NUPARM and NUCGEN: software for analysis and generation of sequence dependent nucleic acid structures

Software packages NUPARM and NUCGEN, are described, which can be used to understand sequence directed structural variations in nucleic acids, by analysis and generation of non-uniform structures. A set of local inter basepair parameters (viz. tilt, roll, twist, shift, slide and rise) have been defined, which use geometry and coordinates of two successive basepairs only and can be used to generate polymeric structures with varying geometries for each of the 16 possible dinucleotide steps. Intra basepair parameters, propeller, buckle, opening and the C6...C8 distance can also be varied, if required, while the sugar phosphate backbone atoms are fixed in some standard conformation ill each of the nucleotides. NUPARM can be used to analyse both DNA and RNA structures, with single as well as double stranded helices. The NUCGEN software generates double helical models with the backbone fixed in B-form DNA, but with appropriate modifications in the input data, it can also generate A-form DNA ar rd RNA duplex structures.

The Chinese Television Industry

Television is a massive industry in China, yet fewer people are watching television screens. This ground-breaking study explores how television content is changing, how the Chinese government is responding to the challenges presented by digital media, and how businesses are brokering alliances in both traditional and new media sectors. Table of Contents Acknowledgments p. vi Introduction p. 1 1 Television in Transition p. 8 2 Nation Building p. 34 3 Soft Power p. 56 4 Formats p. 85 5 Channels and Content p. 111 6 Convergence p. 141 7 Rethinking Chinese Television Research p. 164 Bibliography p. 173 Index p. 184

Free software and the law. Out of the frying pan and into the fire: How shaking up intellectual property suits competition law just fine

Free software is viewed as a revolutionary and subversive practice, and in particular has dealt a strong blow to the traditional conception of intellectual property law (although in its current form could be considered a 'hack' of IP rights). However, other (capitalist) areas of law have been swift to embrace free software, or at least incorporate it into its own tenets. One area in particular is that of competition (antitrust) law, which itself has long been in theoretical conflict with intellectual property, due to the restriction on competition inherent in the grant of ‘monopoly’ rights by copyrights, patents and trademarks. This contribution will examine how competition law has approached free software by examining instances in which courts have had to deal with such initiatives, for instance in the Oracle Sun Systems merger, and the implications that these decisions have on free software initiatives. The presence or absence of corporate involvement in initiatives will be an important factor in this investigation, with it being posited that true instances of ‘commons-based peer production’ can still subvert the capitalist system, including perplexing its laws beyond intellectual property.

Understanding the Knowledge Needs of Designers During Design Process in Industry

Product success is substantially influenced by satisfaction of knowledge needs of designers, and many tools and methods have been proposed to support these needs. However, adoption of these methods in industry is minimal. This may be due to an inadequate understanding of the knowledge needs of designers in industry. This research attempts to develop a better understanding of these needs by undertaking descriptive studies in an industry. We propose a taxonomy of knowledge, and evaluate this by analyzing the questions asked by the designers involved in the study during their interactions. Using the taxonomy, we converted the questions asked into a generic form. The generic questions provide an understanding about what knowledge must be captured during design, and what its structure should be.

Software Pipelined Execution of Stream Programs on GPUs

The StreamIt programming model has been proposed to exploit parallelism in streaming applications on general purpose multi-core architectures. This model allows programmers to specify the structure of a program as a set of filters that act upon data, and a set of communication channels between them. The StreamIt graphs describe task, data and pipeline parallelism which can be exploited on modern Graphics Processing Units (GPUs), as they support abundant parallelism in hardware. In this paper, we describe the challenges in mapping StreamIt to GPUs and propose an efficient technique to software pipeline the execution of stream programs on GPUs. We formulate this problem - both scheduling and assignment of filters to processors - as an efficient Integer Linear Program (ILP), which is then solved using ILP solvers. We also describe a novel buffer layout technique for GPUs which facilitates exploiting the high memory bandwidth available in GPUs. The proposed scheduling utilizes both the scalar units in GPU, to exploit data parallelism, and multiprocessors, to exploit task and pipelin parallelism. Further it takes into consideration the synchronization and bandwidth limitations of GPUs, and yields speedups between 1.87X and 36.83X over a single threaded CPU.

