Digital Classics Outside the Echo-Chamber : Teaching, Knowledge Exchange and Public Engagement /

The international perspectives on these issues are especially valuable in an increasingly connected, but still institutionally and administratively diverse world. The research addressed in several chapters in this volume includes issues around technical standards bodies like EpiDoc and the TEI, engaging with ways these standards are implemented, documented, taught, used in the process of transcribing and annotating texts, and used to generate publications and as the basis for advanced textual or corpus research. Other chapters focus on various aspects of philological research and content creation, including collaborative or community driven efforts, and the issues surrounding editorial oversight, curation, maintenance and sustainability of these resources. Research into the ancient languages and linguistics, in particular Greek, and the language teaching that is a staple of our discipline, are also discussed in several chapters, in particular for ways in which advanced research methods can lead into language technologies and vice versa and ways in which the skills around teaching can be used for public engagement, and vice versa. A common thread through much of the volume is the importance of open access publication or open source development and distribution of texts, materials, tools and standards, both because of the public good provided by such models (circulating materials often already paid for out of the public purse), and the ability to reach non-standard audiences, those who cannot access rich university libraries or afford expensive print volumes. Linked Open Data is another technology that results in wide and free distribution of structured information both within and outside academic circles, and several chapters present academic work that includes ontologies and RDF, either as a direct research output or as essential part of the communication and knowledge representation. Several chapters focus not on the literary and philological side of classics, but on the study of cultural heritage, archaeology, and the material supports on which original textual and artistic material are engraved or otherwise inscribed, addressing both the capture and analysis of artefacts in both 2D and 3D, the representation of data through archaeological standards, and the importance of sharing information and expertise between the several domains both within and without academia that study, record and conserve ancient objects. Almost without exception, the authors reflect on the issues of interdisciplinarity and collaboration, the relationship between their research practice and teaching and/or communication with a wider public, and the importance of the role of the academic researcher in contemporary society and in the context of cutting edge technologies. How research is communicated in a world of instant- access blogging and 140-character micromessaging, and how our expectations of the media affect not only how we publish but how we conduct our research, are questions about which all scholars need to be aware and self-critical.

Essays on Development Policy and the Political Economy of Conflict

Electoral Rules and Leader Selection: Experimental Evidence from Ugandan Community Groups. Despite a large body of work documenting how electoral systems affect policy outcomes, less is known about their impact on leader selection. We study this by comparing two types of participatory decision making in Ugandan community groups: (i) vote by secret ballot and (ii) open discussion with consensus. Random assignment allows us to estimate the causal impact of the rules on leader types and social service delivery. Vote groups are found to elect leaders more similar to the average member while discussion group leaders are positively selected on socio-economic characteristics. Further, dropout rates are significantly higher in discussion groups, particularly for poorer members. After 3.5 years, vote groups are larger in size and their members save less and get smaller loans. We conclude that the secret ballot vote creates more inclusive groups while open discussion groups favor the already economically successful. Preparing for Genocide: Community Meetings in Rwanda. How do political elites prepare the civilian population for participation in violent conflict? We empirically investigate this question using data from the Rwandan Genocide in 1994. Every Saturday before 1994, Rwandan villagers had to meet to work on community infrastructure. The practice was highly politicized and, according to anecdotal evidence, regularly used by the political elites for spreading propaganda in the years before the genocide. This paper presents the first quantitative evidence of this abuse of the community meetings. To establish causality, we exploit cross-sectional variation in meeting intensity induced by exogenous weather fluctuations. We find that an additional rainy Saturday resulted in a five percent lower civilian participation rate in genocide violence. Selection into Borrowing: Survey Evidence from Uganda. In this paper, I study how changes to the standard credit contract affect loan demand and selection into borrowing, using a representative sample of urban micro enterprises, most with no borrowing experience. Hypothetical loan demand questions are used to test whether firm owners respond to changes in loans' contractual terms and whether take-up varies by firms' risk type and other firm owner characteristics. The results indicate that contracts with lower interest rates and less stringent collateral requirements attract less risky borrowers, suggesting that there is scope for improvement of standard financial contract terms. Credit Contract Structure and Firm Growth: Evidence from a Randomized Control Trial. We study the effects of credit contract structure on firm outcomes among small and medium sized firms. A randomized control trial was carried out to distinguish between some of the key constraints to efficient credit use connected to the firms' business environment and production function, namely (i) backloaded returns (ii) uncertain returns and (iii) indivisible fixed costs. Each firm was followed for the 1-year loan cycle. We describe the experiment and present preliminary results from the first 754 out of 2,340 firms to have completed the loan cycle. Firms offered a grace period have higher profits and higher household income than firms receiving a rebate later on as well as the control group. They also increased the number of paid employees  and reduced the number of unpaid employees, an effect also found among firms that received a cash subsidy at the beginning of the loan cycle. We discuss potential mechanisms behind these effects.

