Theorizing and Generalizing About Risk Assessment and Regulation Through Comparative Nested Analysis of Representative Cases

This article provides a framework and offers strategies for theorizing and generalizing about risk assessment and regulation developed in the context of an on-going comparative study of regulatory behavior. Construction of a universe of nearly 3,000 risks and study of a random sample of 100 of these risks allowed us to estimate relative U.S. and European regulatory precaution over a thirty-five-year period. Comparative nested analysis of cases selected from this universe of ecological, health, safety, and other risks or its eighteen categories or ninety-two subcategories of risk sources or causes will allow theory-testing and -building and many further descriptive and causal comparative generalizations

Sciduction: Combining Induction, Deduction, and Structure for Verification and Synthesis

Even with impressive advances in automated formal methods, certain problems in system verification and synthesis remain challenging. Examples include the verification of quantitative properties of software involving constraints on timing and energy consumption, and the automatic synthesis of systems from specifications. The major challenges include environment modeling, incompleteness in specifications, and the complexity of underlying decision problems. This position paper proposes sciduction, an approach to tackle these challenges by integrating inductive inference, deductive reasoning, and structure hypotheses. Deductive reasoning, which leads from general rules or concepts to conclusions about specific problem instances, includes techniques such as logical inference and constraint solving. Inductive inference, which generalizes from specific instances to yield a concept, includes algorithmic learning from examples. Structure hypotheses are used to define the class of artifacts, such as invariants or program fragments, generated during verification or synthesis. Sciduction constrains inductive and deductive reasoning using structure hypotheses, and actively combines inductive and deductive reasoning: for instance, deductive techniques generate examples for learning, and inductive reasoning is used to guide the deductive engines. We illustrate this approach with three applications: (i) timing analysis of software; (ii) synthesis of loop-free programs, and (iii) controller synthesis for hybrid systems. Some future applications are also discussed

“Just Don’t Bore Us To Death”: Seventh Graders’ Perceptions of Flipping a Technology-Mediated English Language Arts Unit

This mixed methods study aimed to assess student engagement during the flipped model of instruction in two seventh-grade English language arts (ELA) classrooms. Implementation of the flipped model required students (n=183) and teachers (n=2) to use digital technology via a website and teacher-made videos. It compared student perceptions during a flipped unit to those same students’ perceptions during a traditionally taught unit. A hybrid embedded design and case study interviews were used to assess students’ cognitive, emotional, and behavioral engagement. Data analysis revealed that overall student engagement decreased in the flipped unit and that students were divided in their reactions to the flipped method with one student poignantly writing on the survey, “Just don’t bore us to death.” This work is significant in that it is among the first to examine whether course content matters when utilizing the flipped method and whether student engagement in the traditional ELA curriculum is unique due its emphasis on discussion and holistic assessment

Discovering Strategies to Improve Business Value in Outsourcing Projects

This paper deals with the problem of leveraging client business value in a software development outsourcing relationship. We have observed software development projects from two different Dutch IT outsourcing companies and studied the approach they apply in their (successful) projects. The results show that they create a role dedicated to facilitate communication. This arrangement has the potential to put team members in a better position to communicate, facilitating the transfer of information supporting the rationale behind design decisions. Teams are thus better equipped to anticipate change and to react faster in solving everyday problems. This paper describes our observations and the practical implications we expect, such as the improvement of re-buy intention on the client's side

Situating requirements engineering methods within design science research

Design Science Research Methodologies (DSRM) are increasingly used to guide research in fields beyond Information Systems, in particular those of Requirements Engineering and Software Engineering (RE/SE). While a number of DSR methodologies have been developed by scholars in the RE/SE fields, there remains a certain level of confusion about the way in which the aim and scope of DSRM and those of methods typically used in RE/SE differ. This issue can be observed in graduate students' work as well as in published literature. In particular, the difference be-tween the research orientation of DSRM and the solution orientation of RE/SE methods can be difficult to navigate. We propose to address this challenge by situating three RE/SE methodologies proposed in published literature within one common DSRM; doing so clarifies the scope of these methodologies and highlights ways in which the knowledge contributions of their results could be further enhanced. This effort is a first step towards providing better guidance to researchers who are new to design science research in order to ensure that recognized DSR principles are promoted and respected

Research questions and approaches for computational thinking curricula design

Teaching computational thinking (CT) is argued to be necessary but also admitted to be a very challenging task. The reasons for this, are: i) no general agreement on what computational thinking is; ii) no clear idea nor evidential support on how to teach CT in an effective way. Hence, there is a need to develop a common approach and a shared understanding of the scope of computational thinking and of effective means of teaching CT. Thus, the consequent ambition is to utilize the preliminary and further research outcomes on CT for the education of the prospective teachers of secondary, further and higher/adult education curricula

The Field-tested and Grounded Technological Rule as Product of Mode 2 Management Research �

management, research

Validity and measurement invariance of the Unified Multidimensional Calling Scale (UMCS): A three-wave survey study

The accumulation of scientific knowledge on calling is limited by the absence of a common theoretical and measurement framework. Many different models of calling have been proposed, and we do not know how much research results that refer to a specific model are generalizable to different theoretical accounts of calling. In this article, we investigate whether two leading models of calling tackle the same construct. The two models were merged into a comprehensive framework that measures calling across seven facets: Passion, Purposefulness, Sacrifice, Pervasiveness, Prosocial Orientation, Transcendent Summons, and Identity. We then developed the Unified Multidimensional Calling Scale (UMCS) drawing from previous published items. Across two surveys involving college students (N = 5886) and adult employees (N = 205) the UMCS was proved to be valid and reliable. We also observed that the UMCS is invariant across time and calling domains. Finally, we found that facets of calling have very different relationships with outcomes and concurrent measures, suggesting that results obtained with a smaller set of facets are not generalizable to the higher-order construct of calling or to a different model that does not share the same facets. \ua9 2018 Vianello et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

Investigation of Air Transportation Technology at Princeton University, 1989-1990

The Air Transportation Technology Program at Princeton University proceeded along six avenues during the past year: microburst hazards to aircraft; machine-intelligent, fault tolerant flight control; computer aided heuristics for piloted flight; stochastic robustness for flight control systems; neural networks for flight control; and computer aided control system design. These topics are briefly discussed, and an annotated bibliography of publications that appeared between January 1989 and June 1990 is given

A metamodel for privacy engineering methods

Engineering privacy in information systems requires systematic methods to capture and address privacy issues throughout the development process. However, the diversity of both privacy and engineering approaches, together with the specific context and scope of each project, have spawned a plethora of privacy engineering methods. Method engineering can help to cope with this landscape, as it allows describing existing methods in terms of a limited variety of method elements (and eventually enable their recombination into new, customized methods). This paper applies method engineering to introduce a privacy engineering metamodel, whose applicability is illustrated with a set of popular privacy engineering method elements, and a widely recognized privacy engineering method