bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
I see you're talking #HPV
Authors: Harrison Angela
Published: April 2014

This poster reports data from a pilot study of communication practices in the microblogging site Twitter. A content analysis was conducted on a random sample of 50 tweets from the #hpv (human papillomavirus) stream in order to determine any recurring practices such as use of links, retweets, uses of the @ symbol, and other phenomena. The pilot study found that, unlike studies conducted on communication patterns in Twitter streams, the participants in the #hpv stream use it to primarily broadcast information as opposed to interacting and conversing with one another, and collaboration, while present indirectly, is minimal. The researcher plans to expand the sample set to 900 tweets and continue the process of content analysis in order to determine more solid findings for practices of communication in this space. The researcher also plans to examine other spaces relevant to the exchange of information on HPV, conduct content analyses for them, and compare them to the findings on Twitter. The goal is to use these findings for both health and technical communication so that better systems can be designed to optimize the power of participant generated information spaces.
Marketing on zero
Authors: Vucinich Christine
Published: April 2014

There's nothing more frustrating than hearing someone say "I didn't know the IT department offered that?!?" when its after the fact or they're getting ready to graduate or leave. Or someone comments on an anonymous survey "I wish the IT department had a service that allowed us to do this" when you already do and don't have a person to follow-up with. Marketing is always a challenge, especially when you are working with a limited or in some cases non-existent budget. Whether it's promoting the IT service desk, site licensing, training program or even a new tool or service, you want to make sure you get the word out to the users who need to know so they use the service and help you spread the word throughout campus.
Visual communication in environmental health
Authors: Meloncon Lisa
Published: April 2014

Disciplinary differences cause multiple problems with trying to create a research study that gauges readers' comprehension of complex scientific information. This paper provides a case study of the some of the issues associated with research methods and methodologies on an on an interdisciplinary team.
Transforming contracts from legal rules to user-centered communication tools
Authors: Passera Stefania , Haapio Helena
Published: April 2014

In this paper, we illustrate how merging contract design with information design, especially visualization, can help to transform contracts (and people's perceptions about contracts) from legal rules to communication tools. We argue that improved human-contract interaction can maximize the value of commercial relationships, minimize risk, and prevent workplace frustration. Viewing contracts as boundary objects and changing their design to overcome the current challenges offer unexplored opportunities for both research and practice.
Visualizing complexity and uncertainty about climate change and sea level rise
Authors: Kain Donna , Covi Michelle
Published: April 2014

In this paper, we discuss the use of visual representations to assist people in understanding complex information about sea level rise and climate change. We report on the results of a 2011 study in which we conducted plus-minus document usability evaluations of documents describing the mechanisms and consequences of sea-level rise in coastal areas. The protocol included 40 participant interviews and post interview quizzes. We tested with three documents, one that presented information for the U.S. southeastern coastal region and two that presented information "localized" for the two areas in which we conducted the research. Findings indicate that participants had difficulty with information presented in graphs and maps and that, while they indicated preferences for localized information, localized images did not improve understanding of complex information.
Cargo cults in information design
Authors: Albers Michael J.
Published: April 2014

There are a multitude of rules of writing and design. Cargo cult design occurs when designers rigidly apply a design rule without a clear understanding of why the rule exists or whether it applies to the situation. The rules moved into the status of being a rule for a reason. It is important for designers to understand those reasons so they can critically analyze the situation and make decisions about the applicability of the rule. Successful design requires deeply understanding and working within the situational context and not blindly applying generic rules.
Exploiting User Preference for Online Learning in Web Content Optimization Systems
Authors: Bian Jiang , Long Bo , Li Lihong , Moon Taesup , Dong Anlei , Chang Yi
Published: April 2014

Web portal services have become an important medium to deliver digital content (e.g. news, advertisements, etc.) to Web users in a timely fashion. To attract more users to various content modules on the Web portal, it is necessary to design a recommender system that can effectively achieve Web portal content optimization by automatically estimating content item attractiveness and relevance to user interests. The state-of-the-art online learning methodology adapts dedicated pointwise models to independently estimate the attractiveness score for each candidate content item. Although such pointwise models can be easily adapted for online recommendation, there still remain a few critical problems. First, this pointwise methodology fails to use invaluable user preferences between content items. Moreover, the performance of pointwise models decreases drastically when facing the problem of sparse learning samples. To address these problems, we propose exploring a new dynamic pairwise learning methodology for Web portal content optimization in which we exploit dynamic user preferences extracted based on users' actions on portal services to compute the attractiveness scores of content items. In this article, we introduce two specific pairwise learning algorithms, a straightforward graph-based algorithm and a formalized Bayesian modeling one. Experiments on large-scale data from a commercial Web portal demonstrate the significant improvement of pairwise methodologies over the baseline pointwise models. Further analysis illustrates that our new pairwise learning approaches can benefit personalized recommendation more than pointwise models, since the data sparsity is more critical for personalized content optimization.
Infer User Interests via Link Structure Regularization
Authors: Wang Jinpeng , Zhao Wayne Xin , He Yulan , Li Xiaoming
Published: April 2014

