BIOLOGICAL SYSTEMS AS ORGANIZATIONAL PARADIGMS†

It is suggested that biological systems provide the best source of paradigms for the consideration of the kinds of organizations which we find in human systems; social, political or economic. A brief review of the several ways in which biological activities can be mathematically modelled is given, together with indications of the manner in which these ideas can be extended and applied beyond biology.     

The effects of geography lessons with geospatial technologies on the development of high school students' relational thinking

Geospatial technologies offer access to geospatial information via digital representations, such as digital maps, and tools for interaction with those representations. The question is whether geography lessons with geospatial technologies really contribute to the development of students' geospatial thinking, in particular geospatial relational thinking, as is suggested in the literature about geospatial technologies in secondary education. This paper reports about the outcomes of a quasi-experimental research project, in which a geography lesson series with geospatial technologies was compared with a conventional geography lesson series that had the same content. Although the lesson series covered only three lessons, the data showed that the lesson series with geospatial technologies contributed significantly more to the development of students' geospatial relational thinking than the conventional lesson series. The effect size was ‘medium large’.     

Spatial distribution of thorium fission rate in a fast spallation and fission neutron field: An experimental and Monte Carlo study

The Energy plus Transmutation (EpT) set-up of the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (JINR), Dubna, Russia is composed of a lead spallation target surrounded by a blanket of natural uranium. The resultant neutron spectrum is a combination of spallation and fission spectra, modified by a reflective external layer of polyethylene and an internal absorbing layer of cadmium. The EpT set-up was irradiated with a beam of 4 GeV deuterons from the Nuclotron Accelerator at JINR. The spatial distribution of thorium fission rate within the assembly was determined experimentally, using a fission track detector technique, and compared with Monte Carlo predictions of the MCNPX code. Contributions of neutrons, protons, deuterons, photons and pions to total fission were taken into account. Close agreement between the experimental and calculated results was found.     

Smart cyber society: Integration of capillary devices with high usability based on Cyber–Physical System

The recent development in the field of embedded devices, such as sensors, actuators, and smartphones, etc. is providing a great business potential towards the new era of web of things (WoT); in which all the capillary devices (electronic devices) are capable of interconnecting and communicating with each other over the Internet. Therefore, web technologies provide a way towards integrating and sharing a common communication medium. However, for integrating Cyber–Physical System (CPS) and WoT, a comprehensive architecture and platform is still missing. Therefore, this paper proposes the concept of Smart Cyber Society; propelling the concept of smart home. We then propose the virtual communication platform that is composed of six functional communication layers, which provides a common medium for communication, i.e., same communication language. In addition, a system architecture for smart cyber society is also proposed, which consists of three networked domains, such as cyber home domain (networked-home), cyber society domain (networked of various societies, i.e., hospitals, police station, and fire brigade), and cyber mobile domain (networked of vehicles). Furthermore, the feasibility and efficiency of the proposed system are implemented on Hadoop single node setup on UBUNTU 14.04 LTS core^TMi5 machine with 3.2 GHz processor and 4 GB memory. Sample medical, sensory datasets and fire detection datasets are tested on the proposed system. Finally, the results show that the proposed system architecture efficiently processes, analyzes, and integrates different datasets efficiently and triggers actions to provide safety measurements for elderly age people, vehicles and others.     

On power of p systems using sequential and parallel rewriting

A new class of distributed computing models inspired from biology, that of P Systems, was recently introduced by Gh. P[acaron]un. Several variants of P Systems were already shown to be computationally universal, equal in power to Turing Machines. We investigate in this paper the power of computability of P Systems based on rewriting, with cooperation, priorities and external output. It is established that rewriting P Systems with priorities and two membranes is computationally universal, thereby making an improvement in the existing result that RE?RP ₃(Pri). We give a new model in P Systems stressing the importance of parallelism. The power of computability of such models is investigated by comparing them with classic mechanisms in L-Systems: TOL, EOL and ETOL Systems     

Restarted Gmres Augmented With Eigenvectors For Shifted Linear Systems * Supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China and the Science and Technology Developing Foundation of University in Shanghai of China

Shifted matrices, which differ by a multiple of the identity only, generate the same Krylov subspaces with respect to any fixed vector. Frommer and Glassner [5] develop a variant of the restarted GMRES method for such shifted systems at the expense of only one matrix-vector multiplication per iteration. However, restarting slows down the convergence, even stagnation. We present a variant of the restarted GMRES augmented with some eigenvectors for the shifted systems. The convergence can be much faster at little extra expense. Numerical experiments show its efficiency.     

