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Software Engineering for Sustainability: Find the Leverage Points!
Full text linkWe as software engineers are responsible for the long-term consequences of the systems we design - including impacts on the wider environmental and societal sustainability. However, field lacks analytical tools for understanding these potential impacts while designing a system, nor for identifying opportunities for how to use software to bring about broader societal transformations. In this article we explore how the concept of leverage points can be used to make sustainability issues more tangible in systems design. Using the example of software for transportation systems, we illustrate how leverage points can help software engineers map out and investigate the wider system in which the software resides, such that we can use software as an effective tool for engineering a more sustainable world
The Directive on the Credit Agreements for Consumers relating to Residential Immovable Property (Directive 2014/17): a Regulatory Explanation and a Private Law Analysis
No full textWith the devastation wrought by the 2008 'property market bubble' still fresh in the mind on one hand, and a spate of recent enthusiasm manifested in the 'rush to the property ladder' on the other, the newly enacted Directive 2014/17 seeks to strike a middle ground of reasonableness in the delicate and sensitive matter of the security granted by the buyer of a residential property.Against this background, the present contribution analyses, first and foremost, the norms of a regulatory nature introduced by the new EU piece of legislation and the attempt to shape a new category of consumer. Among these precepts, attention is particularly afforded to the principle, of a public nature, prescribing that the bank's assessment to grant a mortgage shall be prevailingly based on the ability of the mortgagor to repay the debt, rather than on the expected (but undemonstrated) burgeoning future value of the property.Furthermore, the discussion focuses on the private law principles introduced by the Directive. Among these is the onus lying on the bank to provide adequate information about the terms and conditions of the mortgage. More interestingly, the directive at stake derogates from, and goes beyond, the notion of prohibition of 'agreement of forfeiture' existing in some civil law jurisdictions. This novelty, the ancillary legal provisions of art 28 of Directive 2014/17 as well as their impact on the system of civil proceedings and foreclosure existing in each country, provide fertile ground for a legal and comparative analysis.Finally, the European Business Law Review is a law journal which is published by Kluwer. The prestige of the journal is confirmed by the fact that its publications and its authors appear in the most important legal data base in the Commonwealth, WestLaw
The PCL-R family of psychopathy measures: Dimensionality and predictive utility of the PCL-R, PCL: SV, PCL: YV, SRP-III, and SRP-SF
Full text linkEffect of a thermal care bundle on the prevention, detection and treatment of perioperative inadvertent hypothermia
No full textAims and Objectives:
To improve the prevention, detection, and treatment of perioperative inadvertent hypothermia (PIH) in adult surgical patients by implementing a Thermal Care Bundle.
Background:
Keeping patients normothermic perioperatively prevents adverse surgical outcomes. Hypothermia leads to serious complications including increased risk of surgical bleeding, surgical site infections, and morbid cardiac events. The Thermal Care Bundle consists of three elements: 1) assess risk; 2) record temperature; and (3) actively warm.
Design:
A pre-post implementation study was conducted to determine the impact of the Thermal Care Bundle on the prevention, detection and treatment of PIH.
Methods:
The Thermal Care Bundle was implemented using an adapted version of the Institute of Healthcare Improvement's Breakthrough Series Collaborative Model. Data were collected from auditing medical records.
Results:
Data from 729 patients (pre-implementation: n=351; post-implementation: n=378) at four sites were collected between December 2014 to January 2016. Improvements were recorded in the percentage of patients with a risk assessment; at least one documented temperature recording per perioperative stage; and appropriate active warming. Despite this, the overall incidence of PIH increased post-implementation.