Social funds as a strategy for poverty reduction in Jamaica: An exploratory study

This study explored the relationship between social fund projects and poverty reduction in selected communities in Jamaica. The Caribbean nation's social fund projects aim to reduce “public” poverty by rehabilitating and expanding social and economic infrastructure, improving social services, and strengthening organizations at the community level. Research questions addressed the characteristics of poverty-focused social fund projects; the nexus between poverty reduction and three key concepts suggested by the literature— community (citizen) participation, social capital, and empowerment; and the impact of the projects on poverty. ^ In this qualitative study, data were collected and triangulated by means of in-depth, semi-structured interviews, supplemented by key informant data; non-participant observation; and document reviews. Thirty-four respondents were interviewed individually at eight rural and urban sites over a period of four consecutive months, and 10 key informants provided supplementary data. Open, axial, and selective coding was used for data reduction and analysis as part of the grounded theory method, which included constant comparative analysis. The codes generated a set of themes and a substantive-formal theory. Findings were crosschecked with interview respondents and key informants and validated by means of an audit trail. ^ The results have revealed that the approach to poverty reduction in social fund-supported communities is a process of development-focused collaboration among various stakeholders. The process encompasses four stages: (1) identifying problems and priorities, (2) motivating and mobilizing, (3) working together, and (4) creating an enabling environment. The underlying stakeholder involvement theory posits that collaboration increases the productivity of resources and creates the conditions for community-driven development. In addition, the study has found that social fund projects are largely community-based, collaborative, and highly participatory in their implementation, as well as prescription-driven, results-oriented, and leadership-dependent. Further, social capital formation across communities was found to be limited, and in general, the projects have been enabling rather than empowering. The projects have not reduced poverty per se; however, they have been instrumental in improving conditions that were concomitants of poverty. ^

MixKMeans: Clustering Question-Answer Archives

Community-driven Question Answering (CQA) systems that crowdsource experiential information in the form of questions and answers and have accumulated valuable reusable knowledge. Clustering of QA datasets from CQA systems provides a means of organizing the content to ease tasks such as manual curation and tagging. In this paper, we present a clustering method that exploits the two-part question-answer structure in QA datasets to improve clustering quality. Our method, {\it MixKMeans}, composes question and answer space similarities in a way that the space on which the match is higher is allowed to dominate. This construction is motivated by our observation that semantic similarity between question-answer data (QAs) could get localized in either space. We empirically evaluate our method on a variety of real-world labeled datasets. Our results indicate that our method significantly outperforms state-of-the-art clustering methods for the task of clustering question-answer archives.

