Bottom-up Process Research Articles

Building public trust and confidence in secondary use of health data in Ireland

Abstract Background Secondary use of health data can drive research and healthcare improvements with implications for policy and practice. However, relevant legislation, implementation of technical safeguards, and ethical data management are essential. Existing evidence suggests general public support for secondary data use, but with specific concerns about privacy, confidentiality, misuse of data and trust. The aim of this study is to explore key stakeholders’ perspectives on secondary health data use in Ireland, and mechanisms to build a culture of trust. Methods The study adopts a qualitative cross-sectional approach. Participants include academics and researchers, healthcare professionals, data controllers and ethics experts, industry, and patients and public, recruited through purposive sampling. Data is collected through focus groups discussions, and reflexive thematic analysis is employed. Results The preliminary results suggest that benefits of secondary data use include access to large datasets, streamlined research, reduced bias, and cost-effectiveness, which may lead to improved patient outcomes. Barriers include an underdeveloped national data infrastructure, difficulties with access and linkage, complex ethical regulation, and narrow predetermined indices of health. Concerns related to data sharing are context-dependent, and influenced by patients’ socio-demographic characteristics. Trust appears to be both a bottom-up and top-down process, facilitated through clear communication, organizational openness, transparency, accountability, fairness, respect, and patient and public involvement (PPI). Conclusions The study identifies strong support for secondary health data use among the stakeholders, notwithstanding an identified need for structural improvements, strong safeguards, education and training, and meaningful PPI. This research helps inform public health practice and policies towards building a culture of trust pertaining to secondary data use. Key messages • This study produces novel insights to help advance research and policy on the barriers and facilitators to building trust and confidence in the access and use of health data for secondary purposes. • This study contributes to qualitative research methods related to eliciting people's views and perspectives in a safe, collaborative and efficient manner.

Spatial evolution of the wake of discrete roughness elements in a turbulent boundary layer at a moderate Reynolds number

In this study, the effect of cylindrical discrete roughness elements on multiscale turbulent motions in a canonical turbulent boundary layer was explored. Flow fields with a considerably large field of view in streamwise—wall-normal planes—were measured by two-dimensional particle image velocimetry. It was found that large-scale motions and very-large-scale motions in the outer layer of the middle-to-far-wake regime are enhanced due to the bottom-up process of roughness-introduced disturbance, where vortical structures shedding from the roughness elements lift up to higher flow layers as they convect downstream, thus promoting the cross-layer interaction. The modulation effect was found to extend to the lower bound of the outer region and persist longer than traditionally believed. An interesting finding is that in the near-wall region of the far-wake regime, small-to-moderate-scale components of Reynolds shear stress is suppressed, which may be associated with the inhibition of the generation of near-wall prograde vortical structures. This study offers a new perspective for turbulent control by passive discrete elements.

The contested role of AI ethics boards in smart societies: a step towards improvement based on board composition by sortition

The recent proliferation of AI scandals led private and public organisations to implement new ethics guidelines, introduce AI ethics boards, and list ethical principles. Nevertheless, some of these efforts remained a façade not backed by any substantive action. Such behaviour made the public question the legitimacy of the AI industry and prompted scholars to accuse the sector of ethicswashing, machinewashing, and ethics trivialisation—criticisms that spilt over to institutional AI ethics boards. To counter this widespread issue, contributions in the literature have proposed fixes that do not consider its systemic character and are based on a top-down, expert-centric governance. To fill this gap, we propose to make use of qualified informed lotteries: a two-step model that transposes the documented benefits of the ancient practice of sortition into the selection of AI ethics boards’ members and combines them with the advantages of a stakeholder-driven, participative, and deliberative bottom-up process typical of Citizens’ Assemblies. The model permits increasing the public’s legitimacy and participation in the decision-making process and its deliverables, curbing the industry’s over-influence and lobbying, and diminishing the instrumentalisation of ethics boards. We suggest that this sortition-based approach may provide a sound base for both public and private organisations in smart societies for constructing a decentralised, bottom-up, participative digital democracy.

