A Storm in an IoT Cup: The Emergence of Cyber-Physical Social Machines

The concept of social machines is increasingly being used to characterise various socio-cognitive spaces on the Web. Social machines are human collectives using networked digital technology which initiate real-world processes and activities including human communication, interactions and knowledge creation. As such, they continuously emerge and fade on the Web. The relationship between humans and machines is made more complex by the adoption of Internet of Things (IoT) sensors and devices. The scale, automation, continuous sensing, and actuation capabilities of these devices add an extra dimension to the relationship between humans and machines making it difficult to understand their evolution at either the systemic or the conceptual level. This article describes these new socio-technical systems, which we term Cyber-Physical Social Machines, through different exemplars, and considers the associated challenges of security and privacy.Comment: 14 pages, 4 figure

Numeracy skills and the numerate environment: affordances and demands

In the 2012 PIAAC Survey of Adult Skills of 23 industrialised countries, the UK (England & NI) scored below average on adult numeracy. Several recommendations focus on the need for (some) individuals in the population to undergo training. Yet, even in “high-performing countries” like the Netherlands, many adults (1.5M) score at or below PIAAC Level 1 (sometimes designated as “functionally innumerate”). The question arises as to how all of these people manage in important domains of their lives. In this article we aim to consider the context of the exercise of numeracy by adults, drawing on earlier research in mathematics education. We examine a recent conception of an adult’s ‘literate environment’ (EU HLG on Literacy, 2012), and extend this to reflect on the idea of an adult’s ‘numerate environment’. We consider the range of practices that particular adults may engage in, and the demands that these may make on the adult, the affordances the practices may offer; the latter include the opportunities, and the supports and / or barriers produced within these practices, and in cultures more generally, that may foster or impede an adult’s ongoing numerate development. We give examples of each of these aspects of adults’ numerate practices, and consider implications for the teaching, learning and development of numeracy

Security risk assessment in Internet of Things systems

Cybersecurity risk assessment approaches have served us well over the last decade. They have provided a platform through which organisations and governments could better protect themselves against pertinent risks. As the complexity, pervasiveness and automation of technology systems increases however, particularly with the Internet of Things (IoT), there is a strong argument for the need for new approaches to assess risk and build trust. The challenge with simply extending existing assessment methodologies to these systems is that we could be blind to new risks arising in such ecosystems. These risks could be related to the high degrees of connectivity present, or the coupling of digital, cyber-physical and social systems. This article makes the case for new methodologies to assess risk in this context which consider the dynamics and uniqueness of IoT, but also the rigour of best practice in risk assessment

A critical reflection on the threat from human insiders − its nature‚ industry perceptions‚ and detection approaches

Organisations today operate in a world fraught with threats, including 'script kiddies', hackers, hacktivists and advanced persistent threats. Although these threats can be harmful to an enterprise, a potentially more devastating and anecdotally more likely threat is that of the malicious insider. These trusted individuals have access to valuable company systems and data, and are well placed to undermine security measures and to attack their employers. In this paper, we engage in a critical reflection on the insider threat in order to better understand the nature of attacks, associated human factors, perceptions of threats, and detection approaches. We differentiate our work from other contributions by moving away from a purely academic perspective, and instead focus on distilling industrial reports (i.e., those that capture practitioners’ experiences and feedback) and case studies in order to truly appreciate how insider attacks occur in practice and how viable preventative solutions may be developed

Deus Ex Machina: An Ethnographic Exploration of Technology, Death and Decision-Making in Respiratory Care

Noninvasive advanced respiratory support (NARS) is widely used in acute respiratory failure, including at the end of life, where its use is ethically and emotionally fraught. This ethnographic study examines how decisions to initiate, sustain or withdraw NARS are negotiated within the institutional and moral complexities of a UK hospital. Drawing on fieldwork including nonparticipant observation, reflective fieldnotes and composite narratives, this paper explores how dying is not simply recognised but discursively produced through clinical interactions. Guided by Foucault's concept of power/knowledge and Orlikowski's theory of technology-in-practice, this study shows how authority circulates unevenly across professional boundaries and how machines become nonhuman actors that structure time, command clinical attention and produce epistemically privileged outputs. These outputs, especially blood gas samples, change the flow of power/knowledge and can override patient experience, shaping decisions around palliation. By tracing how clinical truth is co-produced through medical technology, discursive hierarchies and institutional logics, this paper intervenes in sociological debates on end-of-life care, technological agency and the moral labour of frontline staff. It argues that recognising dying is not merely a clinical judgement but an emergent, distributed achievement, one shaped as much by machines and metrics as by human actors