Variability in the growth, feeding and condition of barramundi (Lates calcarifer Bloch) in a northern Australian coastal river and impoundment

Lates calcarifer supports important fisheries throughout tropical Australia. Community-driven fish stocking has resulted in the creation of impoundment fisheries and supplemental stocking of selected wild riverine populations. Using predominantly tag-recapture methods, condition assessment and stomach flushing techniques, this study compared the growth of stocked and wild L. calcarifer in a tropical Australian river (Johnstone River) and stocked fish in a nearby impoundment (Lake Tinaroo). Growth of L. calcarifer in the Johnstone River appeared resource-limited, with juvenile fish in its lower freshwater reaches feeding mainly on small aytid shrimp and limited quantities of fish. Growth was probably greatest in estuarine and coastal areas than in the lower freshwater river. Fish in Lake Tinaroo, where prey availability was greater, grew faster than either wild or stocked fish in the lower freshwater areas of the Johnstone River. Growth of L. calcarifer was highly seasonal with marked declines in the cooler months. This was reflected in both stomach fullness and the percentage of fish with empty stomachs but the condition of L. calcarifer was similar across most sites. In areas where food resources appear stretched, adverse effects on resident L. calcarifer populations and their attendant prey species should be minimised through cessation of, or more conservative, stocking practices.

User-driven community-based service development

This final thesis project was carried out in the Industrial Management department of University of Applied Sciences Stadia for Forum Virium Helsinki. The purpose of this study was to answer to the question of how companies can use online customer community of co-creation in service development and what is the value gained from it. The paper combines a range of recently published theoretical works and ongoing customer community case development. The study aims to provide new information and action approaches to new service developers that may increase the success of the community building process. The paper also outlines the benefits of the use of online customer community and offers practical suggestions for maximizing the value gained from the community in service development projects. The concepts and suggestions introduced in the study appear to have notable new possibilities to the service development process but they have to be further tested empirically. This paper describes the online consumer community of co-creation to an important organizational process of innovation management suggesting that it possesses a great value to business. Online customer communities offer a potential of improving the success of new services or products enabling early, penetrable market entry and creating sustainable competitive advantage.

The International LAM Registry: A Component of an Innovative Web-Based Clinician, Researcher, and Patient-Driven Rare Disease Research Platform

Background: A relative friability to capture a sufficiently large patient population in any one geographic location has traditionally limited research into rare diseases. Methods and Results: Clinicians interested in the rare disease lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM) have worked with the LAM Treatment Alliance, the MIT Media Lab, and Clozure Associates to cooperate in the design of a state-of-the-art data coordination platform that can be used for clinical trials and other research focused on the global LAM patient population. This platform is a component of a set of web-based resources, including a patient self-report data portal, aimed at accelerating research in rare diseases in a rigorous fashion. Conclusions: Collaboration between clinicians, researchers, advocacy groups, and patients can create essential community resource infrastructure to accelerate rare disease research. The International LAM Registry is an example of such an effort.

Antiretroviral Drug Resistance in a Respondent-Driven Sample of HIV-Infected Men Who Have Sex With Men in Brazil

Background: There are few studies on HIV subtypes and primary and secondary antiretroviral drug resistance (ADR) in community-recruited samples in Brazil. We analyzed HIV clade diversity and prevalence of mutations associated with ADR in men who have sex with men in all five regions of Brazil. Methods: Using respondent-driven sampling, we recruited 3515 men who have sex with men in nine cities: 299 (9.5%) were HIV-positive; 143 subjects had adequate genotyping and epidemiologic data. Forty-four (30.8%) subjects were antiretroviral therapy-experienced (AE) and 99 (69.2%) antiretroviral therapy-naive (AN). We sequenced the reverse transcriptase and protease regions of the virus and analyzed them for drug resistant mutations using World Health Organization guidelines. Results: The most common subtypes were B (81.8%), C (7.7%), and recombinant forms (6.9%). The overall prevalence of primary ADR resistance was 21.4% (i.e. among the AN) and secondary ADR was 35.8% (i.e. among the AE). The prevalence of resistance to protease inhibitors was 3.9% (AN) and 4.4% (AE); to nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors 15.0% (AN) and 31.0% (AE) and to nonnucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors 5.5% (AN) and 13.2% (AE). The most common resistance mutation for nucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors was 184V (17 cases) and for nonnucleoside reverse transcriptase inhibitors 103N (16 cases). Conclusions: Our data suggest a high level of both primary and secondary ADR in men who have sex with men in Brazil. Additional studies are needed to identify the correlates and causes of antiretroviral therapy resistance to limit the development of resistance among those in care and the transmission of resistant strains in the wider epidemic.

