Products with Antifouling Activity

Marine fouling affects most man-made surfaces temporarily or permanently immersed in the sea, causing important economic costs. Intense research is aimed at methods for preventing or reducing fouling development. The most widespread solution to inhibit fouling is to make surfaces unsuitable for settlers by coating them with antifouling paints containing toxic compounds. Most such antifouling agents give undesirable effects on nontarget species, including commercially important ones. The search for new nontoxic antifouling technologies has become a necessity, particularly after the ban of organotin compounds such as tributyltin (TBT), once the most widespread and used antifouling agent. Alternative organic and metal-based biocides are now used in antifouling paints, but their possible toxic effects on the aquatic environment are not yet fully understood. A nontoxic alternative for antifouling protection comes from the possibility of adopting natural antifouling compounds that are and may be found in marine sessile invertebrates like sponges, bryozoans, corals, and tunicates and in marine microorganisms. Such metabolites can prevent their producers from being fouled on by other organisms or be responsible for specific metabolic functions that may interfere with biofouling species adhesion. As natural marine compounds, they may inhibit settlement through a nontoxic mechanism without adverse effects to the environment. Such compounds could be developed into active ingredients of new antifouling coatings. So far, a rather limited number of natural products antifoulants (NPAs) has been isolated from marine organisms, but a huge reservoir of compounds with potential antifouling activity is hidden in marine organisms. The Special Issue on Marine Natural Products with Antifouling Activity aims at the discovery of such compounds their activity, toxicity and potential application in environmentally friendly antifouling coatings

Structure, Activity, and Function of Protein Methyltransferases

This collection of review articles describes the structure, function and mechanism of individual protein methyltransferase enzymes including protein lysine methyltransferases, protein arginine methyltransferases, and also the less abundant protein histidine methyltransferases and protein N-terminal end methyltransferases. The topics covered in the individual reviews include structural aspects (domain architecture, homologs and paralogs, and structure), biochemical properties (mechanism, sequence specificity, product specificity, regulation, and histone and non-histone substrates), cellular features (subcellular localization, expression patterns, cellular roles and function, biological effects of substrate protein methylation, connection to cell signaling pathways, and connection to chromatin regulation) and their role in diseases. This review book is a useful resource for scientists working on protein methylation and protein methyltransferases and those interested in joining this emerging research field

The impact of technology on data collection: Case studies in privacy and economics

Technological advancement can often act as a catalyst for scientific paradigm shifts. Today the ability to collect and process large amounts of data about individuals is arguably a paradigm-shift enabling technology in action. One manifestation of this technology within the sciences is the ability to study historically qualitative fields with a more granular quantitative lens than ever before. Despite the potential for this technology, wide-adoption is accompanied by some risks. In this thesis, I will present two case studies. The first, focuses on the impact of machine learning in a cheapest-wins motor insurance market by designing a competition-based data collection mechanism. Pricing models in the insurance industry are changing from statistical methods to machine learning. In this game, close to 2000 participants, acting as insurance companies, trained and submitted pricing models to compete for profit using real motor insurance policies --- with a roughly equal split between legacy and advanced models. With this trend towards machine learning in motion, preliminary analysis of the results suggest that future markets might realise cheaper prices for consumers. Additionally legacy models competing against modern algorithms, may experience a reduction in earning stability --- accelerating machine learning adoption. Overall, the results of this field experiment demonstrate the potential for digital competition-based studies of markets in the future. The second case studies the privacy risks of data collection technologies. Despite a large body of research in re-identification of anonymous data, the question remains: if a dataset was big enough, would records become anonymous by being "lost in the crowd"? Using 3 months of location data, we show that the risk of re-identification decreases slowly with dataset size. This risk is modelled and extrapolated to larger populations with 93% of people being uniquely identifiable using 4 points of auxiliary information among 60M people. These results show how the privacy of individuals is very unlikely to be preserved even in country-scale location datasets and that alternative paradigms of data sharing are still required.Open Acces

