A cybernetic perspective on methods and process models in collaborative designing

Cybernetic thinking provides a framework to understand the issues in creating and using methods and process models during collaborative designing. It can help understand what takes place while the creation and use is unfolding. This viewpoint allows methods and process models to be framed as aiding human decision-making, and as supporting the organisation of design activities. It casts light on how a team acts and what are they doing to solve design problems, by considering that they react to changes in the perceived solution state or goal state. Cybernetics thus provides an articulation of mechanisms for doing design. By identifying virtues that support creation and use of methods and process models during designing, cybernetics could thus help teams to design more effectively. This article considers the creation and use of process models and methods in design from a cybernetic perspective. We suggest that a process model and method are similar in nature, in that they both give guidance for progressing the design according to the circumstances encountered. Cybernetic principles are interpreted to help understand the role of modelling and method use in design process evolution.International Design Conference - DESIGN 201

How and When Socially Entrepreneurial Nonprofit Organizations Benefit From Adopting Social Alliance Management Routines to Manage Social Alliances?

Social alliance is defined as the collaboration between for-profit and nonprofit organizations. Building on the insights derived from the resource-based theory, we develop a conceptual framework to explain how socially entrepreneurial nonprofit organizations (SENPOs) can improve their social alliance performance by adopting strategic alliance management routines. We test our framework using the data collected from 203 UK-based SENPOs in the context of cause-related marketing campaign-derived social alliances. Our results confirm a positive relationship between social alliance management routines and social alliance performance. We also find that relational mechanisms, such as mutual trust, relational embeddedness, and relational commitment, mediate the relationship between social alliance management routines and social alliance performance. Moreover, our findings suggest that different types of social alliance motivation can influence the impact of social alliance management routines on different types of the relational mechanisms. In general, we demonstrate that SENPOs can benefit from adopting social alliance management routines and, in addition, highlight how and when the social alliance management routines–social alliance performance relationship might be shaped. Our study offers important academic and managerial implications, and points out future research directions

Costs and quality of life for prehabilitation and early rehabilitation after surgery of the lumbar spine

During the recent years improved operation techniques and administrative procedures have been developed for early rehabilitation. At the same time preoperative lifestyle intervention (prehabilitation) has revealed a large potential for additional risk reduction

Familial Linkage between Neuropsychiatric Disorders and Intellectual Interests

From personality to neuropsychiatric disorders, individual differences in brain function are known to have a strong heritable component. Here we report that between close relatives, a variety of neuropsychiatric disorders covary strongly with intellectual interests. We surveyed an entire class of high-functioning young adults at an elite university for prospective major, familial incidence of neuropsychiatric disorders, and demographic and attitudinal questions. Students aspiring to technical majors (science/mathematics/engineering) were more likely than other students to report a sibling with an autism spectrum disorder (p = 0.037). Conversely, students interested in the humanities were more likely to report a family member with major depressive disorder (p = 8.8×10−4), bipolar disorder (p = 0.027), or substance abuse problems (p = 1.9×10−6). A combined PREdisposition for Subject MattEr (PRESUME) score based on these disorders was strongly predictive of subject matter interests (p = 9.6×10−8). Our results suggest that shared genetic (and perhaps environmental) factors may both predispose for heritable neuropsychiatric disorders and influence the development of intellectual interests

Biological predictors of suicidality in schizophrenia

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/65166/1/j.1600-0447.1996.tb09883.x.pd

Immune Boosting Explains Regime-Shifts in Prevaccine-Era Pertussis Dynamics

Understanding the biological mechanisms underlying episodic outbreaks of infectious diseases is one of mathematical epidemiology’s major goals. Historic records are an invaluable source of information in this enterprise. Pertussis (whooping cough) is a re-emerging infection whose intermittent bouts of large multiannual epidemics interspersed between periods of smaller-amplitude cycles remain an enigma. It has been suggested that recent increases in pertussis incidence and shifts in the age-distribution of cases may be due to diminished natural immune boosting. Here we show that a model that incorporates this mechanism can account for a unique set of pre-vaccine-era data from Copenhagen. Under this model, immune boosting induces transient bursts of large amplitude outbreaks. In the face of mass vaccination, the boosting model predicts larger and more frequent outbreaks than do models with permanent or passively-waning immunity. Our results emphasize the importance of understanding the mechanisms responsible for maintaining immune memory fo

Pavlovian Reward Prediction and Receipt in Schizophrenia: Relationship to Anhedonia

Reward processing abnormalities have been implicated in the pathophysiology of negative symptoms such as anhedonia and avolition in schizophrenia. However, studies examining neural responses to reward anticipation and receipt have largely relied on instrumental tasks, which may confound reward processing abnormalities with deficits in response selection and execution. 25 chronic, medicated outpatients with schizophrenia and 20 healthy controls underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging using a Pavlovian reward prediction paradigm with no response requirements. Subjects passively viewed cues that predicted subsequent receipt of monetary reward or non-reward, and blood-oxygen-level-dependent signal was measured at the time of cue presentation and receipt. At the group level, neural responses to both reward anticipation and receipt were largely similar between groups. At the time of cue presentation, striatal anticipatory responses did not differ between patients and controls. Right anterior insula demonstrated greater activation for nonreward than reward cues in controls, and for reward than nonreward cues in patients. At the time of receipt, robust responses to receipt of reward vs. nonreward were seen in striatum, midbrain, and frontal cortex in both groups. Furthermore, both groups demonstrated responses to unexpected versus expected outcomes in cortical areas including bilateral dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Individual difference analyses in patients revealed an association between physical anhedonia and activity in ventral striatum and ventromedial prefrontal cortex during anticipation of reward, in which greater anhedonia severity was associated with reduced activation to money versus no-money cues. In ventromedial prefrontal cortex, this relationship held among both controls and patients, suggesting a relationship between anticipatory activity and anhedonia irrespective of diagnosis. These findings suggest that in the absence of response requirements, brain responses to reward receipt are largely intact in medicated individuals with chronic schizophrenia, while reward anticipation responses in left ventral striatum are reduced in those patients with greater anhedonia severity

Diffusion tensor imaging of frontal lobe white matter tracts in schizophrenia

We acquired diffusion tensor and structural MRI images on 103 patients with schizophrenia and 41 age-matched normal controls. The vector data was used to trace tracts from a region of interest in the anterior limb of the internal capsule to the prefrontal cortex. Patients with schizophrenia had tract paths that were significantly shorter in length from the center of internal capsule to prefrontal white matter. These tracts, the anterior thalamic radiations, are important in frontal-striatal-thalamic pathways. These results are consistent with findings of smaller size of the anterior limb of the internal capsule in patients with schizophrenia, diffusion tensor anisotropy decreases in frontal white matter in schizophrenia and hypothesized disruption of the frontal-striatal-thalamic pathway system

NMDA receptor genotypes associated with the vulnerability to develop dyskinesia

Dyskinesias are involuntary muscle movements that occur spontaneously in Huntington's disease (HD) and after long-term treatments for Parkinson's disease (levodopa-induced dyskinesia; LID) or for schizophrenia (tardive dyskinesia, TD). Previous studies suggested that dyskinesias in these three conditions originate from different neuronal pathways that converge on overstimulation of the motor cortex. We hypothesized that the same variants of the N-methyl--aspartate receptor gene that were previously associated with the age of dyskinesia onset in HD were also associated with the vulnerability for TD and not LID. Genotyping patients with LID and TD revealed, however, that these two variants were dose-dependently associated with susceptibility to LID, but not TD. This suggested that LID, TD and HD might arise from the same neuronal pathways, but TD results from a different mechanism