African Clouds over the Oslo Opera

Expressive mobile narratives are in the early stages of design and participative formation. We ask what relations and articulations can be brought to play in the design and enactment of a mobile fictional space in which identity is a core motivation and design feature. Through a design case, we share experiences in the building and trial process of an experimental, mobile “social fiction” called NarraHand. We introduce a new category of expressive mobile narrative, the “reflexive place-space narrative,” along with the term Markers of Identity (MOI).     

MODIS Collection 5 global land cover: Algorithm refinements and characterization of new datasets

Information related to land cover is immensely important to global change science. In the past decade, data sources and methodologies for creating global land cover maps from remote sensing have evolved rapidly. Here we describe the datasets and algorithms used to create the Collection 5 MODIS Global Land Cover Type product, which is substantially changed relative to Collection 4. In addition to using updated input data, the algorithm and ancillary datasets used to produce the product have been refined. Most importantly, the Collection 5 product is generated at 500-m spatial resolution, providing a four-fold increase in spatial resolution relative to the previous version. In addition, many components of the classification algorithm have been changed. The training site database has been revised, land surface temperature is now included as an input feature, and ancillary datasets used in post-processing of ensemble decision tree results have been updated. Further, methods used to correct classifier results for bias imposed by training data properties have been refined, techniques used to fuse ancillary data based on spatially varying prior probabilities have been revised, and a variety of methods have been developed to address limitations of the algorithm for the urban, wetland, and deciduous needleleaf classes. Finally, techniques used to stabilize classification results across years have been developed and implemented to reduce year-to-year variation in land cover labels not associated with land cover change. Results from a cross-validation analysis indicate that the overall accuracy of the product is about 75% correctly classified, but that the range in class-specific accuracies is large. Comparison of Collection 5 maps with Collection 4 results show substantial differences arising from increased spatial resolution and changes in the input data and classification algorithm.     

Picbreeder: a case study in collaborative evolutionary exploration of design space

For domains in which fitness is subjective or difficult to express formally, interactive evolutionary computation (IEC) is a natural choice. It is possible that a collaborative process combining feedback from multiple users can improve the quality and quantity of generated artifacts. Picbreeder, a large-scale online experiment in collaborative interactive evolution (CIE), explores this potential. Picbreeder is an online community in which users can evolve and share images, and most importantly, continue evolving others' images. Through this process of branching from other images, and through continually increasing image complexity made possible by the underlying neuroevolution of augmenting topologies (NEAT) algorithm, evolved images proliferate unlike in any other current IEC system. This paper discusses not only the strengths of the Picbreeder approach, but its challenges and shortcomings as well, in the hope that lessons learned will inform the design of future CIE systems.     

Flexible multibody approach in forward dynamic simulation of locomotive strains in human skeleton with flexible lower body bones

A method for bone strain estimation is examined in this article. The flexibility of a single bone in an otherwise rigid human skeleton model has been studied previously by various authors. However, in the previous studies, the effect of the flexibility of multiple bones on the musculoskeletal model behavior was ignored. This study describes a simulation method that can be used to estimate the bone strains at both tibias and femurs of a 65-year-old Caucasian male subject. The verification of the method is performed by the comparison of the results with other studies available in literature. The results of the study show good correlation with the results of previous empirical studies. A damping effect of the flexible bones on the model is also studied in this paper.     

Analysis of maintenance policies for finite life-cycle multi-state systems

Maintenance policies for multi-state systems (MSS) are often analyzed under infinite horizon assumptions. In practice, it is important to consider maintenance policies under a finite horizon because the life cycles of most systems are finite. In this paper, we consider a finite life-cycle MSS that is subject to both degradation and Poisson failures. We study two classes of maintenance policies – preventive replacements and corrective replacements, and their effectiveness in controlling the customer’s expected discounted maintenance cost (EDMC). For both policies, replacement decisions are modelled via two control parameters – a threshold on the current system state and a threshold on the residual life cycle, which is measured as the time span from present to the end of life cycle. We derive close-to-explicit forms of the cost models under each of the policy. Methodologies for optimizing the maintenance thresholds are further proposed. Computational results verify that preventive replacements outperform corrective replacements typically when the downtime cost per failure is relatively high compared to the repair cost.     

Monte Carlo techniques for phrase-based translation

Recent advances in statistical machine translation have used approximate beam search for NP-complete inference within probabilistic translation models. We present an alternative approach of sampling from the posterior distribution defined by a translation model. We define a novel Gibbs sampler for sampling translations given a source sentence and show that it effectively explores this posterior distribution. In doing so we overcome the limitations of heuristic beam search and obtain theoretically sound solutions to inference problems such as finding the maximum probability translation and minimum risk training and decoding.     

Trends in youth’s videogame playing, overall computer use, and communication technology use: The impact of self-esteem and the Big Five personality factors

The objective of the current research is to model trends in video game playing, overall computer use, and communication technology use in a longitudinal sample of youths, aged 11-16 over a 3-year interval. In addition, individual difference characteristics that may be predictive of these trends were included, namely, socio-demographic characteristics (gender, ethnicity, and parental income) and personality characteristics (self-esteem, the Big Five personality factors). Findings suggested that youth increased their overall computer and communication technology use but decreased their videogame playing over time. Many individual differences predicted mean levels of these technologies with fewer predicting slopes. Conclusions, implications, and limitations are discussed.