What Is Conceptual Glue?

Conceptual structures are commonly likened to scientific theories, yet the content and motivation of the theory analogy are rarely discussed. Gregory Murphy and Douglas Medin's The Role of Theories in Conceptual Coherence is a notable exception and has become an authoritative exposition of the utility of the theory analogy. For Murphy and Medin, the theory analogy solves what they call the problem of conceptual coherence or the problem of conceptual glue. I argue that they conflate a number of issues under these rubrics and that in each case either the problem to be solved isn't subject to a general solution or the theory analogy is of little use. The issues I consider are: (1) what makes a concept efficient, useful, and informative, (2) what makes a concept refer to what it does, (3) what makes a set of objects form a single category, and (4) what makes concepts combine in one way rather than another.     

“What are We Missing?” Usability’s Indexical Ground

In this paper, we describe how usability provides the indexical ground upon which design work in a surgery is achieved. Indexical and deictic referential practices are used (1) to constitute participation frameworks and work sites in an instructional surgery and (2) to encode and manage participants’ differential access to the relevancies and background knowledge required for the achievement of a successful surgical outcome. As a site for both learning and work, the operating room afforded us the opportunity to examine how usability, which is a critical design consideration, can be used as a resource for learning in interaction. In our detailed analysis of the interaction among participants (both co-present and projected) we sought to describe a particular case of how usability was produced as a relevant consideration for surgical education in the operating room. In doing so, we demonstrate a set of members’ methods by which actors worked to establish and provide for the relevance of the anticipated needs of projected users as part of developing an understanding of their current activity.

What holds in a context?

In order to establish that [A] = [B] follows from a set of assumptions often one provesA =B and then invokes the principle of substitution of equals for equals. It has been observed that in the ancillary proof ofA =B one is allowed to use, in addition to those assumptions of which are free for , certain (open) sentencesP which may not be part of and may not follow from , but are related to the context . We show that in an appropriate formal system there is a closed form solution to the problem of determining precisely what sentencesP can be used. We say that those sentenceshold in the context under the set of assumptions . We suggest how the solution could be exploited in an interactive theorem prover.     

Is lines of code a good measure of effort in effort-aware models?

ContextEffort-aware models, e.g., effort-aware bug prediction models aim to help practitioners identify and prioritize buggy software locations according to the effort involved with fixing the bugs. Since the effort of current bugs is not yet known and the effort of past bugs is typically not explicitly recorded, effort-aware bug prediction models are forced to use approximations, such as the number of lines of code (LOC) of the predicted files.ObjectiveAlthough the choice of these approximations is critical for the performance of the prediction models, there is no empirical evidence on whether LOC is actually a good approximation. Therefore, in this paper, we investigate the question: is LOC a good measure of effort for use in effort-aware models?MethodWe perform an empirical study on four open source projects, for which we obtain explicitly-recorded effort data, and compare the use of LOC to various complexity, size and churn metrics as measures of effort.ResultsWe find that using a combination of complexity, size and churn metrics are a better measure of effort than using LOC alone. Furthermore, we examine the impact of our findings on previous effort-aware bug prediction work and find that using LOC as a measure for effort does not significantly affect the list of files being flagged, however, using LOC under-estimates the amount of effort required compared to our best effort predictor by approximately 66%.ConclusionStudies using effort-aware models should not assume that LOC is a good measure of effort. For the case of effort-aware bug prediction, using LOC provides results that are similar to combining complexity, churn, size and LOC as a proxy for effort when prioritizing the most risky files. However, we find that for the purpose of effort-estimation, using LOC may under-estimate the amount of effort required.     

What is the role of IT in innovation? A bibliometric analysis of research development in IT innovation

With the wide diffusion of information technology (IT) in our daily life and work, it is clear that product innovation and service innovation have more and more connection with IT, and IT has become an important tool or component in innovation. The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into future studies pertaining to this area by investigating the research development of IT innovation using bibliometric analysis. The status of IT innovation study is analysed through citation analysis with the help of CiteSpace. Influential references, hot topics, top-tier journals and important institutes are all detected, and the intellectual structure of recent studies is also mapped in this study, and we find that research on IT innovation is mainly from two directions, innovation study group and information systems study group. Finally, we follow the logic of Nambisan [2013. “Information Technology and Product/Service Innovation: A Brief Assessment and Some Suggestions for Future Research.” Journal of the Association for Information Systems 14 (4): 215–226] to explore the relationship between IT and innovation through reviewing papers in the top journals in this field. We find that most studies treat IT as an enabler of innovation. Although some recent studies try to pay attention to the role of IT as a trigger for innovation and give some rationale for the IT–innovation relationship, further studies are still required to uncover the trigger effect mechanism.     

