Towards better Olympic accountability

Ten years after the corruption scandal that shook the International Olympic Committee (IOC) in 1999, this article presents the current situation regarding accountability for this non-governmental organization based in Switzerland. The IOC is responsible for ensuring that the Olympic Games are held regularly, and since its foundation has endeavoured to promote sport without discrimination in service of sustainable human development and a better world. Olympic accountability is examined by means of four facets within a theoretical framework. The analysis of each of them shows that although considerable progress has been made by the IOC since 1999, improvements regarding accountability remain both possible and desirable. A mechanism for making improvements is proposed in the Conclusion.

Memory-based scheduling of scientific computing clusters

This study looks at how increased memory utilisation affects throughput and energy consumption in scientific computing, especially in high-energy physics. Our aim is to minimise energy consumed by a set of jobs without increasing the processing time. The earlier tests indicated that, especially in data analysis, throughput can increase over 100% and energy consumption decrease 50% by processing multiple jobs in parallel per CPU core. Since jobs are heterogeneous, it is not possible to find an optimum value for the number of parallel jobs. A better solution is based on memory utilisation, but finding an optimum memory threshold is not straightforward. Therefore, a fuzzy logic-based algorithm was developed that can dynamically adapt the memory threshold based on the overall load. In this way, it is possible to keep memory consumption stable with different workloads while achieving significantly higher throughput and energy-efficiency than using a traditional fixed number of jobs or fixed memory threshold approaches.

FastEpistasis: a high performance computing solution for quantitative trait epistasis.

Motivation: Genome-wide association studies have become widely used tools to study effects of genetic variants on complex diseases. While it is of great interest to extend existing analysis methods by considering interaction effects between pairs of loci, the large number of possible tests presents a significant computational challenge. The number of computations is further multiplied in the study of gene expression quantitative trait mapping, in which tests are performed for thousands of gene phenotypes simultaneously. Results: We present FastEpistasis, an efficient parallel solution extending the PLINK epistasis module, designed to test for epistasis effects when analyzing continuous phenotypes. Our results show that the algorithm scales with the number of processors and offers a reduction in computation time when several phenotypes are analyzed simultaneously. FastEpistasis is capable of testing the association of a continuous trait with all single nucleotide polymorphism ( SNP) pairs from 500 000 SNPs, totaling 125 billion tests, in a population of 5000 individuals in 29, 4 or 0.5 days using 8, 64 or 512 processors.

Anàlisi comparativa d'accessibilitat i UX d'iTunes, Google Music i Amazon Cloud Player

Aquest treball final de carrera consisteix en la realització d'un estudi de la usabilitat i accessibilitat de tres gestors de medis multimèdia: iTunes, Google Music i Amazon Cloud Player. A través d'observacions contextuals, avaluacions heurístiques i tests d'usuaris he realitzat una anàlisi comparativa. Per tal d'esquematitzar tota aquesta informació he confeccionat una taula amb els punts forts i punts febles de cada aplicació per concloure amb la proposta de millores per a cada un dels gestors de medis.

Sistema de community cloud aplicat a la preservació digital personal (personal archiving) PYRAMID

La preservació digital (PD) s'ha convertit en un problema persistent per a tots els que vulguin conservar la seva informació digital, garantir el seu estat i consultar aquest informació en el transcurs del temps. Fins ara només grans institucions amb coneixement expert i eines especialitzades han pogut fer front a aquest problema, però la preservació digital no pot ser abordada per una sola institució o nació. Les biblioteques, arxius i altres institucions de conservació de la memòria comparteixen aquest repte de la mateixa manera que els col•leccionistes i creadors, que ho fan a títol individual.L’objectiu del projecte és crear l'aplicació Pyramid que està concebuda com una eina de suport orientada a l'usuari domèstic (sense coneixements tècnics ni de preservació) per a la preservació a mig i llarg termini de col•leccions digitals, texts i vídeos, tal que funcioni com un antivirus (en BackGround) i preservi la informació sense requerir un cost addicional a l'ordinador i que l'usuari no noti cap molèstia a l'hora de fer les seves tasques diàries

Sentence de la prévôté de l'Hôtel du roi, et grande prévôté de France, rendue au profit de Mr de la Roche, garde de la porte de Mgr le comte d'Artois, contre les curé et marguillers de Séve (Sèvres) près Saint-Cloud...

[Acte. 1778-09-30. Paris]

Retrieving Cloud Characteristics from Ground-Based Daytime Color All-Sky Images

A discussion is presented of daytime sky imaging and techniques that may be applied to the analysis of full-color sky images to infer cloud macrophysical properties. Descriptions of two different types of skyimaging systems developed by the authors are presented, one of which has been developed into a commercially available instrument. Retrievals of fractional sky cover from automated processing methods are compared to human retrievals, both from direct observations and visual analyses of sky images. Although some uncertainty exists in fractional sky cover retrievals from sky images, this uncertainty is no greater than that attached to human observations for the commercially available sky-imager retrievals. Thus, the application of automatic digital image processing techniques on sky images is a useful method to complement, or even replace, traditional human observations of sky cover and, potentially, cloud type. Additionally, the possibilities for inferring other cloud parameters such as cloud brokenness and solar obstruction further enhance the usefulness of sky imagers

The impact of authority advice and accountability on auditors' decision to recognise norm-violating transactions.

