Visualizing Energy Consumption of Radiators

Heating is a significant expenditure of many households today but the actual power consumption of the heating devices are seldom recognized. To help people understand and reflect upon their domestic energy consumption, we have designed an electrical radiator that emits heat entirely from light bulbs. This appliance responds to temperature changes in the room via sensors. The idea was to combine the product semantics of lamps and radiators and direct focus on the latter neglected product category. We argue that by re-designing domestic appliances adding means to visualize energy consumption in engaging and interesting ways it is possible to make energy utilization less abstract and easier to comprehend

Global perspectives on legacy systems

Summarises findings of two international workshops on legacy systems, held in conjunction with an EPSRC managed programme. Issues covered include the nature and dynamics of legacy systems, the co-evolution of software and organisations, issues around software as a technology (its engineering and its management), and organisational/people issues

On Understanding Catastrophe — The Case of Highly Severe Influenza-Like Illness

Computational epidemiology is a form of spatiotemporal reasoning in which social link structures are employed, and spatially explicit models are specified and executed. We point to issues thus far addressed neither by engineers, nor scientists, in the light of a use case focusing on catastrophic scenarios that assume the emergence of a highly unlikely but lethal and contagious strain of influenza. Our conclusion is that important perspectives are missing when dealing with policy issues resulting from scenario execution and analyses in computational epidemiology

ἦ μάλα θαῦμα κύων ὅδε κεῖτ᾽ ἐνὶ κόπρῳ. The Anagnorisis of Odysseus and His Dog Argos (Hom. Od. 17, 290–327)

In the Odyssey, there is a description of Odysseus being recognized by his age-old and decrepit dog Argos, whom he had reared and trained himself before his departure for Troy. This so-called Argos episode (Od. 17.290–327) is still famous today. It has been continuously treated by generations of scholars from antiquity to our time and served as an inspiration to both the visual arts and literature. The present article deals with the function and intended effects of the Argos scene. After a brief synopsis of the position of this scene within the Odyssey as well as of its content and structure, the author discusses the role of dogs in the Iliad and the Odyssey. The focus of this article lies on the interpretations of the Argos scene, suggested by scholars so far, and on their review by means of a close reading to check their plausibility

Elite Sports Training as Model for Future Internet Practices?

This paper reflects on the experience of using ethnographic and experimental research at a high-performance athletic training center as model for drawing conclusion about the future everyday use of ICT and Internet technologies. The research project has consisted of field studies of training session and everyday life at an elite training center where athletes live and train as well as experimental design processes where new internet and media technologies has been explored within elite sports training. While in some aspects the research has been sports specific (such as using advanced video technology to analyze precise movements), in other aspects the training center has seemed like a more intense, extreme and streamlined version of our contemporary technological everyday. The training center has been a laboratory where issues of quantification of self, goal-orientation vs. creativity, and individual vs. community has been displayed in a more clear, isolated and focused way than observations of everyday life can glean. The conclusion is that studying the intense environments of elite athletes can be a fruitful approach to studying the sociology of Information technology. However, this is only the case as long as our societies are dominated by the same values as elite sports such as competitiveness, goal-orientation, specialization and efficiency through technology and discipline

Forms and processes of information systems evolution

The way in which software evolves over time has been much studied and is now fairly well-understood. What has been less thoroughly studied are the processes by which information systems – containing software as one component, but also with significant human and organisational aspects – evolve. In many organisations, few information systems are built at all from scratch, but rather are modified from or built on top of existing ones or bolted together from third-party components. In practice, the old division between design, implementation and maintenance has largely disappeared. In this paper, I discuss the nature of IS evolution. I make a distinction between planned (intentional and strategic) evolution, for which we can formulate a clear process; and unplanned (emergent and externally-driven) evolution, where we can simply study the dynamics of the process and be ready for events