Is explicit processing of fuzzy direct influence evaluations in DEMATEL indispensable?

DEMATEL is acknowledged to be an effective method for the identification of cause-effect chain components. It is based on the utilisation of a discrete crisp evaluation scale with the aim of assessing the relations between the objects. There have been attempts to make use of the fuzzy extension in this respect but they have not been justified yet. It is thought that in comparison to crisp evaluations explicit processing of fuzzy evaluations in DEMATEL results in more complex calculations and demands a great deal of effort. Numerical experiments presented in this paper show, however, that replacing crisp evaluations with fuzzy evaluations may yield similar results. Thus, we go on to argue that a concept of explicit fuzzy data processing in DEMATEL needs a thorough rethink.     

电子出版 Common Ground:字体完全保真,但与PostScript不完全兼容

Common Ground 2.0 for Windows能实现Adobe Acrobat的大部分功能,但价格更低,对内存、磁盘空间等方面的要求也更少。象Acrobat和Novell的Envoy一样,Common Ground生成可传送的文档,在这些文档中包含你在任何Windows应     

Uncertainty in crop model predictions: What is the role of users?

Crop models are used to estimate crop productivity under future climate projections, and modellers manage uncertainty by considering different scenarios and GCMs, using a range of crop simulators. Five crop models and 20 users were arranged in a randomized block design with four replicates. Parameters for maize (well studied by modellers) and rapeseed (almost ignored) were calibrated. While all models were accurate for maize (RRMSE from 16.5% to 25.9%), they were, to some extent, unsuitable for rapeseed. Although differences between biomass simulated by the models were generally significant for rapeseed, they were significant only in 30% of the cases for maize. This could suggest that in case of models well suited to a crop, user subjectivity (which explained 14% of total variance in maize outputs) can hide differences in model algorithms and, consequently, the uncertainty due to parameterization should be better investigated.     

What’s missing in geographical parsing?

Geographical data can be obtained by converting place names from free-format text into geographical coordinates. The ability to geo-locate events in textual reports represents a valuable source of information in many real-world applications such as emergency responses, real-time social media geographical event analysis, understanding location instructions in auto-response systems and more. However, geoparsing is still widely regarded as a challenge because of domain language diversity, place name ambiguity, metonymic language and limited leveraging of context as we show in our analysis. Results to date, whilst promising, are on laboratory data and unlike in wider NLP are often not cross-compared. In this study, we evaluate and analyse the performance of a number of leading geoparsers on a number of corpora and highlight the challenges in detail. We also publish an automatically geotagged Wikipedia corpus to alleviate the dearth of (open source) corpora in this domain.     

《What Time Is It?》教学案例及点评

正●教学目标分析本课是义务教育课程标准实验教科书新起点英语二年级下册Unit13Time中的第一课时,本课重点是学习时间的正确表达与如何询问时间。该     

Is object-oriented requirements engineering of interest?

Different communities deal with the use of object-oriented (O-O) ideas for requirements engineering. Their views are different and many misunderstandings are around. Although O-O approaches are the most widely used in practice apart from pure natural language, there does not seem to be much interest in the scientific treatment of open issues in this regard. This article argues for taking such issues up (again).

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What Is Good Help? Responses to Solicited and Unsolicited Assistance

Users rarely ask for help, and they tend to respond negatively to unsolicited help, even when they can benefit from it. It is not clear whether this is due to the way systems provide help or whether people in general dislike unsolicited help. To address this issue the authors studied responses to solicited and unsolicited help from a human adviser regarding the use of an unfamiliar e-mail system. Novice users (the advisees) received spoken advice from distant experienced users (the advisers) upon the advisee’s request (the “pull” condition”) or the adviser’s initiative (the “push” condition”). Unsolicited advice helped performance more than advice requested by the advisee, but only for unfamiliar tasks and especially for difficult tasks. Although advisees perceived unsolicited advice as helpful, they were not interested in receiving such advice in the future. This study demonstrates that although advice can help to improve performance, it may still not be welcome, even when provided by a person.     

