Addressing Risk Governance Deficits through Scenario Modeling Practices

In a world of inevitable regret, those governing risk must build practices that withstand the vicissitudes of actual events by demonstrating that reasonable efforts had been and will continue to be taken despite those harms. However, what is reasonable depends on one’s worldview, and so not giving different worldviews appropriate consideration leads to deficits in the quality of risk governance. This project developed foresight methods for eliciting, discovering, representing, and modeling scenarios which capture the counterfactual forests created by disparate worldviews. These methods employ structural differences between objective and subjective relations toward physical events to delineate the actual points of contention, while maintaining neutrality by remaining strictly grounded in the input of the stakeholders themselves. These methods respect how people frame causal information psychologically, avoiding biases known to affect political judgment. Overall, these methods serve as a reminder that how we ask designs how we think. ii

Permaculture as a Systemic Design practice: Contributions, challenges, and new developments

The discourse on design has often situated it as a science of the artificial, but it has always been necessary to design our interaction with natural systems as well. One tradition for doing so is permaculture, a systemic design approach that aims to develop sustainable (permanent) agriculture and settlements. This paper will present permaculture’s relationship to systemic design, providing historical context to understand its ecological, agricultural, and design origins. Permaculture has made many contributions to systemic design, including simple-toremember lists of guiding ethics and principles, a clever vocabulary of categories that allow the discussion of interactions, a toolbox of design methods for selecting and assembling systems of elements, overall design processes, and some agroecological and social system design insights. However, this exchange of ideas can go both ways, as there are current challenges to permaculture in which systemic design can assist, including forming objectives, assessing appropriate technology, stakeholder engagement, and launching viable projects. From there, this paper highlights new developments that show progress in addressing these challenges, and illustrates that systemic designers can join permaculture practitioners in these efforts. Overall, agroecological design is an area of systemic design that shows much need and promise

Knowledge and Attitudes of Guam Residents Towards Cancer Clinical Trial Participation

Purpose/Background: Currently there are no cancer clinical trials conducted in Guam, but interest is growing. Limited information exists on the knowledge and attitudes of Guam’s population towards cancer clinical research, yet cancer is the second highest cause of death in Guam and among the CHamoru people, Guam’s indigenous population. CHamoru people suffer the highest rates of cancer mortality compared to other ethnic groups in Guam. The purpose of this study was to determine differences in knowledge and attitudes towards cancer clinical trials participation, and attitudes towards traditional medicine. Materials & Methods: A telephone survey instrument was designed, pilot-tested, IRB-approved, and implemented using a third-party marketing company. Questions were adapted from existing surveys and new questions were developed to address unique, Guam-specific interests. Recruited subjects were Guam residents adults 18 years of age and older with telephone service. Guam residents were called from October 6 to 10, 2018 to assess levels of knowledge and attitudes towards cancer clinical trials and the attitudes towards using traditional medicine to treat cancer. Descriptive statistics were computed for demographic variables by response category. Univariate logistic regression was conducted to investigate the bivariate association between a survey question and demographic variables. Odds ratios (ORs) and associated 95% confidence intervals (CIs) were calculated. Multivariable logistic regression model was developed for each question, adjusting for important covariates. Hosmer-Lemeshow tests and c-statistics were used to evaluate goodness of fit. Results: The survey respondents’ (n=152) demographic data closely reflected the US Census ethnicity data for Guam: CHamoru (47.0%), Filipino (26.5%), Caucasian (11.3%) and Other (15.2%). Fifty-three percent understood the term “clinical trial”; 73.7% would be willing to participate if they had cancer, and 59.9% believed they would receive good quality treatment from a clinical trial offered in Guam. Approximately 56.0% thought they would have to pay out-of-pocket expenses; and 67.0% disagreed or were not sure that clinical trial sponsors pay for the study drug while other costs are billed to the insurance company. Physician ethnicity was not important to 100% of Caucasians, but was important to at least 30.0% of non-Caucasians; family support was very important to 94.7% of respondents, while religious community support was important to 55.4%. Approximately 65.1% did not believe that people participating in clinical trials were treated like ‘guinea pigs’. Having college education (OR = 3.26; 95% CI: 1.53 – 6.98) and knowing English language well (OR=5.86; 95% CI: 1.21 – 28.38) were significantly associated with higher aggregated knowledge about clinical trials. Although the majority (67.2%) would seek traditional healing practices if diagnosed with cancer, most (84.9%) did not think a suruhano (CHamoru traditional healer) could treat cancer, and 94.7% did not believe cancer was caused by taotaomo’na (ancient spirits). Discussion/Conclusion: Knowledge and attitudes towards cancer clinical trials and the use of traditional medicine to treat cancer were significantly associated with key demographic variables including ethnicity, income, employment status, place of birth and insurance type. Knowledge about cancer clinical trials was as expected: more participants who are Caucasian, have a higher level of education, were born in U.S., are employed, have a higher income, private insurance, self-report that they speak English well, and do not follow religion, were more aware of what a clinical trial is than the other respondents. Though knowledge about cancer clinical trials is limited, attitudes towards participation in cancer clinical trials offered in Guam were largely positive