Learning user interests from online social networks helps to better understand user behaviors and provides useful guidance to design user-centric applications. Apart from analyzing users' online content, it is also important to consider users' social connections in the social Web. Graph regularization methods have been widely used in various text mining tasks, which can leverage the graph structure information extracted from data. Previously, graph regularization methods operate under the cluster assumption that nearby nodes are more similar and nodes on the same structure (typically referred to as a cluster or a manifold) are likely to be similar. We argue that learning user interests from complex, sparse, and dynamic social networks should be based on the link structure assumption under which node similarities are evaluated based on the local link structures instead of explicit links between two nodes. We propose a regularization framework based on the relation bipartite graph, which can be constructed from any type of relations. Using Twitter as our case study, we evaluate our proposed framework from social networks built from retweet relations. Both quantitative and qualitative experiments show that our proposed method outperforms a few competitive baselines in learning user interests over a set of predefined topics. It also gives superior results compared to the baselines on retweet prediction and topical authority identification.
Information entropy based methods for genome comparison
Authors: Jani Mehul , Azad Rajeev K.
Published: April 2014

A plethora of biologically useful information lies obscured in the genomes of organisms. Encoded within the genome of an organism is the information about its evolutionary history. Evolutionary signals are scattered throughout the genome. Bioinformatics approaches are frequently invoked to deconstruct the evolutionary patterns underlying genomes, which are difficult to decipher using traditional laboratory experiments. However, interpreting constantly evolving genomes is a non-trivial task for bioinformaticians. Processes such as mutations, recombinations, insertions and deletions make genomes not only heterogeneous and difficult to decipher but also renders direct sequence comparison less effective. Here we present a brief overview of the sequence comparison methods with a focus on recently proposed alignment-free sequence comparison methods based on Shannon information entropy. Many of these sequence comparison methods have been adapted to construct phylogenetic trees to infer relationships among organisms.
Cluster-Based Collaborative Filtering for Sign Prediction in Social Networks with Positive and Negative Links
Authors: Javari Amin , Jalili Mahdi
Published: April 2014

Social network analysis and mining get ever-increasingly important in recent years, which is mainly due to the availability of large datasets and advances in computing systems. A class of social networks is those with positive and negative links. In such networks, a positive link indicates friendship (or trust), whereas links with a negative sign correspond to enmity (or distrust). Predicting the sign of the links in these networks is an important issue and has many applications, such as friendship recommendation and identifying malicious nodes in the network.

In this manuscript, we proposed a new method for sign prediction in networks with positive and negative links. Our algorithm is based first on clustering the network into a number of clusters and then applying a collaborative filtering algorithm. The clusters are such that the number of intra-cluster negative links and inter-cluster positive links are minimal, that is, the clusters are socially balanced as much as possible (a signed graph is socially balanced if it can be divided into clusters with all positive links inside the clusters and all negative links between them). We then used similarity between the clusters (based on the links between them) in a collaborative filtering algorithm. Our experiments on a number of real datasets showed that the proposed method outperformed previous methods, including those based on social balance and status theories and one based on a machine learning framework (logistic regression in this work).
AutoLCA
Authors: Hossain M. Shahriar , Marwah Manish , Shah Amip , Watson Layne T. , Ramakrishnan Naren
Published: April 2014

With increasing public consciousness regarding sustainability, companies are ever more eager to introduce eco-friendly products and services. Assessing environmental footprints and designing sustainable products are challenging tasks since they require analysis of each component of a product through their life cycle. To achieve sustainable design of products, companies need to evaluate the environmental impact of their system, identify the major contributors to the footprint, and select the design alternative with the lowest environmental footprint. In this article, we formulate sustainable design as a series of clustering and classification problems, and propose a framework called AutoLCA that simplifies the effort of estimating the environmental footprint of a product bill of materials by more than an order of magnitude over current methods, which are mostly labor intensive. We apply AutoLCA to real data from a large computer manufacturer. We conduct a case study on bill of materials of four different products, perform a “hotspot” assessment analysis to identify major contributors to carbon footprint, and determine design alternatives that can reduce the carbon footprint from 1% to 36%.
Description-Driven Community Detection
Authors: Pool Simon , Bonchi Francesco , Leeuwen Matthijs van
Published: April 2014

Traditional approaches to community detection, as studied by physicists, sociologists, and more recently computer scientists, aim at simply partitioning the social network graph. However, with the advent of online social networking sites, richer data has become available: beyond the link information, each user in the network is annotated with additional information, for example, demographics, shopping behavior, or interests. In this context, it is therefore important to develop mining methods which can take advantage of all available information. In the case of community detection, this means finding
good communities
(a set of nodes cohesive in the social graph) which are associated with
good descriptions
in terms of user information (node attributes).

