everything is at once: Reflections on embodied photography and collaborative process

In discussion with his co-collaborators, dance artists Natalie Garrett Brown and Amy Voris, this interview explores the photographic process of Christian Kipp, landscape and dance photographer, as he reflects on his experience of working on the Enter & Inhabit project. The questions asked by Garrett Brown and Voris were generated through movement and reflective writing in response to the photographic collection exhibited as part of the 2011 Dance and Somatic Practices Conference, Coventry, UK. In particular, the article explores the interrelationship between the somatic-informed movement practices and performance score creation of Garrett Brown and Voris and the sensorial play of Kipp’s photography. Co-authored by Garrett Brown, Kipp and Voris, this collection of questions and responses seeks to continue rather than merely document the Enter & Inhabit collaborative process

A controlled experiment for the empirical evaluation of safety analysis techniques for safety-critical software

Context: Today's safety critical systems are increasingly reliant on software. Software becomes responsible for most of the critical functions of systems. Many different safety analysis techniques have been developed to identify hazards of systems. FTA and FMEA are most commonly used by safety analysts. Recently, STPA has been proposed with the goal to better cope with complex systems including software. Objective: This research aimed at comparing quantitatively these three safety analysis techniques with regard to their effectiveness, applicability, understandability, ease of use and efficiency in identifying software safety requirements at the system level. Method: We conducted a controlled experiment with 21 master and bachelor students applying these three techniques to three safety-critical systems: train door control, anti-lock braking and traffic collision and avoidance. Results: The results showed that there is no statistically significant difference between these techniques in terms of applicability, understandability and ease of use, but a significant difference in terms of effectiveness and efficiency is obtained. Conclusion: We conclude that STPA seems to be an effective method to identify software safety requirements at the system level. In particular, STPA addresses more different software safety requirements than the traditional techniques FTA and FMEA, but STPA needs more time to carry out by safety analysts with little or no prior experience.Comment: 10 pages, 1 figure in Proceedings of the 19th International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE '15). ACM, 201

Bound states of magnons in the S=1/2 quantum spin ladder

We study the excitation spectrum of the two-leg antiferromagnetic S=1/2 Heisenberg ladder. Our approach is based on the description of the excitations as triplets above a strong-coupling singlet ground state. The quasiparticle spectrum is calculated by treating the excitations as a dilute Bose gas with infinite on-site repulsion. We find singlet (S=0) and triplet (S=1) two-particle bound states of the elementary triplets. We argue that bound states generally exist in any dimerized quantum spin model.Comment: 4 REVTeX pages, 4 Postscript figure

Design guidelines for assessing and controlling spacecraft charging effects

The need for uniform criteria, or guidelines, to be used in all phases of spacecraft design is discussed. Guidelines were developed for the control of absolute and differential charging of spacecraft surfaces by the lower energy space charged particle environment. Interior charging due to higher energy particles is not considered. A guide to good design practices for assessing and controlling charging effects is presented. Uniform design practices for all space vehicles are outlined

A methodological survey of future mobility literature: Opportunities for design research

Online communities have fundamentally changed how humans connected and are now so common they are fundamental to the human experience. As the Internet developed for Web 1.0 to Web 2.0, the functionality of these communities has far exceeded initial expectations. These communities have shifted from simply places to share information to ways to access products and services that bridge the online and offline worlds. This shift has led to the disruption of many industries with the transportation industry being one such sector. Both private transport providers and public transport systems face competition from online communities who are able to link services providers and customers more effectively and innovatively. These types of communities fall under what has been popularised as collaborative consumption or the sharing economy. The aim of this study is to explore the role of Design-led Innovation in the creation of digital futures, specifically online connected communities for successful new mobility solutions. To explore this proposition multiple data collection methods are proposed;Content Analysis, ii) A Comparative Qualitative Study consisting of Qualitative Interviews and Focus Groups / Design Workshops and iii) An Action Research Cycle of Embedded Practice. The multidisciplinary nature of this study grounds this research in a novel position contributing to new knowledge in both the field of design, and also a deeper understanding of the larger fast-growing online community phenomena

Entropy, Optimization and Counting

In this paper we study the problem of computing max-entropy distributions over a discrete set of objects subject to observed marginals. Interest in such distributions arises due to their applicability in areas such as statistical physics, economics, biology, information theory, machine learning, combinatorics and, more recently, approximation algorithms. A key difficulty in computing max-entropy distributions has been to show that they have polynomially-sized descriptions. We show that such descriptions exist under general conditions. Subsequently, we show how algorithms for (approximately) counting the underlying discrete set can be translated into efficient algorithms to (approximately) compute max-entropy distributions. In the reverse direction, we show how access to algorithms that compute max-entropy distributions can be used to count, which establishes an equivalence between counting and computing max-entropy distributions

High-z radio starbursts host obscured X-ray AGN

We use Virtual Observatory methods to investigate the association between radio and X-ray emission at high redshifts. Fifty-five of the 92 HDF(N) sources resolved by combining MERLIN+VLA data were detected by Chandra, of which 18 are hard enough and bright enough to be obscured AGN. The high-z population of microJy radio sources is dominated by starbursts an order of magnitude more active and more extended than any found at z<1 and at least a quarter of these simultaneously host highly X-ray-luminous obscured AGN.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figures, To appear in the proceedings of 'At the Edge of the Universe' (9-13 October 2006, Sintra, Portugal

Developing National and Global Identities: Adolescent Identity Crisis Negotiation during a Two Week International Exchange

Literature elucidating the adolescent travel experience is scarce. In fact, travel and tourism scholarship to date largely glosses over the adolescent experience, focusing instead on the perspective of the whole family unit or the experience of the older adult traveler. The purpose of this study was to give voice to youth travelers by investigating the travel experiences of two male and six female adolescents from the South Eastern United States