Use of auditory icons as emergency warnings: evaluation within a vehicle collision avoidance application

In the context of emergency warnings, auditory icons, which convey information about system events by analogy with everyday events, have the potential to be understood more quickly and easily than abstract sounds. To test this proposal, an experiment was carried out to evaluate the use of auditory icons for an invehicle collision avoidance application. Two icons, the sounds of a car horn and of skidding tyres, were compared with two conventional warnings, a simple tone and a voice saying ‘ahead’. Participants sat in an experimental vehicle with a road scene projected ahead, and they were required to brake in response to on-screen collision situations and their accompanying warning sounds. The auditory icons produced significantly faster reaction times than the conventional warnings, but suffered from more inappropriate responses, where drivers reacted with a brake press to a non-collision situation. The findings are explained relative to the perceived urgency and inherent meaning of each sound. It is argued that optimal warnings could be achieved by adjusting certain sound attributes of auditory icons, as part of a structured, user-centred design and evaluation procedure.     

Collaborative negotiation for ontology-driven enterprise businesses

The requirements from a globalised world demand that enterprises not only shift their paradigm from product-centrism to component-centrism on integrated products, potentiating the need for tight interoperability dependencies, but also that the product specifications and concepts are fully understood by customers and providers in a transparent manner that surpasses the barriers of language, culture and technology. This paper presents the NEGOSEIO framework, which enables service-based interoperability between parties, closely integrated with semantics and business understanding via the use of reference ontologies in the quest for achieving a stronger interoperability liaison. The paper's validation and discussion is performed in its application on the ontology negotiation of business environments in the scope of the EU-funded FP7 project TIMBUS for digital preservation of resources and enduring business continuity.     

Comparative Exploration of Document Collections: a Visual Analytics Approach

We present an analysis and visualization method for computing what distinguishes a given document collection from others. We determine topics that discriminate a subset of collections from the remaining ones by applying probabilistic topic modeling and subsequently approximating the two relevant criteria distinctiveness and characteristicness algorithmically through a set of heuristics. Furthermore, we suggest a novel visualization method called DiTop‐View, in which topics are represented by glyphs (topic coins) that are arranged on a 2D plane. Topic coins are designed to encode all information necessary for performing comparative analyses such as the class membership of a topic, its most probable terms and the discriminative relations. We evaluate our topic analysis using statistical measures and a small user experiment and present an expert case study with researchers from political sciences analyzing two real‐world datasets.     

Content Management Systems: Enriched learning opportunities for all?

This article examines the popular claim of Content Management Systems (CMSs) that providing a rich toolset and leaving the use under learner control is beneficial to learning. By means of a literature review, the current contribution examines whether all students are capable of using CMS tools so that their learning is enhanced. In contrast to what is assumed, the study conceptualizes tool use as a complex self-regulation strategy that cannot be taken for granted. Specifically, the article reviews empirical studies in relation to three topics: (a) personal agency in tool use, (b) performance effects of tool use and (c) influencing tool use variables. Findings reveal that not every student profited from the CMS learning opportunities; in multiple studies students differed in their tool use, and these differences had significant performance effects. Hence, these findings suggest that the pedagogical claim CMSs make is problematic. Besides this accumulated corpus of knowledge, the review revealed serious limitations in the retrieved studies which could hamper our findings. As a consequence, the review establishes a need for further research into students’ CMS tool use from an instructional design perspective. In addition to the theoretical framework, several directions for future research are given.