Enhancing the learning experiences through Industry-Based Learning from Indonesian university perspective

This paper investigates how students’ learning experience can be enhanced by participating in the Industry-Based Learning (IBL) program. In this program, the university students coming into the industry to experience how the business is run. The students’ learning media is now not coming from the textbooks or the lecturers but from learning by doing. This new learning experience could be very interesting for students but at the same time could also be challenging. The research involves interviewing a number of students from the IBL programs, the academic staff from the participated university who has experience in supervising students and the employees of the industry who supported and supervised the students in their work placements. The research findings offer useful insights and create new knowledge in the field of education and learning. The research contributes to the existing knowledge by providing a new understanding of the topic as it applied to the Indonesian context.

Realisation of University-Industry Collaboration through Industry-Based Learning at Indonesian Higher Education

The collaboration between universities and industries has become increasingly important for the development of Science and Technology. This is particularly more prominent in the Science Technology Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines. Literature suggest that the key element of University-Industry Partnership (UIP) is the exchange of knowledge that is mutually beneficial for both parties. One real example of the collaborations is Industry-Based Learning (IBL) in which university students are coming into industries to experience and learn how the skills and knowledge acquired in the classroom are implemented in work places. This paper investigate how the University-Industry Collaboration program is implemented though Industry-Based Learning (IBL) at Indonesian Universities. The research findings offer useful insights and create a new knowledge in the field of STEM education and collaborative learning. The research will contribute to existing knowledge by providing empirical understanding of this topic. The outcomes can be used to improve the quality of University-Industry Partnership programs at Indonesian Universities and inform Indonesian higher education authorities and their industrial partners of an alternative approach to enhance their IBL programs.

Workplace training and generic and technical skill development in the Australian construction industry

- Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate the current skills gap in both generic and skill areas within the construction industry in Queensland, Australia. - Design/methodology/approach An internet-based survey was administered to collect the opinions of construction employees about the workplace-training environment and their perceptions towards training. The survey intended to address the following research questions, specifically in relation to the construction industry. - Findings The survey results reveal that whilst overall participation in workplace training is high, the current workplace training environments do not foster balanced skill development. The study reveals that in the current absence of a formal and well-balanced training mechanism, construction workers generally resort to their own informal self-development initiatives to develop the needed role-specific theoretical knowledge. - Research limitations/implications The findings of the research are based on the data primarily collected in the construction industry in Queensland, Australia. The data are limited to a single Tier 2 construction company. - Practical implications The findings of this study can be utilised to suggest improvements in the current (or develop new) workplace training initiatives. - Social implications The research suggests that workplace training has positive relationship with career growth. The results suggest that in the construction industry, employees are generally well aware of the importance of workplace training in their career development and they largely appreciate training as being a critical factor for developing their capacity to perform their roles successfully, and to maintain their employability. - Originality/value This paper is unique as it investigates the current skills gap in both generic and skill areas within the construction industry in Queensland, Australia. So far no work has been undertaken to identify and discusses the main method of workplace learning within the Tier 2 industry in the context of Queensland Australia.

Data mining approaches to software fault diagnosis

Automatic identification of software faults has enormous practical significance. This requires characterizing program execution behavior and the use of appropriate data mining techniques on the chosen representation. In this paper, we use the sequence of system calls to characterize program execution. The data mining tasks addressed are learning to map system call streams to fault labels and automatic identification of fault causes. Spectrum kernels and SVM are used for the former while latent semantic analysis is used for the latter The techniques are demonstrated for the intrusion dataset containing system call traces. The results show that kernel techniques are as accurate as the best available results but are faster by orders of magnitude. We also show that latent semantic indexing is capable of revealing fault-specific features.

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.

