Digital Writing

2020 ◽  
pp. 117-131
Author(s):  
Daniel Punday
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Real World ◽  
Computational Models ◽  
Digital Writing ◽  
Digital Texts ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Digital Work ◽  
Fictional Worlds ◽  
Existing Data

Through the framing concept of the ‘platform’, this chapter shows how digital texts frequently impose voluntary constraints upon themselves. Digital media distinguish between what Lev Manovich calls the database and interface. Print texts have only one interface on their fictional worlds, while in a digital work our encounter with that material is variable. Initially this distinction manifested itself in works like hypertext fiction that still functioned within a traditional literary framework of authorship. More recent work has, however, exploited text generated in other ways: through communal authorship, or through computational models, where texts are generated either out of a fixed body of material or in response to real-world events. Drawing on a wide range of contemporary examples, this chapter shows how the digital writer working within the boundaries of these self-imposed constraints resembles a curator or remix artist. He or she becomes an ‘author’ by arranging existing data in novel and meaningful ways.

Humans as a Service

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeremias Prassl
Keyword(s):  
Business Models ◽  
Disruptive Innovation ◽  
Level Playing Field ◽  
Employment Relationships ◽  
Playing Field ◽  
On Demand ◽  
Gig Economy ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Digital Work ◽  
Stable Employment

The rise of the gig economy is disrupting business models across the globe. Platforms’ digital work intermediation has had a profound impact on traditional conceptions of the employment relationship. The completion of ‘tasks’, ‘gigs’, or ‘rides’ in the (digital) crowd fundamentally challenges our understanding of work in modern labour markets: gone are the stable employment relationships between firms and workers, replaced by a world in which everybody can be ‘their own boss’ and enjoy the rewards—and face the risks—of independent businesses. Is this the future of work? What are the benefits and challenges of crowdsourced work? How can we protect consumers and workers without stifling innovation? Humans as a Service provides a detailed account of the growth and operation of gig-economy platforms, and develops a blueprint for solutions to the problems facing on-demand workers, platforms, and their customers. Following a brief introduction to the growth and operation of on-demand platforms across the world, the book scrutinizes competing narratives about ‘gig’ work. Drawing on a wide range of case studies, it explores how claims of ‘disruptive innovation’ and ‘micro-entrepreneurship’ often obscure the realities of precarious work under strict algorithmic surveillance, and the return to a business model that has existed for centuries. Humans as a Service shows how employment law can address many of these problems: gigs, tasks, and rides are work—and should be regulated as such. A concluding chapter demonstrates the broader benefits of a level playing field for consumers, taxpayers, and innovative entrepreneurs.

scholarly journals mtDNAcombine: tools to combine sequences from multiple studies

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Eleanor F. Miller ◽  
Andrea Manica
Keyword(s):  
Sequence Data ◽  
Data Extraction ◽  
Bayesian Skyline Plot ◽  
Model Organisms ◽  
Data Sets ◽  
Data Handling ◽  
Online Database ◽  
Genetic Studies ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Existing Data

Abstract Background Today an unprecedented amount of genetic sequence data is stored in publicly available repositories. For decades now, mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) has been the workhorse of genetic studies, and as a result, there is a large volume of mtDNA data available in these repositories for a wide range of species. Indeed, whilst whole genome sequencing is an exciting prospect for the future, for most non-model organisms’ classical markers such as mtDNA remain widely used. By compiling existing data from multiple original studies, it is possible to build powerful new datasets capable of exploring many questions in ecology, evolution and conservation biology. One key question that these data can help inform is what happened in a species’ demographic past. However, compiling data in this manner is not trivial, there are many complexities associated with data extraction, data quality and data handling. Results Here we present the mtDNAcombine package, a collection of tools developed to manage some of the major decisions associated with handling multi-study sequence data with a particular focus on preparing sequence data for Bayesian skyline plot demographic reconstructions. Conclusions There is now more genetic information available than ever before and large meta-data sets offer great opportunities to explore new and exciting avenues of research. However, compiling multi-study datasets still remains a technically challenging prospect. The mtDNAcombine package provides a pipeline to streamline the process of downloading, curating, and analysing sequence data, guiding the process of compiling data sets from the online database GenBank.

