This thesis takes a fresh look at software, treating it as a document, manuscript, corpus, or text to be consumed among communities of programmers and uncovering the social roles of these texts within two specific sub-communities and comparing them. In the paper, the social roles of the texts are placed within the context of the technical and cultural constraints and environments in which programs are written. Within that context, the comments emphasize the metaphoric status of programming languages and the social role of the comments themselves. These social roles are combined with the normative intentions for each comment, creating a dynamic relationship of form and function for both normative and identity-oriented purposes. The relationship of form and function is used as a unifying concept for a more detailed investigation of the construction of comments, including a look at a literary device that relies on the plural pronoun "we" as the subject. The comments used in this analysis are derived from within the source code of the Linux kernel and from a Corporate environment in the US. / Master of Science

The movement towards open access has allowed academic researchers to communicate and share their scholarly content more widely by being freely available to Internet users. However, there are still issues of concern among faculty in regards to making their scholarly output open access. This study surveyed Virginia Tech faculty (N = 264) awareness and attitudes toward open access practices. In addition, faculty were asked to identify factors that inhibited or encouraged their participation in open access repositories. Findings indicate that while the majority of Virginia Tech faculty are seeking to publish in open access, many are unaware of the open access services provided by the university and even less are using the services available to them. Time, effort, and costs were identified as factors inhibiting open access and data sharing practices. Differences in awareness and attitudes towards open access were observed among faculty ranks and areas of research. Virginia Tech will need to increase faculty awareness of institutional open access repositories and maximize benefits over perceived costs if there is to be more faculty participation in open access practices. / Master of Arts / The movement towards open access has allowed academic researchers to communicate and share their scholarly content more widely by being freely available to Internet users. However, there are still issues of concern among faculty in regards to making their scholarly output open access. This study surveyed Virginia Tech faculty (N = 264) awareness and attitudes toward open access practices. In addition, faculty were asked to identify factors that inhibited or encouraged their participation in open access repositories. Findings indicate that while the majority of Virginia Tech faculty are seeking to publish in open access, many are unaware of the open access services provided by the university and even less are using the services available to them. Time, effort, and costs were identified as factors inhibiting open access and data sharing practices. Differences in awareness and attitudes towards open access were observed among faculty ranks and areas of research. Virginia Tech will need to increase faculty awareness of institutional open access repositories and maximize benefits over perceived costs if there is to be more faculty participation in open access practices.

Die aktuelle Ausgabe gibt einen Überblick über das Potenzial von Open Educational Resources (OER) in der Hochschullehre und die förderpolitischen Maßnahmen, um dieses zu unterstützen. Es werden einige wichtige Beispiele für Initiativen wie OERSI und Twillo aufgeführt. Außerdem wird auf die Fortschritte in Sachsen eingegangen.

Yes / The present study investigates the turbulent hydrodynamics in an open channel flow with an emergent and sparse vegetation patch placed in the middle of the channel. The dimensions of the rigid vegetation patch are 81 cm long and 24 cm wide and it is prepared by a 7× 10 array of uniform acrylic cylinders by maintaining 9 cm and 4 cm spacing between centers of two consecutive cylinders along streamwise and lateral directions respectively. From the leading edge of the patch, the observed nature of time averaged flow velocities along streamwise, lateral and vertical directions is not consistent up to half length of the patch; however the velocity profiles develop a uniform behavior after that length. In the interior of the patch, the magnitude of vertical normal stress is small in comparison to the magnitudes of streamwise and lateral normal stresses. The magnitude of Reynolds shear stress profiles decreases with increasing downstream length from the leading edge of the vegetation patch and the trend continues even in the wake region downstream of the trailing edge. The increased magnitude of turbulent kinetic energy profiles is noticed from leading edge up to a certain length inside the patch; however its value decreases with further increasing downstream distance. A new mathematical model is proposed to predict time averaged streamwise velocity inside the sparse vegetation patch and the proposed model shows good agreement with the experimental data. / Debasish Pal received financial assistance from SRIC Project of IIT Kharagpur (Project code: FVP)

Yes / Effective and efficient healthcare not only depends on good interpersonal communication but also on the ability of organisations to communicate successfully and professionally. Yet organisations can become entrenched in rules, regulations and expected behaviours that stifle creative responses to work situations. Deep-seated bureaucracy can alienate the personal, and is made even more challenging if the organisation has multi-sites. This chapter will examine the many varied structures of organisation, and how communication flow within organisations can limit or expand inclusion of staff members within its boundaries. This chapter offers several barriers to good organisational communication and suggests ways these hurdles can be overcome. The ethics of healthcare practice is discussed in relation to the effect on the individual and the organisation, highlighting how both parties could respond to avoid conflict, clash and threats to professionalism. Above all, this chapter emphasises how open and honest personcentred communication in an organisation can lead to healthy outcomes for staff and patients alike.

