How to Gamify E-Government Services?

Although gamification has been applied to the e-government domain for the past 20 years, the literature shows that the field still lacks formal definitions to support the design of gamified strategies on these types of platforms and services, and that game element selection is often a subjective matter. This chapter provides a useful taxonomy of game elements to support the design of e-government initiatives, elaborated from the analysis of the literature on gamification frameworks and models applied to this domain. This work was additionally validated by gamification experts from public and private organizations during a series of workshops. A total of 30 commonly used game elements were selected, conceptualized, and classified into six dimensions. Gamification experts agreed that this work contributes to standardizing the game elements employed in e-government services, while the authors also believe this taxonomy can be a useful tool to analyze already existing frameworks.

Onto4AIR2: An ontology to manage theses from open repositories

This paper describes Onto4AIR2, an ontology to manage theses from open repositories, this fosters unique and formal definitions of concepts from the Mexican repositories domain in English and Spanish languages, its goal is to support the construction of machine-readable datasets that are semantically labeled for further consultations in educational organizations. The ontology instances are sample data of theses from the National Repository of Mexico, an initiative promoted by the National Council of Science and Technology. The paper describes advantages derived from the formalisms of the ontology, and describes an assessment technique where participants are developers and potential users. Developers followed a competency questions-based approach and determined that the ontology represents questions and answers using its terminology; whereas potential users participated in a satisfaction survey; the results showed a positive perception. At present, the level of the ontology is proof of concept.

Genetic advantage and equality of opportunity in education: Two definitions and an empirical application

The literature of Equality of Opportunity (EOp) has long acknowledged the existence of 'talents', 'innate ability' or 'genetic ability'. Nonetheless, attempts to explicitly incorporate a measure of innate ability in the quantification of EOp have been rare. On the other hand, the literature of social-science genetics has found credible genetic-based components of EOp, without an explicit quantification of overall EOp. In addition, there exists prevalent disagreement within both kinds of literature on whether innate ability should be perceived as a fair or unfair source of advantage. This paper proposes to quantify EOp while explicitly including a genetic-based measure of innate ability. It proposes two formal definitions of EOp that draw on both stances regarding the compensation of innate ability. Novel testable implications are derived. The educational attainment polygenic index is used as a measure of innate ability while correcting for genetic nurture and accounting for the correlation between genes and other circumstances. An empirical application in the US Health and Retirement Study finds that the share of inequality of opportunity is 26% under the view that genetic differences are unfair sources of advantage and 21% otherwise. A comparative analysis over cohorts reveals that the trend in EOp depends on the definition adopted; if genetic advantage is a fair source of inequality then EOp has improved; the opposite holds if one considers genetic advantage an unfair source of inequality. These results highlight the importance of accounting for genetic differences in the EOp framework.

A framework for delineating the scale, extent and characteristics of American retail centre agglomerations

Retail centres are important tools for understanding the distribution and evolution of the retail sector at varying geographical scales. This paper presents a framework through which formal definitions and typologies of retail centres, such as those in the UK, can be extended to the US. Using Chicago as a case study and data from SafeGraph, we present a retail centre delineation method that combines Hierarchical-DBSCAN with ‘H3’, and demonstrate the usefulness of a non-hierarchical approach to retail classification. In addition, we show that the dynamicity and comprehensibility of retail centres make them an effective tool through which to better understand the impacts of COVID-19 on retail centre ‘health’, demonstrating significant scope for a comprehensive delineation of the scale, extent and characteristics of American retail centre agglomerations, providing a tool through which to monitor the evolution of American retail.

Dimensions of personhood in cultural heritage: Who (or what) gets to be called a person?

We examine the notion of “person” in cultural heritage settings (libraries, museums, and archives) and how this notion has implications for their function and purpose. Variations in the way persons are described, represented, and discussed have taken on new significance in emerging online environments predicated on reusing and sharing data from disparate sources. We start with a representative sample of systems and tools used for organizing knowledge in tangible cultural heritage, including metadata standards, conceptual models, and web data models, and for each, analyze their formal definitions of personhood. We asked what characteristics of a person are important in each of these definitions, and what might be the reasons for any variations among them. An analysis of the definitions themselves revealed five dimensions of personhood: life, actuality, biology, agency, and individuality. Using this framework along with the general literature on personhood we then describe the possible reasons, both historical and practical, for the definitions, their dimensions, and the differences among them. Finally, we speculate on the implications of such differences for emerging information environments.

