Ein Fallbeispiel zum Umgang mit Learning-Analytics-Forschungsdaten

Offene Wissenschaft in die Praxis umzusetzen, bringt für jede Fachwissenschaft und Wissenschaftler*innen Herausforderungen mit sich. Mit dem Aufkommen von Data Librarians hat sich ein neues Berufsbild etabliert, mit dem wissenschaftliche Bibliotheken die Prozesse im Forschungsdatenmanagement umsetzen können. In diesem Beitrag werden die grundsätzlichen Rollen und Aufgaben von Data Librarians erläutert und ihr spezifischer Einsatz im Rahmen des BMBF-Forschungsprojekts DiP-iT aufgezeigt. Ausgehend von einer gemeinsamen Verständigungsebene in Form eines Dateninterviews wurden fachspezifische Konzepte für die Learning Analytics in den Bereichen Datendokumentation, -kuration und -organisation entwickelt. Ergebnisse sind ein Datentransfermodell, das die Speicherung der Daten in verschiedenen Domänen unter Einbezug datenschutzrechtlicher Rahmenbedingungen ermöglicht, und die detaillierte und fachspezifische Dokumentation der Daten anhand eines Learning Analytics Metadatenmodells

Technical Evaluation of the Carolo-Cup 2014 - A Competition for Self-Driving Miniature Cars

The Carolo-Cup competition conducted for the eighth time this year, is an international student competition focusing on autonomous driving scenarios implemented on 1:10 scale car models. Three practical sub-competitions have to be realized in this context and represent a complex, interdisciplinary challenge. Hence, students have to cope with all core topics like mechanical development, electronic design, and programming as addressed usually by robotic applications. In this paper we introduce the competition challenges in detail and evaluate the results of all 13 participating teams from the 2014 competition. For this purpose, we analyze technical as well as non-technical configurations of each student group and derive best practices, lessons learned, and criteria as a precondition for a successful participation. Due to the comprehensive orientation of the Carolo-Cup, this knowledge can be applied on comparable projects and related competitions as well

Photography-based taxonomy is inadequate, unnecessary, and potentially harmful for biological sciences

The question whether taxonomic descriptions naming new animal species without type specimen(s) deposited in collections should be accepted for publication by scientific journals and allowed by the Code has already been discussed in Zootaxa (Dubois & Nemésio 2007; Donegan 2008, 2009; Nemésio 2009a–b; Dubois 2009; Gentile & Snell 2009; Minelli 2009; Cianferoni & Bartolozzi 2016; Amorim et al. 2016). This question was again raised in a letter supported by 35 signatories published in the journal Nature (Pape et al. 2016) on 15 September 2016. On 25 September 2016, the following rebuttal (strictly limited to 300 words as per the editorial rules of Nature) was submitted to Nature, which on 18 October 2016 refused to publish it. As we think this problem is a very important one for zoological taxonomy, this text is published here exactly as submitted to Nature, followed by the list of the 493 taxonomists and collection-based researchers who signed it in the short time span from 20 September to 6 October 2016

The Gift of Water. Social Redistribution of Water among Neighbours in Khartoum

Water gifts are a common strategy to satisfy water needs in the absence of sufficiently performing water networks in Khartoum, but a widely ignored topic in urban political ecology of water. This article questions the exclusive focus of political ecologists on the capitalist waterscape of the city and argues for supplementing the perspective with an in-depth analysis of the neighbourly waterscape, where water gifts are carried out. Through the analysis of interconnected waterscapes on different scales a more holistic understanding of the social construction of water supply in the city can be achieved. The emergence of the gift of water in a city depends on heterogeneity of neighbours’ water access, the cost of the water to be gift, the relationship between donor and recipient, as well as the local social and moral framework. This article uses the example of Khartoum to explore and conceptualize the gift of water in the framework of political ecology

Generic Sensor Failure Modeling for Cooperative Systems

The advent of cooperative systems entails a dynamic composition of their components. As this contrasts current, statically composed systems, new approaches for maintaining their safety are required. In that endeavor, we propose an integration step that evaluates the failure model of shared information in relation to an application’s fault tolerance and thereby promises maintainability of such system’s safety. However, it also poses new requirements on failure models, which are not fulfilled by state-of-the-art approaches. Consequently, this work presents a mathematically defined generic failure model as well as a processing chain for automatically extracting such failure models from empirical data. By examining data of an Sharp GP2D12 distance sensor, we show that the generic failure model not only fulfills the predefined requirements, but also models failure characteristics appropriately when compared to traditional techniques