Heterodox modeling: practicing well-tuned provisioning or commoning with networked multi-agent environments

Market-driven, profit-oriented, mainstream neoclassical economics is increasingly being challenged by alternative approaches such as heterodox economics. This article contributes to broader discussions in this field, especially of social provisioning, and suggests that integrating perspectives from the overlapping fields of media history and history of economy could not only provide valuable insights and attract more supporters, but even initiate a bottom-up transformation process. Historical knowledge regarding how neoclassical economics gained mainstream status in the early postwar decades provides hints on how to popularize non-profit-driven, well-designed approaches to social provisioning, often referred to as commoning. More specifically, the article firstly addresses the necessity of a large-scale appropriation of computational methods, procedures, tools, media, and models to experiment with economic issues, which are usually applied mostly by mainstream profit-driven approaches. Secondly, it presents the implications of such a practice, which I tentatively refer to as heterodox modeling, while remembering the 1960s North American context of business simulation games and their role within the large-scale effort to educate and train the newly-defined class of “business managers.” The article, thirdly, theorizes heterodox modeling as being based on a still imaginary, not-yet implemented, networked multi-agent online environment, which would integrate the modular programming of agent-based models, group exercises, role-playing, gaming, and testing of operations and processes within large-scale socio-ecological networks of commoning. Finally, the article argues not only to model heterodox economic theories, but at the same time to model in heterodox ways and highlight associated implications.

스마트도시사업 조성을 위한 중소도시 리빙랩 운영 사례

This study synthesized case studies of living labs in small and medium-sized cities among various types of projects that have been carried out by local governments as part of the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport's smart city development project. In particular, we derived a plan that can be used as a reference when promoting smart city development projects. Smart cities have been in the spotlight around the world as an alternative urban design method to solve urban problems and improve the quality of life of residents. Likewise, smart city development projects are becoming established in local governments through various public offering projects of central ministries. However, although it is recommended to have a bottom-up process of citizen participation in smart city creation, the weight of the discussion is different in each region, so a systematic discussion to standardize it was necessary. Therefore, solving social problems and social demands can no longer be considered only local issues, and this also applies to the creation of smart cities. In the end, in order to operate a smart city living lab sustainably and successfully, it is necessary to organize learning-evolving subject-specific communication activities along with online and offline-based feedback, which is left as a task for the next research.

Unlocking the power of job design in sports: a systematic review and future research agenda

ABSTRACT Using a Systematic Quantitative Literature Review (SQLR) approach, this article consolidates studies on the job characteristics (top-down process of job design) and job crafting (bottom-up process of job design) components of sport-related jobs. The SQLR maps the emerging research topic of job design in sport and provides a research direction agenda to guide scholarship. Out of 5,974 retrieved documents, a total of 187 academic articles published in English journals between 1988 and 2021 matched the selected terms in title or abstract or keywords. Following a deductive coding process using NVivo 12, the results demonstrated that previous research has been undertaken mainly over the last 15 years with a focus on job characteristics (77%) compared with job crafting (23%). The emphasis in prior research is placed on: (1) sport managers’ “task” and “knowledge” job characteristics; (2) coaches’ “social” job characteristics; (3) referees’ “contextual” job characteristics, and (4) athletic trainers’ “work – life crafting”. Findings were used to develop two models representing the top-down and bottom-up processes of job design in sport. The top-down model illustrates that: task and knowledge job characteristics influence attitudinal and behavioural outcomes; contextual job characteristics build only well-being outcomes; and social job characteristics predict a wide range of job outcomes. The bottom-up model highlights the significance of approach relational crafting, avoidance task crafting and work – life crafting in shaping behavioural and well-being outcomes. The most understudied area is job crafting among sport volunteers, a gap worth examining further in future research.

‘TIONGHOA’ OR ‘CINA’: negotiating Chinese-Indonesians’ preferred identity in the post-reform era

ABSTRACT This paper aims to explore the dynamics evident in views among Chinese-Indonesians regarding the preferred name for their ethnic identity, with particular reference to the 2014 Presidential Decree that changed the official term from ‘Cina’ to ‘Tionghoa’. Using a qualitative approach, the data was collected through surveys and in-depth interviews with a number of purposely selected Chinese-Indonesian participants. In general, the survey results indicated that both older and younger generations of Chinese-Indonesians believe the policy of officially naming their ethnic group is a valid means to eliminate discrimination and negative stereotyping. However, acknowledging their intrinsic heterogeneity, although it is deemed necessary to regulate an ethnic identity term or name, it is likewise important to develop that identity by supporting a bottom-up process that encourages a fair understanding in the wider community that being ‘Cina’, ‘Tionghoa’ or ‘Chindo/Cindo’ are an integral element of Indonesian-ness.

