Managing digital coordination of design: emerging hybrid practices in an institutionalized project setting

What happens when digital coordination practices are introduced into the institutionalized setting of an engineering project? This question is addressed through an interpretive study that examines how a shared digital model becomes used in the late design stages of a major station refurbishment project. The paper contributes by mobilizing the idea of ‘hybrid practices’ to understand the diverse patterns of activity that emerge to manage digital coordination of design. It articulates how engineering and architecture professions develop different relationships with the shared model; the design team negotiates paper-based practices across organizational boundaries; and diverse practitioners probe the potential and limitations of the digital infrastructure. While different software packages and tools have become linked together into an integrated digital infrastructure, these emerging hybrid practices contrast with the interactions anticipated in practice and policy guidance and presenting new opportunities and challenges for managing project delivery. The study has implications for researchers working in the growing field of empirical work on engineering project organizations as it shows the importance of considering, and suggests new ways to theorise, the introduction of digital coordination practices into these institutionalized settings

Detecting Satire in Italian Political Commentaries

This paper presents computational work to detect satire/sarcasm in long commentaries on Italian politics. It uses the lexica extracted from the manual annotation based on Appraisal Theory, of some 30 K word texts. The underlying hypothesis is that using this framework it is possible to precisely pinpoint ironic content through the deep semantic analysis of evaluative judgement and appreciation. The paper presents the manual annotation phase realized on 112 texts by two well-known Italian journalists. After a first experimentation phase based on the lexica extracted from the xml output files, we proceeded to retag lexical entries dividing them up into two subclasses: figurative and literal meaning. Finally more fine-grained Appraisal features have been derived and more experiments have been carried out and compared to results obtained by a lean sentiment analysis. The final output is produced from held out texts to verify the usefulness of the lexica and the Appraisal theory in detecting ironic content

The evolutionary roots of creativity: mechanisms and motivations

Funding: MASTS pooling initiative (The Marine Alliance for Science and Technology for Scotland). MASTS is funded by the Scottish Funding Council (grant reference HR09011) and contributing institutions.We consider the evolution of cognition and the emergence of creative behaviour, in relation to vocal communication. We address two key questions: (i) what cognitive and/or social mechanisms have evolved that afford aspects of creativity?; (ii) has natural and/or sexual selection favoured human behaviours considered ‘creative’? This entails analysis of ‘creativity’, an imprecise construct: comparable properties in non-humans differ in magnitude and teleology from generally agreed human creativity. We then address two apparent problems: (i) the difference between merely novel productions and ‘creative’ ones; (ii) the emergence of creative behaviour in spite of high cost: does it fit the idea that females choose a male who succeeds in spite of a handicap (costly ornament); or that creative males capable of producing a large and complex song repertoire grew up under favourable conditions; or a demonstration of generally beneficial heightened reasoning capacity; or an opportunity to continually reinforce social bonding through changing communication tropes; or something else? We illustrate and support our argument by reference to whale and bird song; these independently evolved biological signal mechanisms objectively share surface properties with human behaviours generally called ‘creative’. Studying them may elucidate mechanisms underlying human creativity; we outline a research programme to do so.PostprintPeer reviewe

Towards Harmonisation in Landscape Unit Delineation: An Analysis of Spanish Case Studies

[EN] The European Landscape Convention has encouraged member states to develop tools for landscape planning and management. Landscape character assessment is the most widespread approach. The aim of this paper is to identify the main trends in landscape unit delineation in Spain. For this purpose, 29 works are analysed by the Multiple Correspondence technique (MCA). Each work is characterised by a category of the variables: scale, type of extent, geomorphology, land matrix and visual boundaries. Results show that there is an implicit hierarchy in the way Spanish professionals are mapping landscape units. It is more apparent in variables related to geomorphology and less evident in variables related to land matrix. Regarding visual boundaries, they are not usually used at small scales and are more frequent at intermediate and large scales. The definition of clear criteria that allow comparable classifications and the increased consideration of cultural and perceptual factors is encouraged for future landscape character classifications.This work was supported by DGI and FEDER grant n8 AGL–2004-03263/AGR. We would like to thank Paz Aramburu, Rafael Escribano, Jordi Puig, the enterprise P&G and Florencio Zoido and Valencia Regional Department of Environment for the data provided for this research and also the R&D&I Linguistic Assistance Office at the Universidad Polite´cnica de Valencia for their help in revising and correcting this paper.Vallés-Planells, M.; Galiana, F.; Bru García, R. (2012). Towards Harmonisation in Landscape Unit Delineation: An Analysis of Spanish Case Studies. Landscape Research. 38(3):329-346. https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2011.647896S32934638

Toward community standards in the quest for orthologs

The identification of orthologs—genes pairs descended from a common ancestor through speciation, rather than duplication—has emerged as an essential component of many bioinformatics applications, ranging from the annotation of new genomes to experimental target prioritization. Yet, the development and application of orthology inference methods is hampered by the lack of consensus on source proteomes, file formats and benchmarks. The second ‘Quest for Orthologs' meeting brought together stakeholders from various communities to address these challenges. We report on achievements and outcomes of this meeting, focusing on topics of particular relevance to the research community at large. The Quest for Orthologs consortium is an open community that welcomes contributions from all researchers interested in orthology research and applications. Contact: [email protected]

Promoter methylation of Wnt-antagonists in polypoid and nonpolypoid colorectal adenomas

