How Are Communication Channels on GitHub Presented to Their Intended Audience? -- A Thematic Analysis

Communication is essential in software development, and even more in distributed settings. Communication activities need to be organized and coordinated to defend against the threat of productivity losses, increases in cognitive load, and stress among team members. With a plethora of communication channels that were identified by previous research in open-source projects, there is a need to explore organizational issues in how these communication channels are introduced, explained, and motivated for use among all project members. In this study, we wanted to understand which communication channels are used in GitHub projects and how they are presented to the GitHub project audience. We employed thematic analysis to analyze 151 artifacts in 90 GitHub projects. Our results revealed 32 unique communications channels that can be divided into nine different types. Projects mostly provide channels of different types, but for some types (e.g., chat) it is common to provide several channels. Maintainers are aware that channels have different properties and help the developers to decide which channel should be used in which case. However, this is not true for all projects, and often we have not found any explicit reasons why maintainers chose to provide one channel over another. Different channels can be used for different purposes and have different affordances, so maintainers have to decide wisely which channels they want to provide and make clear which channel should be used in which case. Otherwise, developers might feel overwhelmed of too many channels and information can get fragmented over multiple channels.Comment: 10 pages, 5 figures. Accepted for presentation at the International Conference on Evaluation and Assessment in Software Engineering (EASE) 202

Integration Platform as a Service

Erworben im Rahmen der Schweizer Nationallizenzen (http://www.nationallizenzen.ch)Around 2000, the term “enterprise application integration” (EAI) became popular with IT departments. Until then, silo applications – custom-developed or packaged, host- or client-server-based – had been connected with numerous point-to-point interfaces. The resulting complexity of the application landscape affected the implementation of additional business requirements such as electronic marketplaces, e-commerce, and supply chain management. Commonly used middleware techniques such as message queues, object request brokers, or remote procedure calls required significant and costly alterations of source and target systems

Exploiting jet binning to identify the initial state of high-mass resonances

If a new high-mass resonance is discovered at the Large Hadron Collider, model-independent techniques to identify the production mechanism will be crucial to understand its nature and effective couplings to Standard Model particles. We present a powerful and model-independent method to infer the initial state in the production of any high-mass color-singlet system by using a tight veto on accompanying hadronic jets to divide the data into two mutually exclusive event samples (jet bins). For a resonance of several hundred GeV, the jet binning cut needed to discriminate quark and gluon initial states is in the experimentally accessible range of several tens of GeV. It also yields comparable cross sections for both bins, making this method viable already with the small event samples available shortly after a discovery. Theoretically, the method is made feasible by utilizing an effective field theory setup to compute the jet cut dependence precisely and model independently and to systematically control all sources of theoretical uncertainties in the jet binning, as well as their correlations. We use a 750 GeV scalar resonance as an example to demonstrate the viability of our method.Comment: 6 pages, 2 figures, v2: journal versio

Physics informed Neural Networks applied to the description of wave-particle resonance in kinetic simulations of fusion plasmas

The Vlasov-Poisson system is employed in its reduced form version (1D1V) as a test bed for the applicability of Physics Informed Neural Network (PINN) to the wave-particle resonance. Two examples are explored: the Landau damping and the bump-on-tail instability. PINN is first tested as a compression method for the solution of the Vlasov-Poisson system and compared to the standard neural networks. Second, the application of PINN to solving the Vlasov-Poisson system is also presented with the special emphasis on the integral part, which motivates the implementation of a PINN variant, called Integrable PINN (I-PINN), based on the automatic-differentiation to solve the partial differential equation and on the automatic-integration to solve the integral equation

Free Indirect Discourse Meets Character Viewpoint Gestures

Contribution to Linguistic Evidence 202

Vielfältig statt ideal: Arbeitspsychologisches Feldexperiment zur Gestaltung von Nutzerarbeitsplätzen in einer Universitätsbibliothek

