Stimulating Stakeholders’ Imagination: New Creativity Triggers for Eliciting Novel Requirements

Requirements engineering is a creative process in which stakeholders and engineers work together to create ideas for new products, services and systems. Several techniques have proved to be effective for eliciting creative requirements. Yet, most of these techniques are heavy to implement and require long periods of time to be applied correctly. Few lightweight creativity techniques have been developed for use in requirements engineering. One such lightweight technique is the creativity trigger, which provides simple guidance to stakeholders and engineers to help produce creative requirements. While easy to apply, creativity triggers were derived informally from experience of practitioners and have not been validated in a systematic way. This paper reports design and preliminary validation research, that sought to provide empirical foundations for a more complete set of lightweight creativity triggers, to be used by stakeholders and engineers to quickly and simply generate new and useful requirements on products, services and systems

Material Properties Measurements for Selected Materials

Hugoniot equation of state measurements were made on Coconino sandstone, Vacaville basalt, Kaibab limestone, Mono Crater, pumice and Zelux (a polycarbonate resin) for pressures to 2 Mb. A single data point was obtained for fused quartz at 1.6 Mb. In addition to the hugoniot studies, the uniaxial compressive stress behavior of Vacaville basalt and Zelux was investigated at strain rates from about 10(exp -5)/sec to 10(exp 3)/second. The data presented include the stress - strain relations as a function of strain rate for these two materials

Genealogical typing of Neisseria meningitidis

Despite the increasing popularity of multilocus sequence typing (MLST), the most appropriate method for characterizing bacterial variation and facilitating epidemiological investigations remains a matter of debate. Here, we propose that different typing schemes should be compared on the basis of their power to infer clonal relationships and investigate the utility of sequence data for genealogical reconstruction by exploiting new statistical tools and data from 20 housekeeping loci for 93 isolates of the bacterial pathogen Neisseria meningitidis. Our analysis demonstrated that all but one of the hyperinvasive isolates established by multilocus enzyme electrophoresis and MLST were grouped into one of six genealogical lineages, each of which contained substantial variation. Due to the confounding effect of recombination, evolutionary relationships among these lineages remained unclear, even using 20 loci. Analyses of the seven loci in the standard MLST scheme using the same methods reproduced this classification, but were unable to support finer inferences concerning the relationships between the members within each complex

Changes in serogroup and genotype prevalence among carried meningococci in the United Kingdom during vaccine implementation.

BACKGROUND: Herd immunity is important in the effectiveness of conjugate polysaccharide vaccines against encapsulated bacteria. A large multicenter study investigated the effect of meningococcal serogroup C conjugate vaccine introduction on the meningococcal population. METHODS: Carried meningococci in individuals aged 15-19 years attending education establishments were investigated before and for 2 years after vaccine introduction. Isolates were characterized by multilocus sequence typing, serogroup, and capsular region genotype and changes in phenotypes and genotypes assessed. RESULTS: A total of 8462 meningococci were isolated from 47 765 participants (17.7%). Serogroup prevalence was similar over the 3 years, except for decreases of 80% for serogroup C and 40% for serogroup 29E. Clonal complexes were associated with particular serogroups and their relative proportions fluctuated, with 12 statistically significant changes (6 up, 6 down). The reduction of ST-11 complex serogroup C meningococci was probably due to vaccine introduction. Reasons for a decrease in serogroup 29E ST-254 meningococci (from 1.8% to 0.7%) and an increase in serogroup B ST-213 complex meningococci (from 6.7% to 10.6%) were less clear. CONCLUSIONS: Natural fluctuations in carried meningococcal genotypes and phenotypes a can be affected by the use of conjugate vaccines, and not all of these changes are anticipatable in advance of vaccine introduction

A systematic review of source attribution of human campylobacteriosis using multilocus sequence typing

This work was supported by the United Kingdom Food Standards Agency [grant number FS101013]; the Wellcome Trust [grant numbers 087622 to M.C.J.M., 072782MA to N.D.M.]; and National Institute for Health Research Health Protection Research Unit (NIHR HPRU) in Gastrointestinal Infections at the University of Oxford in partnership with Public Health England (PHE). The views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the FSA, NHS, the NIHR, the Department of Health or Public Health England.Peer reviewedPublisher PD

Developing and Evaluating Digital Creativity Support in Google Docs for Journalists

Although journalism is classified as one of the creative industries, there is little bespoke digital support for creative thinking by journalists. To fill the gap, this paper reports new research that led to the implementation and first evaluation of JUICE, a new digital prototype to support creative thinking by journalists during the early development of news stories. Emerging from a user centred design process, JUICE is implemented as a simple Add-on Sidebar and Dialog Box in Google Docs that a journalist can invoke when developing news stories. Interviews with experienced journalists were used to elicit 6 strategies that JUICE uses to guide its users to generate different angles on news stories using creative information searches and interactive creativity support. In this paper we describe the information search algorithm and new interactive support to create news stories with one of these strategies – the individual human angle on the story – then report a first evaluation of JUICE implemented with the algorithm and support during its use by journalism students. Results revealed that most of these student journalists were able use JUICE to generate new news stories with individual human angles in a short period of time, but still used established web search tools to collect more detailed information about the angle in order to write the story. Journalist feedback was used to improve the usability of JUICE and design new interactive features

Experimental investigations of simulated meteoroid damage to various spacecraft structures progress report no. 1, period ending 30 sep. 1964

Space simulation experimental studies of penetration mechanics of meteoroids into typical spacecraft structure

Experimental investigations of simulated meteoroid damage to various spacecraft structures progress report no. 3, period ending 31 jan. 1965

Simulation of meteoroid interaction and impact damage to spacecraft structure

Experimental investigations of simulated meteoroid damage to various spacecraft structures Summary report

Optimum structural meteoroid protection requirements for Apollo and Mars mission spacecraf

Comparative analysis of core genome MLST and SNP typing within a European Salmonella serovar Enteritidis outbreak

Multi-country outbreaks of foodborne bacterial disease present challenges in their detection, tracking, and notification. As food is increasingly distributed across borders, such outbreaks are becoming more common. This increases the need for high-resolution, accessible, and replicable isolate typing schemes. Here we evaluate a core genome multilocus typing (cgMLST) scheme for the high-resolution reproducible typing of Salmonella enterica (S. enterica) isolates, by its application to a large European outbreak of S. enterica serovar Enteritidis. This outbreak had been extensively characterised using single nucleotide polymorphism (SNP)-based approaches. The cgMLST analysis was congruent with the original SNP-based analysis, the epidemiological data, and whole genome MLST (wgMLST) analysis. Combination of the cgMLST and epidemiological data confirmed that the genetic diversity among the isolates predated the outbreak, and was likely present at the infection source. There was consequently no link between country of isolation and genetic diversity, but the cgMLST clusters were congruent with date of isolation. Furthermore, comparison with publicly available Enteritidis isolate data demonstrated that the cgMLST scheme presented is highly scalable, enabling outbreaks to be contextualised within the Salmonella genus. The cgMLST scheme is therefore shown to be a standardised and scalable typing method, which allows Salmonella outbreaks to be analysed and compared across laboratories and jurisdictions. [Abstract copyright: Copyright © 2018. Published by Elsevier B.V.