Synesthesia: a colorful word with a touching sound?

Synesthesia is a fairly common condition in which individuals experience atypical responses (such as color experiences) in association with certain types of stimuli (such as non-colored letters). Although synesthesia has been described for centuries, only very recently has there been an explosive growth of systematic scientific examinations of this condition. In this article, we review and critically evaluate current methods for both assessing synesthesia and examining its psychological basis, including the “test-retest” procedure, online battery assessments, and behavioral experiments. We highlight the limitations of these methods for understanding the nature of this complex condition and propose potential solutions to address some of these limitations. We also provide a set of markers that aid in distinguishing synesthesia from other closely related psychological phenomena

Investigating Differences between Graphical and Textual Declarative Process Models

Declarative approaches to business process modeling are regarded as well suited for highly volatile environments, as they enable a high degree of flexibility. However, problems in understanding declarative process models often impede their adoption. Particularly, a study revealed that aspects that are present in both imperative and declarative process modeling languages at a graphical level-while having different semantics-cause considerable troubles. In this work we investigate whether a notation that does not contain graphical lookalikes, i.e., a textual notation, can help to avoid this problem. Even though a textual representation does not suffer from lookalikes, in our empirical study it performed worse in terms of error rate, duration and mental effort, as the textual representation forces the reader to mentally merge the textual information. Likewise, subjects themselves expressed that the graphical representation is easier to understand

Enabling the Collaborative Definition of DSMLs

International audienceSoftware development processes are collaborative in nature. Neglecting the key role of end-users leads to software that does not satisfy their needs. This collaboration becomes specially important when creating Domain-Specific Modeling Languages (DSMLs), which are (modeling) languages specifically designed to carry out the tasks of a particular domain. While end-users are actually the experts of the domain for which a DSML is developed, their participation in the DSML specification process is still rather limited nowadays. In this paper we propose a more community-aware language development process by enabling the active participation of all community members (both developers and end-users of the DSML) from the very beginning. Our proposal is based on a DSML itself, called Collaboro, which allows representing change proposals on the DSML design and discussing (and tracing back) possible solutions, comments and decisions arisen during the collaboration

Meta Modeling for Business Process Improvement

Conducting business process improvement (BPI) initiatives is a topic of high priority for today’s companies. However, performing BPI projects has become challenging. This is due to rapidly changing customer requirements and an increase of inter-organizational business processes, which need to be considered from an end-to-end perspective. In addition, traditional BPI approaches are more and more perceived as overly complex and too resource-consuming in practice. Against this background, the paper proposes a BPI roadmap, which is an approach for systematically performing BPI projects and serves practitioners’ needs for manageable BPI methods. Based on this BPI roadmap, a domain-specific conceptual modeling method (DSMM) has been developed. The DSMM supports the efficient documentation and communication of the results that emerge during the application of the roadmap. Thus, conceptual modeling acts as a means for purposefully codifying the outcomes of a BPI project. Furthermore, a corresponding software prototype has been implemented using a meta modeling platform to assess the technical feasibility of the approach. Finally, the usability of the prototype has been empirically evaluated

A DECISION MODEL FOR THE ENGINEERING DESIGN OF A GROUNDWATER DECONTAMINATION SYSTEM

Στην εργασία αναπτύσσεται και επιλύεται ένα μοντέλο απόφασης για τον σχεδιασμό έργων απορρύπανσης σε έναν υδροφορέα που έχει υποβαθμισθεί ποιοτικά. Η λήψη των αποφάσεων γίνεται σε συνθήκες επικινδυνότητας, καθώς η αβεβαιότητα για τις τιμές του πεδίου της μεταφορικότητας θέτει σε αμφιβολία την αποτελεσματικότητα των σχεδιαζόμενων έργων. Οι πιθανότητες αστοχίας των έργων υπολογίζονται μετά από επίλυση του στοχαστικού μοντέλου της προσομοίωσης και στο μοντέλο της απόφασης ενσωματώνεται το κόστος από το ενδεχόμενο δυσμενών επιπτώσεων. Εξετάζονται και αξιολογούνται έξι σενάρια διαχείρισης του υδροφορέα και επιλέγεται τελικά εκείνο για το οποίο η επίλυση του μοντέλου της απόφασης δίνει τον καλύτερο συνδυασμό αποτελεσματικότητας και οικονομίας.A decision model for the engineering design of a groundwater decontamination system is developed and solved. The uncertainty of the transmissivity field is the cause for the risk conditions under which decisions should be taken. The risk of failing to meet design objectives is taken into account and the probabilities of failure are computed after the solution of the stochastic simulation model. The concequenses of failure are quantified and their probabilistic costs are taken into account for the development of the decision model. Six alternative scenarios with different design schemes are evaluated and the best of them is selected