Having good descriptions associated to our models make them understandable by domain experts and thus more useful in real-world applications. Another requirement dictated by real-world applications, is to develop methods that can use, when available, any domain-specific background knowledge. In the case of community detection the background knowledge could be a vague description of the communities sought in a specific application, or some prototypical nodes (e.g., good customers in the past), that represent what the analyst is looking for (a community of similar users).

Towards this goal, in this article, we define and study the problem of finding a diverse set of cohesive communities with concise descriptions. We propose an effective algorithm that alternates between two phases: a hill-climbing phase producing (possibly overlapping) communities, and a description induction phase which uses techniques from supervised pattern set mining. Our framework has the nice feature of being able to build well-described cohesive communities starting from any given description or seed set of nodes, which makes it very flexible and easily applicable in real-world applications.

Our experimental evaluation confirms that the proposed method discovers cohesive communities with concise descriptions in realistic and large online social networks such as D
elicious
, F
lickr
, and L
ast
FM.
Design of communication open research questions
Authors: Albers Michael J.
Published: April 2014

This issue considers the question of what are (or should be) the major current research problems that researchers within Design of Communication should be addressing.
Identifying core principles and expectations
Authors: Davis Marjorie T.
Published: April 2014

I'd like to add my brief response to your discussion about research questions facing our discipline. I can immediately name two.
Navigating increasingly cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary, and cross-organizational contexts to support social justice
Authors: Walton Rebecca , Jones Natasha N.
Published: April 2014

We believe that one of the major research questions that will drive the field of technical communication during the next 5--10 years is, "How can technical communication scholars navigate increasingly cross-cultural, cross-disciplinary, and cross-organizational contexts to support social justice through better communication?"
Chickens, MRIs, and graphics
Authors: Welhausen Candice A.
Published: April 2014

Last semester I gave a talk to a small group of graduate students and faculty in the Department of Animal and Food Sciences in the College of Agriculture on my campus. As one of several invited speakers for the department's graduate seminar series, the purpose, I was told, was straightforward: model an effective presentation for the students. I teach courses in technical and professional communication so I imagined it might also be useful to discuss presentation strategies. I concluded by giving an overview of my own research interests---broadly, visual communication---and briefly described a project I am working on related to scientific graphics and historic public health maps.
Writing for machine translation
Authors: Abel Scott
Published: April 2014

Computer-assisted translation (aka machine translation) is on the fast track to becoming a utility. Translation will automatically become part of everything we do. Computers, websites, touch screen devices, in-car navigation systems, kiosks in public places, ATMs, airline self-service terminals -- basically any consumer-facing graphic user interface -- will include a "translate" button. In fact, the beta version of the Android operating system includes just that in the latest rendition of the Chrome browser. That's just the start of things to come. Machine translation will soon be ubiquitous!
CIM
Authors: Chen Yi-Cheng , Zhu Wen-Yuan , Peng Wen-Chih , Lee Wang-Chien , Lee Suh-Yin
Published: April 2014

Given a social graph, the problem of influence maximization is to determine a set of nodes that maximizes the spread of influences. While some recent research has studied the problem of influence maximization, these works are generally too time consuming for practical use in a large-scale social network. In this article, we develop a new framework,
community-based influence maximization
(CIM), to tackle the influence maximization problem with an emphasis on the time efficiency issue. Our proposed framework, CIM, comprises three phases: (i) community detection, (ii) candidate generation, and (iii) seed selection. Specifically, phase (i) discovers the community structure of the network; phase (ii) uses the information of communities to narrow down the possible seed candidates; and phase (iii) finalizes the seed nodes from the candidate set. By exploiting the properties of the community structures, we are able to avoid overlapped information and thus efficiently select the number of seeds to maximize information spreads. The experimental results on both synthetic and real datasets show that the proposed CIM algorithm significantly outperforms the state-of-the-art algorithms in terms of efficiency and scalability, with almost no compromise of effectiveness.
When Errors Become the Rule
Authors: Uneson Marcus
Published: April 2014

Transformation-based learning (TBL) is a machine learning method for, in particular, sequential classification, invented by Eric Brill [Brill 1993b, 1995a]. It is widely used within computational linguistics and natural language processing, but surprisingly little in other areas.

