Meyouandus: Interactive in-venue displays. Research and Development Report

Arts practice MeYouAndUs will produce TILO, a hybrid display system for cultural venues. It uses digital screens situated in the public spaces of a venue, combined with live feeds and sensors to display engaging, interactive and personalised content. TILO aims to create a dialogue between the arts organisation, the building and its visitors, and will allow artists to carry out their own interventions. The system will be piloted at FACT, the popular cross-arts venue in Liverpool

Sclerites and possible mouthparts of Wiwaxia from the temperate palaeolatitudes of Colombia, South America

The problematic mollusc Wiwaxia is perhaps the most widely distributed non-mineralized Cambrian metazoan, but has only been reported from palaeotropical latitudes. Here, we describe mid-Cambrian (Drumian, c. 504 Ma) sclerites and possible tooth arrays from the northern Llanos Basin, Colombia, recovered from drilled ditch cuttings by palynological processing – demonstrating that pristine material and low-manipulation processing are not essential to the recovery of Small Carbonaceous Fossils. This, the first report of Wiwaxia from South America, substantially expands Wiwaxia's geographic range into the high palaeolatitudes

A Review of Software Inspections

For two decades, software inspections have proven effective for detecting defects in software. We have reviewed the different ways software inspections are done, created a taxonomy of inspection methods, and examined claims about the cost-effectiveness of different methods. We detect a disturbing pattern in the evaluation of inspection methods. Although there is universal agreement on the effectiveness of software inspection, their economics are uncertain. Our examination of several empirical studies leads us to conclude that the benefits of inspections are often overstated and the costs (especially for large software developments) are understated. Furthermore, some of the most influential studies establishing these costs and benefits are 20 years old now, which leads us to question their relevance to today's software development processes. Extensive work is needed to determine exactly how, why, and when software inspections work, and whether some defect detection techniques might be more cost-effective than others. In this article we ask some questions about measuring effectiveness of software inspections and determining how much they really cost when their effect on the rest of the development process is considered. Finding answers to these questions will enable us to improve the efficiency of software development. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-95-104

Applying the asymmetric information management technique to insurance claims

This study investigates the Asymmetric Information Management (AIM) technique's ability to detect fraudulent insurance claims submitted online. The AIM instructions inform claimants that, inter alia, more detailed statements are easier to accurately classify as genuine or fabricated. To test this, truth tellers (n=55) provided an honest statement about a lost or stolen item, while liars (n=53) provided a false claim. All claimants were randomly assigned to either receive the control or AIM instructions. We found that truth tellers provided more information in the AIM condition (compared to the control condition), and discriminant analysis classificatory performance was improved slightly. Unfortunately, the AIM instructions had little effect on the amount of information liars provided. Thus, the AIM technique is useful for supporting truth tellers to be more detailed, but more work needs to be conducted to assess why liars in this study did not adapt a withholding strategy

An Experiment to Assess Cost-Benefits of Inspection Meetings and their Alternatives

We hypothesize that inspection meetings are far less effective than many people believe and that meetingless inspections are equally effective. However, two of our previous industrial case studies contradict each other on this issue. Therefore, we are conducting a multi-trial, controlled experiment to assess the benefits of inspection meetings and to evaluate alternative procedures. The experiment manipulates four independent variables- (1) the inspection method used (two methods involve meetings, one method does not), (2) the requirements specification to be inspected (there are two), (3) the inspection round (each team participates in two inspections), and (4) the presentation order (either specification can be inspected first). For each experiment we measure 3 dependent variables: (1) the individual fault detection rate, (2) the team fault detection rate, and (3) the percentage of faults originally discovered after the initial inspection phase (during which phase reviewers individually analyze the document). So far we have completed one run of the experiment with 21 graduate students in the computer science at the University of Maryland as subjects, but we do not yet have enough data points to draw definite conclusions. Rather than presenting preliminary conclusions, this article (1) describes the experiment's design and the provocative hypotheses we are evaluating, (2) summarizes our observations from the experiment's initial run, and (3) discusses how we are using these observations to verify our data collection instruments and to refine future experimental runs. (Also cross-referenced as UMIACS-TR-95-89