Livestreaming from the bedroom: Performing intimacy through domestic space on Twitch

2020 ◽  
pp. 135485652097832
Author(s):  
Bonnie ‘Bo’ Ruberg ◽  
Daniel Lark
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Video Game ◽  
Performing Arts ◽  
Domestic Space ◽  
Domestic Spaces ◽  
Affective Labor ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Media Form ◽  
Cultural Connotations

This article looks at the appearance of domestic spaces on the popular livestreaming platform Twitch.tv, with a focus on livestreams that appear to be shot in streamers’ bedrooms. Many Twitch streamers broadcast from their homes, making domestic space central to questions of placemaking for this rapidly growing digital media form. Within the home, bedrooms merit particular attention because they carry particular cultural connotations; they are associated with intimacy, embodiment, and erotics. Drawing from observations of gaming and nongaming streams, we map where bedrooms do and do not appear on Twitch. We locate the majority of bedrooms in categories that foreground connections between streamers and viewers, like Just Chatting, Music & Performing Arts, and autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR). By contrast, across a wide range of video game genres, bedrooms remain largely absent from gaming streams. The presence of bedrooms on Twitch also breaks down along gender lines, with women streaming being far more likely to broadcast from their bedrooms than men. Here, we build from existing research on both livestreaming and digital placemaking to argue for an understanding of place on Twitch as fundamentally performative. This performance is inherently gendered and bound up with the affective labor of streaming. In addition, we demonstrate how the bedroom, even when it does not appear on screen, can be understood as a ‘structuring logic’ of placemaking on Twitch. Given the history of livestreaming, which grows out of women’s experiments with online ‘lifecasting’, the bedroom sets expectations for the type of spatial and emotional access a stream is imagined to offer viewers. In this sense, the absence of bedrooms in gaming streams can be understood as a disavowal of intimate domestic space: an attempt by predominantly male streamers to distance themselves from the implicit parallels between livestreaming and practices like webcam modeling.

scholarly journals EXPLORING THE ROLE OF TRANSACTIVE MEMORY SYSTEMS IN TEAM DECISION-MAKING DURING IDEATION PHASE

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 1529-1536
Author(s):  
Mohammad Reza Dastmalchi ◽  
Bimal Balakrishnan ◽  
Danielle Oprean
Keyword(s):  
Digital Media ◽  
Memory Systems ◽  
Transactive Memory ◽  
Design Teams ◽  
Team Cognition ◽  
Team Members ◽  
Media Type ◽  
Design Collaboration ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Communication Modes

AbstractTeam collaboration is a critical necessity of the modern-day engineering design profession. This is no surprise given that teams typically possess more task-relevant skills and knowledge than individuals (Levine & Choi, 2004). Advancements in digital media provide new opportunities for collaboration across the design lifecycle. However, early stages of the design process still pose challenges to digitally mediated design collaboration due to greater representational abstraction and the presence of multiple modalities for design ideation. Usually, design teams spend a substantial amount of time generating a broad set of ideas that can lead them to a wide range of design solutions during the ideation phase. However, sooner or later, teams should narrow down their vision for a final solution. What factors influence team members to eliminate or select an idea? Our study is an attempt to demonstrate some examples of this challenge. By drawing on research in team cognition, particularly the concept of transactive memory system (TMS) we studied a design teams' communication and media use during the ideation phase. The goal was to see if media type and communication modes can predict a team's decisions on selecting and eliminating ideas.

scholarly journals Goal-driven active learning

2021 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicolas Bougie ◽  
Ryutaro Ichise
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Reinforcement Learning ◽  
Learning Process ◽  
Real World ◽  
Imitation Learning ◽  
Learning Approaches ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Fixed Set ◽  
Complex Decision Making ◽  
Complex Decision

AbstractDeep reinforcement learning methods have achieved significant successes in complex decision-making problems. In fact, they traditionally rely on well-designed extrinsic rewards, which limits their applicability to many real-world tasks where rewards are naturally sparse. While cloning behaviors provided by an expert is a promising approach to the exploration problem, learning from a fixed set of demonstrations may be impracticable due to lack of state coverage or distribution mismatch—when the learner’s goal deviates from the demonstrated behaviors. Besides, we are interested in learning how to reach a wide range of goals from the same set of demonstrations. In this work we propose a novel goal-conditioned method that leverages very small sets of goal-driven demonstrations to massively accelerate the learning process. Crucially, we introduce the concept of active goal-driven demonstrations to query the demonstrator only in hard-to-learn and uncertain regions of the state space. We further present a strategy for prioritizing sampling of goals where the disagreement between the expert and the policy is maximized. We evaluate our method on a variety of benchmark environments from the Mujoco domain. Experimental results show that our method outperforms prior imitation learning approaches in most of the tasks in terms of exploration efficiency and average scores.