TBL is a simple yet flexible paradigm, which achieves competitive or even state-of-the-art performance in several areas and does not overtrain easily. It is especially successful at catching local, fixed-distance dependencies and seamlessly exploits information from heterogeneous discrete feature types. The learned representation—an ordered list of transformation rules—is compact and efficient, with clear semantics. Individual rules are interpretable and often meaningful to humans.

The present article offers a survey of the most important theoretical work on TBL, addressing a perceived gap in the literature. Because the method should be useful also outside the world of computational linguistics and natural language processing, a chief aim is to provide an informal but relatively comprehensive introduction, readable also by people coming from other specialities.
Getting started on the right foot
Authors: Vucinich Christine L.
Published: April 2014

"Ice Ice Baby." Ok, now that I got that out of my system….What are icebreakers and why use them in the first place? Icebreakers are activities that you do before a meeting or a training session (or any other learning activity or get together for that matter). An icebreaker gives participants the opportunity to get to know each other or know each other better. An icebreaker will allow the team to start interacting - essentially "breaking the ice" with one another before you get into the agenda and meat of the program. If done well this shared experience will set the tone for the rest of the day (session, etc.).
Getting the most from the conference
Authors: Weese Ashley
Published: April 2014

When you attend the fall SIGUCCS conference or any other conference, you will have a greater return on your conference "investment" if you are organized and willing to participate in sessions, networking with colleagues, poster sessions, and vendor exhibits. Not only will you share new ideas, but also feel re-energized as you attend sessions and talk with others who know the ups and downs of higher education information technology.
Computational biologist in profile
Authors: Shehu Amarda
Published: April 2014

I first met Ruth during my graduate studies, when she was invited to give a seminar on her decade-long research in computational biology. I sat through her inspiring (and what has been etched on my memory as gentle) delivery of her work on macromolecular structure and interactions. Her informal meeting with graduate students after the talk left a deep impression on me of someone highly dedicated to providing students with guidance on what was important in biological research. Many years later, ending up near the National Cancer Institute (NCI), where one can find Ruth mostly these days as head of the Computational Structural Biology Group of the Center for Cancer Research Nanobiology Program at NCI, I simply could not give up the opportunity of obtaining a closer look at her journey as a scientist.
Rhetorical Accessability: At the Intersection of Technical Communication and Disability Studies, edited by Lisa Meloncon, Amityville, New York: Baywood, 2013. 247 pp.
Authors: Hennes Jack
Published: April 2014

Meloncon's
Rhetorical Accessability
explores the connections between critical work in disability studies and technical communication. The first collection of its kind, included essays combine theory and practice to emphasize the value of placing disability studies at the forefront of design, workplace practices, and pedagogies. Echoing the diversity of scholarship that has contributed to this emerging area of study---from disability studies, technical communication, rhetoric, and literacy studies--- the collection emphasizes technical communication as a crucial multidisciplinary ground for critical discourse regarding disability and accessibility. As a whole, Meloncon's collection initiates a broader scholarly conversation centered on issues of accessibility in various technical communication contexts.
The UX book: Process and guidelines for ensuring a quality user experience by Rex Hartson and Pardha A. Pyla, San Diego: Morgan Kaufmann. 2012.
Authors: Franklin Nathan
Published: April 2014

Immediately, the Preface and introduction of Rex Hartson and Pardha A. Pyla's (2012) co-authored
The UX Book: Process and Guidelines for Ensuring a Quality User Experience
, grounds the reader in a specific overview of the practical and pedagogical components of the UX design process. The practical aspect of the text centers on what the authors call the UX lifecycle, a highly structured framework that orchestrates the many different design and evaluative stages of system or product completion. The pedagogical approach of the text is an awareness of audience that translates into a customizable book. Both authors encourage their readers to decide what parts of the text are of interest and to focus on those sections only. Central to the text's overall approach is the refrain "user experience is more than usability" (pg. xi). Within this approach, for instance, Hartson and Pyla address some of the ineffective metaphors that cloud or muddle the UX lifecycle process. Previous models often rely on testing, or lab-based metaphors that fail to generate a quality user experience. With the rise of design-oriented techniques today, the development process has been wrested from previously-held beliefs that a system or product can be generated independent of the user's environment.
Computer scientist in profile
Authors: Shehu Amarda
Published: April 2014

