The Global Studio: Linking Research, Teaching and Learning

At its most basic The Global Studio: Linking Research, Teaching and Learning documents a course that brings together design students from three universities (Northumbria and Napier Universities in the UK and TU Delft in the Netherlands) to collaborate on a product design project. This book is a much richer resource though; it records an ambitious and challenging project that explores areas as important as design education, cultural communities, changing design practice and new design technologies, processes and research methods

디자인 스마트 / 스마트 디자인: 기술, 문화, 디자인의 결합

Technologies and globalization have drastically changed how we design and who we design for and with. Historically design served as both a producer and representative of a specific culture – designed artefacts represented a particular history and society. Additionally the participants in the design process – client, designer and producer – also shared common histories, language and values. Digital technologies have drastically expanded the possibilities for design, creating opportunities that move beyond traditional geographies and shared histories and languages. With these opportunities also come challenges – how do we collaborative through technologies? How do we communicate effectively when we do not share common histories or a common language? How can we design for, or with, a different culture? These are the challenges currently facing design. This paper explores the relationship between culture, communication and technology and the new landscape and possibilities afforded by design. This paper focuses on design education and makes the case for an educational environment that interrogates this relationship – between culture, communication and technology, enabling students to situate their own design practice and future. I present a variety of projects that allow design students in Asia and in North America to work together – from a collaborative cultural identity project pairing up students from the two continents to a large international exhibition that brings together work from students of design from Asia, North America and the UK. The paper concludes by examining the benefits and challenges of using culture, communication and technology as a focal point to enable smart design. 기술과 세계화는 우리가 디자인 하는 방법과 누구를 위해, 누구와 함께 디자인 하는가를 급진적으로 바꿔놓았다. 역사적으로 디자인은 특정 문화의 생산자이며 대표자였다. 즉 디자인된 가공물(artefact)들은 특정 역사와 사회를 대표했다. 게다가 디자인 과정의 참가자인 클라이언트, 디자이너, 프로듀서 모두 공통의 역사, 언어, 가치관을 공유했다. 디지털 기술은 디자인의 가능성을 급진적으로 확장하여 전통적인 지리적 위치를 넘어선 기회를 창조하고 역사와 언어를 공유했다. 이 기회로 인해 기술을 통한 협업의 문제 또한 발생했다. 역사와 언어를 공유하지 않는 우리가 어떻게 효과적으로 커뮤니케이트 할 것 인가? 다른 문화와 함께, 다른 문화를 위해 어떻게 디자인할 것인가? 이것들이 현재 디자인이 직면한 문제들이다. 이 논문은 문화, 커뮤니케이션, 그리고 기술 의 관계를 그리고 디자인이 제공하는 새로운 전망과 가능성을 탐구한다. 이 논문은 디자 인 교육에 초점을 두고 문화, 커뮤니케이션, 기술의 관계를 탐구하여 학생들이 자신의 디 자인 실행과 미래를 맡길 수 있는 교육 환경을 주장한다. 아시아와 북미의 디자인 학생들 이 함께 일하는 다양한 프로젝트를 제시한다. 그것은 양 대륙의 학생들이 짝을 이루어 행 하는 협업적 문화 정체성 프로젝트에서부터 아시아, 북미, 영국의 디자인 학생들의 작업 을 모은 거대한 국제적 전시회를 포함한다. 이 논문은 스마트 디자인을 가능케 하는 초점으로써 문화, 커뮤니케이션, 기술을 사용하 는 이점과 어려움을 검토하면서 끝을 맺는다

Track 1.b Introduction: Re-Designing Health: Transforming Systems, Practices and Care

The Re-Designing Health: Transforming Systems, Practices and Care track explores the increasing role and possibility for a wide range of design practices and methods to contribute to health care products, provision, and systems. There is growing recognition of the increasing complexity faced by healthcare systems; critical issues and challenges include ageing populations, chronic diseases, growing drug ineffectiveness, and lack of access to comprehensive services (to name only a few examples). Concurrently design thinking, methods and practices are increasingly recognized as means of addressing complex, multi-levelled and systemic problems. The track session brought together design academics, researchers and practitioners that are working in—and across—areas of design, medicine and health. Employing design methods, practices, and thinking to address a range of healthcare challenges—from individual product to large-scale policy. This track provided a forum for researchers, practitioners, students, and designers to provide evidence for these relationships, document challenges and successes and to provide theoretical and practical models for healthcare and design to work collaboratively to address complex healthcare problems

