Startup communities: notes on the sociality of tech-entrepreneurs in Manchester

In this contribution I explore the conflicting moralities and practices of technology entrepreneurship through the lenses of Mary Douglas’ Grid-Group Cultural Theory. Starting from the distinction between communitarian, individualistic and hierarchical culture, I explore my empirical material drawn from ethnographic fieldwork in Manchester, UK. In particular, I describe the sociality of young male tech-entrepreneurs at networking events, ‘coffices’ and coworkspaces around an urban ‘creative quarter’. I argue that ‘startup communities’ simultaneously encourage individualistic market-competition, contribute to feelings of local group-belonging and are narrative constructions promoted by entrepreneurs, corporations and the State.Universidad de Sevill

Processing and Linking Audio Events in Large Multimedia Archives: The EU inEvent Project

In the inEvent EU project [1], we aim at structuring, retrieving, and sharing large archives of networked, and dynamically changing, multimedia recordings, mainly consisting of meetings, videoconferences, and lectures. More specifically, we are developing an integrated system that performs audiovisual processing of multimedia recordings, and labels them in terms of interconnected “hyper-events ” (a notion inspired from hyper-texts). Each hyper-event is composed of simpler facets, including audio-video recordings and metadata, which are then easier to search, retrieve and share. In the present paper, we mainly cover the audio processing aspects of the system, including speech recognition, speaker diarization and linking (across recordings), the use of these features for hyper-event indexing and recommendation, and the search portal. We present initial results for feature extraction from lecture recordings using the TED talks. Index Terms: Networked multimedia events; audio processing: speech recognition; speaker diarization and linking; multimedia indexing and searching; hyper-events. 1

Inside a cultural agency: team ethnography and knowledge exchange

This article undertakes an auto-critical analysis of the research team's ethnographic study of Cultural Enterprise Office (CEO), a Scottish creative business support agency. We discuss the team's composition and how this relates to other analyses of ethnographic teamwork. Our research is situated in the wider policy context of the “creative-economic” turn in the UK's research funding. This has been accompanied by increased emphasis on “knowledge exchange” and “impact” in the drive for greater accountability in higher education. The team's evolution in the course of undertaking research is illustrated by reference to four “pivotal moments,” which illustrate how we “performed” knowledge exchange

Direct action ethic

Direct action has long been associated with European anarchism, from the industrial sabotage espoused by nineteenth and twentieth century anarcho-syndicalists to the anti-Poll tax activists and the "DiY culture" of more recent British movements. A particular ethic is identified within anarchist direct action, which has two features: the first requires that means be in accordance with ends (prefiguration); the second the identities of the subjects involved in the act. prefiguration distinguished direct action from both Leninist consequentialism and the deontological approaches of liberal and anrcho-capitalist traditions. The identities of the agents involved and created through direct action illustrate important differences between anarchist direct action and that of more conservative groupings. The paper not only clarifies direct action but also considers whether a prefigurative ethic necessitates non-violence. Additionally, the paper answers the question of why direct action is embraced by the anti-hierarchical anarchist tradition, explaining the attractions of such methods to contemporary movements and illustrating parallels between contemporary anarchism and politically-engaged post-structuralisms. Examples are drawn from actions from the 1990s to early 2000s' the publicity and discussion materials of contemporary groupings and their critics as well as texts more centrally located within the academy

The Voice of Which People? Transnational Advocacy Networks and Governance Networks at the United Nations

We can expand our understanding of the politics of global networks and how they relate to the United Nations, by closely examining the concept of a network. There is a long-established International Relations literature focusing on the more institutionalised, international non-governmental organisations. Keck and Sikkink have drawn on the Sociology literature covering social movements in global politics to discuss transnational advocacy networks. It is also necessary to distinguish a third major category: governance networks. They operate to enhance the participation rights of NGOs in intergovernmental organisations. Differences in membership and functions of the two types of networks can be clearly specified analytically, but real-world networks may have some features from each ideal-type. However, if the distinction between them is not understood and respected by those participating in a network, there can be major political conflicts that threaten the legitimacy of the network. Three case-studies – on the NGO Steering Committee at the UN Commission on Sustainable Development, on the World Conference Against Racism and on the World Summit on Sustainable Development – are used to demonstrate how crises can arise when the fundamental contradictions between engaging in collective advocacy and adopting a governance role are not recognised