Of all the undergraduate majors that might steer someone towards an accomplished scientific career and prolific research in Artificial Intelligence, Robotics, and Computational Structural Biology, you would have a hard time circling 'Russian Language and Literature.' Yet, that is exactly how Bruce's journey started at Yale. Bruce fondly recalls his famous English and Literature professors, such as Harold Bloom and Victor Ehrlich, who left a deep impression on him and played no small part in Bruce eventually graduating summa cum laude in 1980. "The connection with Computer Science was there all along," says Bruce, "though I did not obtain any formal training in CS. I had been a hacker in high school, and I did take some LOGO and Fortran classes at MIT. I hung out with a group of programmers in school and had a job programming and selling one of the first personal computers, the MITS Altair 8800." He recalls that despite his interest in programming, at Yale he almost exclusively took only Humanities courses. The only other courses outside Humanities were a Physics, Calculus, and Artificial Intelligence course.
Learning Probabilistic Hierarchical Task Networks as Probabilistic Context-Free Grammars to Capture User Preferences
Authors: Li Nan , Cushing William , Kambhampati Subbarao , Yoon Sungwook
Published: April 2014

We introduce an algorithm to automatically learn probabilistic hierarchical task networks (pHTNs) that capture a user's preferences on plans by observing only the user's behavior. HTNs are a common choice of representation for a variety of purposes in planning, including work on learning in planning. Our contributions are twofold. First, in contrast with prior work, which employs HTNs to represent domain physics or search control knowledge, we use HTNs to model user preferences. Second, while most prior work on HTN learning requires additional information (e.g., annotated traces or tasks) to assist the learning process, our system only takes plan traces as input. Initially, we will assume that users carry out preferred plans more frequently, and thus the observed distribution of plans is an accurate representation of user preference. We then generalize to the situation where feasibility constraints frequently prevent the execution of preferred plans. Taking the prevalent perspective of viewing HTNs as grammars over primitive actions, we adapt an expectation-maximization (EM) technique from the discipline of probabilistic grammar induction to acquire probabilistic context-free grammars (pCFG) that capture the distribution on plans. To account for the difference between the distributions of possible and preferred plans, we subsequently modify this core EM technique by rescaling its input. We empirically demonstrate that the proposed approaches are able to learn HTNs representing user preferences better than the inside-outside algorithm. Furthermore, when feasibility constraints are obfuscated, the algorithm with rescaled input performs better than the algorithm with the original input.
A Framework for Effectively Choosing between Alternative Candidate Partners
Authors: Reches Shulamit , Kalech Meir , Hendrix Philip
Published: April 2014

Many multi-agent settings require that agents identify appropriate partners or teammates with whom to work on tasks. When selecting potential partners, agents may benefit from obtaining information about the alternatives, for instance, through gossip (i.e., by consulting others) or reputation systems. When information is uncertain and associated with cost, deciding on the amount of information needed is a hard optimization problem. This article defines a statistical model, the Information-Acquisition Source Utility model (IASU), by which agents, operating in an uncertain world, can determine (1) which information sources they should request for information, and (2) the amount of information to collect about potential partners from each source. To maximize the expected gain from the choice, IASU computes the utility of choosing a partner by estimating the benefit of additional information. The article presents empirical studies through a simulation domain as well as a real-world domain of restaurants. We compare the IASU model to other relevant models and show that the use of the IASU model significantly increases agents' overall utility.
Conveying Semantics through Visual Metaphor
Authors: Heath Derrall , Norton David , Ventura Dan
Published: April 2014

In the field of visual art, metaphor is a way to communicate meaning to the viewer. We present a computational system for communicating visual metaphor that can identify adjectives for describing an image based on a low-level visual feature representation of the image. We show that the system can use this visual-linguistic association to render source images that convey the meaning of adjectives in a way consistent with human understanding. Our conclusions are based on a detailed analysis of how the system's artifacts cluster, how these clusters correspond to the semantic relationships of adjectives as documented in WordNet, and how these clusters correspond to human opinion.
Rethinking how to teach programming to newcomers
Authors: Robertson Judy
Published: April 2014

The
Communications
Web site, http://cacm.acm.org, features more than a dozen bloggers in the BLOG@CACM community. In each issue of
Communications
, we'll publish selected posts or excerpts.

twitter

Follow us on Twitter at http://twitter.com/blogCACM

http://cacm.acm.org/blogs/blog-cacm

Judy Robertson reviews what happened when she decided to introduce Android development into the curriculum for first-year computer science students.
Technology confounds the courts
Authors: Kirkpatrick Keith
Published: April 2014