A CFD Study of Focused Extreme Wave Impact on Decks of Offshore Structures

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xin Lu ◽  
Pankaj Kumar ◽  
Anand Bahuguni ◽  
Yanling Wu
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Offshore Structures ◽  
Air Gap ◽  
Irregular Waves ◽  
Linear Wave ◽  
Extreme Wave ◽  
Wave Impact ◽  
Loading Test ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Wave Maker

The design of offshore structures for extreme/abnormal waves assumes that there is sufficient air gap such that waves will not hit the platform deck. Due to inaccuracies in the predictions of extreme wave crests in addition to settlement or sea-level increases, the required air gap between the crest of the extreme wave and the deck is often inadequate in existing platforms and therefore wave-in-deck loads need to be considered when assessing the integrity of such platforms. The problem of wave-in-deck loading involves very complex physics and demands intensive study. In the Computational Fluid Mechanics (CFD) approach, two critical issues must be addressed, namely the efficient, realistic numerical wave maker and the accurate free surface capturing methodology. Most reported CFD research on wave-in-deck loads consider regular waves only, for instance the Stokes fifth-order waves. They are, however, recognized by designers as approximate approaches since “real world” sea states consist of random irregular waves. In our work, we report a recently developed focused extreme wave maker based on the NewWave theory. This model can better approximate the “real world” conditions, and is more efficient than conventional random wave makers. It is able to efficiently generate targeted waves at a prescribed time and location. The work is implemented and integrated with OpenFOAM, an open source platform that receives more and more attention in a wide range of industrial applications. We will describe the developed numerical method of predicting highly non-linear wave-in-deck loads in the time domain. The model’s capability is firstly demonstrated against 3D model testing experiments on a fixed block with various deck orientations under random waves. A detailed loading analysis is conducted and compared with available numerical and measurement data. It is then applied to an extreme wave loading test on a selected bridge with multiple under-deck girders. The waves are focused extreme irregular waves derived from NewWave theory and JONSWAP spectra.

scholarly journals Classification of unlabeled online media

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Sakthi Kumar Arul Prakash ◽  
Conrad Tucker
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Real World ◽  
Graphical Model ◽  
Ground Truth ◽  
Classification Problem ◽  
Machine Learning Algorithms ◽  
Social Media Networks ◽  
Online Social Media ◽  
Wide Range

AbstractThis work investigates the ability to classify misinformation in online social media networks in a manner that avoids the need for ground truth labels. Rather than approach the classification problem as a task for humans or machine learning algorithms, this work leverages user–user and user–media (i.e.,media likes) interactions to infer the type of information (fake vs. authentic) being spread, without needing to know the actual details of the information itself. To study the inception and evolution of user–user and user–media interactions over time, we create an experimental platform that mimics the functionality of real-world social media networks. We develop a graphical model that considers the evolution of this network topology to model the uncertainty (entropy) propagation when fake and authentic media disseminates across the network. The creation of a real-world social media network enables a wide range of hypotheses to be tested pertaining to users, their interactions with other users, and with media content. The discovery that the entropy of user–user and user–media interactions approximate fake and authentic media likes, enables us to classify fake media in an unsupervised learning manner.

scholarly journals Transforming Cultural Ideas of Aging and Disability to Improve Policy and Practice

2020 ◽  
Vol 4 (Supplement_1) ◽  
pp. 645-645
Author(s):  
Anne Ordway
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Health Care ◽  
Recent Work ◽  
Interest Group ◽  
Quality Of Health Care ◽  
Real World ◽  
People With Disabilities ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Full Participation

