Use of scenario planning as a theory-driven evaluation tool

Theory-driven evaluation (TDE) is an approach for prescribing an evaluation’s purposes, users and uses, general activities, strategies and methods in the form of a ‘program theory’. While widely-used, the literature highlights a number of common deficiencies in TDEs, among which is the tendency for underdeveloped program theories because of a lack of specificity on the theory-creation process, and because the emergent nature of change renders it difficult to identify relevant theory a priori, leading to uncertainty. Theoretical underdevelopment may reduce the effectiveness of change initiatives and make their evaluation problematic due to a lack of clarity regarding what the program was originally expected to achieve, and how. The paper addresses this issue by showing that scenario planning can assist TDE by 1) making explicit initial causal logic and theory 2) facilitating useful debate and discussion among multiple stakeholders 3) facilitating consideration of how contingent and complex causation may lead to unexpected outcomes, allowing for consideration of adaptations that may be needed as a program unfolds. The paper shows that scenario planning is highly congruent with a complex-realist understanding of evaluation that emphasises causal indeterminism. In sum, we show how scenario planning can be used as a theory-driven evaluation tool

Compensation or inhibitory failure? Testing hypotheses of age-related right frontal lobe involvement in verbal memory ability using structural and diffusion MRI

AbstractFunctional neuroimaging studies report increased right prefrontal cortex (PFC) involvement during verbal memory tasks amongst low-scoring older individuals, compared to younger controls and their higher-scoring contemporaries. Some propose that this reflects inefficient use of neural resources through failure of the left PFC to inhibit non-task-related right PFC activity, via the anterior corpus callosum (CC). For others, it indicates partial compensation – that is, the right PFC cannot completely supplement the failing neural network, but contributes positively to performance. We propose that combining structural and diffusion brain MRI can be used to test predictions from these theories which have arisen from fMRI studies. We test these hypotheses in immediate and delayed verbal memory ability amongst 90 healthy older adults of mean age 73 years. Right hippocampus and left dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) volumes, and fractional anisotropy (FA) in the splenium made unique contributions to verbal memory ability in the whole group. There was no significant effect of anterior callosal white matter integrity on performance. Rather, segmented linear regression indicated that right DLPFC volume was a significantly stronger positive predictor of verbal memory for lower-scorers than higher-scorers, supporting a compensatory explanation for the differential involvement of the right frontal lobe in verbal memory tasks in older age

Anonymität und Unbeobachtbarkeit im Internet (= Anonymity and unobservability in the Internet)

Durch seine vielfältigen Möglichkeiten spielt das Internet in immer mehr Bereichen des privaten und öffentlichen Lebens eine zunehmende Rolle. Ein spezieller Bereich ist der E-Commerce, der den elektronischen Handel im Allgemeinen und die wirtschaftlichen Beziehungen zwischen Anbietern, Kunden und anderen Akteuren im Speziellen bezeichnet. Diese gestiegene Bedeutung des Internets in vielen Bereichen des Lebens steigert auch das Interesse seitens Dritter, durch Beobachtung möglichst viel über einzelne Personen, ihre Interessen und Neigungen mittels des Internets in Erfahrung zu bringen. In diesem Artikel werden daher verschiedene Verfahren vorgestellt, die einen gewissen Schutz vor solchen Angriffen bieten. With its broad variety of potential uses the Internet is becoming more and more important in many areas of both private and public life. This holds particularly for Electronic Commerce, i.e., electronic transactions between businesses, consumers, and potentially other actors. With the increasing importance of the Internet especially in this domain, third parties may want to illegally obtain as much information as possible about the acting parties through espionage. This article discusses some methods that offer protection against such attacks

Longitudinal Analytics on Web Archive Data: It's About Time!

Organizations like the Internet Archive have been capturing Web contents over decades, building up huge repositories of time-versioned pages. The timestamp annotations and the sheer volume of multi-modal content constitutes a gold mine for analysts of all sorts, across different application areas, from political analysts and marketing agencies to academic researchers and product developers. In contrast to traditional data analytics on click logs, the focus is on longitudinal stud- ies over very long horizons. This longitudinal aspect affects and concerns all data and metadata, from the content itself, to the indices and the statistical metadata maintained for it. Moreover, advanced analysts prefer to deal with semantically rich entities like people, places, organizations, and ideally relationships such as company acquisitions, instead of, say, Web pages containing such references. For example, tracking and analyzing a politician?s public appearances over a decade is much harder than mining frequently used query words or frequently clicked URLs for the last month. The huge size of Web archives adds to the complexity of this daunting task. This paper discusses key challenges, that we intend to take up, which are posed by this kind of longitudinal analytics: time-travel indexing and querying, entity detection and track- ing along the time axis, algorithms for advanced analyses and knowledge discovery, and scalability and platform issues

The effects of lateral prefrontal transcranial magnetic stimulation on item memory encoding

Previous neuroimaging research has established that the left ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (VLPFC) is involved in long-term memory (LTM) encoding for individual items. Dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is implicated less frequently, and one theory that has gained support to explain this discrepancy is that DLPFC is involved in forming item-item relational but not item LTM. Given that neuroimaging results are correlational, complimentary methods such as repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) have been used to test causal hypotheses generated from imaging data. Most TMS studies of LTM encoding have found that disruption of lateral PFC activity impairs subsequent memory. However these studies have lacked methods to precisely localize and directly compare TMS effects from frontal subregions implicated by the neuroimaging literature. Here, we target specific subregions of lateral PFC with TMS to test the prediction from the item/relational framework that temporary disruption of VLPFC during encoding will impair subsequent memory whereas TMS to DLPFC during item encoding will not. Frontal TMS was administered prior to a LTM encoding task in which participants were presented with a list of individual nouns and asked to judge whether each noun was concrete or abstract. After a 40 minute delay period, item recognition memory was tested. Results indicate that VLPFC and DLPFC TMS have differential effects on subsequent item memory. VLPFC TMS reliably disrupted subsequent item memory whereas DLPFC TMS led to numerical enhancement in item memory, relative to TMS to a control region