Telling the market story through organic information interaction design and broadcast media : submitted to the College of Creative Arts as requirement for the degree of Master of Design, Massey University, Wellington, New Zealand, 2007

Interaction Design, which is essentially story-creating and telling, is at once both and ancient art and a new technology. Media have always effected the telling of stories and the creation of experiences. (Shedroff, N., 1994, p. 2) Advances with visual representations within broadcast design have been applied to areas such as weather simulations, sporting events, and historical reconstruction's. However, financial market information presentation is fairly uniform in television news broadcasting, showing little progression in pace with other news information catego­ries. While stock market news segments make limited use of supporting graphics, addi­ tional information that may assist the viewer is filtered out, effecting viewers interest, understanding and decision making process often associated with market related stories. Research to date has been limited to single visualisations. There has been little re­search into the use of multiple information views that are composed to support news presentations. People use many different information sources on a daily basis. News sources are used to stay informed about events, to some sources, viewer evaluation of informa­tion is a part of that process. News information and other data commodity sources are now more accessible, allowing designers to look at ways of transforming them into new or improved information services. This research explores the display of stock market information by looking at ap­propriate media delivery methods combined with Organic Information Interaction Design to enhance information relationships. Organic Design and Information Inter­action Design 1 principles are combined. This denotes a 'living' relationship between elements, incorporating hierarchy principles with enhanced information delivery and user experiences. Four themes are tied together through the use of a conceptual prototype. [FROM INTRO

The consequences of online information dissemination on stock market liquidity and efficiency: Implications on African markets

From the Efficient Market Hypothesis, a market is efficient if security prices fully and correctly reflect all available information that is relevant for the stock’s pricing. This requires a medium of information dissemination and transaction ordering with both speed and accuracy. This paper chronologically presents arguments in favour of the internet as one such medium. The internet has also enabled the transmission and archiving of bulky information in a ready-to-use format. And abnormal returns are now quickly observed and arbitraged away to non-existence. Using correlation analysis, we find a positive relationship between the internet and some stock market development indicators.Efficient market hypothesis; internet; online information; stock market; development indicators; Africa

A technology and policy analysis for global E-business

Thesis (S.M.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Engineering Systems Division, Technology and Policy Program, 2002.Includes bibliographical references (p. 49-51).We introduce an e-business analytical framework that focuses on transaction flows, including information, physical goods, and services. Within this framework, global e-business involves transaction flows that cross both organizational and national boundaries. Many challenging technology and policy issues arise from this trans-boundary characteristic of global e-business. These issues are analyzed using web aggregation as an example global e-business application. We start the analysis by introducing web aggregation services and their enabling technologies. Our survey of current status of web aggregation indicates that most services are still operated regionally despite their global presence. Although benefits of web aggregation have been realized in regions with extensive use of information aggregation, little is done at the global level. Our case study on worldwide price distribution of a nearly homogeneous consumer electronics product indicates great potential for global aggregation to bring information and efficiency to the global market. In addition to lack of global integration, we identified other deficiencies of web aggregation. Technological challenges and possible solutions to overcoming these deficiencies are discussed. However, having technological capability for trans-boundary information flow does not solve all problems in global aggregation. National policies often prohibit such flow into nations that have different policies, especially in database and privacy protection areas. We analyze these policy issues and propose future research on international policy harmonization.by Hongwei Zhu.S.M

Graph Locality Prefetcher for Graph Database

This work presents a hardware prefetcher to improve the performance of accessing graph data representing large and complex networks. We represent complex networks as graphs, and queries amount to traversals on the graph. Unlike conventional memory hierarchies that exploit spatial and temporal locality, we observe that graph traversals do not necessarily exhibit these same notions of locality. This results in degraded performance of the memory hierarchy. Consequently, our hardware prefetcher exploits locality that is intrinsic to graph traversals, which we call graph-locality to improve the performance of the memory hierarchy. We design and evaluate our prototype using a micro-architectural simulator, and deploy benchmarks from GDBench that is oriented to evaluate the performance of graph database systems.1 yea

Safe code transfromations for speculative execution in real-time systems

Although compiler optimization techniques are standard and successful in non-real-time systems, if naively applied, they can destroy safety guarantees and deadlines in hard real-time systems. For this reason, real-time systems developers have tended to avoid automatic compiler optimization of their code. However, real-time applications in several areas have been growing substantially in size and complexity in recent years. This size and complexity makes it impossible for real-time programmers to write optimal code, and consequently indicates a need for compiler optimization. Recently researchers have developed or modified analyses and transformations to improve performance without degrading worst-case execution times. Moreover, these optimization techniques can sometimes transform programs which may not meet constraints/deadlines, or which result in timeouts, into deadline-satisfying programs. One such technique, speculative execution, also used for example in parallel computing and databases, can enhance performance by executing parts of the code whose execution may or may not be needed. In some cases, rollback is necessary if the computation turns out to be invalid. However, speculative execution must be applied carefully to real-time systems so that the worst-case execution path is not extended. Deterministic worst-case execution for satisfying hard real-time constraints, and speculative execution with rollback for improving average-case throughput, appear to lie on opposite ends of a spectrum of performance requirements and strategies. Deterministic worst-case execution for satisfying hard real-time constraints, and speculative execution with rollback for improving average-case throughput, appear to lie on opposite ends of a spectrum of performance requirements and strategies. Nonetheless, this thesis shows that there are situations in which speculative execution can improve the performance of a hard real-time system, either by enhancing average performance while not affecting the worst-case, or by actually decreasing the worst-case execution time. The thesis proposes a set of compiler transformation rules to identify opportunities for speculative execution and to transform the code. Proofs for semantic correctness and timeliness preservation are provided to verify safety of applying transformation rules to real-time systems. Moreover, an extensive experiment using simulation of randomly generated real-time programs have been conducted to evaluate applicability and profitability of speculative execution. The simulation results indicate that speculative execution improves average execution time and program timeliness. Finally, a prototype implementation is described in which these transformations can be evaluated for realistic applications

Issues in Evaluating Health Department Web-Based Data Query Systems: Working Papers

Compiles papers on conceptual and methodological topics to consider in evaluating state health department systems that provide aggregate data online, such as taxonomy, logic models, indicators, and design. Includes surveys and examples of evaluations

Sustainability Indicators Past and Present: What Next?

This paper discusses the current state of thought amongst the Sustainability Indicator (SI) community, what has been achieved and where we are succeeding and failing. Recent years have witnessed the rise of “alternative facts” and “fake news” and this paper discusses how SIs fit into this maelstrom, especially as they are themselves designed to encapsulate complexity into condensed signals and it has long been known that SIs can be selectively used to support polarized sides of a debate. This paper draws from chapters in a new edited volume, the “Routledge Handbook of Sustainability Indicators and Indices”, edited by the authors. The book has 34 chapters written by a total of 59 SI experts from a wide range of backgrounds, and attempts to provide a picture of the past and present, strengths and weaknesses of SI development today. This paper is an “analysis of those analyses”—a mindful reflection on reflection, and an assessment of the malign and benign forces at work in 2018 within the SI arena. Finally, we seek to identify where SIs may be going over the coming, unpredictable years