Assessment and ranking flood events in a regulated river using information and complexity measures

The availability of a robust approach that describe the hidden features of flood events in regulated rivers is of great importance. The key goal of this research is to utilize some of information and complexity measures to assess and rank flood patterns within a regulated river system. To meet this goal, the Metric Entropy (ME) as measure of information content and Rényi Complexity (CR) as a quantification for complexity content were employed. To examine the role of river regulation on flood risk control, river stage records of two monitoring stations located at downstream of two different dams were considered in this research. The findings show that information and complexity metrics offer an image of the randomness embedded in dataset and the presence of internal patterns in studied data records. In general, this research shows that natural environmental risks and disasters can be assessed and ranked using a promising physical scheme based on information and complexity measures.

The Complexity of Medical Device Regulations Has Increased, as Assessed through Data-Driven Techniques

Medical device regulations are dynamic, as they need to cover an ever changing landscape. In Europe this has led to a new set of regulations (both for Medical Devices and In Vitro Diagnostics), which replaced the old rules. This study is interested in how the complexity of these medical regulations changed over time and if additional time-based metrics can be associated with any of the complexity metrics. Complexity is defined in terms of readability of the text and it is computed using established linguistic measures, as well as Halstead complexity scores. It was shown that the regulatory complexity of new EU medical device regulations was higher than their predecessors, especially when Halstead complexity measures were considered. The complexity metrics obtained for the new regulations were subsequently associated with the time it took to consider these regulations. Only very weak Pearson’s correlation coefficients were found between the complexity scores and the obtained response times for the new regulations. This could indicate that there are issues with how complexity is perceived by those that need to apply these regulations. Taking the complexity of regulations into account can greatly help with the development of more user friendly regulations. The results from the data-driven methods that are applied in this research indicate that governments could benefit from focusing on making regulations more accessible and utilitarian. This would improve the stakeholder adherence and facilitate effective implementation. This work also highlighted the need to develop more suitable methods to analyse regulatory text to further inform the wider research community.

Narrational Complexity

What makes a narrative complex? Different disciplines have defined complexity in a number of ways, but all of them reduce to the notion of counting. In education, one often finds complexity metrics based on counts of the words in the average sentence and the number of syllables in the words. Is there anything in movies like this? Not clearly. But rather than focusing on the narrative (the story) per se, this chapter focuses on the narration (how the story is told). One possible measure of narrational complexity is the number of narrational shifts in a given movie. Given the growth in number of syntagma during the past 50 years—a reflection of the construction of the narration—there is ample evidence for these shifts being a reasonable measure of complexity. They also appear to reinforce emotional commitment in the viewer.

COMPARISON OF SOFTWARE COMPLEXITY OF SEARCH ALGORITHM USING CODE BASED COMPLEXITY METRICS

Measures of software complexity are essential part of software engineering. Complexity metrics can be used to forecast key information regarding the testability, reliability, and manageability of software systems from study of the source code. This paper presents the results of three distinct software complexity metrics that were applied to two searching algorithms (Linear and Binary search algorithm). The goal is to compare the complexity of linear and binary search algorithms implemented in (Python, Java, and C++ languages) and measure the sample algorithms using line of code, McCabe and Halstead metrics. The findings indicate that the program difficulty of Halstead metrics has minimal value for both linear and binary search when implemented in python. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) was adopted to determine whether there is any statistically significant differences between the search algorithms when implemented in the three programming languages and it was revealed that the three (3) programming languages do not vary considerably for both linear and binary search techniques which implies that any of the (3) programming languages is suitable for coding linear and binary search algorithms.

3D assessment of a coral reef at Lalo Atoll reveals varying responses of habitat metrics following a catastrophic hurricane

Extreme disturbances such as hurricanes can cause reductions in coral cover and three-dimensional (3D) structural complexity of coral reefs. We examined changes in structural complexity utilizing 3D reconstruction of a coral-reef site before and after Hurricane Walaka passed through Lalo of the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands. This event resulted in complete destruction of the coral-reef habitat, with dramatic changes in benthic cover from pre-hurricane tabulate coral to post-hurricane rubble. Rugosity and mean slope decreased after the hurricane, while structural complexity, captured by vector ruggedness measure (VRM), showed resolution-specific responses. This metric captured the structural complexity of rubble at a high raster resolution of 1 cm and that of tabulate coral at lower resolutions, resulting in decreases in mean VRM values at 2- and 4-cm resolutions but an increase at 1-cm resolution. Variability in profile and planform curvature was reduced after the hurricane due to a disappearance of extreme curvature values created by the tabulate coral after the hurricane. This study highlights the varying responses of habitat complexity metrics to the complete destruction of a coral reef and provides us with insights into how choices of habitat complexity metrics can affect quantitative assessments of 3D habitat structure.