Use of Document Management Systems - a Case Study of the Finnish Construction Industry

Triggered by the very quick proliferation of Internet connectivity, electronic document management (EDM) systems are now rapidly being adopted for managing the documentation that is produced and exchanged in construction projects. Nevertheless there are still substantial barriers to the efficient use of such systems, mainly of a psychological nature and related to insufficient training. This paper presents the results of empirical studies carried out during 2002 concerning the current usage of EDM systems in the Finnish construction industry. The studies employed three different methods in order to provide a multifaceted view of the problem area, both on the industry and individual project level. In order to provide an accurate measurement of overall usage volume in the industry as a whole telephone interviews with key personnel from 100 randomly chosen construction projects were conducted. The interviews showed that while around 1/3 of big projects already have adopted the use of EDM, very few small projects have adopted this technology. The barriers to introduction were investigated through interviews with representatives for half a dozen of providers of systems and ASP-services. These interviews shed a lot of light on the dynamics of the market for this type of services and illustrated the diversity of business strategies adopted by vendors. In the final study log files from a project which had used an EDM system were analysed in order to determine usage patterns. The results illustrated that use is yet incomplete in coverage and that only a part of the individuals involved in the project used the system efficiently, either as information producers or consumers. The study also provided feedback on the usefulness of the log files.

The Context and Diffusion of Knowledge in the Finnish Jewellery Industry - The role of the House of Fabergé

Researchers within the fields of economic geography and organizational management have extensively studied learning and the prerequisites and impediments for knowledge transfer. This paper combines two discourses within the two subjects: the-communities-of-practice and the learning region approaches, merging them through the so-called ecology of knowledge-approach, which is used to examine the knowledge transfer from the House of Fabergé to the Finnish jewellery industry. We examine the pre-revolution St Petersburg jewellery cluster and the post-revolution Helsinki, and the transfer of knowledge between these two locations through the components of communities of people, institutions and industry. The paper shows that the industrial dynamics of the Finnish modern-day goldsmith industry was inherently shaped both through the transfer and the non-transfer of knowledge. It also contends that the “knowledge-economy” is not anchored in and exclusive for the high technology sector of the late 20th century.

Constructing Stability in Software Product Development during Organizational Restructurings

We all have fresh in our memory what happened to the IT sector only a few years ago when the IT-bubble burst. The upswing of productivity in this sector slowed down, investors lost large investments, many found themselves looking for a new job, and countless dreams fell apart. Product developers in the IT sector have experienced a large number of organizational restructurings since the IT boom, including rapid growth, downsizing processes, and structural reforms. Organizational restructurings seem to be a complex and continuous phenomenon people in this sector have to deal with. How do software product developers retrospectively construct their work in relation to organizational restructurings? How do organizational restructurings bring about specific social processes in product development? This working paper focuses on these questions. The overall aim is to develop an understanding of how software product developers construct their work during organizational restructurings. The theoretical frame of reference is based on a social constructionist approach and discourse analysis. This approach offers more or less radical and critical alternatives to mainstream organizational theory. Writings from this perspective attempt to investigate and understand sociocultural processes by which various realities are created. Therefore these studies aim at showing how people participate in constituting the social world (Gergen & Thatchenkery, 1996); knowledge of the world is seen to be constructed between people in daily interaction, in which language plays a central role. This means that interaction, especially the ways of talking and writing about product development during organizational restructurings, become the target of concern. This study consists of 25 in-depth interviews following a pilot study based on 57 semi-structured interviews. In this working paper I analyze 9 in-depth interviews. The interviews were conducted in eight IT firms. The analysis explores how discourses are constructed and function, as well as the consequences that follow from different discourses. The analysis shows that even though the product developers have experienced many organizational restructurings, some of which have been far-reaching, their accounts build strongly on a stability discourse. According to this discourse product development is, perhaps surprisingly, not influenced to a great extent by organizational restructurings. This does not mean that product development is static. According to the social constructionist approach, product development is constantly being reproduced and maintained in ongoing processes. In other words stable effects are also ongoing achievements and these are of particular interest in this study. The product developers maintain rather than change the product development through ongoing processes of construction, even when they experience continuous extensive organizational restructurings. The discourse of stability exists alongside other discourses, some which contradict each other. Together they direct product development and generate meanings. The product developers consequently take an active role in the construction of their work during organizational restructurings. When doing this they also negotiate credible positions for themselves