Learning Community Group Concept Mapping: Fall 2014 Outreach and Recruitment, Spring 2015 Case Management and Service Delivery. Final Reports

Beginning in 2014, the Federal Government provided funding to New York State as part of an initiative to improve services that lead to sustainable outcomes for youth receiving Supplemental Security Income (SSI) benefits. As part of the NYS PROMISE initiative, Concept Systems, Inc. worked with the Learning Community to develop learning needs frameworks using the Group Concept Mapping methodology (GCM). This GCM project gathers, aggregates, and integrates the specific knowledge and opinions of the Learning Community members and allows for their guidance and involvement in supporting NYS PROMISE as a viable community of practice. This work also increases the responsiveness of NYS PROMISE to the Learning Community members’ needs by inspiring discussion during the semi-annual in-person meetings. As of the end of year two, two GCM projects have been completed with the PROMISE Learning Community. These projects focused on Outreach and Recruitment and Case Management and Service Delivery. This report discusses the data collection method and participation in both GCM projects, as well as providing graphics, statistical reports, and a summary of the analysis. In this report we refer to the Fall 2014 project as Project 1, and the Spring 2015 project as Project 2

Industrial implementation of intelligent system techniques for nuclear power plant condition monitoring

As the nuclear power plants within the UK age, there is an increased requirement for condition monitoring to ensure that the plants are still be able to operate safely. This paper describes the novel application of Intelligent Systems (IS) techniques to provide decision support to the condition monitoring of Nuclear Power Plant (NPP) reactor cores within the UK. The resulting system, BETA (British Energy Trace Analysis) is deployed within the UK’s nuclear operator and provides automated decision support for the analysis of refuelling data, a lead indicator of the health of AGR (Advanced Gas-cooled Reactor) nuclear power plant cores. The key contribution of this work is the improvement of existing manual, labour-intensive analysis through the application of IS techniques to provide decision support to NPP reactor core condition monitoring. This enables an existing source of condition monitoring data to be analysed in a rapid and repeatable manner, providing additional information relating to core health on a more regular basis than routine inspection data allows. The application of IS techniques addresses two issues with the existing manual interpretation of the data, namely the limited availability of expertise and the variability of assessment between different experts. Decision support is provided by four applications of intelligent systems techniques. Two instances of a rule-based expert system are deployed, the first to automatically identify key features within the refuelling data and the second to classify specific types of anomaly. Clustering techniques are applied to support the definition of benchmark behaviour, which is used to detect the presence of anomalies within the refuelling data. Finally data mining techniques are used to track the evolution of the normal benchmark behaviour over time. This results in a system that not only provides support for analysing new refuelling events but also provides the platform to allow future events to be analysed. The BETA system has been deployed within the nuclear operator in the UK and is used at both the engineering offices and on station to support the analysis of refuelling events from two AGR stations, with a view to expanding it to the rest of the fleet in the near future

Fundamental structures of dynamic social networks

Social systems are in a constant state of flux with dynamics spanning from minute-by-minute changes to patterns present on the timescale of years. Accurate models of social dynamics are important for understanding spreading of influence or diseases, formation of friendships, and the productivity of teams. While there has been much progress on understanding complex networks over the past decade, little is known about the regularities governing the micro-dynamics of social networks. Here we explore the dynamic social network of a densely-connected population of approximately 1000 individuals and their interactions in the network of real-world person-to-person proximity measured via Bluetooth, as well as their telecommunication networks, online social media contacts, geo-location, and demographic data. These high-resolution data allow us to observe social groups directly, rendering community detection unnecessary. Starting from 5-minute time slices we uncover dynamic social structures expressed on multiple timescales. On the hourly timescale, we find that gatherings are fluid, with members coming and going, but organized via a stable core of individuals. Each core represents a social context. Cores exhibit a pattern of recurring meetings across weeks and months, each with varying degrees of regularity. Taken together, these findings provide a powerful simplification of the social network, where cores represent fundamental structures expressed with strong temporal and spatial regularity. Using this framework, we explore the complex interplay between social and geospatial behavior, documenting how the formation of cores are preceded by coordination behavior in the communication networks, and demonstrating that social behavior can be predicted with high precision.Comment: Main Manuscript: 16 pages, 4 figures. Supplementary Information: 39 pages, 34 figure