Auditors face the difficult responsibilty to approve companies' financial accounting information reliably. They are trained to work according to accounting standards that are designed to help them in their decision making. Yet, auditors do not work in a social vacuum and are thus subject to various influences. One important source of influence at work is authority figures (e.g., experts, supervisors). On this background, we examined within two studies the impact of (1) authority advice to comply with accounting standards or to additionally maximize profits and (2) of participants' accountability for their decision. In Study 1, (n = 184 accounting students), participants who were advised by an authority to comply with accounting standards had a lower probability to recognise transactions that violated those standards than participants who were advised to comply but also to maximise profit. However, holding participants accountable for their decision reduced the difference between the two groups. In Study 2, (n = 58 managers), we again found an interaction between authority advice and accountability. But unlike the first study, participants only showed a lower probability to recognise transactions that violated accounting standards when they were held accountable and when the authority only advised them to comply with the standards. We discuss our results in light of unethical decision making and different norms or pressures to which managers may be exposed but students may not.

The M-Coffee web server: a meta-method for computing multiple sequence alignments by combining alternative alignment methods.

The M-Coffee server is a web server that makes it possible to compute multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) by running several MSA methods and combining their output into one single model. This allows the user to simultaneously run all his methods of choice without having to arbitrarily choose one of them. The MSA is delivered along with a local estimation of its consistency with the individual MSAs it was derived from. The computation of the consensus multiple alignment is carried out using a special mode of the T-Coffee package [Notredame, Higgins and Heringa (T-Coffee: a novel method for fast and accurate multiple sequence alignment. J. Mol. Biol. 2000; 302: 205-217); Wallace, O'Sullivan, Higgins and Notredame (M-Coffee: combining multiple sequence alignment methods with T-Coffee. Nucleic Acids Res. 2006; 34: 1692-1699)] Given a set of sequences (DNA or proteins) in FASTA format, M-Coffee delivers a multiple alignment in the most common formats. M-Coffee is a freeware open source package distributed under a GPL license and it is available either as a standalone package or as a web service from www.tcoffee.org.

Trust region versus line search for computing the optical flow

We consider the numerical treatment of the optical flow problem by evaluating the performance of the trust region method versus the line search method. To the best of our knowledge, the trust region method is studied here for the first time for variational optical flow computation. Four different optical flow models are used to test the performance of the proposed algorithm combining linear and nonlinear data terms with quadratic and TV regularization. We show that trust region often performs better than line search; especially in the presence of non-linearity and non-convexity in the model.

Effects of computing parameters and measurement locations on the estimation of 3D NPS in non-stationary MDCT images.

The goal of this study was to investigate the impact of computing parameters and the location of volumes of interest (VOI) on the calculation of 3D noise power spectrum (NPS) in order to determine an optimal set of computing parameters and propose a robust method for evaluating the noise properties of imaging systems. Noise stationarity in noise volumes acquired with a water phantom on a 128-MDCT and a 320-MDCT scanner were analyzed in the spatial domain in order to define locally stationary VOIs. The influence of the computing parameters in the 3D NPS measurement: the sampling distances bx,y,z and the VOI lengths Lx,y,z, the number of VOIs NVOI and the structured noise were investigated to minimize measurement errors. The effect of the VOI locations on the NPS was also investigated. Results showed that the noise (standard deviation) varies more in the r-direction (phantom radius) than z-direction plane. A 25 × 25 × 40 mm(3) VOI associated with DFOV = 200 mm (Lx,y,z = 64, bx,y = 0.391 mm with 512 × 512 matrix) and a first-order detrending method to reduce structured noise led to an accurate NPS estimation. NPS estimated from off centered small VOIs had a directional dependency contrary to NPS obtained from large VOIs located in the center of the volume or from small VOIs located on a concentric circle. This showed that the VOI size and location play a major role in the determination of NPS when images are not stationary. This study emphasizes the need for consistent measurement methods to assess and compare image quality in CT.

The media accountability of independent regulatory agencies

Independent regulatory agencies (IRAs) are increasingly attracting academic and societal attention, as they represent the institutional cornerstone of the regulatory state and play a key role in policy-making. Besides the expected benefits in terms of credibility and efficiency, these regulators are said to bring about a 'democratic deficit', following their statutory separation from democratic institutions. Consequently, a 'multi-pronged system of control' is required. This article focuses on a specific component of this system, that is, the media. The goal is to determine whether media coverage of IRAs meets the necessary prerequisites to be considered a potential 'accountability forum' for regulators. The results of a comparison of two contrasted cases - the British and Swiss competition commissions - mostly support the expectations, because they show that media coverage of IRAs corresponds to that of the most relevant policy issues and follows the regulatory cycle. Furthermore, a systematic bias in media coverage can be excluded.