Uvis: A Formula-Based End-User Tool for Data Visualization

© 2013 IEEE. Existing approaches to data visualization are one of these two: accessible to end-user developers but limited in customizability, or inaccessible and expressive. For instance, commercial charting tools are easy to use, but support only predefined visualizations, while programmatic visualization tools support custom visualizations, but require advanced programming skills. We show that it is possible to combine the learnability of charting tools and the expressiveness of visualization tools. Uvis is an interactive visualization and user interface design tool that targets end-user developers with skills comparable to spreadsheet formulas. With Uvis, designers drag and drop visual objects, set visual properties to formulas, and see the result immediately. The formulas are declarative and similar to spreadsheet formulas. The formulas compute the property values and can refer to data from database, visual objects, and end-user input. To substantiate our claim, we compared Uvis with popular visualization tools. Further, we conducted usability studies that test the ability of designers to customize visualizations with our approach. Our results show that end-user developers can learn the basics of Uvis relatively fast

How Material Practices and their Symbolic and Physical Meanings Form a Colonising Logic

This PhD thesis is the outcome of three-year doctoral study of corporate social responsibility (CSR) and stakeholder engagement in the water sector. This study contributes to new knowledge about water companies formed as hybrid organisations in the aftermath of the new public management (NPM) era worldwide. Today we see different hybrid organisations of water companies around the world that have either been fully privatised or quasi-privatised. Quasiprivatisation in Denmark means that water utilities are still perceived as natural monopolies, which has not made them into for-profit driven companies. Instead a simulated market and state regulation has been introduces with annual, national benchmarking to set a price cap as an upper limit for the consumer-price of water. Similar systems are seen in fully privatised water companies in the United Kingdom, the United States, and partially in South Africa. However, here the water companies are typically owned by private companies and not established as municipalityowned limited liabilities1 as in Denmark and elsewhere in Scandinavia. This PhD thesis proposes new models and principles and corporate social responsibility and stakeholder engagement of these water companies. The findings of the study suggest a new definition of a colonising logic of CSR competing and coexisting with the regulators’ colonising logic of NPM. Through the study and definition of these logics as colonising the water sector this PhD theisis provides an understand of new perspectives of how CSR is enacted through stakeholder engagement and how the logic of CSR frames the top managers’ claim: ”We are CSR!” (Interview B, March 2011) and the consequences of this logic. Both the logic of CSR and the logic of NPM is found to be based on the materials that the water companies are organised around, namely water. Water is perceived as a natural good that should ideally be free and plentiful for all citizens around the world. However, the competition between the two colonising logics stems from another material, namely the money or price that providing clean and pure water for all are allowed to cost the citizens. Through the dialectical interaction of these in terms of material practices between producing water and infrastructure to distribute it and collecting money as a payment for it and the regulation of this, this PhD thesis proposes a new definition of the role of materials and material practices underlying several institutional logics such as the institutional logic of capitalism, state, democracy, family, religion/science, profession, and corporation (Friedland & Alford, 1991; Thornton et al., 2012; Friedland, 2013)

Vridsløselille Statsfængsel set i fangeperspektiv

This article outlines a study done by an inmate at the Vridsløselille State Prison (Lauesen 1998). Power relations within the prison are contemplated within a Foucaultian conception of power: Power techniques and strategies are characterised, and their consequences examined. Various forms of counter-power-techniques and strategies developed by prisoners in response to the prison environment are also outlined. The consequences of this interaction are conceptualised as "de-socialisation " and "learned helplessness." The article goes on to critique traditional discussions of the negative role of "strong" prisoners, as well as a new prison structure in which the guards perform additional duties as social advisers and pedagogues