Concept-based Analysis of Surface and Structural Misfits (CASSM) Tutorial notes

Concept-based Analysis of Surface and Structural Misfits (CASSM) in a novel approach to usability analysis that focuses attention on misfits between user and system concepts. We believe that as an approach it has several desirable qualities: o It focuses on concepts rather than tasks or procedures. Consequently, it complements the majority of existing approaches to usability evaluation. In particular, it analyses conceptual misfits between user and system. o By intentionally supporting ‘sketchy’ analysis, CASSM avoids the ‘death by detail’ that plagues many evaluation techniques. CASSM analyses do not have to be complete or consistent to be useful – though of course a thorough analysis is likely to have these properties. Also, CASSM analyses are often quite succinct, compared to (for example) a Cognitive Walkthrough (Wharton et al, 1994), Heuristic Evaluation (Nielsen, 1994) or GOMS analysis (John & Kieras, 1996). o As a notation, it provides a ‘bridge’ between the core ideas underpinning work on mental models and design issues, and may thus make prior work on mental models more readily accessible to design practice. [This should be regarded as a hypothesis that has not yet been tested.] o The CASSM notation provides a relatively formal definition of many of Green’s Cognitive Dimensions (see, for example, Green, 1989; Green & Petre, 1996; Blackwell & Green 2003). In this way, it further supports assessment of a system in terms of CDs. This is discussed in detail towards the end of this document. Although the name (CASSM: Concept-based Analysis of Surface and Structural Misfits) emphasises the importance of misfits, you should be aware that there are other kinds of user–system misfits that are outside the scope of CASSM; for example, inconsistencies in procedures for similar tasks would be picked up by other techniques but are not directly addressed within CASSM. CASSM focuses on conceptual structures

The Discourse of Management and the Management of Discourse

Discourse is a pervasive tool of management; one might even say that discourse is what managers do. A widespread assumption among managers is that discourse is not only a pervasive tool, but an effective one for precise communication of information, for making decisions, and for enlisting action, essentially a transmission tool. This paper maintains that the transmission view is a limited conception of language use, one which leads to a faulty conception of what managers do. It ignores the need for an ethics of communication and misjudges the creative aspects of language use. Management discourse is a far more complex and fluid phenomenon, one requiring not just effective use, but management itself. In other words consideration of the discourse of management leads us to the need for the management of discourse.

Predicting ecosystem shifts requires new approaches that integrate the effects of climate change across entire systems.

Most studies that forecast the ecological consequences of climate change target a single species and a single life stage. Depending on climatic impacts on other life stages and on interacting species, however, the results from simple experiments may not translate into accurate predictions of future ecological change. Research needs to move beyond simple experimental studies and environmental envelope projections for single species towards identifying where ecosystem change is likely to occur and the drivers for this change. For this to happen, we advocate research directions that (i) identify the critical species within the target ecosystem, and the life stage(s) most susceptible to changing conditions and (ii) the key interactions between these species and components of their broader ecosystem. A combined approach using macroecology, experimentally derived data and modelling that incorporates energy budgets in life cycle models may identify critical abiotic conditions that disproportionately alter important ecological processes under forecasted climates

Recovering a lost baseline: missing kelp forests from a metropolitan coast

© 2008 AuthorThere is concern about historical and continuing loss of canopy-forming algae across the world’s temperate coastline. In South Australia, the sparse cover of canopy-forming algae on the Adelaide metropolitan coast has been of public concern with continuous years of anecdotal evidence culminating in 2 competing views. One view considers that current patterns existed before the onset of urbanisation, whereas the alternate view is that they developed after urbanisation. We tested hypotheses to distinguish between these 2 models, each centred on the reconstruction of historical covers of canopies on the metropolitan coast. Historically, the metropolitan sites were indistinguishable from contemporary populations of reference sites across 70 km (i.e. Gulf St. Vincent), and could also represent a random subset of exposed coastal sites across 2100 km of the greater biogeographic province. Thus there was nothing ‘special’ about the metropolitan sites historically, but today they stand out because they have sparser covers of canopies compared to equivalent locations and times in the gulf and the greater province. This is evidence of wholesale loss of canopy-forming algae (up to 70%) on parts of the Adelaide metropolitan coast since major urbanisation. These findings not only set a research agenda based on the magnitude of loss, but they also bring into question the logic that smaller metropolitan populations of humans create impacts that are trivial relative to that of larger metropolitan centres. Instead, we highlight a need to recognise the ecological context that makes some coastal systems more vulnerable or resistant to increasing human-domination of the world’s coastlines. We discuss challenges to this kind of research that receive little ecological discussion, particularly better leadership and administration, recognising that the systems we study out-live the life spans of individual research groups and operate on spatial scales that exceed the capacity of single research providers.Sean D. Connell, Bayden D. Russell, David J. Turner, Scoresby A. Shepherd, Timothy Kildea, David Miller, Laura Airoldi, Anthony Cheshir

'Mine's a Pint of Bitter': Performativity, gender, class and representations of authenticity in real-ale tourism