Technical note: A bootstrapped LOESS regression approach for comparing soil depth profiles

Understanding the consequences of different land uses for the soil system is important to make better informed decisions based on sustainability. The ability to assess change in soil properties, throughout the soil profile, is a critical step in this process. We present an approach to examine differences in soil depth profiles between land uses using bootstrapped LOESS regressions (BLRs). This non-parametric approach is data-driven, unconstrained by distributional model parameters and provides the ability to determine significant effects of land use at specific locations down a soil profile. We demonstrate an example of the BLR approach using data from a study examining the impacts of bioenergy land use change on soil organic carbon (SOC). While this straightforward non-parametric approach may be most useful in comparing SOC profiles between land uses, it can be applied to any soil property which has been measured at satisfactory resolution down the soil profile. It is hoped that further studies of land use and land management, based on new or existing data, can make use of this approach to examine differences in soil profiles

Multi-domain quantitative recovery following Radical Cystectomy for patients within the iROC (Robot Assisted Radical Cystectomy with intracorporeal urinary diversion versus Open Radical Cystectomy) Randomised Controlled Trial: The first 30 patients

Many patients develop complications after radical cystectomy (RC) [1]. Reductions in morbidity have occurred through centralisation and technical improvements [2], and perhaps through robot-assisted RC (RARC). Whilst RARC is gaining popularity, there are concerns about oncological safety [3] and extracorporeal reconstruction [4], and randomised controlled trials (RCTs) find little difference [5]. We are conducting a prospective RCT comparing open RC and RARC with mandated intracorporeal reconstruction (Robot-assisted Radical Cystectomy with intracorporeal urinary diversion versus Open Radical Cystectomy [iROC] trial) [6]

Spatial patterns and environmental constraints on ecosystem services at a catchment scale

Improved understanding and prediction of the fundamental environmental controls on ecosystem service supply across the landscape will help to inform decisions made by policy makers and land-water managers. To evaluate this issue for a local catchment case study, we explored metrics and spatial patterns of service supply for water quality regulation, agriculture production, carbon storage, and biodiversity for the Macronutrient Conwy catchment. Methods included using ecosystem models such as LUCI and JULES, integration of national scale field survey datasets, earth observation products and plant trait databases, to produce finely resolved maps of species richness and primary production. Analyses were done with both 1x1 km gridded and subcatchment data. A common single gradient characterised catchment scale ecosystem services supply with agricultural production and carbon storage at opposing ends of the gradient as reported for a national-scale assessment. Species diversity was positively related to production due to the below national average productivity levels in the Conwy combined with the unimodal relationship between biodiversity and productivity at the national scale. In contrast to the national scale assessment, a strong reduction in water quality as production increased was observed in these low productive systems. Various soil variables were tested for their predictive power of ecosystem service supply. Soil carbon, nitrogen, their ratio and soil pH all had double the power of rainfall and altitude, each explaining around 45% of variation but soil pH is proposed as a potential metric for ecosystem service supply potential as it is a simple and practical metric which can be carried out in the field with crowd-sourcing technologies now available. The study emphasises the importance of considering multiple ecosystem services together due to the complexity of covariation at local and national scales, and the benefits of exploiting a wide range of metrics for each service to enhance data robustness

Systems-Level Modeling of Cancer-Fibroblast Interaction

Cancer cells interact with surrounding stromal fibroblasts during tumorigenesis, but the complex molecular rules that govern these interactions remain poorly understood thus hindering the development of therapeutic strategies to target cancer stroma. We have taken a mathematical approach to begin defining these rules by performing the first large-scale quantitative analysis of fibroblast effects on cancer cell proliferation across more than four hundred heterotypic cell line pairings. Systems-level modeling of this complex dataset using singular value decomposition revealed that normal tissue fibroblasts variably express at least two functionally distinct activities, one which reflects transcriptional programs associated with activated mesenchymal cells, that act either coordinately or at cross-purposes to modulate cancer cell proliferation. These findings suggest that quantitative approaches may prove useful for identifying organizational principles that govern complex heterotypic cell-cell interactions in cancer and other contexts

Impacts of land use change to short rotation forestry for bioenergy on soil greenhouse gas emissions and soil carbon