Conclusion:
The Thermal Care Bundle facilitated improved management of PIH through increased risk assessment, temperature recording, and active warming but did not impact on PIH incidence. Increased temperature recording may have more accurately revealed the true extent of PIH in this population
Externally Supported Models for Efficient Computation of Paracoherent Answer Sets
Full text linkAnswer Set Programming (ASP) is a well established formalism for nonmonotonic reasoning. While incoherence, the non-existence of answer sets for some programs, is an important feature of ASP, it has frequently been criticised and indeed has some disadvantages, especially for query answering. Paracoherent semantics have been suggested as a remedy, which extend the classical notion of answer sets to draw meaningful conclusions also from incoherent programs. In this paper we present an alternative characterization of the two major paracoherent semantics in terms of (extended) externally supported models. This definition uses a transformation of ASP programs that is more parsimonious than the classic epistemic transformation used in recent implementations. A performance comparison carried out on benchmarks from ASP competitions shows that the usage of the new transformation brings about performance improvements that are independent of the underlying algorithms
Exploring Difference or Just Watching the Experts at Work? Interrogating Patient and Public Involvement (PPI) in a Cancer Research Setting Using the Work of Jurgen Habermas
Full text linkPatient and public involvement (PPI) has emerged as a key consideration for organisations delivering health research and has spawned a burgeoning literature in the health and social sciences. The literature makes clear that PPI in health research encompasses a heterogeneous set of practices with levels of participation and involvement ranging from relatively minimal contributions to research processes to actively driving the research agenda. In this paper, we draw on the work of Jurgen Habermas to explore the ways in which PPI was accomplished in a cancer research setting in England. Drawing on ethnographic data with PPI participants and professional researchers, we describe the ways in which the life-world experiences of PPI participants were shaped by the health research system. We argue that PPI in this setting is less about exploring differences with regard to a plurality of expertise and more about simply watching or supporting the professional researchers at work
“This Rough Magic I Here Abjure” Performativity, Practice and Purpose of the Bizarre
Full text linkThis paper argues that through the theatrical application of defamiliarization (ostranenie) the performer of 'bizarre' magic seeks to achieve an 'illusion of reality' which transcends the traditional performance-magic desire to deceive and rather create a long-lasting impression in the minds of the spectator that artistically confabulates, instilling a realistic memory spawned of a pretended reality. The article distinguishes 'presentational' from 'representational' theatrical approaches to argue that the 'bizarre' magician performs within a hyper-representational mode that the author terms 'paratheatre', meaning theatre and performance that the audience fails to recognize as such. Tracing the history of magic from its application among, inter alia, the priestly classes through stage magicians, this article discusses the 'bizarrist' aim to remove magic from the expectation of deception and any willing suspension of disbelief, and, via convincing storytelling, re-situate the magic moment into an atmosphere of genuine acceptance and even belief
Soundings: documentary film and the listening experience
Full text linkThe associative, connotative and sheer emotive power of sound has the capacity to move and shake us in a myriad of direct, subtle and often profound ways. The implications of this for its role as speech, location sound, and music in documentary film are far-reaching. The writers in this book draw on the lived experience of sound’s resounding capacity as primary motivation for exploring these implications, united by the overarching theme of how listening is connected with acts of making sense both on its own terms and in conjunction with viewing
Large Spatial Database Indexing with aX-tree
Full text linkSpatial databases are optimized for the management of data stored based on their geometric space. Researchers through high degree scalability have proposed several spatial indexing structures towards this effect. Among these indexing structures is the X-tree. The existing X-trees and its variants are designed for dynamic environment, with the capability for handling insertions and deletions. Notwithstanding, the X-tree degrades on retrieval performance as dimensionality increases and brings about poor worst-case performance than sequential scan. We propose a new X-tree packing techniques for static spatial databases which performs better in space utilization through cautious packing. This new improved structure yields two basic advantage: It reduces the space overhead of the index and produces a better response time, because the aX-tree has a higher fan-out and so the tree always ends up shorter. New model for super-node construction and effective method for optimal packing using an improved str bulk-loading technique is proposed. The study reveals that proposed system performs better than many existing spatial indexing structure
Software Sustainability: Research and Practice from a Software Architecture Viewpoint
Full text linkContext:
Modern societies are highly dependent on complex, large-scale, software-intensive systems that increasingly operate within an environment of continuous availability, which is challenging to maintain and evolve in response to the inevitable changes in stakeholder goals and requirements of the system. Software architectures are the foundation of any software system and provide a mechanism for reasoning about core software quality requirements. Their sustainability – the capacity to endure in changing environments – is a critical concern for software architecture research and practice.
Problem:
Accidental software complexity accrues both naturally and gradually over time as part of the overall software design and development process. From a software architecture perspective, this allows several issues to overlap including, but not limited to: the accumulation of technical debt design decisions of individual components and systems leading to coupling and cohesion issues; the application of tacit architectural knowledge resulting in unsystematic and undocumented design decisions; architectural knowledge vaporisation of design choices and the continued ability of the organization to understand the architecture of its systems; sustainability debt and the broader cumulative effects of flawed architectural design choices over time resulting in code smells, architectural brittleness, erosion, and drift, which ultimately lead to decay and software death. Sustainable software architectures are required to evolve over the entire lifecycle of the system from initial design inception to end-of-life to achieve efficient and effective maintenance and evolutionary change.
Method:
This article outlines general principles and perspectives on sustainability with regards to software systems to provide a context and terminology for framing the discourse on software architectures and sustainability. Focusing on the capacity of software architectures and architectural design choices to endure over time, it highlights some of the recent research trends and approaches with regards to explicitly addressing sustainability in the context of software architectures.
Contribution:
The principal aim of this article is to provide a foundation and roadmap of emerging research themes in the area of sustainable software architectures highlighting recent trends, and open issues and research challenges
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