An investigation of innovation and knowledge creation in virtual worlds

The Internet and World Wide Web have had, and continue to have, an incredible impact on our civilization. These technologies have radically influenced the way that society is organised and the manner in which people around the world communicate and interact. The structure and function of individual, social, organisational, economic and political life begin to resemble the digital network architectures upon which they are increasingly reliant. It is increasingly difficult to imagine how our ‘offline’ world would look or function without the ‘online’ world; it is becoming less meaningful to distinguish between the ‘actual’ and the ‘virtual’. Thus, the major architectural project of the twenty-first century is to “imagine, build, and enhance an interactive and ever changing cyberspace” (Lévy, 1997, p. 10). Virtual worlds are at the forefront of this evolving digital landscape. Virtual worlds have “critical implications for business, education, social sciences, and our society at large” (Messinger et al., 2009, p. 204). This study focuses on the possibilities of virtual worlds in terms of communication, collaboration, innovation and creativity. The concept of knowledge creation is at the core of this research. The study shows that scholars increasingly recognise that knowledge creation, as a socially enacted process, goes to the very heart of innovation. However, efforts to build upon these insights have struggled to escape the influence of the information processing paradigm of old and have failed to move beyond the persistent but problematic conceptualisation of knowledge creation in terms of tacit and explicit knowledge. Based on these insights, the study leverages extant research to develop the conceptual apparatus necessary to carry out an investigation of innovation and knowledge creation in virtual worlds. The study derives and articulates a set of definitions (of virtual worlds, innovation, knowledge and knowledge creation) to guide research. The study also leverages a number of extant theories in order to develop a preliminary framework to model knowledge creation in virtual worlds. Using a combination of participant observation and six case studies of innovative educational projects in Second Life, the study yields a range of insights into the process of knowledge creation in virtual worlds and into the factors that affect it. The study’s contributions to theory are expressed as a series of propositions and findings and are represented as a revised and empirically grounded theoretical framework of knowledge creation in virtual worlds. These findings highlight the importance of prior related knowledge and intrinsic motivation in terms of shaping and stimulating knowledge creation in virtual worlds. At the same time, they highlight the importance of meta-knowledge (knowledge about knowledge) in terms of guiding the knowledge creation process whilst revealing the diversity of behavioural approaches actually used to create knowledge in virtual worlds and. This theoretical framework is itself one of the chief contributions of the study and the analysis explores how it can be used to guide further research in virtual worlds and on knowledge creation. The study’s contributions to practice are presented as actionable guide to simulate knowledge creation in virtual worlds. This guide utilises a theoretically based classification of four knowledge-creator archetypes (the sage, the lore master, the artisan, and the apprentice) and derives an actionable set of behavioural prescriptions for each archetype. The study concludes with a discussion of the study’s implications in terms of future research.

Reasoning about trust, entrepreneurial services, and the virtual team

This Portfolio of Exploration (PoE) tracks a transformative learning developmental journey that is directed at changing meaning making structures and mental models within an innovation practice. The explicit purpose of the Portfolio is to develop new and different perspectives that enable the handling of new and more complex phenomena through self transformation and increased emotional intelligence development. The Portfolio provides a response to the question: ‘What are the key determinants that enable a Virtual Team (VT) to flourish where flourishing means developing and delivering on the firm’s innovative imperatives?’ Furthermore, the PoE is structured as an investigation into how higher order meaning making promotes ‘entrepreneurial services’ within an intra-firm virtual team, with a secondary aim to identify how reasoning about trust influence KGPs to exchange knowledge. I have developed a framework which specifically focuses on the effectiveness of any firms’ Virtual Team (VT) through transforming the meaning making of the VT participants. I hypothesized it is the way KGPs make meaning (reasoning about trust) which differentiates the firm as a growing firm in the sense of Penrosean resources: ‘inducement to expand and a limit of expansion’ (1959). Reasoning about trust is used as a higher order meaning-making concept in line with Kegan’s (1994) conception of complex meaning making, which is the combining of ideas and data in ways that transform meaning and implicates participants to find new ways of knowledge generation. Simply, it is the VT participants who develop higher order meaning making that hold the capabilities to transform the firm from within, providing a unique competitive advantage that enables the firm to grow.