Despite the need to make decisions relevant to technologies, the U.S. Supreme Court is not the most techno-savvy group.
The forever disc
Authors: Geller Tom
Published: April 2014

Can our digital data represent us a million years from now?
What happened to video game piracy?
Authors: Depoorter Ben
Published: April 2014

How video games thrive in a world of piracy.
Tom Kilburn
Authors: Anderson David
Published: April 2014

Reflections on a British computer engineer who influenced several important machines, including the first stored-program computer.
Reducing the software value gap
Authors: Pass Shimeon , Ronen Boaz
Published: April 2014

How to cope with the growing demand for software solutions at no extra cost.
Structure and Overlaps of Ground-Truth Communities in Networks
Authors: Yang Jaewon , Leskovec Jure
Published: April 2014

One of the main organizing principles in real-world networks is that of
network communities
, where sets of nodes organize into densely linked clusters. Even though detection of such communities is of great interest, understanding the structure communities in large networks remains relatively limited. In particular, due to the unavailability of labeled ground-truth data, it was traditionally very hard to develop accurate models of network community structure.

Here we use six large social, collaboration, and information networks where nodes explicitly state their ground-truth community memberships. For example, nodes in social networks join into explicitly defined interest based groups, and we use such groups as explicitly labeled ground-truth communities. We use such ground-truth communities to study their structural signatures by analyzing how ground-truth communities emerge in networks and how they overlap. We observe some surprising phenomena. First, ground-truth communities contain high-degree hub nodes that reside in community overlaps and link to most of the members of the community. Second, the overlaps of communities are more densely connected than the non-overlapping parts of communities. We show that this in contrast to the conventional wisdom that community overlaps are more sparsely connected than the non-overlapping parts themselves. We then show that many existing models of network communities do not capture dense community overlaps. This in turn means that most present models and community detection methods confuse overlaps as separate communities. In contrast, we present the
community-affiliation graph model
(AGM), a conceptual model of network community structure. We demonstrate that AGM reliably captures the overall structure of networks as well as the overlapping and hierarchical nature of network communities.
Building a virtual community of practice for K-12 CS teachers
Authors: Cooper Steve , Grover Shuchi , Simon Beth
Published: April 2014

Bringing educators together and focusing their interests toward improving computer science education in high schools.
Robots are coming
Authors: Bajcsy Ruzena
Published: April 2014

Considering the societal implications of the robotics revolution.
The mobile situation
Authors: Swarts Jason
Published: April 2014

Written communication and its accumulated principles of applied design often serve conservative and preservationist goals. Literacy and its various, sprawling technological apparatuses of production and distribution preserve ideas and prepare them for uptake and adaptation. What is preserved in writing speaks with greater reliability over time and choices about design can influence the validity or appropriateness of those texts, by invoking proper voices and suggesting or demanding appropriate relationships between people and institutions organized around those texts. While this may seem an inhospitable way to open a column in a journal on communication design, my point is not intentionally disparaging. Instead it is to draw a contrast between types of communication design work: that which works to affiliate discourse with a location and practices of uptake and that which creates and works across those locations.
Toward a more integrated view of technical communication
Authors: Andersen Rebekka
Published: April 2014

For the past few years, I have attended a number of industry conferences focused on content management (CM); reviewed a wealth of CM-focused publications, including trade books, white papers, newsletters, and blogs; and followed numerous CM-focused online discussions. Through these experiences and readings I have learned a great deal about the affordances and challenges of CM. But the message that has most impacted my thinking about CM---and what it means for the field of Technical Communication (TC)---is this: the era of document-based information development (ID), which has shaped all aspects of TC research, training, and practice since the field's inception, is coming to an end.
Building better help
Authors: Zhang Tao , Barnes Ilana R. , Promann Marlen
Published: April 2014

The goal of this study is to examine the effect of user help seeking characteristics on their perception of library help design principles, formats and tools. Structural equation modeling (SEM) of a questionnaire survey results showed a number of significant regression relationships. Analysis of open-ended survey questions revealed existing user behaviors such as preferred help formats and gave insights into the likelihood of using a help system.
Remediation in data visualization
Authors: Young Justin , Potter Charlie
Published: April 2014

Our poster is an exploration of the effects of quantifying physical experiences and refashioning them into new, interactive, live experiences through data visualization; the poster explores how data visualizations are designed to teach and effect change. Specifically, the authors explore two topics: athletic training and teacher training. Both of these fields have been inundated by data analysis tactics; sports data visualizations are highly developed and hypermediate while teacher training data are still largely immediate and static Through an analysis of these two topics in relation to theories of phenomenography and remediation, the poster discusses how the use of real-time data analysis and data visualization common in sports training might inform how that we effect change in other fields, such as teaching.
Social media in disaster response: how experience architects can build for participation by L. Potts, (2013). New York, NY: Routledge
Authors: Keller Beth
Published: April 2014