Self-wrinkling coating for impact resistance and mechanical enhancement

Protective materials are essential for personal, electronic, and military defenses owing to their efficient impact-resistant and energy-absorbing properties. Inspired by the bottom-up fabrication process and energy dissipation mechanism of natural organisms with hierarchical structures, we demonstrated a self-wrinkled photo-curing coating as a new protective material for enhancing the anti-impact property of the substrates. Owing to the self-assembly of polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) containing polymeric photoinitiator on the surface, the liquid coating formulation was photo-cured by one-step UV irradiation with simultaneous generation of self-wrinkled surface morphology and a gradient cross-linked architecture. The maximum impact resistance height (hmax) of the glass substrate coated with plain coating increased from 120 to 180 cm when coated with wrinkled gradient coating. Furthermore, the Young’s modulus, fracture stress, and toughness of the wrinkled gradient coating film improved from 39.6 MPa, 2.4 MPa, and 74.1 MJ/cm3 to 235.0 MPa (∼5× increase), 18.5 MPa (∼6.6× increase), and 845.0 MJ/cm3 (∼10.8× increase) compared to the pure coating film as reference. The theoretical simulation and experimental results proved that the surface self-wrinkled morphology and intrinsic hierarchical architecture contribute to the energy dissipation and impact resistance of the cured coating. The photo-curing process, a bottom-up strategy, is conducted in a non-contact mode compared with nano-printing and lithography, enabling bulk materials to be engineered.

Ultralow-loss Optical Waveguides through Balancing Deep-Blue TADF and Orange Room Temperature Phosphorescence in Hybrid Antimony Halide Microstructures.

Harnessing the potential of thermally activated delayed fluorescence (TADF) and room temperature phosphorescence (RTP) is crucial for developing light-emitting diodes (LEDs), lasers, sensors, and many others. However, effective strategies in this domain are still relatively scarce. This study presents a new approach to achieving highly efficient deep-blue TADF (with a PLQY of 25 %) and low-energy orange RTP (with a PLQY of 90 %) through the fabrication of lead-free hybrid halides. This new class of monomeric and dimeric 0D antimony halides can be facilely synthesized using a bottom-up solution process, requiring only a few seconds to minutes, which offer exceptional stability and nontoxicity. By leveraging the highly adaptable molecular arrangement and crystal packing modes, the hybrid antimony halides demonstrate the ability to self-assemble into regular 1D microrod and 2D microplate morphologies. This self-assembly is facilitated by multiple non-covalent interactions between the inorganic cores and organic shells. Notably, these microstructures exhibit outstanding polarized luminescence and function as low-dimensional optical waveguides with remarkably low optical-loss coefficients. Therefore, this work not only presents a pioneering demonstration of deep-blue TADF in hybrid antimony halides, but also introduces 1D and 2D micro/nanostructures that hold promising potential for applications in white LEDs and low-dimensional photonic systems.

Exploring the Relationship between Touristification and Commercial Gentrification from the Perspective of Tourist Flow Networks: A Case Study of Yuzhong District, Chongqing

Existing research has noted a clear interaction between touristification and commercial gentrification; however, the differences between these two coexisting but distinct phenomena require further research. This study uses online big data and quantitative methods to explore the relationship between touristification and commercial gentrification. Taking Yuzhong District in Chongqing as an example, this study constructs an inter-attraction network based on 1306 itineraries extracted from online travel diaries, develops a method to evaluate community tourism centrality based on network analysis, and examines the correlation between community tourism centrality, touristification, and commercial gentrification. The results suggest that attractions with historical value, unique local landscapes, and mixed functions show greater tourism centrality in the tourist flow network. Attractions with similar themes are more likely to be included in one travel route, and the influence of distance is insignificant at the district level. Communities with higher tourism centrality are clustered in old city areas with a rich historic heritage and have experienced profound commercialisation. Although similar, touristification is primarily a bottom-up process, while commercial gentrification tends to be more involved with the top-down urban planning process. This study contributes to the methodological development of network analysis in tourism research and advances the understanding of the different mechanisms of touristification and commercial gentrification.