Low power predictable memory and processing architectures

Great demand in power optimized devices shows promising economic potential and draws lots of attention in industry and research area. Due to the continuously shrinking CMOS process, not only dynamic power but also static power has emerged as a big concern in power reduction. Other than power optimization, average-case power estimation is quite significant for power budget allocation but also challenging in terms of time and effort. In this thesis, we will introduce a methodology to support modular quantitative analysis in order to estimate average power of circuits, on the basis of two concepts named Random Bag Preserving and Linear Compositionality. It can shorten simulation time and sustain high accuracy, resulting in increasing the feasibility of power estimation of big systems. For power saving, firstly, we take advantages of the low power characteristic of adiabatic logic and asynchronous logic to achieve ultra-low dynamic and static power. We will propose two memory cells, which could run in adiabatic and non-adiabatic mode. About 90% dynamic power can be saved in adiabatic mode when compared to other up-to-date designs. About 90% leakage power is saved. Secondly, a novel logic, named Asynchronous Charge Sharing Logic (ACSL), will be introduced. The realization of completion detection is simplified considerably. Not just the power reduction improvement, ACSL brings another promising feature in average power estimation called data-independency where this characteristic would make power estimation effortless and be meaningful for modular quantitative average case analysis. Finally, a new asynchronous Arithmetic Logic Unit (ALU) with a ripple carry adder implemented using the logically reversible/bidirectional characteristic exhibiting ultra-low power dissipation with sub-threshold region operating point will be presented. The proposed adder is able to operate multi-functionally.

Exploring the Zionist evolution of Robert Briscoe: History and memory

Robert Briscoe was the Dublin born son of Lithuanian and German-Jewish immigrants. As a young man he joined Sinn Féin and was an important figure in the War of Independence due to a role as one of the IRA’s main gun-procuring agents. He took the anti-Treaty side during an internecine Civil War, mainly due to the influence of Eamon de Valera and retained a filial devotion towards him for the rest of his life. In 1926 he was a founding member of Fianna Fáil, de Valera’s breakaway republican party, which would dominate twentieth-century Irish politics. He was first elected as a Fianna Fáil T.D. (Teachta Dála, Deputy to the Dáil) in 1927, and successfully defended his seat eleven times becoming the first Jewish Lord Mayor of Dublin in 1956, an honour that was repeated in 1961. On this basis alone, it can be argued that Briscoe was a significant presence in an embryonic Irish political culture; however, when his role in the 1930s Jewish immigration endeavor is acknowledged, it is clear that he played a unique part in one of the most contentious political and social discourses of the pre-war years. This was reinforced when Briscoe embraced Zionism in a belated realisation that the survival of his European co-religionists could only be guaranteed if an independent Jewish state existed. This information is to a certain degree public knowledge; however, the full extent of his involvement as an immigration advocate for potential Jewish refugees, and the seniority he achieved in the New Zionist Organisation (Revisionists) has not been fully recognised. This is partly explicable because researchers have based their assessment of Briscoe on an incomplete political archive in the National Library of Ireland (NLI). The vast majority of documentation pertaining to his involvement in the immigration endeavor has not been available to scholars and remains the private property of Robert Briscoe’s son, Ben Briscoe. The lack of immigration files in the NLI was reinforced by the fact that information about Briscoe’s Revisionist engagement was donated to the Jabotinsky Institute in Tel Aviv and can only be accessed physically by visiting Israel. Therefore, even though these twin endeavors have been commented on by a number of academics, their assessments have tended to be based on an incomplete archive, which was supplemented by Briscoe’s autobiographical memoir published in 1958. This study will attempt to fill in the missing gaps in Briscoe’s complex political narrative by incorporating the rarely used private papers of Robert Briscoe, and the difficult to access Briscoe files in Tel Aviv. This undertaking was only possible when Mr.Ben Briscoe graciously granted me full and unrestricted access to his father’s papers, and after a month-long research trip to the Jabotinsky Institute in Tel Aviv. Access to this rarely used documentation facilitated a holistic examination of Briscoe’s complex and multifaceted political reality. It revealed the full extent of Briscoe’s political and social evolution as the Nazi instigated Jewish emigration crisis reached catastrophic proportions. He was by turn Fianna Fáil nationalist, Jewish immigration advocate and senior Revisionist actor on a global stage. The study will examine the contrasting political and social forces that initiated each stage of Briscoe’s Zionist awakening, and in the process will fill a major gap in Irish-Jewish historiography by revealing the full extent of his Revisionist engagement.