Liza Potts' recent book,
Social media in disaster response: How experience architects can build for participation
, explores the ways in which social web tools provide researchers and practitioners with opportunities to address disaster communication and information design for building participatory cultures. All too often, researchers and design practitioners in both the academy and industry think of social web tools as static, as "single-serving interfaces, systems, documents and silos" (1). In order to meet the progressive needs of contemporary knowledge workers, interdisciplinary teams that include humanists, social scientists, and technologists must build better architectures for everyday experiences users encounter in social media. Although issues of social media experience and participation may seem of concern to only a small group of information and experience designers---or, "experience architects," as Potts terms them---Potts argues that anyone who cares about writing, communication, social web design, and development should be deeply concerned with these issues, especially as they relate to how information is located and distributed as knowledge across the social web during times of disaster.
Global UX: design and research in a connected world by W. Quesenbery and D. Szuc; Waltham, MA: Morgan Kaufmann and A web for everyone: designing accessible user experiences by S. Horton and W. Quesenbery; Brooklyn, NY: Rosenfeld media
Authors: Ruszkiewicz Sheryl
Published: April 2014

In
Global UX: Design and research in a connected world
, Quesenbery and Szuc present a thoughtful and adaptable guide for the reader's individual needs or projects in relation to UX (user experience), regardless of the reader's experience level. Quesenbery and Szuc gathered material from 65 interviews of UX practitioners across the globe, and analyzed over 70 hours of interviews to represent current trends and personal experiences with UX. To highlight different voices and perspectives gathered from the interviews, the authors chose to provide multiple quotations and anecdotal, yet practical, stories to define UX terminology and concepts. Quesenbery and Szuc share many effective strategies for this process, while highlighting, through vignettes from their interviews, some of the difficulties and problem-solving strategies useful when working in UX on a global (or even local) scale. The book is divided into short, easily digestible chapters with infographics that summarize each chapter succinctly. This book provides enough structure to guide novice UX practitioners, while providing innovative anecdotes, tips, and strategies for more seasoned practitioners, as well. In addition, the information gathered from the interviews highlights the passion of those in UX, helping the reader to feel passionate about UX as well.
The Curse of the Excluded Middle
Authors: Meijer Erik
Published: April 2014

There is a trend in the software industry to sell "mostly functional" programming as the silver bullet for solving problems developers face with concurrency, parallelism (manycore), and, of course, Big Data. Contemporary imperative languages could continue the ongoing trend, embrace closures, and try to limit mutation and other side effects. Unfortunately, just as "mostly secure" does not work, "mostly functional" does not work either. Instead, developers should seriously consider a completely fundamentalist option as well: embrace pure lazy functional programming with all effects explicitly surfaced in the type system using monads.
Engineered Proteins for Bioelectrochemistry
Authors: Akram Muhammad Safwan , Rehman Jawad Ur , Hall Elizabeth A.H.
Published: April 2014

It is only in the past two decades that excellent protein engineering tools have begun to meet parallel advances in materials chemistry, nanofabrication, and electronics. This is revealing scenarios from which synthetic enzymes can emerge, which were previously impossible, as well as interfaces with novel electrode materials. That means the control of the protein structure, electron transport pathway, and electrode surface can usher us into a new era of bioelectrochemistry. This article reviews the principle of electron transfer (ET) and considers how its application at the electrode, within the protein, and at a redox group is directing key advances in the understanding of protein structure to create systems that exhibit better efficiency and unique bioelectrochemistry.
Microfluidic Systems with Ion-Selective Membranes
Authors: Slouka Zdenek , Senapati Satyajyoti , Chang Hsueh-Chia
Published: April 2014

When integrated into microfluidic chips, ion-selective nanoporous polymer and solid-state membranes can be used for on-chip pumping, pH actuation, analyte concentration, molecular separation, reactive mixing, and molecular sensing. They offer numerous functionalities and are hence superior to paper-based devices for point-of-care biochips, with only slightly more investment in fabrication and material costs required. In this review, we first discuss the fundamentals of several nonequilibrium ion current phenomena associated with ion-selective membranes, many of them revealed by studies with fabricated single nanochannels/nanopores. We then focus on how the plethora of phenomena has been applied for transport, separation, concentration, and detection of biomolecules on biochips.
Heart Regeneration with Engineered Myocardial Tissue
Authors: Coulombe Kareen L.K. , Bajpai Vivek K. , Andreadis Stelios T. , Murry Charles E.
Published: April 2014

