Making urban places : a social innovation transition through placemaking in Lund, Sweden

Urban design and city planning have historically been a practice undertaken by distanced experts and funded by detached donors and political bodies. The result is often urban sprawl, transit domination, and streets deprioritizing pedestrians. While urban areas do support innovation and knowledge-intensive production, the occurrence of social and environmental urban vulnerabilities is increasing and negatively impacting urban growth. To harness more socially sustainable cityscapes, urban design and development must contribute to a socio-technical transition to social innovation. This thesis assesses, through the lens of the socio-technical transition theory, a case study conducted in Lund, Sweden. The case will analyze a top-down participatory placemaking project led by Lund Municipality in a new urban development. Placemaking is a social innovation niche experiment that integrates resident needs into urban design through methods of traditionally bottom-up community collaboration. Through the analysis of this case, this thesis provides insight into the municipality’s efforts to transition from niche social innovation to regime and if placemaking is able to harness this transition. To address this question, semi-structured interviews, action research based observation, and municipal document analysis is used to collect data, and is framed within a transition theory multi-level perspective (MLP) framework. The theory-guided research complemented by action research suggests that it is highly possible for a Swedish municipality to achieve a social innovation transition, yet unlikely. Social innovation can harness a socio-technical transition in a Swedish context but actors at the landscape level prevent methods such as placemaking from progressing to the regime level. The findings of this study imply that Lund Municipality has the tools to support social innovation niches, and furthermore can shape how sustainability is conceived in urban development. Through an illustration of the transition process, I suggest how the collaboration of the public and political spheres can contribute to a path toward sustainability in Lund

Global Diffusion of the Internet V - The Changing Dynamic of the Internet: Early and Late Adopters of the IPv6 Standard

The introduction of a new network level protocol called Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) represents a significant step forward in the development of the Internet. While IPv6 offers a number of advantages over the current standard (IPv4), its adoption has been inconsistent, often varying by geographic and political region. Through an investigation of early and late adopters of IPv6, this paper seeks to understand the factors that influence the time of adoption decision. The study was conducted in two stages. In the first stage, we interviewed Internet thought leaders. Based on previous literature about the characteristics of early and late adopters, and characteristics specific to IPv6 derived from the interviews, we developed a set of initial notions describing the conditions that are likely to encourage early adoption of IPv6. In stage two we tested those conditions through interviews with eight ISPs in six countries. We found that relative advantage, uncertainty and risk, crisis, and power relationships influence an organization\u27s time of adoption while organizational age does not impact the time of adoption. In addition, we found that sponsorship and availability of information indirectly affect time of adoption by mitigating the perceived risk of early adoption

A Process Based Framework for Assessing IT Value

The financial impact of IT involves both tangible and intangible social and technical costs. The problem of measuring “true” costs and benefits of IT investments is a complex problem and has caused researchers to focus on issues such as the productivity paradox, total cost of ownership, and cost taxonomies. This task becomes even more complicated when considering technologies that impact a variety of processes across the value chain. Therefore, a comprehensive approach designed for taking into account multiple aspects of IT value is desirable. In this paper we propose a model of IT cost that integrates socio-technical and process perspectives. Our model helps reveal which investments have the most return, and where that return is realized

Strain Analysis by a Total Generalized Variation Regularized Optical Flow Model

In this paper we deal with the important problem of estimating the local strain tensor from a sequence of micro-structural images realized during deformation tests of engineering materials. Since the strain tensor is defined via the Jacobian of the displacement field, we propose to compute the displacement field by a variational model which takes care of properties of the Jacobian of the displacement field. In particular we are interested in areas of high strain. The data term of our variational model relies on the brightness invariance property of the image sequence. As prior we choose the second order total generalized variation of the displacement field. This prior splits the Jacobian of the displacement field into a smooth and a non-smooth part. The latter reflects the material cracks. An additional constraint is incorporated to handle physical properties of the non-smooth part for tensile tests. We prove that the resulting convex model has a minimizer and show how a primal-dual method can be applied to find a minimizer. The corresponding algorithm has the advantage that the strain tensor is directly computed within the iteration process. Our algorithm is further equipped with a coarse-to-fine strategy to cope with larger displacements. Numerical examples with simulated and experimental data demonstrate the very good performance of our algorithm. In comparison to state-of-the-art engineering software for strain analysis our method can resolve local phenomena much better

Deploying APIs in the Cloud: A Novel Approach to the MIS Infrastructure Course

Among the most in-demand technology jobs for 2020 include cloud architect and software developer. The typical IT infrastructure position will require programming knowledge, while the typical developer will require infrastructure knowledge. The creation and deployment of APIs is an ideal vehicle to teach both programming and cloud infrastructure in an integrated way. This paper describes the design and structure of a new undergraduate cloud infrastructure course that takes this integrated approach

Comparing the Understandability of Alternative Data Warehouse Schemas: An Empirical Study

An easily understood data warehouse model enables users to better identify and retrieve its data. It also makes it easier for users to suggest changes to its structure and content. Through an exploratory, empirical study, we compared the understandability of the star and traditional relational schemas. The results of our experiment contradict previous findings and show schema type did not lead to significant performance differences for a content identification task. Further, the relational schema actually led to slightly better results for a schema augmentation task. We discuss the implications of these findings for data warehouse design and future research

Recombinant human thyroid stimulating hormone in 2008: focus on thyroid cancer management

Radioiodine (RAI) ablation following thyroidectomy is standard of care treatment for patients with intermediate or high risk differentiated thyroid cancer. Traditionally, this has been achieved by forgoing thyroid hormone replacement postoperatively, allowing endogenous thyroid stimulating hormone (TSH) levels to rise. This rise in TSH provides the stimulus for RAI uptake by the thyroid remnant, but is associated with clinical hypothyroidism and its associated morbidities. Recombinant human TSH (rhTSH, thyrotropin alfa [Thyrogen®], Genzyme Corporation, Cambridge, MA, USA) was developed to provide TSH stimulation without withdrawal of thyroid hormone and clinical hypothyroidism. Phase III studies reported equivalent detection of recurrent or residual disease when rhTSH was used compared with thyroid hormone withdrawal (THW). These trials led to its approval as an adjunctive diagnostic tool for serum thyroglobulin (Tg) testing with or without RAI imaging in the surveillance of patients with differentiated thyroid cancer. Recently, rhTSH was given an indication for adjunctive preparation for thyroid remnant ablation after phase III studies demonstrated comparable outcomes for rhTSH preparation when compared with THW. Importantly, rhTSH stimulation has been found to be safe, well tolerated, and to result in improved quality of life. Here, we review the efficacy and tolerability studies leading to the approval for the use of rhTSH in well-differentiated thyroid cancer management