A river of memory: landscape, narrative and identity in the Lee Valley, Co. Cork, Ireland

In moments of rapid social changes, as has been witnessed in Ireland in the last decade, the conditions through which people engage with their localities though memory, individually and collectively, remains an important cultural issue with key implications for questions of heritage, preservation and civic identity. In recent decades, cultural geographers have argued that landscape is more than just a view or a static text of something symbolic. The emphasis seems to be on landscape as a dynamic cultural process – an ever-evolving process being constructed and re-constructed. Hence, landscape seems to be a highly complex term that carries many different meanings. Material, form, relationships or actions have different meanings in different settings. Drawing upon recent and continuing scholarly debates in cultural landscapes and collective memory, this thesis sets out to examine the generation of collective memory and how it is employed as a cultural tool in the production of memory in the landscape. More specifically, the research considers the relationships between landscape and memory, investigating the ways in which places are produced, appropriated, experienced, sensed, acknowledged, imagined, yearned for, appropriated, re-appropriated, contested and identified with. A polyvocal-bricoleur approach aims to get below the surface of a cultural landscape, inject historical research and temporal depth into cultural landscape studies and instil a genuine sense of inclusivity of a wide variety of voices (role of monuments and rituals and voices of people) from the past and present. The polyvocal-bricoleur approach inspires a mixed method methodology approach to fieldsites through archival research, fieldwork and filmed interviews. Using a mixture of mini-vignettes of place narratives in the River Lee valley in the south of Ireland, the thesis explores a number of questions on the fluid nature of narrative in representing the story and role of the landscape in memory-making. The case studies in the Lee Valley are harnessed to investigate the role of the above questions/ themes/ debates in the act of memory making at sites ranging from an Irish War of Independence memorial to the River Lee’s hydroelectric scheme to the valley’s key religious pilgrimage site. The thesis investigates the idea that that the process of landscape extends not only across space but also across time – that the concept of historical continuity and the individual and collective human engagement and experience of this continuity are central to the processes of remembering on the landscape. In addition the thesis debates the idea that the production of landscape is conditioned by several social frames of memory – that individuals remember according to several social frames that give emphasis to different aspects of the reality of human experience. The thesis also reflects on how the process of landscape is represented by those who re-produce its narratives in various media.

Religious memory as a conveyor of authoritative tradition: The necessary and essential component in a definition of religion

In a landmark book published in 2000, the sociologist Danièle Hervieu-Léger defined religion as a chain of memory, by which she meant that within religious communities remembered traditions are transmitted with an overpowering authority from generation to generation. After analysing Hervieu-Léger’s sociological approach as overcoming the dichotomy between substantive and functional definitions, this article compares a ritual honouring the ancestors in which a medium becomes possessed by the senior elder’s ancestor spirit among the Shona of Zimbabwe with a cleansing ritual performed by a Celtic shaman in New Hampshire, USA. In both instances, despite different social and historical contexts, appeals are made to an authoritative tradition to legitimize the rituals performed. This lends support to the claim that the authoritative transmission of a remembered tradition, by exercising an overwhelming power over communities, even if the memory of such a tradition is merely postulated, identifies the necessary and essential component for any activity to be labelled “religious”.