Heart disease is the leading cause of morbidity and mortality worldwide, and regenerative therapies that replace damaged myocardium could benefit millions of patients annually. The many cell types in the heart, including cardiomyocytes, endothelial cells, vascular smooth muscle cells, pericytes, and cardiac fibroblasts, communicate via intercellular signaling and modulate each other's function. Although much progress has been made in generating cells of the cardiovascular lineage from human pluripotent stem cells, a major challenge now is creating the tissue architecture to integrate a microvascular circulation and afferent arterioles into such an engineered tissue. Recent advances in cardiac and vascular tissue engineering will move us closer to the goal of generating functionally mature tissue. Using the biology of the myocardium as the foundation for designing engineered tissue and addressing the challenges to implantation and integration, we can bridge the gap from bench to bedside for a clinically tractable engineered cardiac tissue.
Bringing Bioelectricity to Light
Authors: Cohen Adam E. , Venkatachalam Veena
Published: April 2014

Any bilayer lipid membrane can support a membrane voltage. The combination of optical perturbation and optical readout of membrane voltage opens the door to studies of electrophysiology in a huge variety of systems previously inaccessible to electrode-based measurements. Yet, the application of optogenetic electrophysiology requires careful reconsideration of the fundamentals of bioelectricity. Rules of thumb appropriate for neuroscience and cardiology may not apply in systems with dramatically different sizes, lipid compositions, charge carriers, or protein machinery. Optogenetic tools are not electrodes; thus, optical and electrode-based measurements have different quirks. Here we review the fundamental aspects of bioelectricity with the aim of laying a conceptual framework for all-optical electrophysiology.
The Economics of Human Development and Social Mobility
Authors: Heckman James J. , Mosso Stefano
Published: April 2014

This article distills and extends recent research on the economics of human development and social mobility. It summarizes the evidence from diverse literatures on the importance of early life conditions in shaping multiple life skills and the evidence on critical and sensitive investment periods for shaping different skills. It presents economic models that rationalize the evidence and unify the treatment effect and family influence literatures. The evidence on the empirical and policy importance of credit constraints in forming skills is examined. There is little support for the claim that untargeted income transfer policies to poor families significantly boost child outcomes. Mentoring, parenting, and attachment are essential features of successful families and interventions that shape skills at all stages of childhood. The next wave of family studies will better capture the active role of the emerging autonomous child in learning and responding to the actions of parents, mentors, and teachers.
Fluid Mechanics in Sommerfeld's School
Authors: Eckert Michael
Published: April 2014

Sommerfeld's affiliation with fluid mechanics started when he began his career as an assistant of the mathematician Felix Klein at Göttingen. He always regarded fluid mechanics as a particular challenge. In 1904, he published a theory of hydrodynamic lubrication. Four years later, he conceived an approach for the analysis of flow instability (the Orr-Sommerfeld approach) as an attempt to account for the transition from laminar to turbulent flow. The onset of turbulence also became a major challenge for some of his pupils, in particular Ludwig Hopf and Fritz Noether. Both contributed considerably to elaborate the Orr-Sommerfeld theory. Heisenberg's doctoral work was another attempt in this quest. When Sommerfeld published his lectures on theoretical physics during World War II, he dedicated one of the six volumes to the mechanics of continuous media. With chapters on boundary layer theory and turbulence, it exceeded the scope of contemporary theoretical physics—revealing Sommerfeld's persistent appreciation of fluid mechanics. He resorted to Prandtl's Göttingen school of fluid mechanics in order to stay abreast of the rapid development of these specialties.
No Gene in the Genome Makes Sense Except in the Light of Evolution
Authors: Haerty Wilfried , Ponting Chris P.
Published: April 2014

Evolutionary conservation has been an accurate predictor of functional elements across the first decade of metazoan genomics. More recently, there has been a move to define functional elements instead from biochemical annotations. Evolutionary methods are, however, more comprehensive than biochemical approaches can be and can assess quantitatively, especially for subtle effects, how biologically important—how injurious after mutation—different types of elements are. Evolutionary methods are thus critical for understanding the large fraction (up to 10%) of the human genome that does not encode proteins and yet might convey function. These methods can also capture the ephemeral nature of much noncoding functional sequence, with large numbers of functional elements having been gained and lost rapidly along each mammalian lineage. Here, we review how different strengths of purifying selection have impacted on protein-coding and non-protein-coding loci and on transcription factor binding sites in mammalian and fruit fly genomes.