Is Zendia the Isle of Pines?

Among several authoritative and diverse sources, this article is an attempt by the author, who believes that the Isle of Pines is Zendia and that it was the first choice as a landing site to establish a provisional government in exile, to be followed by a second landing onto mainland Cuba.     

What will it take? A view on adoption of model-based methods in practice

Model-based engineering (MBE) has been touted as a new and substantively different approach to software development, characterized by higher levels of abstraction and automation compared to traditional methods. Despite the availability of published verifiable evidence that it can significantly boost both developer productivity and product quality in industrial projects, adoption of this approach has been surprisingly slow. In this article, we review the causes behind this, both technical and non-technical, and outline what needs to happen for MBE to become a reliable mainstream approach to software development.     

What lies behind requirements? A quality assessment of statement grounds in requirements elicitation

Software Quality Journal - In requirements engineering (RE), an early yet critical activity consists in eliciting the requirements from various stakeholders, who usually have different assumptions,...     

What is a process model composed of?

Software and Systems Modeling - Business process modelling languages typically enable the representation of business process models by employing (graphical) symbols. These symbols can vary...     

Is Weak Emergence Just in the Mind?

Weak emergence is the view that a system’s macro properties can be explained by its micro properties but only in an especially complicated way. This paper explains a version of weak emergence based on the notion of explanatory incompressibility and “crawling the causal web.” Then it examines three reasons why weak emergence might be thought to be just in the mind. The first reason is based on contrasting mere epistemological emergence with a form of ontological emergence that involves irreducible downward causation. The second reason is based on the idea that attributions of emergence are always a reflection of our ignorance of non-emergent explanations. The third reason is based on the charge that complex explanations are anthropocentric. Rather than being just in the mind, weak emergence is seen to involve a distinctive kind of complex, macro-pattern in the mind-independent objective micro-causal structure that exists in nature. The paper ends by addressing two further questions. One concerns whether weak emergence applies only or mainly to computer simulations and computational systems. The other concerns the respect in which weak emergence is dynamic rather than static.

What about Privacy of My OSN Data?

In the arena of internet of things, everyone has the ability to share every aspect of their lives with other people. Social media is the most popular and effective medium to provide communication. Social media has gripped our lives in a dramatic way. Privacy of users data lying with the service providers needs to be preserved when published for the purpose of research as the release of sensitive personal information of an individual may pose security threats. This has become an important research area nowadays. To some extent, the concepts of anonymization that were earlier used to preserve privacy of relational microdata have been applied to preserve privacy of social networks data. Anonymizing social networks data is challenging as it is a complex structure with users connected to one another graphically and the most important is to preserve the structural properties of the graph depicting the social network relationships while applying such concepts. Recent studies based upon K-anonymity and L-diversity help to preserve privacy of online social networks data and subsequently identify attacks that arise while applying these techniques in different scenarios. K-anonymity equalizes the degree of the nodes to prevent the data from identity disclosure but it cannot preserve sensitive information and also cannot handle attacks arising due to background knowledge and homogeneity. To cope up with the drawbacks of K anonymity, L-diversity was introduced that protects the sensitive labels of the users. In this paper, a novel technique has been proposed which implements the combined features of K-anonymity and L-diversity. Our proposed approach has been validated using the data of real time social network–Twitter (most popular microblogging network). The performance of the proposed technique has been measured by the metrics, such as average path length, average change in sensitive labels, and remaining ratio of top influential users. It thus becomes evident from the results that the values of these parameters attained with the proposed technique for the anonymized graph has minimal variation to that of original structural graph. So, it is possible to retain the utility without compromising privacy while publishing social networks data. Further, the performance of the proposed technique has been discussed by calculating the information loss that addresses the concern of preserving privacy with the least variation of actual content viz info loss.     

What is the academic efficacy of podcasting?

Podcasting may be an answer to some of the challenges to higher education to modernize, to open up, and to develop a competitive edge. However, over the years there have been many high claims for new technology, and not all of them have been redeemed. In terms of academic performance, it may therefore be asked if podcasting really is worth the investment? Looking for at least a tentative answer, the present paper reviews an extensive body of scholarly literature published 2004–2009 on experiences with podcasting in higher education.