Partial utility-driven scheduling for flexible SLA and pricing arbitration in clouds

Cloud SLAs compensate customers with credits when average availability drops below certain levels. This is too inflexible because consumers lose non-measurable amounts of performance being only compensated later, in next charging cycles. We propose to schedule virtual machines (VMs), driven by range-based non-linear reductions of utility, different for classes of users and across different ranges of resource allocations: partial utility. This customer-defined metric, allows providers transferring resources between VMs in meaningful and economically efficient ways. We define a comprehensive cost model incorporating partial utility given by clients to a certain level of degradation, when VMs are allocated in overcommitted environments (Public, Private, Community Clouds). CloudSim was extended to support our scheduling model. Several simulation scenarios with synthetic and real workloads are presented, using datacenters with different dimensions regarding the number of servers and computational capacity. We show the partial utility-driven driven scheduling allows more VMs to be allocated. It brings benefits to providers, regarding revenue and resource utilization, allowing for more revenue per resource allocated and scaling well with the size of datacenters when comparing with an utility-oblivious redistribution of resources. Regarding clients, their workloads’ execution time is also improved, by incorporating an SLA-based redistribution of their VM’s computational power.

Geodupa - a geography-driven partial membership algorithm

Trabalho apresentado no âmbito do Mestrado em Engenharia Informática, como requisito parcial para obtenção do grau de Mestre em Engenharia Informática

Multi-level SLA-driven resource management on Cloud Providers

Nowadays, service providers in the Cloud offer complex services ready to be used as it was a commodity like water or electricity to their customers with any other extra effort for them. However, providing these services implies a high management effort which requires a lot of human interaction. Furthermore, an efficient resource management mechanism considering only provider's resources is, though necessary, not enough, because the provider's profit is limited by the amount of resources it owns. Dynamically outsourcing resources to other providers in response to demand variation avoids this problem and makes the provider to get more profit. A key technology for achieving these goals is virtualization which facilitates provider's management and provides on-demand virtual environments, which are isolated and consolidated in order to achieve a better utilization of the provider's resources. Nevertheless, dealing with some virtualization capabilities implies an effort for the user in order to take benefit from them. In order to avoid this problem, we are contributing the research community with a virtualized environment manager which aims to provide virtual machines that fulfils with the user requirements. Another challenge is sharing resources among different federated Cloud providers while exploiting the features of virtualization in a new approach for facilitating providers' management. This project aims for reducing provider's costs and at the same time fulfilling the quality of service agreed with the customers while maximizing the provider's revenue. It considers resource management at several layers, namely locally to each node in the provider, among different nodes in the provider, and among different federated providers. This latter layer supports the novel capabilities of outsourcing when the local resources are not enough to fulfil the users demand, and offering resources to other providers when the local resources are underused.

The International LAM Registry: a component of an innovative web-based clinician, researcher, and patient-driven rare disease research platform.

BACKGROUND: A relative inability to capture a sufficiently large patient population in any one geographic location has traditionally limited research into rare diseases. METHODS AND RESULTS: Clinicians interested in the rare disease lymphangioleiomyomatosis (LAM) have worked with the LAM Treatment Alliance, the MIT Media Lab, and Clozure Associates to cooperate in the design of a state-of-the-art data coordination platform that can be used for clinical trials and other research focused on the global LAM patient population. This platform is a component of a set of web-based resources, including a patient self-report data portal, aimed at accelerating research in rare diseases in a rigorous fashion. CONCLUSIONS: Collaboration between clinicians, researchers, advocacy groups, and patients can create essential community resource infrastructure to accelerate rare disease research. The International LAM Registry is an example of such an effort. 82.

