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Using data visualization in creativity workshops: a new tool in the designer's kit
Creativity workshops have proved effective in drawing out unexpected requirements and giving form to participants' novel ideas. Here, we introduce a new addition to the workshop designer's toolkit: interactive data visualization, used as stimuli to prompt insight and inspire creativity. We first describe a pilot study in which we compare the effectiveness of two different styles of data visualization. Here we found that a less ambiguous style was more effective in supporting idea generation. Following this, we report a case study in which we employ data visualization within a service design workshop, where participants gain insights that are later realized in design ideas
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Creative User-Centered Visualization Design for Energy Analysts and Modelers
We enhance a user-centered design process with techniques that deliberately promote creativity to identify opportunities for the visualization of data generated by a major energy supplier. Visualization prototypes developed in this way prove effective in a situation whereby data sets are largely unknown and requirements open – enabling successful exploration of possibilities for visualization in Smart Home data analysis. The process gives rise to novel designs and design metaphors including data sculpting. It suggests: that the deliberate use of creativity techniques with data stakeholders is likely to contribute to successful, novel and effective solutions; that being explicit about creativity may contribute to designers developing creative solutions; that using creativity techniques early in the design process may result in a creative approach persisting throughout the process. The work constitutes the first systematic visualization design for a data rich source that will be increasingly important to energy suppliers and consumers as Smart Meter technology is widely deployed. It is novel in explicitly employing creativity techniques at the requirements stage of visualization design and development, paving the way for further use and study of creativity methods in visualization design
Low Temperature Electronic Transport through Macromolecules and Characteristics of Intramolecular Electron Transfer
A theory of electronic transport through molecular wires is applied to
analyze characteristics of a long-range electron transfer (ET) through
molecular bridges in macromolecules with complex donor/acceptor subsystems.
Assuming a coherent electron tunneling through the bridge to be the predominant
mechanism of ET at low temperatures it is shown that low temperature
current-voltage curves can exhibit a step-like structure, which contains
information concerning intrinsic features of ET processes such as the effect of
donor/acceptor coupling to the bridge and primary pathways of electrons
tunneling through the bridge. By contacting the proposed theoretical analysis
with such experimental data a variety of valuable characteristics of long-range
intramolecular ET can be identified. Analytical and numerical results are
presented. Using the Buttiker dephasing model within the scattering matrix
formalism we analyze dephasing effects, and we show that these effects could be
reduced enough to allow the structure of the electron transmission function to
be exposed in the experiments on the electronic transport through
macromolecules.Comment: 9 pages, 2 figures, text revise
Sharing Polarization within Quantum Subspaces
Given an ensemble of n spins, at least some of which are partially polarized,
we investigate the sharing of this polarization within a subspace of k spins.
We assume that the sharing results in a pseudopure state, characterized by a
single purity parameter which we call the bias. As a concrete example we
consider ensembles of spin-1/2 nuclei in liquid-state nuclear magnetic
resonance (NMR) systems. The shared bias levels are compared with some current
entanglement bounds to determine whether the reduced subspaces can give rise to
entangled states.Comment: 7 pages, 3 figure
Orbiter/payload proximity operations: Lateral approach technique
The lateral approach is presented for proximity operations associated with the retrieval of free flying payloads. An out of plane final approach emphasizing onboard software support is recommended for all except the latter segment of the final approach in which manual control is considered mandatory. An overall assessment of various candidate proximity operations techniques are made
Propagation of the phase of solar modulation
The phase of the 11 year galactic cosmic ray variation, due to a varying rate of emission of long lived propagating regions of enhanced scattering, travels faster than the scattering regions themselves. The radial speed of the 11 year phase in the quasi-steady, force field approximation is exactly twice the speed of the individual, episodic decreases. A time dependent, numerical solution for 1 GeV protons at 1 and 30 Au gives a phase speed which is 1.85 times the propagation speed of the individual decreases
Single-Peakedness and Disconnected Coalitions
Ordinally single-peaked preferences are distinguished from cardinally singlepeaked preferences, in which all players have a similar perception of distances in some one-dimensional ordering. While ordinal single-peakedness can lead to disconnected coalitions that have a "hole" in the ordering, cardinal single-peakedness precludes this possibility, based on two models of coalition formation: ¥ Fallback (FB): Players seek coalition partners by descending lower and lower in their preference rankings until a majority coalition forms. ¥ Build-Up (BU): Similar to FB, except that when nonmajority subcoalitions form, they fuse into composite players, whose positions are defined cardinally and who are treated as single players in the convergence process. FB better reflects the unconstrained, or nonmyopic, possibilities of coalition formation, whereas BU-because all subcoalition members must be included in any majority coalition that forms-restricts combinatorial possibilities and tends to produce less compact majority coalitions. The "strange bedfellows" frequently observed in legislative coalitions and military alliances suggest that even when players agree on, say, a left-right ordering, their perceptions of exactly where players stand in this ordering may differ substantially. If so, a player may be acceptable to a coalition but may not find every member in it acceptable, causing that player not to join and possibly creating a disconnected coalition.COALITION FORMATION; SINGLE-PEAKEDNESS; LEGISLATURES; ALLIANCES
ESO 3060170 -- a massive fossil galaxy group with a heated gas core?
We present a detailed study of the ESO 3060170 galaxy group combining
Chandra, XMM and optical observations. The system is found to be a fossil
galaxy group. The group X-ray emission is composed of a central dense cool core
(10 kpc in radius) and an isothermal medium beyond the central 10 kpc. The
region between 10 and 50 kpc (the cooling radius) has the same temperature as
the gas from 50 kpc to 400 kpc although the gas cooling time between 10 and 50
kpc (2 - 6 Gyr) is shorter than the Hubble time. Thus, the ESO 3060170 group
does not have a group-sized cooling core. We suggest that the group cooling
core may have been heated by a central AGN outburst in the past and the small
dense cool core is the truncated relic of a previous cooling core. The Chandra
observations also reveal a variety of X-ray features in the central region,
including a ``finger'', an edge-like feature and a small ``tail'', all aligned
along a north-south axis, as are the galaxy light and group galaxy
distribution. The proposed AGN outburst may cause gas ``sloshing'' around the
center and produce these asymmetric features. The observed flat temperature
profile to 1/3 R_vir is not consistent with the predicted temperature profile
in recent numerical simulations. We compare the entropy profile of the ESO
3060170 group with those of three other groups and find a flatter relation than
that predicted by simulations involving only shock heating, S r. This is direct evidence for the importance of non-gravitational
processes in group centers. We derive the mass profiles within 1/3 R_vir and
find the ESO 3060170 group is the most massive fossil group known (1 - 2 X
10 M). The M/L ratio of the system, ~ 150 at 0.3 R_vir, is
normal.Comment: 17 pages, 12 figures, to appear in ApJ. A high-resolution version can
be downloaded from http://cxc.harvard.edu/~msun/esoa.p
Structural templating as a route to improved photovoltaic performance in copper phthalocyanine/fullerene (C60) heterojunctions
We have developed a method to improve the short circuit current density in copper phthalocyanine (CuPc)/fullerene (C60) organic solar cells by ~60% by modifying the CuPc crystal orientation through use of a molecular interlayer to maximize charge transport in the direction between the two electrodes. Powder x-ray diffraction and electronic absorption spectroscopy show that a thin 3,4,9,10-perylenetetracarboxylic dianhydride interlayer before CuPc growth templates the CuPc film structure, forcing the molecules to lie flat with respect to the substrate surface, although the intrastack orientation is unaffected. This modified stacking configuration facilitates charge transport and improves charge collection
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