Physical prototypes in cross-functional team collaboration : a study of the Model-T2 concept car project

Virtual and physical prototypes play a significant role in the design of artifacts. This is particularly true in cross-functional team collaboration, where diverse disciplines come together to contribute to the concept, design and development of an artifact. While the role of prototyping in design and cross-functional collaboration has been widely studied independently, little is known of the role that physical prototypes play during cross-functional team collaboration. This paper reports on a study of virtual and physical prototyping strategies used by a cross-functional team comprising engineers and designers working on a concept car project. The paper provides a background of the collaborative design process and details the role of physical prototyping methods during the design of the concept car.

Adolescent resilience : a concept analysis

There is need for greater clarity around the concept of resilience as it relates to the period of adolescence. Literature on resilience published between 1990 and 2000 and relevant to adolescents aged between 12- and 18-years of age was reviewed with the aim of examining the various uses of the term, and commenting on how specific ways of conceptualizing of resilience may help develop new research agendas in the field. By bringing together ideas on resilience from a variety of research and clinical perspectives, the purpose of the review is to explicate core elements of resilience in more precise ways, in the hope that greater conceptual clarity will lead to a range of tailored interventions that benefit young people.

Using multiple windows to track concept drift

In this paper we present a multiple window incremental learning algorithm that distinguishes between virtual concept drift and real concept drift. The algorithm is unsupervised and uses a novel approach to tracking concept drift that involves the use of competing windows to interpret the data. Unlike previous methods which use a single window to determine the drift in the data, our algorithm uses three windows of different sizes to estimate the change in the data. The advantage of this approach is that it allows the system to progressively adapt and predict the change thus enabling it to deal more effectively with different types of drift. We give a detailed description of the algorithm and present the results obtained from its application to two real world problems: background image processing and sound recognition. We also compare its performance with FLORA, an existing concept drift tracking algorithm.

Using selective memory to track concept drift effectively

In this paper we describe a supervised learning algorithm that uses selective memory to track concept drift. Unlike previous methods to track concept drift that use window heuristics to adapt to changes, we present an improved approach that discriminates between the instances observed. The advantage of this method is that it allows the system to both adapt to and track drift more accurately as well as filter the noise in the data more effectively. We present the algorithm and compare its performance with FLORA a well known concept drift tracking algorithm.

The concept of prevention : a good idea gone astray?

Over time, the definition of prevention has expanded so that its meaning in the context of health services is now unclear. As risk factors are increasingly considered to be the equivalent of “diseases” for purposes of intervention, the concept of prevention has lost all practical meaning. This paper reviews the inconsistencies in its utility, and suggests principles that it should follow in the future: a population orientation with explicit consideration of attributable risk, the setting of priorities based on reduction in illness and avoidance of adverse effects, and the imperative to reduce inequities in health.

Indigenising civil society : applying Ibn Khaldun’s asabiya concept on tribes in Iraq

After the US-led invasion of Iraq in 2003, civil society has become among the buzz words that are frequently used by local and international government and non-government institutions. However, the connotations of civil society were merely drawn from Western conceptions referring to formally organised types of institutions, like NGOs, unions and media. This paper argues that Muslim/Arab theories should also be tested in their original indigenous societies before generalisation of Western models. The Western conceptualisation overlooks the informal type of civil society organisations and excludes family and kinship ties from its equation. Indigenous social structures, i.e. tribes are key active player in the daily life of the Iraqi political, economic, social and cultural scenes. This study argues that the spirit of social solidarity drawn from Ibn Khaldun’s “asabiya” concepts as well as functions of civil society organisations are the bases for examining tribes in Iraq. Tribes have played significant roles in conflict management, peace-building, reconciliation, policy-formulation, advocacy, active citizenship and democratisation since 2003. The article concludes that, based on their sense of solidarity that is the impetus to functions, tribes are among the active civil society organisations in Iraq.

Concept definition in knowledge management : the development of an organizational memory scale

Theorists and researchers in the field of Knowledge Management are frequently frustrated by issues with concept definition, as illustrated by the following comment "there remains disagreement on methodologies, definitions and processes" from the summary article "Issues Raised at ECKM, 2008". How can we clearly define constructs of interest? How can we further research and understanding in the field if we are speaking with different vocabularies? This paper illustrates some of these issues by describing the concept definition process involved in the development of an organizational memory scale. The example being used to illustrate these issues was a self-report scale of organizational memory developed to survey experienced workers' attitudes to mentoring others to pass on their knowledge. The current research sought to differentiate between the types of organizational knowledge that experienced workers have and the possible relationships these have with attitudes pertaining to knowledge transfer via mentoring. Defining the construct to be measured is the vital first ingredient in scale development. Many researchers lament that the concept of organizational memory is a "rather loosely defined and under-developed concept" (e.g. Johnson & Paper, 1998, p.504), and this hints at the challenges that concept definition can entail. Furthermore, in the early stages of this particular project it became clear that the organizational memory scale had similar aims, and was able to borrow from, an existing sale of organizational socialization (Chao, O'Leary-Kelly, Woolf, Klein & Gardner, 1994). This paper describes the concept definition process involved in the development of the scale along with results from the exploratory factor analysis. There is a discussion of the relative contribution that the organizational memory scale makes alongside the existing measure of socialization (Chao et al., 1994), along with goals for further development.