Entrepreneurship: economic and social embedding of the production of futures

Entrepreneurship, the practice of creating new economic enterprises through innovation that are sustained by economic performance, is, theoretically, an individualistic account of socio-economic change. If new enterprises and new economies are created by entrepreneurship then to what extent does this activity harbour prescience and to what extent does its creative destruction carry moral responsibility? Although entrepreneurship is socially constructed as an individualistic account of the production of new patterns of organisation, theories of entrepreneurship span a number of ontologies, i.e. individual motives, new firm formation, socially beneficial activity, the production of networks and multi-organisational forms, and even of micro economies. The paper discusses the conception entrepreneurship as a set of socially constructed processes which together produce futures at multiple ontological levels, and seeks to identify relationships between this body of knowledge and anticipating, creating and 'minding' futures

N-Myc and GCN5 Regulate Significantly Overlapping Transcriptional Programs in Neural Stem Cells

Here we examine the functions of the Myc cofactor and histone acetyltransferase, GCN5/KAT2A, in neural stem and precursor cells (NSC) using a conditional knockout approach driven by nestin-cre. Mice with GCN5-deficient NSC exhibit a 25% reduction in brain mass with a microcephaly phenotype similar to that observed in nestin-cre driven knockouts of c- or N-myc. In addition, the loss of GCN5 inhibits precursor cell proliferation and reduces their populations in vivo, as does loss of N-myc. Gene expression analysis indicates that about one-sixth of genes whose expression is affected by loss of GCN5 are also affected in the same manner by loss of N-myc. These findings strongly support the notion that GCN5 protein is a key N-Myc transcriptional cofactor in NSC, but are also consistent with recruitment of GCN5 by other transcription factors and the use by N-Myc of other histone acetyltransferases. Putative N-Myc/GCN5 coregulated transcriptional pathways include cell metabolism, cell cycle, chromatin, and neuron projection morphogenesis genes. GCN5 is also required for maintenance of histone acetylation both at its putative specific target genes and at Myc targets. Thus, we have defined an important role for GCN5 in NSC and provided evidence that GCN5 is an important Myc transcriptional cofactor in vivo

Objective Validation of Airport Terminal Architecture using Agent-based Simulations

This thesis explores how airport terminal architecture is tested before it is built. The purpose of testing is to make sure an architectural layout aligns with the rest of the airport’s systems. The design of a terminal is a long and expensive process that must accommodate tens of thousands of passengers every hour, the movement of logistics, and control of security. Evaluating spaces for that many people can be difficult to measure, which can result in architects relying on their intuition and experience to judge the impact of a layout for daily operations without objective validation. It is not practical for designers to build a complete airport to see how it works and make renovations after finding aspects that have poor performance. As a result, testing airports requires using mathematical models and simulations to validate how well different systems work together. Designers try to validate architectural layouts in airport terminals by using crowd simulations to approximate passenger behaviour. Existing research in civil engineering and computer science has shown how mathematical models can predict patterns of human activity in the built environment on a large scale. However, these simulations have primarily focused on either modelling passengers as a process flow or people in emergency building evacuation. As a result, existing agent navigation does not consider how passengers use the surrounding architecture for decision-making during daily airport interactions. When passengers enter a terminal for the first time, they can be unaware of what they need to do or how to get there. Instead, passengers rely on using their perception of the environment (the architecture) to inform them what to do. However, there currently are no methods that incorporate architectural perception to validate a building layout in these conditions. This thesis develops an agent-based simulation to validate how well architectural layouts align with the daily operations of an airport terminal. It quantifies the value of a spatial arrangement as a function of people’s interactions in a given space. The model approximates human behaviour based on statistics from existing crowd simulations. It uses spatial analysis, like the isovist and graph theory, for agent navigation and measuring architectural conditions. The proposal incorporates agent perception to provide feedback between people’s decision-making and the influence of the surrounding space. The thesis calculates architectural value using normalized passenger priorities based on typical processing and non-processing airport domains. The success of a terminal layout is dependent on the agent’s ability to complete airport processing and fulfill their priorities. The final value of an architectural layout is determined using statistical methods to provide a probability distribution of likely values. The proposed agent simulation and mathematical models are built using Unity software, which is used to perform several simulation tests in this thesis. Basic functional components of the simulation are validated using existing crowd modelling standards. Tests are also performed to illustrate how different agent perception and priorities influence the value of architectural spaces. Monte Carlo simulations are created for simple terminal layouts to illustrate how changing the floor plan of a security area affects the architectural value for departing passengers. Finally, the architectural values of two real airport terminals are compared against an established passenger experience survey in a basic simulation model. The results of the testing shows that the agent simulation can differentiate between different architectural conditions, within reason, depending on the passengers’ priorities