Art in the Museum

I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art (“the Met”) found at 1000 Fifth Avenue in New York City on Saturday, September 15, 2018, during a visit home. Although there was substantial traffic because of a German Heritage parade, it was a beautiful day to visit a magnificent museum. Everything about the Met is grand, including its entrance lobby and its artwork. I passed a few hours wandering the different halls with my family, while taking pictures and notes for this assignment. Some of my favorites during this visit was the Heavenly Bodies exhibit and the many halls filled by American artists. After much thought, I decided that the painting, “Moses Shown the Promised Land” would be the focus of this paper

A machine model for dataflow actors and its applications

In application areas that process stream-like data such as multimedia, networking and DSP, the pipelined concurrent processing is frequently represented as a dataflow network of communicating computational kernels connected by FIFO queues. However, while dataflow is a natural medium for conceptualizing and modeling stream-processing systems, its adoption as a programming methodology has been hindered by an unappealing choice between expres- siveness and efficient implementability—efficient implemen- tation techniques being primarily limited to restricted sub- classes of dataflow programs. The paper presents a simple machine model for a very general class of dataflow programs and shows how it can be used as a foundation for their efficient implementation

The Reorganization of the School Districts of Minnehaha County, South Dakota

In general terms the purpose of this study is to present a plan for the rearrangement of the school administrative unit boundaries of Minnehaha County, South Dakota. This rearrangement will be so designed that it will facilitate the improvement of the educational opportunities offered to pupils of this county. At the same time, this plan will be designed to equalize the tax burden of the total area involved

A Rejection of Semantic Holism, Based on Linguistic Relativity and Determinism

In this paper, I will argue that semantic holism is, inherently, a false claim. Semantic holism, here, being defined as the meaning of a word or expression in a given language (λ) is constructed by its relation to other words and expressions in said given language (λ) and its role in said given language (λ). The following premises and examples within the premises support the refutability of semantic holism, including linguistic relativity, culture and linguistic determinism

Making the Right Choice: Gamification for Different Attribution Styles to Increase Motivation

Experience, expertise, but also self-confidence and attitudes towards computer technology play an important role in how people interact with computers, especially when problems arise (cf. Janneck, Vincent-Höper, & Ehrhardt, 2013). In this regard, attribution theory is a promising approach to explain general types of user behavior. Attribution theory deals with the causal explanations people find for things happening around them, and also with the extent of control people feel they have over external events. Attribution styles have a considerable influence on motivation, behavior, and emotions (Weiner, 1985; Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978). While originating in social psychology, attribution theory is also applicable to computer-related experiences. Recent research found distinct computer-related attribution styles (Niels & Janneck, 2015). Moreover, a study has shown that users with more unfavorable (e.g. low sense of control) attribution styles are less motivated in handling computer issues – such as breakdowns or learning to use new features – than users with more favorable attribution styles (Niels & Janneck, 2017). These results raise the question which specific measures are appropriate to specifically support users with less favorable attribution styles with the intention to increase their motivation to master computer applications. [... from the Introduction

Clinical review of malaria for the emergency physician

AbstractMalaria is a disease caused by parasites of the Plasmodium genus, and is one of the most prevalent diseases in Africa and around the world. Emergency physicians in both endemic and non-endemic regions often encounter initial presentations of malaria, and knowledge about the pathophysiology, diagnosis, and treatment of this disease is crucial in caring for these patients. This article covers briefly the epidemiology of malaria and the lifecycle of the Plasmodium parasite. This is followed by a discussion of the clinical evaluation, diagnosis, and management of patients with malaria, as pertinent to the African emergency physician

Inter-Contextual Distributed Participatory Design

Most studies of participatory design examine the development of a single, customized software system that supports typical workflows within a single client organization. To cope with other use contexts and new forms of work – such as communities and virtual networks – the traditional repertoire of PD methodology needs to be expanded to deal with distribution and diversification of users. Based on a ten-year case study, we describe experiences with PD in the development of a groupware system that initially targeted a single use context, but was continually extended and adapted to new contexts of use with new requirements and work practices. To enable distributed participation across contexts, new methods had to be established: inter-contextual user workshops bring users from different contexts and developers together to reflect on the usage and design of the software and its further development. Commented case studies make this face-to-face interaction persistent, providing a written documentation of distributed use experiences and design decisions. In the process of building an inter-contextual community of users, the PD focus shifts from custom software development to empowering users in assessing their own practice and technology use

Auf verschlungenen Forschungspfaden: Erfahrungen mit der Sekundärnutzung qualitativer Interviewdaten in induktiven, deduktiven und Triangulationsverfahren

'Dieser Beitrag schildert Erfahrungen mit der Sekundäranalyse qualitativer Interviewdaten über soziale Beziehungen in virtuellen Gemeinschaften, wobei die Primärdaten in drei Phasen sowohl induktiven als auch deduktiven Auswertungsmethoden unterzogen und schließlich in einen ganz neuen Forschungskontext transferiert wurden. Die hierdurch ermöglichte vergleichende Betrachtung und Diskussion verschiedener Vorgehensweisen und Rahmenbedingungen bei Sekundäranalysen zeigt, dass sowohl induktive als auch deduktive Auswertungen gewinnbringend angewendet werden können und auch der (zumindest teilweise) Kontextverlust bei der Wiederverwendung nicht zwangsläufig zu einer Verarmung der Daten führen muss. Zudem erwies sich in den hier geschilderten Untersuchungen die Triangulation von Sekundäranalysen und eigener ergänzender Datenerhebung als besonders geeignete Forschungsstrategie.' (Autorenreferat)'This article describes three secondary analyses of qualitative interview data about social relationships in online communities, making use of a-priori (theory-driven) as well as post-hoc approaches (such as Grounded Theory) and also looking at the data from a variety of different research contexts and questions. Comparing the different approaches taken shows that both a-priori as well as post-hoc designs might successfully be applied in secondary analyses. Furthermore, loss of context when reusing data does not necessarily lead to a decrease in data quality and explanatory power. Secondary analyses might thus constitute a meaningful part of an overall qualitative research strategy, especially when combined with additional primary data.' (author's abstract)

Beyond von Neumann: weakly programmable processor arrays and their programming

The age of parallelism is here. For a sustainable software development for massively parallel architectures the von Neumann model need to be replaced by one with native support for parallelism. We suggest a data flow model for signal processing applications. This will make it possible to reuse software implementations for different targets and future platform generations. We also outline our development tool flow for compiling CAL, a data flow language, to parallel architectures. We also present our processor array, which can be configured to handle massively parallel computations. We demonstrate its power by implementing part of a software radio receiver

Das Fünf-Ebenen-Modell der computervermittelten Kommunikation

Mit dem Fünf-Ebenen-Modell wird hier ein Ansatz zur Analyse computervermittelter Kommunikation vorgestellt, der sich durch eine klare Unterscheidung der die Kommunikation beeinflussenden Variablen nach Eigenschaften und Verhalten der menschlichen Kommunikationspartner einerseits und den Systemeigenschaften und dem „Verhalten“ der technischen Medien andererseits auszeichnet. Das ermöglicht nicht nur eine genauere Analyse von Problemsituationen, sondern auch das Ableiten konkreter Hinweise für die Gestaltung der eingesetzten Medien. Dies wird an einem Fallbeispiel illustriert