Leisure choices are expressive of individual agency around the maintenance of taste, boundaries, identity and community. This research paper is part of a wider project designed to assess the social and cultural value of real ale to tourism in the north of England. This paper explores the performativity of real-ale tourism and debates about belonging in northern English real-ale communities. The research combines an ethnographic case study of a real-ale festival with semi-structured interviews with organisers and volunteers, northern English real-ale brewers and real-ale tourists visiting the festival. It is argued that real-ale tourism, despite its origins in the logic of capitalism, becomes a space where people can perform Habermasian, communicative leisure, and despite the contradictions of preferring some capitalist industries over others on the basis of their perceived smaller size and older age, real-ale fans demonstrate agency in their performativity

Von Neumann Regular Cellular Automata

For any group $G$ and any set $A$, a cellular automaton (CA) is a transformation of the configuration space $A^G$ defined via a finite memory set and a local function. Let $\text{CA}(G;A)$ be the monoid of all CA over $A^G$. In this paper, we investigate a generalisation of the inverse of a CA from the semigroup-theoretic perspective. An element $\tau \in \text{CA}(G;A)$ is von Neumann regular (or simply regular) if there exists $\sigma \in \text{CA}(G;A)$ such that $\tau \circ \sigma \circ \tau = \tau$ and $\sigma \circ \tau \circ \sigma = \sigma$, where $\circ$ is the composition of functions. Such an element $\sigma$ is called a generalised inverse of $\tau$. The monoid $\text{CA}(G;A)$ itself is regular if all its elements are regular. We establish that $\text{CA}(G;A)$ is regular if and only if $\vert G \vert = 1$ or $\vert A \vert = 1$, and we characterise all regular elements in $\text{CA}(G;A)$ when $G$ and $A$ are both finite. Furthermore, we study regular linear CA when $A= V$ is a vector space over a field $\mathbb{F}$; in particular, we show that every regular linear CA is invertible when $G$ is torsion-free elementary amenable (e.g. when $G=\mathbb{Z}^d, \ d \in \mathbb{N}$) and $V=\mathbb{F}$, and that every linear CA is regular when $V$ is finite-dimensional and $G$ is locally finite with $\text{Char}(\mathbb{F}) \nmid o(g)$ for all $g \in G$.Comment: 10 pages. Theorem 5 corrected from previous versions, in A. Dennunzio, E. Formenti, L. Manzoni, A.E. Porreca (Eds.): Cellular Automata and Discrete Complex Systems, AUTOMATA 2017, LNCS 10248, pp. 44-55, Springer, 201

Avian Resistance to Campylobacter jejuni Colonization Is Associated with an Intestinal Immunogene Expression Signature Identified by mRNA Sequencing

peer-reviewedThis research was funded by the The Irish Department of Agriculture and Food’s Food Institutional Research Measure (http://www.agriculture.gov.ie/ research/foodinstitutionalresearchmeasurefirm) – Grant No: 06_RDD_486.Campylobacter jejuni is the most common cause of human bacterial gastroenteritis and is associated with several post-infectious manifestations, including onset of the autoimmune neuropathy Guillain-Barré syndrome, causing significant morbidity and mortality. Poorly-cooked chicken meat is the most frequent source of infection as C. jejuni colonizes the avian intestine in a commensal relationship. However, not all chickens are equally colonized and resistance seems to be genetically determined. We hypothesize that differences in immune response may contribute to variation in colonization levels between susceptible and resistant birds. Using high-throughput sequencing in an avian infection model, we investigate gene expression associated with resistance or susceptibility to colonization of the gastrointestinal tract with C. jejuni and find that gut related immune mechanisms are critical for regulating colonization. Amongst a single population of 300 4-week old chickens, there was clear segregation in levels of C. jejuni colonization 48 hours post-exposure. RNAseq analysis of caecal tissue from 14 C. jejuni-susceptible and 14 C. jejuni-resistant birds generated over 363 million short mRNA sequences which were investigated to identify 219 differentially expressed genes. Significantly higher expression of genes involved in the innate immune response, cytokine signaling, B cell and T cell activation and immunoglobulin production, as well as the renin-angiotensin system was observed in resistant birds, suggesting an early active immune response to C. jejuni. Lower expression of these genes in colonized birds suggests suppression or inhibition of a clearing immune response thus facilitating commensal colonization and generating vectors for zoonotic transmission. This study describes biological processes regulating C. jejuni colonization of the avian intestine and gives insight into the differential immune mechanisms incited in response to commensal bacteria in general within vertebrate populations. The results reported here illustrate how an exaggerated immune response may be elicited in a subset of the population, which alters host-microbe interactions and inhibits the commensal state, therefore having wider relevance with regard to inflammatory and autoimmune disease

Parallel-propagated frame along null geodesics in higher-dimensional black hole spacetimes

In [arXiv:0803.3259] the equations describing the parallel transport of orthonormal frames along timelike (spacelike) geodesics in a spacetime admitting a non-degenerate principal conformal Killing-Yano 2-form h were solved. The construction employed is based on studying the Darboux subspaces of the 2-form F obtained as a projection of h along the geodesic trajectory. In this paper we demonstrate that, although slightly modified, a similar construction is possible also in the case of null geodesics. In particular, we explicitly construct the parallel-transported frames along null geodesics in D=4,5,6 Kerr-NUT-(A)dS spacetimes. We further discuss the parallel transport along principal null directions in these spacetimes. Such directions coincide with the eigenvectors of the principal conformal Killing-Yano tensor. Finally, we show how to obtain a parallel-transported frame along null geodesics in the background of the 4D Plebanski-Demianski metric which admits only a conformal generalization of the Killing-Yano tensor.Comment: 17 pages, no figure