Amidst an amygdala renaissance in Alzheimer’s disease

The amygdala was highlighted as an early site for neurofibrillary tau tangle pathology in Alzheimer’s disease in the seminal 1991 article by Braak and Braak. This knowledge has, however, only received traction recently with advances in imaging and image analysis techniques. Here, we provide a cross-disciplinary overview of pathology and neuroimaging studies on the amygdala. These studies provide strong support for an early role of the amygdala in Alzheimer’s disease and the utility of imaging biomarkers of the amygdala in detecting early changes and predicting decline in cognitive functions and neuropsychiatric symptoms in early stages. We summarize the animal literature on connectivity of the amygdala, demonstrating that amygdala nuclei that show the earliest and strongest accumulation of neurofibrillary tangle pathology are those that are connected to brain regions that also show early neurofibrillary tangle accumulation. Additionally, we propose an alternative pathway of neurofibrillary tangle spreading within the medial temporal lobe between the amygdala and the anterior hippocampus. The proposed existence of this pathway is strengthened by novel experimental data on human functional connectivity. Finally, we summarize the functional roles of the amygdala, highlighting the correspondence between neurofibrillary tangle accumulation and symptomatic profiles in Alzheimer’s disease. In summary, these findings provide a new impetus for studying the amygdala in Alzheimer’s disease and a unique perspective to guide further study on neurofibrillary tangle spreading and the occurrence of neuropsychiatric symptoms in Alzheimer’s disease.publishedVersio

Probing the electron capture dissociation mass spectrometry of phosphopeptides with traveling wave ion mobility spectrometry and molecular dynamics simulations

Electron capture dissociation mass spectrometry offers several advantages for the analysis of peptides, most notably that backbone c and z fragments typically retain labile modifications such as phosphorylation. We have shown previously that, in some cases, the presence of phosphorylation has a deleterious effect on peptide sequence coverage, and hypothesized that intramolecular interactions involving the phosphate group were preventing separation of backbone fragments. In the present work, we seek to rationalize the observed ECD behavior through a combination of ECD of model peptides, traveling wave ion mobility mass spectrometry and molecular dynamics simulations. The results suggest that for doubly protonated ions of phosphopeptide APLpSFRGSLPKSYVK a salt-bridge structure is favored, whereas for the doubly-protonated ions of APLSFRGSLPKpSYVK ionic hydrogen bonds predominate. [Figure: see text] ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1007/s13361-015-1094-1) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users

Oral microbiome and nitric oxide biomarkers in older people with mild cognitive impairment and APOE4 genotype

Apolipoprotein E4 (APOE4) genotype and nitric oxide (NO) deficiency are risk factors for age-associated cognitive decline. The oral microbiome plays a critical role in maintaining NO bioavailability during ageing. The aim of this study was to assess interactions between the oral microbiome, NO biomarkers and cognitive function in 60 participants with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) and 60 healthy controls using weighted gene co-occurrence network analysis (WGCNA), and to compare the oral microbiomes between APOE4 carriers and non-carriers in a subgroup of 35 MCI participants. Within the MCI group, a high relative abundance of Neisseria associated with better indices of cognition relating to executive function (Switching Stroop, rs=0.33, p=0.03) and visual attention (Trail Making, rs=-0.30, p=0.05), and in the healthy group Neisseria correlated with working memory (Digit Span, rs=0.26, p=0.04). High abundances of Haemophilus (rs=0.38, p=0.01) and H. parainfluenzae (rs=0.32, p=0.03), that co-occurred with Neisseria, correlated with better scores on executive function (Switching Stroop) in the MCI group. There were no differences in oral nitrate (p=0.48) or nitrite concentrations (p=0.84) between the MCI and healthy groups. Linear discriminant analysis Effect Size (LEfSe) identified Porphyromonas as a predictor for MCI and Prevotella intermedia as a predictor of APOE4-carrier status. The principal findings of this study were that a greater prevalence of oral P. intermedia is linked to elevated genetic risk for dementia (APOE4 genotype) in individuals with MCI prior to dementia diagnosis, and that interventions that promote the oral Neisseria-Haemophilus and suppress Prevotella-dominated modules have potential for delaying cognitive decline