Science of Digital Libraries(SciDL)

Our purpose is to ensure that people and institutions better manage information through digital libraries (DLs). Thus we address a fundamental human and social need, which is particularly urgent in the modern Information (and Knowledge) Age. Our goal is to significantly advance both the theory and state-of-theart of DLs (and other advanced information systems) - thoroughly validating our approach using highly visible testbeds. Our research objective is to leverage our formal, theory-based approach to the problems of defining, understanding, modeling, building, personalizing, and evaluating DLs. We will construct models and tools based on that theory so organizations and individuals can easily create and maintain fully functional DLs, whose components can interoperate with corresponding components of related DLs. This research should be highly meritorious intellectually. We bring together a team of senior researchers with expertise in information retrieval, human-computer interaction, scenario-based design, personalization, and componentized system development and expect to make important contributions in each of those areas. Of crucial import, however, is that we will integrate our prior research and experience to achieve breakthrough advances in the field of DLs, regarding theory, methodology, systems, and evaluation. We will extend the 5S theory, which has identified five key dimensions or onstructs underlying effective DLs: Streams, Structures, Spaces, Scenarios, and Societies. We will use that theory to describe and develop metamodels, models, and systems, which can be tailored to disciplines and/or groups, as well as personalized. We will disseminate our findings as well as provide toolkits as open source software, encouraging wide use. We will validate our work using testbeds, ensuring broad impact. We will put powerful tools into the hands of digital librarians so they may easily plan and configure tailored systems, to support an extensible set of services, including publishing, discovery, searching, browsing, recommending, and access control, handling diverse types of collections, and varied genres and classes of digital objects. With these tools, end-users will for be able to design personal DLs. Testbeds are crucial to validate scientific theories and will be thoroughly integrated into SciDL research and evaluation. We will focus on two application domains, which together should allow comprehensive validation and increase the significance of SciDL's impact on scholarly communities. One is education (through CITIDEL); the other is libraries (through DLA and OCKHAM). CITIDEL deals with content from publishers (e.g, ACM Digital Library), corporate research efforts e.g., CiteSeer), volunteer initiatives (e.g., DBLP, based on the database and logic rogramming literature), CS departments (e.g., NCSTRL, mostly technical reports), educational initiatives (e.g., Computer Science Teaching Center), and universities (e.g., theses and dissertations). DLA is a unit of the Virginia Tech library that virtually publishes scholarly communication such as faculty-edited journals and rare and unique resources including image collections and finding aids from Special Collections. The OCKHAM initiative, calling for simplicity in the library world, emphasizes a three-part solution: lightweightprotocols, component-based development, and open reference models. It provides a framework to research the deployment of the SciDL approach in libraries. Thus our choice of testbeds also will nsure that our research will have additional benefit to and impact on the fields of computing and library and information science, supporting transformations in how we learn and deal with information

2020 media futures trends package

2020 Media Futures is a mul6-­‐industry strategic foresight project designed to understand and envision what media may look like in the year 2020; what kind of cross-­‐plaAorm Internet environment may shape our media and entertainment in the coming decade; and how Ontario firms take ac6on today toward capturing and maintaining posi6ons of na6onal and interna6onal leadership. The project asks: In the face of sweeping and disrupDve changes driven by the Internet, how can we help companies in the book, film, interacDve, magazine, music and television industries – Ontario’s CreaDve and Entertainment Cluster – to beNer idenDfy emerging opportuniDes, create more resilient strategic plans and partnerships, boost innovaDon, and compete in increasingly demanding global markets? This document is a product of our ‘horizon scanning’ process. Trends and Countertrends represent direcDonal paNerns in data, a rising Dde of signals, in which, for example, a criDcal mass of headlines about people using Facebook to call for help in emergency situaDons points to a larger trend regarding the increasing mission-­‐criDcal importance of social networks. To date we have idenDfied more than sixty trends at the project website: hNp://2020mediafutures.ca/Trend

Utility of Self-Rated Adherence for Monitoring Dietary and Physical Activity Compliance and Assessment of Participant Feedback of the Healthy Diet and Lifestyle Study pilot.

We examined the utility of self-rated adherence to dietary and physical activity (PA) prescriptions as a method to monitor intervention compliance and facilitate goal setting during the Healthy Diet and Lifestyle Study (HDLS). In addition, we assessed participants’ feedback of HDLS. HDLS is a randomized pilot intervention that compared the effect of intermittent energy restriction combined with a Mediterranean diet (IER + MED) to a Dietary Approaches to Stop Hypertension (DASH) diet, with matching PA regimens, for reducing visceral adipose tissue area (VAT)