Abstract

The Institution of Plant Engineers (IPlantE) had its origins in the Second World War, when engineers who found themselves responsible for the operation and maintenance of the large excavators and other mobile plant brought from the USA to work open-cast coal met together for the exchange of information and to discuss their problems. These meetings were so successful that the engineers concerned decided to continue them in a more formal manner through the medium of a properly incorporated body. The Institution amalgamated with the Institute of Road Transport Engineers to form a new body called the Society of Operations Engineers (SOE). The Society of Operations Engineers is a small-scale reflection of the engineering profession as a whole, embracing a wide range of disciplines and activities. The purpose of the Society is to promote safe, efficient, and environmentally sustainable operations engineering to the benefit of society. Its vision is to be the preferred professional body for those engaged in the life cycle management of systems, facilities, vehicles, and equipment, and the recognized authority on these matters.

Abstract

More and more interfaces are designed for ‘everybody’, instead of with a specific user-group in mind. In practice, most of them are still used by the ‘typical Internet-user’, the highly educated, white young male with extensive computer and Internet-experience. Amsterdam-based digital city DDS is no exception to this rule. In this article, the interface of DDS is studied with the help of ten first-time users with a more diverse background. Did they face any barriers in using DDS? And what kind of work did they need to perform to use the interface? This study shows that the most serious problems the first-time users faced were not caused by a lack of skill, but by the different technological frame they had. Thus, a script-analysis with the help of ‘outsiders’ seems to be an effective way to uncover some exclusion-processes of a digital city.

Abstract

mong the several findings deriving from the application of complex network formalism to the investigation of natural phenomena, the fact that linguistic constructions follow power laws presents special interest for its potential implications for psychology and brain science. By corresponding to one of the most essentially human manifestations, such language-related properties suggest that similar dynamics may also be inherent to the brain areas related to language and associative memory, and perhaps even consciousness. The present work reports a preliminary experimental investigation aimed at characterizing and modeling the flow of sequentially induced associations between words from the English language in terms of complex networks. The data is produced through a psychophysical experiment where a word is presented to the subject, who is requested to associate another word. Complex network and graph theory formalism and measurements are applied in order to characterize the experimental data. Several interesting results are identified, including the characterization of attraction basins, association asymmetries, context biasing, as well as a possible power-law underlying word associations, which could be explained by the appearance of strange loops along the hierarchical structure underlying word categories. Comment: 5 pages, 6 figures, 3 table Document type: Preprint