NUVIEW:software for display and interactive manipulation of nucleic acid models

The NUVIEW software package allows skeletal models of any double helical nucleic acid molecule to be displayed out a graphics monitor and to apply various rotations, translations and scaling transformations interactively, through the keyboard. The skeletal model is generated by connecting any pair of representative points, one from each of the bases in the basepair. In addition to the above mentioned manipulations, the base residues can be identified by using a locator and the distance between any pair of residues can be obtained. A sequence based color coded display allows easy identification of sequence repeats, such as runs of Adenines. The real time interactive manipulation of such skeletal models for large DNA/RNA double helices, can be used to trace the path of the nucleic acid chain in three dimensions and hence get a better idea of its topology, location of linear or curved regions, distances between far off regions in the sequence etc. A physical picture of these features will assist in understanding the relationship between base sequence, structure and biological function in nucleic acids.

Dancing into the second phase of creative industries

As we enter the second phase of creative industries there is a shift away from the early 1990s ideology of the arts as a creative content provider for the wealth generating ‘knowledge’ economy to an expanded rhetoric encompassing ‘cultural capital’ and its symbolic value. A renewed focus on culture is examined through a regional scan of creative industries in which social engineering of the arts occurs through policy imperatives driven by ‘profit oriented conceptualisations of culture’ (Hornidge 2011, p. 263) In the push for artists to become ‘culturpreneurs’ a trend has emerged where demand for ‘embedded creatives’ (Cunningham 2013) sees an exodus from arts-based employment through use of transferable skills into areas outside the arts. For those that stay, within the performing arts in particular, employment remains project-based, sporadic, underpaid, self-initiated and often self-financed, requiring adaptive career paths. Artist entrepreneurs must balance creation and performance of their art with increasing amounts of time spent on branding, compliance, fundraising and the logistical and commercial requirements of operating in a CI paradigm. The artists’ key challenge thus becomes one of aligning core creative and aesthetic values with market and business considerations. There is also the perceived threat posed by the ‘prosumer’ phenomenon (Bruns 2008), in which digital on-line products are created and produced by those formerly seen as consumers of art or audiences for art. Despite negative aspects to this scenario, a recent study (Steiner & Schneider 2013) reveals that artists are happier and more satisfied than other workers within and outside the creative industries. A lively hybridisation of creative practice is occurring through mobile and interactive technologies with dynamic connections to social media. Continued growth in arts festivals attracts participation in international and transdisciplinary collaborations, whilst cross-sectoral partnerships provide artists with opportunities beyond a socio-cultural setting into business, health, science and education. This is occurring alongside a renewed engagement with place through the rise of cultural precincts in ‘creative cities’ (Florida 2008, Landry 2000), providing revitalised spaces for artists to gather and work. Finally, a reconsideration of the specialist attributes and transferable skills that artists bring to the creative industries suggests ways to dance through both the challenges and opportunities occasioned by the current complexities of arts’ practices.

Adoption processes for EDM, EDI and BIM technologies in the construction industry

Three strategically important uses of IT in the construction industry are the storage and management of project documents on webservers (EDM), the electronic handling of orders and invoices between companies (EDI) and the use of 3-D models including non-geometrical attributes for integrated design and construction (BIM). In a broad longitudinal survey study of IT use in the Swedish Construction Industry the extent of use of these techniques was measured in 1998, 2000 and 2007. The results showed that EDM and EDI are currently already well-established techniques whereas BIM, although it promises the biggest potential benefits to the industry, only seems to be at the beginning of adoption. In a follow-up to the quantitative studies, the factors affecting the decisions to implement EDM, EDI and BIM as well as the actual adoption processes, were studied using semi-structured interviews with practitioners. The theoretical basis for the interview studies was informed by theoretical frameworks from IT-adoption theory, where in particular the UTAUT model has provided the main basis for the analyses presented here. The results showed that the decisions to take the above technologies into use are made on three differ- ent levels: the individual level, the organizational level in the form of a company, and the organiza- tional level in the form of a project. The different patterns in adoption can to some part be explained by where the decisions are mainly taken. EDM is driven from the organisation/project level, EDI mainly from the organisation/company level, and BIM is driven by individuals pioneering the technique.

Information and Decision Technologies

Production scheduling in a flexible manufacturing system (FMS) is a real-time combinatorial optimization problem that has been proved to be NP-complete. Solving this problem needs on-line monitoring of plan execution and requires real-time decision-making in selecting alternative routings, assigning required resources, and rescheduling when failures occur in the system. Expert systems provide a natural framework for solving this kind of NP-complete problems.In this paper an expert system with a novel parallel heuristic approach is implemented for automatic short-term dynamic scheduling of FMS. The principal features of the expert system presented in this paper include easy rescheduling, on-line plan execution, load balancing, an on-line garbage collection process, and the use of advanced knowledge representational schemes. Its effectiveness is demonstrated with two examples.

Evaluation of two alternative carbon capture and storage technologies

4 p.

Evaluation of Two Alternative Carbon Capture and Storage Technologies: A Stochastic Model

30 p.

Information science and the scientist. A look at information requirements and the technologies available to scientists in the pursuit of information

A review article looking at the type of information requirements commonly shared by scientists and their use of traditional information services. Areas covered include primary requirements of IFE (Institute of Freshwater Ecology) staff, pure versus applied research, informal and personal sources of information, and traditional library and information services. It goes on to describe how research into information systems and technology may improve the wider accessibility and use of information to the scientific community. Technologies covered include online databases, telecommunications, gateways, expert systems, optical technology and applications of CDROM.

Analysis of channel quality reporting mechanisms and their impact into 4G and beyond technologies

206 p.