Der vorliegende Aufsatz stellt ein arbeitspsychologisches Feldexperiment zur Untersuchung von vier verschiedenen Nutzerarbeitsplatzqualitäten innerhalb der Publikumsfläche der Universitätsbibliothek der Otto-von-Guericke-Universität Magdeburg anhand der subjektiv beurteilten Lernumgebung durch Studierende dar und wurde von der Universitätsbibliothek mit dem Ziel in Auftrag gegeben, mögliche Ansatzpunkte für eine nutzendenorientierte Optimierung der Arbeitsplätze abzuleiten. In Anlehnung an vergleichbare Studien in anderen Universitätsbibliotheken wurde die Wahrnehmung der Lernumgebung und die Beurteilung der Nutzerarbeitsplätze mittels eigens für diese Untersuchung erstellten Fragebögen sowie standardisierten Interviews erhoben. Außerdem wurde ein mobiles Eye-Tracking-System zur Analyse potentieller Ablenkungsfaktoren in der Lernumgebung genutzt. Die Ergebnisse weisen darauf hin, dass sich die wahrgenommenen Eigenschaften der Lernumgebung auf das Wohlbefinden der Studierenden auswirken, welches wiederum die Wahl ihres Arbeitsplatzes beeinflusst. Basierend auf der Interpretation der gewonnenen Erkenntnisse und unter Berücksich-tigung möglicher Kritikpunkte am Studiendesign zeigen die Daten Evidenz dafür, dass die Helligkeit, die ergonomische Ausstattung, ein freies Sichtfeld sowie die Lautstärke wichtige Einflussfaktoren für das Wohlbefinden der Studierenden darstellen, wobei auch die individuellen Lernpräferenzen dazu führen, dass Nutzende unterschiedliche Plätze favorisieren. Den idealen Nutzerarbeitsplatz gibt es demnach nicht. Die Aufgabe einer Universitätsbibliothek sollte daher u. a. darin bestehen, den Studierenden eine möglichst vielfältige Auswahl an Arbeitsplätzen zur Verfügung zu stellen.This paper presents a psychological study, which examined four different work spaces in the university library of the Otto-von-Guericke-University Magdeburg based on the learning environment evaluated by students. The study was commissioned by the library with the aim to identify important factors in designing a learning environment, which fits the students` needs. Based on similar studies conducted in other university libraries the environmental perception and the evaluation of the workspaces were examined with questionnaires and standardised interviews. A mobile eye-tracking system was used to analyse potential distractors around the spaces. The results show that the perceived features of the learning environment have an impact on the wellbeing of the students, which in turn influences the choice of their favourite learning space. Based on the interpretation of these findings and taking into account possible limitations of the study design the data indicate that light, ergonomic features and the visibility of the whole room as well as noise have an important influence on the wellbeing of students. However, because of individual learning preferences, users prefer different learning spaces. Therefore there cannot be the perfect learning space. The results indicate that university libraries should focus on providing a diverse choice of learning spaces

Reconstitution of CD8 T cells protective against cytomegalovirus in a mouse model of hematopoietic cell transplantation : dynamics and inessentiality of epitope immunodominance

Successful reconstitution of cytomegalovirus (CMV)-specific CD8+ T cells by hematopoietic cell transplantation (HCT) gives a favorable prognosis for the control of CMV reactivation and prevention of CMV disease after hematoablative therapy of hematopoietic malignancies. In the transient immunocompromised state after HCT, pre-emptive cytoimmunotherapy with viral epitope-specific effector or memory CD8+ T cells is a promising option to speed up antiviral control. Despite high-coding capacity of CMVs and a broad CD8+ T-cell response on the population level, which reflects polymorphism in major histocompatibility complex class-I (MHC-I) glycoproteins, the response in terms of quantity of CD8+ T cells in any individual is directed against a limited set of CMV-encoded epitopes selected for presentation by the private repertoire of MHC-I molecules. Such epitopes are known as “immunodominant” epitopes (IDEs). Besides host immunogenetics, genetic variance in CMV strains harbored as latent viruses by an individual HCT recipient can also determine the set of IDEs, which complicates a “personalized immunotherapy.” It is, therefore, an important question if IDE-specific CD8+ T-cell reconstitution after HCT is critical or dispensable for antiviral control. As viruses with targeted mutations of IDEs cannot be experimentally tested in HCT patients, we employed the well-established mouse model of HCT. Notably, control of murine CMV (mCMV) after HCT was comparably efficient for IDE-deletion mutant mCMV-Δ4IDE and the corresponding IDE-expressing revertant virus mCMV-Δ4IDE-rev. Thus, antigenicity-loss mutations in IDEs do not result in loss-of-function of a polyclonal CD8+ T-cell population. Although IDE deletion was not associated with global changes in the response to non-IDE epitopes, the collective of non-IDE-specific CD8+ T-cells infiltrates infected tissue and confines infection within nodular inflammatory foci. We conclude from the model, and predict also for human CMV, that there is no need to exclusively aim for IDE-specific immunoreconstitution

Skew scattering in dilute ferromagnetic alloys

The challenging problem of skew scattering for Hall effects in dilute ferromagnetic alloys, with intertwined effects of spin-orbit coupling, magnetism and impurity scattering, is studied here from first principles. Our main aim is to identify chemical trends and work out simple rules for large skew scattering in terms of the impurity and host states at the Fermi surface, with particular emphasis on the interplay of the spin and anomalous Hall effects in one and the same system. The predicted trends are benchmarked by referring to three different \emph{ab initio} methods based on different approximations with respect to the electronic structure and transport properties.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figure

The Glarus thrust: excursion guide and report of a field trip of the Swiss Tectonic Studies Group (Swiss Geological Society, 14.-16. 09. 2006)

Participants: Ansorge Jörg (ETHZ) den Brok Bas (EAWAG-EMPA) Dèzes Pierre (SANW) Gonzalez Laura (University of Bern) Herwegh Marco (University of Bern) Hürzeler Jean-Pierre (University of Basel) Imper David (GeoPark) Mancktelow Neil (ETHZ) Mullis Josef (University of Basel) Nyffenegger Franziska (Fachhochschule Burgdorf, University of Bern) Pfiffner Adrian (University of Bern) Schreurs Guido (University of Bern) Schmalholz Stefan (ETHZ) Schmid Stefan (University of Basel) Wiederkehr Michael (University of Basel) Wilson Christopher (Melbourne University) Wilson Lilian (Melbourne University