Culture of Meritocracy, Political Hegemony, and Singapore’s Development

Why have Singapore’s unique developmental state arrangements persisted in a region which has experienced democratic change? This paper argues that this is due to the PAP state’s successful legitimation of its unique brand of meritocracy, one which has both competitive and interventionist elements. During the colonial era, a culture of economic meritocracy evolved in a bottom-up process through social and commercial interactions between the British class and Chinese community. This was then transmuted by the PAP’s top-down imposition of the institutions and discourses of political meritocracy. This cultural hybrid allows the state to sustain its hegemony in the face of progressive social change. Accordingly, our emphasis on the wider institutional environment within which merit is conceived helps to better illuminate Singapore’s challenges of encouraging organic innovation, alleviating social stratification, and opening up its political arena. This paper suggests that the problems in these areas stem not from meritocracy per se, but from the PAP’s “monocentric meritocracy” where merit is narrowly defined and singularly imposed in the post-colonial era.

How the brain controls decision making ina multisensory world.

Sensory systems evolved to provide the organism with information about the environment to guide adaptive behaviour. Neuroscientists and psychologists have traditionally considered each sense independently, a legacy of Aristotle and a natural consequence of their distinct physical and anatomical bases. However, from the point of view of the organism, perception and sensorimotor behaviour are fundamentally multi-modal; after all, each modality provides complementary information about the same world. Classic studies revealed much about where and how sensory signals are combined to improve performance, but these tended to treat multisensory integration as a static, passive, bottom-up process. It has become increasingly clear how this approach falls short, ignoring the interplay between perception and action, the temporal dynamics of the decision process and the many ways by which the brain can exert top-down control of integration. The goal of this issue is to highlight recent advances on these higher order aspects of multisensory processing, which together constitute a mainstay of our understanding of complex, natural behaviour and its neural basis. This article is part of the theme issue 'Decision and control processes in multisensory perception'.

Electrochemical Assembly Strategies of Polymer and Hybrid Thin Films for (Bio)sensors, Charge Storage, and Triggered Release.

In the context of functional and hierarchical materials, electrode reactions coupled with one or more chemical reactions constitute the most powerful bottom-up process for the electrosynthesis of film components and their electrodeposition, enabling the localized functionalization of conductive surfaces using an electrical stimulus. In analogy with developmental biological processes, our group introduced the concept of morphogen-driven film buildup. In this approach, the gradient of a diffusing reactive molecule or ion (called a morphogen) is controlled by an electrical stimulus to locally induce a chemical process (solubility change, hydrolysis, complexation, and covalent reaction) that induces a film assembly. One of the prominent advantages of this technique is the conformal nature of the deposits toward the electrode. This Feature Article presents the contributions made by our group and other researchers to develop strategies for the assembly of different polymer and nanoparticle/polymer hybrid films by using electrochemically generated reagents and/or catalysts. The main electrochemical-chemical approaches for conformal films are described in the case where (i) the products are noncovalent aggregates that spontaneously precipitate on the electrode (film electrodeposition) or (ii) new chemical compounds are generated, which do not necessarily spontaneously precipitate and enable the formation of covalent or noncovalent films (film electrosynthesis). The applications of those electrogenerated films will be described with a focus on charge storage/transport, (bio)sensing, and stimuli-responsive cargo delivery systems.

