The cost, usability and power efficiency of available wildlife monitoring equipment currently inhibits full ground‐level coverage of many natural systems. Developments over the last decade in ...technology, open science, and the sharing economy promise to bring global access to more versatile and more affordable monitoring tools, to improve coverage for conservation researchers and managers.
Here we describe the development and proof‐of‐concept of a low‐cost, small‐sized and low‐energy acoustic detector: “AudioMoth.” The device is open‐source and programmable, with diverse applications for recording animal calls or human activity at sample rates of up to 384 kHz. We briefly outline two ongoing real‐world case studies of large‐scale, long‐term monitoring for biodiversity and exploitation of natural resources. These studies demonstrate the potential for AudioMoth to enable a substantial shift away from passive continuous recording by individual devices, towards smart detection by networks of devices flooding large and inaccessible ecosystems.
The case studies demonstrate one of the smart capabilities of AudioMoth, to trigger event logging on the basis of classification algorithms that identify specific acoustic events. An algorithm to trigger recordings of the New Forest cicada (Cicadetta montana) demonstrates the potential for AudioMoth to vastly improve the spatial and temporal coverage of surveys for the presence of cryptic animals. An algorithm for logging gunshot events has potential to identify a shotgun blast in tropical rainforest at distances of up to 500 m, extending to 1 km with continuous recording.
AudioMoth is more energy efficient than currently available passive acoustic monitoring devices, giving it considerably greater portability and longevity in the field with smaller batteries. At a build cost of ∼US$43 per unit, AudioMoth has potential for varied applications in large‐scale, long‐term acoustic surveys. With continuing developments in smart, energy‐efficient algorithms and diminishing component costs, we are approaching the milestone of local communities being able to afford to remotely monitor their own natural resources.
The high cost of what have historically been sophisticated research-related sensors and tools has limited their adoption to a relatively small group of well-funded researchers. This paper provides a ...methodology for applying an open-source approach to design and development of a colorimeter. A 3-D printable, open-source colorimeter utilizing only open-source hardware and software solutions and readily available discrete components is discussed and its performance compared to a commercial portable colorimeter. Performance is evaluated with commercial vials prepared for the closed reflux chemical oxygen demand (COD) method. This approach reduced the cost of reliable closed reflux COD by two orders of magnitude making it an economic alternative for the vast majority of potential users. The open-source colorimeter demonstrated good reproducibility and serves as a platform for further development and derivation of the design for other, similar purposes such as nephelometry. This approach promises unprecedented access to sophisticated instrumentation based on low-cost sensors by those most in need of it, under-developed and developing world laboratories.
Summary
Meta‐analysis and meta‐regression are statistical methods for synthesizing and modelling the results of different studies, and are critical research synthesis tools in ecology and ...evolutionary biology (E&E). However, many E&E researchers carry out meta‐analyses using software that is limited in its statistical functionality and is not easily updatable. It is likely that these software limitations have slowed the uptake of new methods in E&E and limited the scope and quality of inferences from research syntheses.
We developed OpenMEE: Open Meta‐analyst for Ecology and Evolution to address the need for advanced, easy‐to‐use software for meta‐analysis and meta‐regression. OpenMEE has a cross‐platform, easy‐to‐use graphical user interface (GUI) that gives E&E researchers access to the diverse and advanced statistical functionalities offered in R, without requiring knowledge of R programming.
OpenMEE offers a suite of advanced meta‐analysis and meta‐regression methods for synthesizing continuous and categorical data, including meta‐regression with multiple covariates and their interactions, phylogenetic analyses, and simple missing data imputation. OpenMEE also supports data importing and exporting, exploratory data analysis, graphing of data, and summary table generation.
As intuitive, open‐source, free software for advanced methods in meta‐analysis, OpenMEE meets the current and pressing needs of the E&E community for teaching meta‐analysis and conducting high‐quality syntheses. Because OpenMEE's statistical components are written in R, new methods and packages can be rapidly incorporated into the software. To fully realize the potential of OpenMEE, we encourage community development with an aim to advance the capabilities of meta‐analyses in E&E.
Forecast combinations: An over 50-year review Wang, Xiaoqian; Hyndman, Rob J.; Li, Feng ...
International journal of forecasting,
October-December 2023, 2023-10-00, Letnik:
39, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Odprti dostop
Forecast combinations have flourished remarkably in the forecasting community and, in recent years, have become part of mainstream forecasting research and activities. Combining multiple forecasts ...produced for a target time series is now widely used to improve accuracy through the integration of information gleaned from different sources, thereby avoiding the need to identify a single “best” forecast. Combination schemes have evolved from simple combination methods without estimation to sophisticated techniques involving time-varying weights, nonlinear combinations, correlations among components, and cross-learning. They include combining point forecasts and combining probabilistic forecasts. This paper provides an up-to-date review of the extensive literature on forecast combinations and a reference to available open-source software implementations. We discuss the potential and limitations of various methods and highlight how these ideas have developed over time. Some crucial issues concerning the utility of forecast combinations are also surveyed. Finally, we conclude with current research gaps and potential insights for future research.
► We explore the relationship between product designs and organizational designs. ► We compare open source software with software developed by commercial firms. ► We measure modularity by capturing ...the level of coupling between components. ► We find that loosely coupled organizations tend to develop more modular products. ► The differences in modularity are substantial—up to a factor of six in our sample.
A variety of academic studies argue that a relationship exists between the structure of an organization and the design of the products that this organization produces. Specifically, products tend to “mirror” the architectures of the organizations in which they are developed. This dynamic occurs because the organization's governance structures, problem solving routines and communication patterns constrain the space in which it searches for new solutions. Such a relationship is important, given that product architecture has been shown to be an important predictor of product performance, product variety, process flexibility and even the path of industry evolution.