BACKGROUND: Nonpolypoid adenomas are a subgroup of colorectal adenomas that have been associated with a more aggressive clinical behaviour compared to their polypoid counterparts. A substantial proportion of nonpolypoid and polypoid adenomas lack APC mutations, APC methylation or chromosomal loss of the APC locus on chromosome 5q, suggesting the involvement of other Wnt-pathway genes. The present study investigated promoter methylation of several Wnt-pathway antagonists in both nonpolypoid and polypoid adenomas. METHODS: Quantitative methylation-specific PCR (qMSP) was used to evaluate methylation of four Wnt-antagonists, SFRP2, WIF-1, DKK3 and SOX17 in 18 normal colorectal mucosa samples, 9 colorectal cancer cell lines, 18 carcinomas, 44 nonpolypoid and 44 polypoid adenomas. Results were integrated with previously obtained data on APC mutation, methylation and chromosome 5q status from the same samples. RESULTS: Increased methylation of all genes was found in the majority of cell lines, adenomas and carcinomas compared to normal controls. WIF-1 and DKK3 showed a significantly lower level of methylation in nonpolypoid compared to polypoid adenomas (p < 0.01). Combining both adenoma types, a positive trend between APC mutation and both WIF-1 and DKK3 methylation was observed (p < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Methylation of Wnt-pathway antagonists represents an additional mechanism of constitutive Wnt-pathway activation in colorectal adenomas. Current results further substantiate the existence of partially alternative Wnt-pathway disruption mechanisms in nonpolypoid compared to polypoid adenomas, in line with previous observations

Promoter methylation of Wnt-antagonists in polypoid and nonpolypoid colorectal adenomas.

BACKGROUND: Nonpolypoid adenomas are a subgroup of colorectal adenomas that have been associated with a more aggressive clinical behaviour compared to their polypoid counterparts. A substantial proportion of nonpolypoid and polypoid adenomas lack APC mutations, APC methylation or chromosomal loss of the APC locus on chromosome 5q, suggesting the involvement of other Wnt-pathway genes. The present study investigated promoter methylation of several Wnt-pathway antagonists in both nonpolypoid and polypoid adenomas. METHODS: Quantitative methylation-specific PCR (qMSP) was used to evaluate methylation of four Wnt-antagonists, SFRP2, WIF-1, DKK3 and SOX17 in 18 normal colorectal mucosa samples, 9 colorectal cancer cell lines, 18 carcinomas, 44 nonpolypoid and 44 polypoid adenomas. Results were integrated with previously obtained data on APC mutation, methylation and chromosome 5q status from the same samples. RESULTS: Increased methylation of all genes was found in the majority of cell lines, adenomas and carcinomas compared to normal controls. WIF-1 and DKK3 showed a significantly lower level of methylation in nonpolypoid compared to polypoid adenomas (p < 0.01). Combining both adenoma types, a positive trend between APC mutation and both WIF-1 and DKK3 methylation was observed (p < 0.05). CONCLUSIONS: Methylation of Wnt-pathway antagonists represents an additional mechanism of constitutive Wnt-pathway activation in colorectal adenomas. Current results further substantiate the existence of partially alternative Wnt-pathway disruption mechanisms in nonpolypoid compared to polypoid adenomas, in line with previous observations

Dynamics of social class contempt in contemporary British television comedy

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ 2010 Taylor & Francis.British television comedy has often ridiculed the complexities and characteristics of social class structures and identities. In recent years, poor white socially marginalised groups, now popularly referred to as “chavs”, have become a prevalent comedy target. One of the most popular and controversial television “comedy chavs” is Little Britain's fictional teenage single mother, Vicky Pollard. This article examines the representation of Vicky Pollard in light of contemporary widespread abuse of the white working class. Highlighting the polysemic and ambivalent nature of Vicky Pollard's representation, the article argues that whilst Little Britain's characterisation of Vicky Pollard largely contributes to contemporary widespread demonisation of the working class, there are moments within Little Britain when a more sympathetic tone towards the poor working class may be read, and where chav identities are used to ridicule the pretensions, superficiality, and falsity of middle-class identities. The article concludes that television comedy has been, and continues to be, a significant vehicle through which serious concerns, anxieties, and questions about social class and class identities are discursively constructed and contested

Mimicking human neuronal pathways in silico: an emergent model on the effective connectivity

International audienceWe present a novel computational model that detects temporal configurations of a given human neuronal pathway and constructs its artificial replication. This poses a great challenge since direct recordings from individual neurons are impossible in the human central nervous system and therefore the underlying neuronal pathway has to be considered as a black box. For tackling this challenge, we used a branch of complex systems modeling called artificial self-organization in which large sets of software entities interacting locally give rise to bottom-up collective behaviors. The result is an emergent model where each software entity represents an integrate-and-fire neuron. We then applied the model to the reflex responses of single motor units obtained from conscious human subjects. Experimental results show that the model recovers functionality of real human neuronal pathways by comparing it to appropriate surrogate data. What makes the model promising is the fact that, to the best of our knowledge, it is the first realistic model to self-wire an artificial neuronal network by efficiently combining neuroscience with artificial self-organization. Although there is no evidence yet of the model's connectivity mapping onto the human connectivity, we anticipate this model will help neuroscientists to learn much more about human neuronal networks, and could also be used for predicting hypotheses to lead future experiments

Energy Metabolism of 28 World Countries: A Multi-scale Integrated Analysis

In this paper the Multi-Scale Integrated Analysis of Social Metabolism (MuSIASEM) is used to investigate the metabolic profile of 28 world countries. The years considered are 1995 and 2007 and the socio-economic and environmental data included in the World Input-Output Database (WIOD) are used to provide consistent comparisons between countries. The analyses are performed by considering the entire society (Level N), the household and the paid sectors (Level N-1) and the different economic sectors (Level N-2). The main results show that, despite the differences existing between countries, the increasing energy throughput and per-capita consumption contributed to change the metabolic profile of the countries considered in this paper