In 1976, Cambridge, MA, and Berkeley, CA, responded to concerns about the environmental effects of recombinant DNA by adopting identical biosafety ordinances. This paper explores the mediating factors that explain how scientists and entrepreneurs came to view these regulatory interventions in diametrically distinct ways. We argue that although the regulations were the same, the process behind t...

Much of the research focus in the cooperative control community has been on formation control problems [1, 3, 7, 10, 19]. This focus may be due to the fact that the group control problem can be reduced to well-established single-agent control problems by employing a leader-follower type control strategy. For example, single-agent path planning and trajectory generation techniques can be employe...

A central challenge in information systems development (ISD) refers to the ability to fit the different requirements as perceived by the stakeholders into shared accurate and complete models of the desired system. Focusing on ISD as a language development and formalization process, we claim that its effectiveness depends on the ability to manage the question how people deal with language in pra...

Recent information systems have become large and complex by interacting with each other via networks. This makes assuring dependability of systems much more difficult than ever before. For this problem, we observe that requirement elicitation and risk analysis methods should be tightly connected with assurance methods. Furthermore, requirements should be ensured also in operation in such open e...

The present study's objective was to determine the mechanisms for enhancing the utility of action checklists applied in participatory approach programs for workplace improvements, to identify the benefits of building consensus and to compare their applicability in Asian countries to find the most appropriate configuration for action checklists. Data were collected from eight trainees and 43 tra...

Distributed computing technology allows software engineering teams to work across different locations and times, collaboratively refining documents or diagrams ultimately producing a single agreed outcome. A natural part of this process is the emergence of differences or conflicts reflecting divergent team member perspectives, interpretations, skills or knowledge. This paper describes CONFER (C...

This paper presents N-Site, a distributed consensus building and negotiation support system, which is used to provide geographically dispersed teams with agile access to a Web-based group decision support system. Four teams located in France, Mexico, the Ukraine, and the United States participated in the N-Site project. Each team was required to research the problem using the World Wide Web (WW...

As a relatively recent human phenomenon, cities are the physical culmination of many pre-existing psychological, social and cognitive capacities. The persistent presence of deliberately empty spaces in urban areas both past and present signals the conscious creation and maintenance of those locales at various levels: household, neighbourhood and civic/centralizing. Domestic empty space, in part...

An attempt was made to statistically estimate proposals which survived the discussion to be incorporated in the final agreement in an instance of a Japanese design conversation. Low level speech and vision features of hearer behaviors corresponding to aiduti, noddings and gaze were found to be a positive predictor of survival. The result suggests that non-linguistic hearer responses work as imp...

Communication and learning from each other are part of the success of insect societies. Here, we review a spectrum of social information usage in insects--from inadvertently provided cues to signals shaped by selection specifically for information transfer. We pinpoint the sensory modalities involved and, in some cases, quantify the adaptive benefits. Well substantiated cases of social learning...