We explore this relationship in the software industry. Our research takes advantage of a natural experiment, in that we observe products that fulfill the same function being developed by very different organizational forms. At one extreme are commercial software firms, in which the organizational participants are tightly-coupled, with respect to their goals, structure and behavior. At the other, are open source software communities, in which the participants are much more loosely-coupled by comparison. The mirroring hypothesis predicts that these different organizational forms will produce products with distinctly different architectures. Specifically, loosely-coupled organizations will develop more modular designs than tightly-coupled organizations. We test this hypothesis, using a sample of matched-pair products.
We find strong evidence to support the mirroring hypothesis. In all of the pairs we examine, the product developed by the loosely-coupled organization is significantly more modular than the product from the tightly-coupled organization. We measure modularity by capturing the level of coupling between a product's components. The magnitude of the differences is substantial—up to a factor of six, in terms of the potential for a design change in one component to propagate to others. Our results have significant managerial implications, in highlighting the impact of organizational design decisions on the technical structure of the artifacts that these organizations subsequently develop.
Open‐source practices and resources in magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) have increased substantially in recent years. This trend started with software and data being published open‐source and, more ...recently, open‐source hardware designs have become increasingly available. These developments towards a culture of sharing and establishing nonexclusive global collaborations have already improved the reproducibility and reusability of code and designs, while providing a more inclusive approach, especially for low‐income settings. Community‐driven standardization and documentation efforts are further strengthening and expanding these milestones. The future of open‐source MRI is bright and we have just started to discover its full collaborative potential. In this review we will give an overview of open‐source software and open‐source hardware projects in human MRI research.
Open‐source practices and resources in MRI have increased substantially in recent years. These advancements have fostered a culture of sharing and establishing nonexclusive global collaborations, leading to improved reproducibility and reusability of code and devices.
This book delivers an in-depth examination of the policy, legal, and commercial structures relating to the usage and exploitation of Open Source Software, enabling readers to understand the legal ...environment within which Open Source operates.
•Open innovation communities are key strategic alliance partners for companies.•Companies must select the ‘right’ community to partner with on the basis of strategic goals.•Companies judge value of ...an open innovation community based on the community’s health, and ecosystem health.•A healthy open innovation community is one that is vibrant, quality-focused, and friendly to companies.•Evaluating an open innovation community means focusing more on value creation than on proprietary value capture.
Organizations build strategic alliances with other firms with the intent of tapping into partners’ resources and capturing long-term value from these relationships. Such partnerships are typically governed by contractual or equity arrangements with clear mutual obligations. More recently, however, organizations have begun to seek strategic partnerships with open innovation communities, which are novel digitally enabled forms of organizing, and where contractual commitments are not possible. Thus, selecting the right open innovation community as an alliance partner becomes a more complex decision. We follow how the organizational decision makers, in two technology firms that were pioneers of forming strategic alliances with open innovation communities, developed metrics around making such decisions. We build upon Shah and Swaminathan’s (2008) contingency model of alliance partner selection and consider how it applies to the case of partnering with open innovation communities. This framework was useful in to frame our findings, yet our work recognizes and builds upon two key differences: 1) the evaluation metrics used in selecting an open innovation community were more focused on value creation than value capture; and 2) open ecosystem considerations, and not just partner-specific metrics, featured prominently in this type of alliance partner evaluation. We develop the notions of community and ecosystem health to refer to these new metrics.
Open source software projects rely on the voluntary efforts of thousands of software developers, yet we know little about why developers choose to participate in this collective development process. ...This paper inductively derives a framework for understanding participation from the perspective of the individual software developer based on data from two software communities with different governance structures.
In both communities, a need for software-related improvements drives initial participation. The majority of participants leave the community once their needs are met, however, a small subset remains involved. For this set of developers, motives evolve over time and participation becomes a hobby. These hobbyists are critical to the long-term viability of the software code: They take on tasks that might otherwise go undone and work to maintain the simplicity and modularity of the code. Governance structures affect this evolution of motives. Implications for firms interested in implementing hybrid strategies designed to combine the advantages of open source software development with proprietary ownership and control are discussed.
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Both the free and open source software (FOSS) as well as the distributed digital manufacturing of free and open source hardware (FOSH) has shown particular promise among scientists ...for developing custom scientific tools. Early research found substantial economic savings for these technologies, but as the open source design paradigm has grown by orders of magnitude it is possible that the savings observed in the early work was isolated to special cases. Today there are examples of open source technology for science in the vast majority of disciplines and several resources dedicated specifically to publishing them. Do the tremendous economic savings observed earlier hold today? To answer that question, this study evaluates free and open source technologies in the two repositories compared to proprietary functionally-equivalent tools as a function of their use of Arduino-based electronics, RepRap-class 3-D printing, as well as the combination of the two. The results of the review find overwhelming evidence for a wide range of scientific tools, that open source technologies provide economic savings of 87% compared to equivalent or lesser proprietary tools. These economic savings increased slightly to 89% for those that used Arduino technology and even more to 92% for those that used RepRap-class 3-D printing. Combining both Arduino and 3-D printing the savings averaged 94% for free and open source tools over commercial equivalents. The results provide strong evidence for financial support of open source hardware and software development for the sciences. Given the overwhelming economic advantages of free and open source technologies, it appears financially responsible to divert funding of proprietary scientific tools and their development in favor of FOSH. Policies were outlined that provide nations with a template for strategically harvesting the opportunities provided by the free and open source paradigm.
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