The politics of space: negotiating tenure security in a Nairobi Slum

Slum upgrading is a planning intervention where the state, in the process of upgrading an informal space, is seen as delivering tenure security to the residents in that space. This dissertation investigates the making legible of an informal space in Nairobi by analysing the processes and outcomes of a slum upgrading project and the consequent impact on tenure security. Using a qualitative, case study approach, I begin by analysing the production of the Korogocho slum and the practices that contributed to the production of the informal space. Next I examine two processes within the slum upgrading intervention aimed at making legible the space and the people, processes that are distinctively grounded in modernist planning: preparing a physical plan and conducting enumeration. I show how during these processes different rationalities, or ways of knowing, are continually meeting, contesting and negotiating, leading to hybridized outcomes. While the planning intervention has made some aspects of the space legible, it has reduced the legitimacy of some use claims on the space, particularly those of sole structure owners. Further, only certain subpopulations are made legible; long-term tenants, particularly those that are youth born in the settlement, are pushed further into illegibility and tenure insecurity. Within this analysis, I discuss how residents in the settlement propose how the two processes could have been implemented to lead to legibility that matched their ways of knowing. My findings illustrate that planning interventions that are predicated on technocratic solutions need to be balanced with an understanding of the everyday dynamics, or rationalities, of residents in informal spaces. I argue that tenure security needs to be conceptualised as the outcome of negotiated practices between actors taking place in a particular type of space rather than the outcome of planning practices used by the state to guarantee tenure security or used by urban residents to contest or fight for it. In addition, I argue that slum upgrading needs to move attention beyond tenure regularization to other components of tenure security, including those for the various categories of tenants in order to match their needs

Poincaré and the Three Body Problem

The purpose of the thesis is to present an account of Henri Poincare's famous memoir on the three body problem, the final version of which was published in Acta Mathematica in 1890 as the prize-winning entry in King Oscar II's 60th birthday competition. The memoir is reknowned both for its role in providing the foundations for Poincare's celebrated three volume Méthodes Nouvelles de la Mécanique Céleste, and for containing the first mathematical description of chaotic behaviour in a dynamical system. A historical context is provided both through consideration of the problem itself and through a discussion of Poincaré's earlier work which relates to the mathematics developed in the memoir. The organisation of the Oscar competition, which was undertaken by Gösta Mittag-Leffler, is also described. This not only provides an insight into the late 19th century European mathematical community but also reveals that after the prize had been awarded Poincare found an important error in his work and substantially revised the memoir prior to its publication in Acta. The discovery of a printed version of the original memoir personally annotated by Poincaré has allowed for a detailed comparative study of the mathematics contained in both versions of the memoir. The error is explained and it is shown that it was only as a result of its correction that Poincaré discovered the chaotic behaviour now associated with the memoir. The contemporary reception of the memoir is discussed and Poincaré's subsequent work in celestial mechanics and related topics is examined. Through the consideration of sources up to 1920 the influence and impact of the memoir on the progress of the three body problem and on dynamics in general is assessed

Education in the Peterborough Diocese in the century following the "Glorious Revolution", 1688 / by D.K. Shearing.

There is a consensus of academic opinion that for approximately 100 years stretching from 1688, the date of the 'Glorious Revolution', to the onset of industrialisation England enjoyed relative stability, the condition being attributed to political pragmatism. The purpose of this thesis is twofold; to document the educational developments that characterized the period and to examine their effect, nature and scope, about which historians sharply disagree. The principle that in any age education is a social tool whose practical possibilities rest on people's assumptions determined the strategy of pursuing four main lines of enquiry. These form thematic chapters, the contents of which are briefly summarized as follows: 1. Provision; the Church of England's supervisory role; incidental management of schools. 2. The curriculum and teaching methodology employed in the various scholastic institutions. 3. A survey of scholars in attendance at elementary schools, grammar schools and academies. 4. A consideration of the teaching force with sections on religious attitudes, financial standing and professionalism. Although the study has a national dimension its distinct regional focus is intentional because the bulk of surviving records relate to a locality, enabling its educational system to be largely reconstructed. The Peterborough diocese proved to be an eminently suitable choice being both the setting for educational diversity and extremely rich in source material. The evidence which accrued was not used merely to illustrate what is already known; rather, it made possible more realistic interpretations of the macro situation than hitherto. It is argued in the conclusion that education neither stagnated nor regressed. The principal finding is that the classical tradition of the grammar schools and the universities gradually lost ground to Dissent with its insistence on science and 'the relief of man's estate'. Consequently, new ideas were enterprisingly translated into commendable practice