Intelligence analysts today are faced with many challenges, chief among them being the need to fuse disparate streams of data and rapidly arrive at analytical decisions and quantitative predictions for use by policy makers. A forecasting tool to anticipate key events of interest is an invaluable aid in helping analysts cut through the chatter. We present the design of user interfaces for the EMBERS system, an anticipatory intelligence system that ingests myriad open source data streams (e.g., news, blogs, tweets, economic and financial indicators, search trends) to generate forecasts of significant societal-level events such as disease outbreaks, protests, and elections. A key research issue in EMBERS is not just to generate high-quality forecasts but provide interfaces for analysts so they can understand the rationale behind these forecasts and pose why, what-if, and other exploratory questions. This thesis presents the design and implementation of three visualization interfaces for EMBERS. First, we illustrate how the rationale behind forecasts can be presented to users through the use of an audit trail and its associated visualization. The audit trail enables an analyst to drill-down from a final forecast down to the raw (and processed) data sources that contributed to the forecast. Second, we present a forensics tool called Reverse OSI that enables analysts to investigate if there was additional information either in existing or new data sources that can be used to improve forecasting. Unlike the audit trail which captures the transduction of data from raw feeds into alerts, Reverse OSI enables us to posit connections from (missed) forecasts back to raw feeds. Finally, we present an interactive machine learning approach for analysts to steer the construction of machine learning mod-els. This provides fine-grained control into tuning tradeoffs underlying EMBERS. Together, these three interfaces support a range of functionality in EMBERS, from visualization of algorithm output to a complete framework for user feedback via a tight human-algorithm loop. They are currently being utilized by a range of user groups in EMBERS: analysts, social scientists, and machine learning developers, respectively. / Master of Science

The design of public open spaces frequently does not address the physical and psychological needs of their users with regard to their ages. This research gathered and restated the needs and preferences of teenagers, as an understudied group, in public open spaces, with an emphasis on neighborhood parks. Utilizing a neighborhood park in Roanoke, Virginia, the study developed findings that can influence the design of public open spaces, with the goals of providing social and physical benefits of neighborhood parks for teenagers. This research was conducted through two phases of interviews. The first phase of interviews took place with professionals who had experience in working with teenagers. The data collected in the first phase of interviews with adults were utilized for the second phase of interviews, which were with teenagers. Experimental models of the study site were created for the second phase to assist the interviewees in visualizing the various designs. In the second phase, the design options were presented to the teenaged study group in response to teenagers' characteristics and needs as determined by the outcomes of the first phase of interviews. The teenagers were asked to state their preferences among the design options. The different options for designing neighborhood parks utilized a neighborhood park in Roanoke, Virginia, as a study site. The findings of this research suggest that teenagers prefer to utilize spaces closer to the front of the park, by its edges, entrances, and exits, and the parking lot. These findings suggest that there may be no need to design specific spaces dedicated for teenagers in public spaces; however teenager's preferences should be considered in the design process of public spaces. Based on the findings of this research and the suggested relationships among the design attributes of neighborhood parks and teenagers' use of space, this research suggests that providing public spaces is linked with increased opportunities for the social development of teenagers. The primary implications of the findings of this research could help inform landscape architects and urban planners in their designs of future public open spaces that address the needs of teenagers. / Master of Landscape Architecture

