99,771 research outputs found
Experimental Navigation and the Creative Process
For this creative project, I am exploring alternate methods of navigating urban environments, and ways in which this activity can inspire creativity. This process is intended to create a new awareness of the urban landscape, break out of the prescribed, and to inspire innovation. The range of possibilities for this way of navigating is vast, and part of the challenge of my experience has been defining boundaries, assigning variables, and using strategies for exploration making my process inherently morphological. I hope that my work here will encourage others to step out of their comfort zone and experience their environment in a new way
Engineering of a synthetic quadrastable gene network to approach Waddington landscape and cell fate determination
abstract: The process of cell fate determination has been depicted intuitively as cells travelling and resting on a rugged landscape, which has been probed by various theoretical studies. However, few studies have experimentally demonstrated how underlying gene regulatory networks shape the landscape and hence orchestrate cellular decision-making in the presence of both signal and noise. Here we tested different topologies and verified a synthetic gene circuit with mutual inhibition and auto-activations to be quadrastable, which enables direct study of quadruple cell fate determination on an engineered landscape. We show that cells indeed gravitate towards local minima and signal inductions dictate cell fates through modulating the shape of the multistable landscape. Experiments, guided by model predictions, reveal that sequential inductions generate distinct cell fates by changing landscape in sequence and hence navigating cells to different final states. This work provides a synthetic biology framework to approach cell fate determination and suggests a landscape-based explanation of fixed induction sequences for targeted differentiation
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Evaluation Beyond the Binary: Information Literacy for CORE 103
Our team of teaching librarians co-created this lesson as part of Champlain College’s Core 103 course, Navigating Your Information Landscape. Core is Champlain’s version of general education. Core’s four-year curriculum is interdisciplinary education with a focus on critical thinking, collaborative skills, and learning by doing. We will deliver the lesson to all Champlain College first-year students next semester via an online Canvas module. Students will engage with the lesson asynchronously. Librarians will interact with the students throughout their participation in the module.
Our Canvas instructional module focuses specifically on evaluation with an emphasis on the impact of the positionality of the information seeker as well as the content and creation process of the information products themselves in information evaluation. This module emphasizes that information evaluation is more than the binary of fake/real or trustworthy/untrustworthy, takes time, practice, and reflective action, and is part of navigating your information landscape. We introduce a framework for evaluation and have students apply these practices with real information objects. In addition to the module, our teaching librarian team is creating a slate of online, asynchronous, interactive library instruction options that walk students through a variety of research methods. Topics include navigating specific databases that are relevant to research required in the course, introduction to some evaluative frameworks, and how to read a scholarly article. Some of the online platforms we will utilize for this research slate are Sidecar side-by-side tutorials, LibGuides, and videos. Course instructors can integrate their selections of these options into their courses
Into the Unknown: Navigating Spaces, Terra Incognita and the Art Archive
This paper is a navigation across time and space – travelling from 16th century colonial world maps which marked unknown territories as Terra Incognita, via 18th century cabinets of curiosities; to the unknown spaces of the Anthropocene Age, in which for the first time we humans are making a permanent geological record on the earth’s ecosystems. This includes climate change.
The recurring theme is loss and becoming lost. I investigate what happens when someone who is lost attempts to navigate and find parallels between Terra Incognita and the art archive, and explore the points where mapping, archiving and collecting intersect. Once something is perceived to be at risk, the fear of loss and the impulse to preserve emerges. I investigate why in the Anthropocene Age we have a stronger impulse to the archive and look to the past, rather than face the unknowable effects of climate change. This is counterpointed by artists, whose hybrids practices engage with re-imaging and re-imagining today’s world, thereby moving us forward into the unknown. ‘Becoming’ is therefore another central theme.
The art archive is explored from multiple perspectives – as an artist, an art archive user and an archivist – noting that the subject, the consumer and the archivist all have very differing agendas. I question who uses physical archives today and how we can retain our sense of curiosity. I conclude with a link to an interactive artwork, which visualises, synthesises and expands this research
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The Role of Landscapes and Landmarks in Bee Navigation: A Review.
The ability of animals to explore landmarks in their environment is essential to their fitness. Landmarks are widely recognized to play a key role in navigation by providing information in multiple sensory modalities. However, what is a landmark? We propose that animals use a hierarchy of information based upon its utility and salience when an animal is in a given motivational state. Focusing on honeybees, we suggest that foragers choose landmarks based upon their relative uniqueness, conspicuousness, stability, and context. We also propose that it is useful to distinguish between landmarks that provide sensory input that changes ("near") or does not change ("far") as the receiver uses these landmarks to navigate. However, we recognize that this distinction occurs on a continuum and is not a clear-cut dichotomy. We review the rich literature on landmarks, focusing on recent studies that have illuminated our understanding of the kinds of information that bees use, how they use it, potential mechanisms, and future research directions
Current Practices for Product Usability Testing in Web and Mobile Applications
Software usability testing is a key methodology that ensures applications are intuitive and easy to use for the target audience. Usability testing has direct benefits for companies as usability improvements often are fundamental to the success of a product. A standard usability test study includes the following five steps: obtain suitable participants, design test scripts, conduct usability sessions, interpret test outcomes, and produce recommendations. Due to the increasing importance for more usable applications, effective techniques to develop usable products, as well as technologies to improve usability testing, have been widely utilized. However, as companies are developing more cross-platform web and mobile apps, traditional single-platform usability testing has shortcomings with respect to ensuring a uniform user experience. In this report, a new strategy is proposed to promote a consistent user experience across all application versions and platforms. This method integrates the testing of different application versions, e.g., the website, mobile app, mobile website. Participants are recruited with a better-defined criterion according to their preferred devices. The usability session is conducted iteratively on several different devices, and the test results of individual application versions are compared on a per-device basis to improve the test outcomes. This strategy is expected to extend on current practices for usability testing by incorporating cross-platform consistency of software versions on most devices
The Tyranny of a Metaphor
Debates on the practical relevance of ideal theory revolve around Sen's metaphor of navigating a mountainous landscape. In *The Tyranny of the Ideal*, Gerald Gaus presents the most thorough articulation of this metaphor to date. His detailed exploration yields new insight on central issues in existing debates, as well as a fruitful medium for exploring important limitations on our ability to map the space of social possibilities. Yet Gaus's heavy reliance on the navigation metaphor obscures questions about the reasoning by which ideal theories are justified. As a result, Gaus fails to notice the ways in which his theory of the Open Society resembles the ideal theories he aims to dismiss. Ironically, Gaus winds up neglecting the ways in which the Open Society might tyrannize our efforts to realize greater justice. (This article is part of a symposium on Gaus's *The Tyranny of the Ideal*.
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