Abstract Aging and disability are normative processes that extend across the lifespan. However, ageism and ableism are incorporated into many of our practices, programs, and policies—devaluing the lives of older adults and people aging with disabilities and ultimately preventing their full participation in society. Ageism and ableism are closely connected. For example, both systems identify impairment as an individual and social liability. As recent studies have demonstrated, this has real world implications for the quantity and quality of health care requested, delivered, and received by both older adults and people with disabilities. In this session, we discuss the connections between these two forms of oppression and present recent work by researchers in both fields and the FrameWorks Institute that shows how to transform our cultural ideas of aging and disability and development more inclusive policies and services. Part of a symposium sponsored by the Lifelong Disabilities Interest Group.

scholarly journals An information theoretic approach to link prediction in multiplex networks

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Seyed Hossein Jafari ◽  
Amir Mahdi Abdolhosseini-Qomi ◽  
Masoud Asadpour ◽  
Maseud Rahgozar ◽  
Naser Yazdani
Keyword(s):  
Real World ◽  
Link Prediction ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Similarity Measures ◽  
Prediction Method ◽  
General Purpose ◽  
Fast Method ◽  
Theoretic Approach ◽  
Multiplex Networks ◽  
Wide Range

AbstractThe entities of real-world networks are connected via different types of connections (i.e., layers). The task of link prediction in multiplex networks is about finding missing connections based on both intra-layer and inter-layer correlations. Our observations confirm that in a wide range of real-world multiplex networks, from social to biological and technological, a positive correlation exists between connection probability in one layer and similarity in other layers. Accordingly, a similarity-based automatic general-purpose multiplex link prediction method—SimBins—is devised that quantifies the amount of connection uncertainty based on observed inter-layer correlations in a multiplex network. Moreover, SimBins enhances the prediction quality in the target layer by incorporating the effect of link overlap across layers. Applying SimBins to various datasets from diverse domains, our findings indicate that SimBins outperforms the compared methods (both baseline and state-of-the-art methods) in most instances when predicting links. Furthermore, it is discussed that SimBins imposes minor computational overhead to the base similarity measures making it a potentially fast method, suitable for large-scale multiplex networks.

scholarly journals Comparing optical performance of a wide range of perovskite/silicon tandem architectures under real-world conditions

Nanophotonics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Manvika Singh ◽  
Rudi Santbergen ◽  
Indra Syifai ◽  
Arthur Weeber ◽  
Miro Zeman ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Solar Cells ◽  
Real World ◽  
Solar Spectrum ◽  
Photocurrent Density ◽  
Angle Of Incidence ◽  
Optical Study ◽  
Optical Performance ◽  
Tandem Solar Cells ◽  
Bottom Cell ◽  
Wide Range

Abstract Since single junction c-Si solar cells are reaching their practical efficiency limit. Perovskite/c-Si tandem solar cells hold the promise of achieving greater than 30% efficiencies. In this regard, optical simulations can deliver guidelines for reducing the parasitic absorption losses and increasing the photocurrent density of the tandem solar cells. In this work, an optical study of 2, 3 and 4 terminal perovskite/c-Si tandem solar cells with c-Si solar bottom cells passivated by high thermal-budget poly-Si, poly-SiOx and poly-SiCx is performed to evaluate their optical performance with respect to the conventional tandem solar cells employing silicon heterojunction bottom cells. The parasitic absorption in these carrier selective passivating contacts has been quantified. It is shown that they enable greater than 20 mA/cm2 matched implied photocurrent density in un-encapsulated 2T tandem architecture along with being compatible with high temperature production processes. For studying the performance of such tandem devices in real-world irradiance conditions and for different locations of the world, the effect of solar spectrum and angle of incidence on their optical performance is studied. Passing from mono-facial to bi-facial tandem solar cells, the photocurrent density in the bottom cell can be increased, requiring again optical optimization. Here, we analyse the effect of albedo, perovskite thickness and band gap as well as geographical location on the optical performance of these bi-facial perovskite/c-Si tandem solar cells. Our optical study shows that bi-facial 2T tandems, that also convert light incident from the rear, require radically thicker perovskite layers to match the additional current from the c-Si bottom cell. For typical perovskite bandgap and albedo values, even doubling the perovskite thickness is not sufficient. In this respect, lower bandgap perovskites are very interesting for application not only in bi-facial 2T tandems but also in related 3T and 4T tandems.

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