Für den Umstieg von Closed Access auf Open Access haben sich Article Processing Charges (APCs) als vorherrschendes Geschäftsmodell mit Verlagen etabliert. Die Bearbeitung und das Monitoring von APCs stellt, so die Ausgangsthese dieser Arbeit, Universitätsbibliotheken vor große Herausforderungen, da Publikationszahlen und -kosten stetig steigen. Die Arbeit erhebt den aktuellen Stand an acht Einrichtungen mittels leitfadengestützter qualitativer Expert*inneninterviews. Zur Auswertung der Interviews kam die inhaltlich-strukturierende qualitative Inhaltsanalyse zur Anwendung. Leitende Forschungsfragen für die Untersuchung waren: Wie gestalten sich die Workflows bei der Bearbeitung und dem Monitoring von APCs an deutschen Universitätsbibliotheken? Welche Arbeitsinstrumente kommen zum Einsatz? Sind die eingesetzten Systeme interoperabel? Welche Metadaten werden wo erfasst? Was wissen die Bibliotheken über dezentrale Kosten? Die Auswertung der Studie zeigt, dass effiziente und skalierbare Arbeitsprozesse und -instrumente an deutschen Universitätsbibliotheken nur begrenzt etabliert sind, sich jedoch im Aufbau befinden. Die Workflows sind oftmals von fehlender Interoperabilität der eingesetzten Arbeitsinstrumente geprägt. Die acht Einrichtungen organisieren die einzelnen Workflowschritte sehr heterogen. Eine zentrale Rechnungsabwicklung für alle Publikationskosten einer Universität ist nicht üblich. Für die Bearbeitung und Überwachung von APCs kommen in der Regel mehrere Arbeitsinstrumente zum Einsatz, die von Bibliothek zu Bibliothek variieren. Die wenigsten Bibliotheken dokumentieren alle für das Monitoring empfohlenen Metadaten. Zudem erfasst kaum eine Einrichtung alle Metadaten in einem einzigen Informationssystem. Sehr detaillierte Kenntnisse besitzen die Bibliotheken bezüglich der Kosten, die über Publikationsfonds abgewickelt werden. Hier ist das Monitoring etabliert und funktioniert gut. Anders verhält es sich mit dezentralen Kosten, sodass ein Überblick über die Gesamtkosten des Publizierens oftmals fehlt.:1 Einleitung 2 Hintergrund – Open-Access-Transformation 2.1 Open Access 2.2 Der Goldene Weg 2.3 Geschäftsmodell Article Processing Charges 2.4 Publikationsfonds 2.5 Kosten 2.6 Initiativen 3 Ausgangslage – Bearbeitung und Monitoring von APCs 3.1 Workflows zur Bearbeitung von APCs 3.2 Arbeitsinstrumente für die Bearbeitung und das Monitoring von APCs 3.3 Interoperabilität zwischen den Arbeitsinstrumenten 3.4 Erfassung von Metadaten 3.5 Erfassung dezentraler Kosten 4 Methodisches Vorgehen 4.1 Forschungsdesign 4.2 Erhebungsmethode – leitfadengestütztes qualitatives Expert*inneninterview 4.2.1 Erhebungsinstrument – Interviewleitfaden 4.2.2 Stichprobe – Auswahl der Expert*innen 4.2.3 Durchführung der leitfadengestützen Expert*inneninterviews 4.3 Aufbereitung des Materials – Transkription 4.4 Auswertungsmethode – inhaltlich-strukturierende qualitative Inhaltsanalyse 5 Ergebnisbericht 5.1 Workflow zur Bearbeitung von APCs 5.1.1 Arbeitsschritte 5.1.2 Medienbrüche 5.1.3 Zusammenarbeit mit Dienstleistern 5.1.4 Verantwortlichkeiten 5.2 Arbeitsinstrumente für die Bearbeitung und das Monitoring von APCs 5.3 Interoperabilität der Arbeitsinstrumente 5.4 Erfassung Metadaten 5.4.1 Erfasste Metadaten und Arbeitsinstrumente 5.4.2 Erfassung dezentraler Kosten 5.4.3 Reports 5.5 Herausforderungen bei der Bearbeitung und beim Monitoring von APCs 5.6 Was funktioniert gut bei der Bearbeitung und beim Monitoring von APCs 5.7 Bewertung des Geschäftsmodells APC 6 Zusammenfassung und Diskussion der Ergebnisse 6.1 Workflow zur Bearbeitung von APCs 6.2 Arbeitsinstrumente für die Bearbeitung und das Monitoring von APCs 6.3 Interoperabilität zwischen den Arbeitsinstrumenten 6.4 Erfassung von Metadaten 6.5 Herausforderungen bei der Bearbeitung und beim Monitoring von APCs 6.6 Was funktioniert gut bei der Bearbeitung und beim Monitoring von APCs 6.7 Bewertung des Geschäftsmodells APCs 7 Fazit

Yes / This study considers the effects of financial development on output in a panel cointegration framework, focusing on the implications of trade and financial openness. Our analysis indicates that after controlling for cross-sectional dependence, the typical relationship between finance and output does not hold in the long run. This relationship, however, is re-established once we account for economic openness. While trade openness emerges as more important for developing countries, financial openness is more important for advanced economies. In the long run, causality runs from financial development to output in the advanced economies, while in developing economies causality is bidirectional. There is no short-run causality between financial development and output, however.

Yes / Government legislation and calls for greater levels of oversight and transparency are leading public bodies to publish their raw datasets online. Policy makers and elected officials anticipate that the accessibility of open data through online Government portals for citizens will enable public engagement in policy making through increased levels of fact based content elicited from open data. The usability and benefits of such open data are being argued as contributing positively towards public sector reforms, which are under extreme pressures driven by extended periods of austerity. However, there is very limited scholarly studies that have attempted to empirically evaluate the performance of government open data websites and the acceptance and use of these data from a citizen perspective. Given this research void, an adjusted diffusion of innovation model based on Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory (DOI) is proposed and used in this paper to empirically determine the predictors influencing the use of public sector open data. A good understanding of these predictors affecting the acceptance and use of open data will likely assist policy makers and public administrations in determining the policy instruments that can increase the acceptance and use of open data through an active promotion campaign to engage-contribute-use.