Quantification of environment-driven changes in epiphytic macroinvertebrate communities associated to Phragmites australis

The epiphytic macroinvertebrate communities associated with the Common Reed, Phragmites australis (Cav.) Trin. ex Steudel, were examined seasonally from summer 2004 to spring 2005 in eleven coastal lagoons of the Llobregat Delta (NE Spain) following the method proposed by Kornijów & Kairesalo (1994). The aims of the study were to: 1) characterise and quantify changes in epiphytic macroinvertebrate communities along environmental gradients; 2) assess the contribution of elements of the epiphytic compartment to structuring the community; 3) define the optima and tolerances of selected epiphytic macroinvertebrate taxa for the most relevant ecological factors responsible for assemblage composition; and 4) identify possible epiphytic species assemblages that would allow a lagoon"s typology to be established, as well as their representative indicator species. Communities showed statistically significant seasonal variation, with two faunal peaks: one in summer, with high chironomid densities, and the other in winter, with high naidid densities. These peaks showed a clear response to the influence of environmental factors. Salinity explained the highest percentage of total variance (36%), while trophic variables (nutrients, phytoplanktonic chlorophyll-a, and total organic carbon) and epiphyton biomass (19.2 and 4% of total variance explained, respectively) were secondary. Three different epiphytic macroinvertebrate species assemblages could be defined. These assemblages were directly linked to conductivity conditions, which determined the rate of survival of certain taxa, and to the existence of a direct connection with the sea, which permitted the establishment of 'brackish-water' species. In spite of the existence of these species assemblages, the species composition and biomass of epiphytic macroinvertebrates and epiphyton differed substantially between lagoons; both elements were subject to changes in the environment, which finally determined the site-to-site variation in the density and composition of the macroinvertebrate population

Parallel declines in species and genetic diversity driven by anthropogenic disturbance: a multispecies approach in a French Atlantic dune system.

Numerous studies assess the correlation between genetic and species diversities, but the processes underlying the observed patterns have only received limited attention. For instance, varying levels of habitat disturbance across a region may locally reduce both diversities due to extinctions, and increased genetic drift during population bottlenecks and founder events. We investigated the regional distribution of genetic and species diversities of a coastal sand dune plant community along 240 kilometers of coastline with the aim to test for a correlation between the two diversity levels. We further quantify and tease apart the respective contributions of natural and anthropogenic disturbance factors to the observed patterns. We detected significant positive correlation between both variables. We further revealed a negative impact of urbanization: Sites with a high amount of recreational infrastructure within 10 km coastline had significantly lowered genetic and species diversities. On the other hand, a measure of natural habitat disturbance had no effect. This study shows that parallel variation of genetic and species diversities across a region can be traced back to human landscape alteration, provides arguments for a more resolute dune protection, and may help to design priority conservation areas.

The dynamics of biofilm bacterial communities is driven by flow wax and wane in a temporary stream

Biofilm communities are exposed to long periods of desiccation in temporary streams. We investigated how water flow intermittency affected the bacterial community structure colonizing three different streambed compartments in a Mediterranean stream. Massive parallel sequencing revealed different bacterial communities in biofilms from sand sediments and cobbles. Bacterial communities were similar (62% of shared operational taxonomic units) in the epipsammic and hyporheic biofilms, and more diverse than those in the epilithic biofilms. The non-flow phase caused a decrease of bacterial diversity in the biofilms, when communities included only bacterial taxa assumed to be adapted to water stress. The most sensitive bacterial communities to flow intermittency were in the epilithic, where the exposure to physical stress was the highest. In sand sediments a wide group of bacterial taxa was tolerant to desiccation. During non-flow the proliferation of opportunistic taxa in the superficial compartments evidenced the biological link with the terrestrial environment. Bacterial communities better tolerate rewetting than desiccation, since a major number of taxa tolerant to rewetting occurred in all biofilms. Overall, bacterial communities in sandy compartments showed higher resistance to flow intermittency than those in epilithic biofilms