Short Rotation Forestry (SRF) for bioenergy could be used to meet biomass requirements and contribute to achieving renewable energy targets. As an important source of biomass it is important to gain an understanding of the implications of large-scale application of SRF on the soil-atmosphere greenhouse gas (GHG) exchange. This study examined the effects of land use change (LUC) from grassland to SRF on soil fluxes of methane (CH4), nitrous oxide (N2O) and carbon dioxide (CO2), and the important drivers in action. Examining soils from a range of sites across the UK, CO2 emission potentials were reduced under SRF with differences between coniferous and broadleaved transitions; these changes were found to be related to changes in soil pH and microbial biomass. However, there were limited effects of SRF tree species type on CH4 and N2O fluxes. A detailed study at an experimental SRF site over 16 months demonstrated a reduction in CH4 and net CO2 emissions from soils under SRF and revealed intriguing temporal dynamics of N2O under Sitka spruce and common alder. A significant proportion of the variation in soil N2O fluxes was attributed to differences between tree species, water table depth, spatial effects, and their interactions. The effects of microtopography (ridges, troughs, flats), and its interactions with water table depth on soil GHG fluxes under different tree species was tested using mesocosm cores collected in the field. Microtopography did not significantly affect soil GHG fluxes but trends suggested that considering this spatial factor in sampling regimes could be important. N2O fluxes from Sitka spruce soils did not respond to water table depth manipulation in the laboratory suggesting that they may also be determined by tree-driven nitrogen (N) availability, with other research showing N deposition to be higher in coniferous plantations. An N addition experiment lead to increased N2O emissions with greatest relative response in the Sitka spruce soils. Overall, LUC from rough grassland to SRF resulted in a reduction in soil CH4 emissions, increased N2O emissions and a reduction or no change in net CO2 emissions. These changes in emissions were influenced both directly and indirectly by tree species type with Sitka spruce having the greatest effect on N2O in particular, thus highlighting the importance of considering soil N2O emissions in any life cycle analysis or GHG budgets of LUC to SRF for bioenergy. This research can help inform decisions around SRF tree species selection in future large-scale bioenergy planting

Optimasi Portofolio Resiko Menggunakan Model Markowitz MVO Dikaitkan dengan Keterbatasan Manusia dalam Memprediksi Masa Depan dalam Perspektif Al-Qur`an

Risk portfolio on modern finance has become increasingly technical, requiring the use of sophisticated mathematical tools in both research and practice. Since companies cannot insure themselves completely against risk, as human incompetence in predicting the future precisely that written in Al-Quran surah Luqman verse 34, they have to manage it to yield an optimal portfolio. The objective here is to minimize the variance among all portfolios, or alternatively, to maximize expected return among all portfolios that has at least a certain expected return. Furthermore, this study focuses on optimizing risk portfolio so called Markowitz MVO (Mean-Variance Optimization). Some theoretical frameworks for analysis are arithmetic mean, geometric mean, variance, covariance, linear programming, and quadratic programming. Moreover, finding a minimum variance portfolio produces a convex quadratic programming, that is minimizing the objective function ðð¥with constraintsð ð 𥠥 ðandð´ð¥ = ð. The outcome of this research is the solution of optimal risk portofolio in some investments that could be finished smoothly using MATLAB R2007b software together with its graphic analysis

Search for heavy resonances decaying to two Higgs bosons in final states containing four b quarks

A search is presented for narrow heavy resonances X decaying into pairs of Higgs bosons (H) in proton-proton collisions collected by the CMS experiment at the LHC at root s = 8 TeV. The data correspond to an integrated luminosity of 19.7 fb(-1). The search considers HH resonances with masses between 1 and 3 TeV, having final states of two b quark pairs. Each Higgs boson is produced with large momentum, and the hadronization products of the pair of b quarks can usually be reconstructed as single large jets. The background from multijet and t (t) over bar events is significantly reduced by applying requirements related to the flavor of the jet, its mass, and its substructure. The signal would be identified as a peak on top of the dijet invariant mass spectrum of the remaining background events. No evidence is observed for such a signal. Upper limits obtained at 95 confidence level for the product of the production cross section and branching fraction sigma(gg -> X) B(X -> HH -> b (b) over barb (b) over bar) range from 10 to 1.5 fb for the mass of X from 1.15 to 2.0 TeV, significantly extending previous searches. For a warped extra dimension theory with amass scale Lambda(R) = 1 TeV, the data exclude radion scalar masses between 1.15 and 1.55 TeV