Defining Understanding

Promoting student understanding of biological concepts is a key part of biology education, and the ability to “understand” a concept forms one of the six categories of the oft-used Bloom’s Taxonomy. Despite this, there remains no consensus as to what it means to understand a concept. While several formal definitions have been offered, we investigated how biology instructors and biology education researchers define the term and how they perceived the skill sets needed for a student to understand a concept in the context of assessments. We found that there was no agreement on the definition of understanding, and that responses differed in the cognitive level required to reach “understanding” of a concept. We discuss these findings in the context of Bloom’s Taxonomy and variation theory and provide directions for future inquiries. We conclude by discussing implications for biology instructors and the importance of explicitly conveying expectations to better align student and instructor expectations.

Negative feedback

Negative feedback is an essential constituent of any control system. It is illustrated for the case of an electronic voltage amplifier. Formal definitions are given of positive and negative feedback. Feedback can be used to adjust the amplifier's frequency response. Distortion, meaning generation of new and unwanted frequencies (harmonics, sums, differences), is reduced by a factor equal to the “return difference”.

Verbose exponence: integrating the typologies of distributed and multiple exponence

Multiple exponence is the multiple marking of the same feature or category within a single word. Distributed exponence is the occurrence of morphological structure such that providing a precise interpretation of a category can only be determined after considering more than one morphological formative. I propose the term verbose exponence to capture the common ground between these phenomena, i.e. all situations involving multiple morphological formatives sensitive to some common information. From this definition, a typology based on informational overlap emerges with types of verbose exponence corresponding to types of set interactions. The typology incorporates known related phenomena, such as overlapping exponence, while providing a sophisticated framework for describing previously unnamed phenomena. This typology is naturally cast in set-theoretic terms and formal definitions are provided for all assumptions and points in the typology. Such an approach provides precise articulations of the typological space but also of morphological redundancy, a property often associated with multiple exponence.

Numerical classification of French vegetation of Carici caryophylleae – Genistetea lobelii J.-C. Klein 1972

Carici-Genistetea lobelii Klein 1972 corresponds to cyrno-sardinian oromediterranean cushion scrub and related grasslands. In France, this class is only present in Corsica and the syntaxonomic scheme is debated among phytosociologists. The aim of this paper is to highlight the main plant associations of Carici-Genistetea lobelii Klein 1972 and to define the diagnostic species for each phytosociological unit. We compiled 519 vegetation plots and we applied EuropeanVegetationChecklist expert system for the classes of European vegetation to retain only vegetation plots belonging to Carici-Genistetea lobelii. We obtained a dataset with 189 vegetation plots and we classified them with Modified TWINSPAN classification. Our analyses recognized 6 plant associations and 3 sub-associations already described in the literature; and to describe a new alliance corresponding to the supra-mediterranean vegetations (Genistion salzmannii), a new association (Brimeuro fastigiatae-Juniperetum nanae) and its sub-association (alnetosum suaveolentis). For each of them, we identified diagnostic, constant and dominant species and produced their distribution map. Formal definitions were then written for each phytosociological unit (from subassociation to class) and grouped in an expert system to automatically classify the vegetations of Carici-Genistetea lobelii.

Causal Sufficiency and Actual Causation

Pearl opened the door to formally defining actual causation using causal models. His approach rests on two strategies: first, capturing the widespread intuition that X = x causes Y = y iff X = x is a Necessary Element of a Sufficient Set for Y = y, and second, showing that his definition gives intuitive answers on a wide set of problem cases. This inspired dozens of variations of his definition of actual causation, the most prominent of which are due to Halpern & Pearl. Yet all of them ignore Pearl’s first strategy, and the second strategy taken by itself is unable to deliver a consensus. This paper offers a way out by going back to the first strategy: it offers six formal definitions of causal sufficiency and two interpretations of necessity. Combining the two gives twelve new definitions of actual causation. Several interesting results about these definitions and their relation to the various Halpern & Pearl definitions are presented. Afterwards the second strategy is evaluated as well. In order to maximize neutrality, the paper relies mostly on the examples and intuitions of Halpern & Pearl. One definition comes out as being superior to all others, and is therefore suggested as a new definition of actual causation.