Visual information processing through the interplay between fine and coarse signal pathways

Object recognition is often viewed as a feedforward, bottom-up process in machine learning, but in real neural systems, object recognition is a complicated process which involves the interplay between two signal pathways. One is the parvocellular pathway (P-pathway), which is slow and extracts fine features of objects; the other is the magnocellular pathway (M-pathway), which is fast and extracts coarse features of objects. It has been suggested that the interplay between the two pathways endows the neural system with the capacity of processing visual information rapidly, adaptively, and robustly. However, the underlying computational mechanism remains largely unknown. In this study, we build a two-pathway model to elucidate the computational properties associated with the interactions between two visual pathways. Specifically, we model two visual pathways using two convolution neural networks: one mimics the P-pathway, referred to as FineNet, which is deep, has small-size kernels, and receives detailed visual inputs; the other mimics the M-pathway, referred to as CoarseNet, which is shallow, has large-size kernels, and receives blurred visual inputs. We show that CoarseNet can learn from FineNet through imitation to improve its performance, FineNet can benefit from the feedback of CoarseNet to improve its robustness to noise; and the two pathways interact with each other to achieve rough-to-fine information processing. Using visual backward masking as an example, we further demonstrate that our model can explain visual cognitive behaviors that involve the interplay between two pathways. We hope that this study gives us insight into understanding the interaction principles between two visual pathways.

Different mechanisms underpin the decline in growth of anchovies and sardines of the Bay of Biscay.

Declines in individuals' growth in exploited fish species are generally attributed to evolutionary consequences of size-selective fishing or to plastic responses due to constraints set by changing environmental conditions dampening individuals' growth. However, other processes such as growth compensation and non-directional selection can occur and their importance on the overall phenotypic response of exploited populations has largely been ignored. Using otolith growth data collected in European anchovy and sardine of the Bay of Biscay (18 cohorts from 2000 to 2018), we parameterized the breeder's equation to determine whether declines in size-at-age in these species were due to an adaptive response (i.e. related to directional or non-directional selection differentials within parental cohorts) or a plastic response (i.e. related to changes in environmental). We found that growth at age-0 in anchovy declined between parents and their offspring when biomass increased and the selective disappearance of large individuals was high in parents. Therefore, an adaptive response probably occurred in years with high fishing effort and the large increase in biomass after the collapse of this stock maintained this adaptive response subsequently. In sardine offspring, higher growth at age-0 was associated with increasing biomass between parents and offspring, suggesting a plastic response to a bottom-up process (i.e. a change in food quantity or quality). Parental cohorts in which selection favoured individuals with high growth compensation produced offspring high catch up growth rates, which may explain the smaller decline in growth in sardine relative to anchovy. Finally, on non-directional selection differentials were not significantly related to the changes in growth at age-0 and growth compensation at age-1 in both species. Although anchovy and sardine have similar ecologies, the mechanisms underlying the declines in their growth are clearly different. The consequences of the exploitation of natural populations could be long lasting if density-dependent processes follow adaptive changes.

Everyday problem solving for US court interpreters and the role of research

This article examines the problem-solving strategies and resources that professional court interpreters in the United States use to address challenges in their daily work, with the goal of investigating the current influence of research on professional practice. The authors report on the first stage of a bipartite study consisting of focus groups conducted in California, New York, and Texas in the spring of 2018, the results of which directly shaped the development of a survey launched at the national level. Participants included a combination of junior and senior interpreters, staff and freelancers, and certified court interpreters with varying degrees of formal interpreter training and education. The anonymized transcripts of these groups were analyzed qualitatively following the principles of thematic analysis and a mixed top-down and bottom-up coding process. The results obtained interrogate the purported divide between theory and practice and reveal valuable information about the areas of professional practice that present challenges for court interpreters, the human and written (scholarly and/or professional) resources that court interpreters use to improve their professional practice and, most germanely, court interpreters’ needs and expectations about scholarly research. Ultimately, the study aims to inform future practice-based research and to improve interpreters’ performance through data-driven suggestions stemming from that research.

Comparative health policy goes qualitative: Broadening the focus of research after COVID-19.

The COVID-19 pandemic has pushed health policy frontstage and exposed the stark differences in government capacities to respond to the crisis. This has created new demands for comparative heath policy to support knowledge creation on a large scale. However, comparative health policy has not necessarily been well prepared; studies have focused on health systems and used typologies together with descriptive, quantitative methods. This makes it difficult to capture the multi-level nature of health policy, the diverse actors involved and the many societal facets of governance performance. We argue for broadening the perspective to include health policy as a bottom-up process with diverse interests. This calls for expanding the methodology of comparative health policy by also using approaches that make greater use of explorative, qualitative research. We introduce possible developmental pathways to illustrate what this may look like. The Pan-European Commission shows how to broaden the definition of comparative health policy, notably as transnational and planetary. The gender analysis matrix illustrates how comparative health policy can strengthen its assessment of performance by focussing on gender equity. The street-level bureaucrat framework highlights how analysing frontline work can help conduct small-scale bottom-up comparisons of health policy. Together, these developmental pathways demonstrate the potential to broaden comparative health policy towards greater responsiveness to the societal performance of governments, such as social inequalities created by the COVID-19 pandemic. This also opens opportunities for strengthening the global outlook of comparative health policy.

A New Approach for Anonymizing Transaction Data with Set Values

This article proposes a new method that can guarantee strong privacy while minimizing information loss in transactional data composed of a set of each attribute value in a relational database, which is not generally well-known structured data. The proposed scheme adopts the same top-down partitioning algorithm as the existing k-anonymity model, using local generalization to optimize safety and CPU execution time. At the same time, the information loss rate, which is a disadvantage of the existing local generalization, is further improved by reallocating transactions through an additional bottom-up tree search process after the partitioning process. Our scheme shows a very fast processing time compared to the HgHs algorithm using generalization and deletion techniques. In terms of information loss, our scheme shows much better performance than any schemes proposed so far, such as the existing local generalization or HgHs algorithm. In order to evaluate the efficiency of our algorithm, the experiment compared its performance with the existing local generalization and the HgHs algorithm, in terms of both execution time and information loss rate. As a result of the experiment, for example, when k is 5 in k-anonymity for the dataset BMS-WebView-2, the execution time of our scheme is up to 255 times faster than the HgHs algorithm, and with regard to the information loss rate, our method showed a maximum rate of 62.37 times lower than the local generalization algorithm.

The Co-Production of a Shared Community Space in Al-Khodor, Karantina, in the Aftermath of the Beirut Port Blast

This paper explores urban recovery as a participatory bottom-up process that highlights the importance and social significance of spaces of shared memories in reconstituting the built as well as the sociocultural fabrics of a place. It examines the multiple modes of engaging local communities in the process of recovering and rehabilitating shared public spaces, including organizing workshops to identify a space of common social significance, co-designing and co-producing a spatial intervention, and maintaining the intervention over the long term. The paper focuses on Karantina, a neighborhood in Beirut that became the site of post-disaster recovery in the aftermath of the Beirut Port blast in August 2020, and the spatial intervention that the urban recovery team at the Beirut Urban Lab implemented in the sub-neighborhood of Al-Khodor. In doing so, the paper contributes experiences from recent work on participatory modes of engaging the local community groups in Al-Khodor. It highlights the importance of community participation in researching, designing, implementing, and maintaining spatial interventions in the near absence of an active government in a country such as Lebanon.

CHAIN: Cyber hierarchy and interactional network

The open complex giant systems, such as energy internet, communication, transportation and environment, have the characteristics of openness, complexity, evolution, hierarchy and largeness, with unclear mechanisms, time-space asynchronization, open-loop system, data compatibility and other challenges. Therefore, a universal architecture is urgently demanded with internal fusion and external interaction. In this paper, we propose an architecture with strong generalizability, namely Cyber Hierarchy and Interactional Network (CHAIN), as a solution to guide the holistic, associated, ordered and dynamic regulation of complex giant systems. CHAIN has the multi-dimensional hierarchical structure and human-machine-environment interactional capability. Based on CHAIN architecture, in terms of end-cloud collaborative battery management system, the bottom-up progressive X-cycle development process with mapping design and validation can promote and regulate the decentralized and multi-layer end-cloud-end framework, further deriving infrastructure-platform-software-data service modes and industry specialization. CHAIN can drive the material-energy-information-value four-chain collaboration through the feedback, fine-tuning, and iteration processes. To construct the interactional and integrated CHAIN, the four optimization directions, basic theory, time-space synchronization, system autonomy and data ecology, are presented to realize the interconnection between multi-scale models, multi-dimensional entities, multi-agent systems and multi-modality data. The proposed CHAIN architecture sheds light on the solution for complex giant systems to construct open and versatile internet of everything (IoE) ecology.