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![]() ![]() ![]() The reflections presented in this paper are by-products of the data analysis that the author conducted from 2011 to 2012 for a study titled ‘Examining the differences in uptake of antenatal care between young and old women in Zomba, Malawi’. No specific fieldwork or data collection was commissioned for the current study. Actual data management process using NVivo is presented first and is followed by deep reflection of the process. To make this practical, I will use one of the recent studies I have analysed using NVivo. The objective is to provide evidence-based implications of using qualitative data analysis software, so as to keep fellow health researchers well-informed, and consequently allow them to make informed decisions on whether to use CAQDAS or not. In this paper, the author reflects on his own experience of using NVivo. While the issue of mastering CAQDAS has received ample attention, little has been done to address the misconceptions associated with the use of CAQDAS. This may be due to the hassles that one has to go through to master the software and or the misconceptions that are associated with using CAQDAS 7. Although CAQDAS has been available since 1984, very few qualitative health researchers (16%) report using it 7. (Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis) 6 used NVivo to manage data for their respective different study designs. The software is not methodological-specific, it works well with wide range of qualitative research designs and data analysis methods such as discourse analysis, grounded theory, conversation analysis, ethnography, literature reviews, phenomenology, and mixed methods. Moreover, the strength of NVivo lies in its high compatibility to research designs. Additionally, NVivo also has in-built facilities that allow people from different geographical spaces to work on the same data files at the same time through a network. ![]() He stated that above and beyond NUD*IST, NVivo has features such as character-based coding, rich text capabilities and multimedia functions that are crucial for qualitative data management. In his paper, Tom Richards, the co-developer of the program, justified the birth of NVivo in the face of the reputation and long history of NUD*IST. The developers of the software have described it as an improved and expanded version of the NUD*IST 3. NVivo, one of the current popular qualitative data management programs, has its roots in the NUD*IST. The dawn of CAQDAS was marked by the development of a program called Non-numerical Unstructured Data Indexing Searching and Theorizing (NUD*IST), which was specifically designed for qualitative data management in 1980's. To lessen this burden, it is important that health researchers become aware of the possibilities of using Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS) such as ATLAS.ti, MAXqda, NVivo and N6. The systematic and rigorous preparation and analysis of qualitative data is usually time consuming and labour intensive 2. Qualitative research usually produces large amounts of textual data in the form of transcripts and field notes. In recent years, there has been an increase in number of qualitative studies been carried out by health professionals. However, when we want to broaden or deepen our understanding of how things came to be the way they are in our social world, qualitative research has no substitute 1. Quantitative research tells us how often or how many behave in a certain way. CAQDAS are basically data management packages, which support the researcher during analysis. In other words, researchers must equally know that no software can analyse qualitative data. The key message is that unlike statistical software, the main function of CAQDAS is not to analyse data but rather to aid the analysis process, which the researcher must always remain in control of. In this paper, the author reflects on his experience of interacting with one of the popular CAQDAS (NVivo) in order to provide evidence-based implications of using the software. While the issue of mastering CAQDAS has received ample attention, little has been done to address the misconceptions associated with CAQDAS. This may be due to the difficulties that one has to go through to master the software and the misconceptions that are associated with using CAQDAS. Although the CAQDAS has been there for decades, very few qualitative health researchers report using it. However, Computer Assisted Qualitative Data Analysis Software (CAQDAS) are increasingly being developed. For a long time, electronic data analysis has been associated with quantitative methods. ![]() ![]()
![]() The software has an easy-to-use interface that is great for new users just getting started in 3D imaging. It can handle everything related to creating 3D imaging, from modeling, rigging, animation, simulation, rendering, compositing and motion tracking, even video editing and game creation.
![]() ![]() Maintainability 3 DI =30 (Degree of Influence) SEG3300 A&B W2004 R.L. Reusability 3 11.Ğase of Installation 3 12.Ğase of Operation 5 13. Probertġ1 Example (.) Technical Complexity Factors:ġ. Reusability 11.Ğase of Installation 12.Ğase of Operation 13. ![]() Probertġ0 Function Points(.) Technical Complexity Factors:ġ. Probertĩ Function Points(.) STEP 3: Calculate the total UFP (Unadjusted Function Points) STEP 4: Calculate the total TCF (Technical Complexity Factor) by giving a value between 0 and 5 according to the importance of the following points: TCF= *DI SEG3300 A&B W2004 R.L. The value is given by a table: SEG3300 A&B W2004 R.L. ProbertĨ Function Points(.) STEP 2: Multiply each number by a weight factor, according to complexity (simple, average or complex) of the parameter, associated with that number.
![]() ![]() ![]() We strongly believe that San Diego’s workforce can support cutting-edge research in environmental science and that the academic programs offered by local institutions provide skills that are directly transferable to work in the private sector. San Diego’s business community is special as there is substantial collaboration between founders, government, and academia. What is special about San Diego’s business community, and the talent that drives it? We want to highlight the support of Cleantech San Diego, the Southern California Energy Innovation Network, The Maritime Alliance and the The Bluetech Incubator, and the services provided by Connect and the San Diego and Imperial Small Business Development Center. Benchmark Labs has been fortunate to find great mentors, organizations, and local resources during the last few years. We are very grateful to EDC for their support during our company relocation and with the internship program. Tell us about your experience building a small business/startup in San Diego. How has your company pivoted as a result of COVID-19?Īs a result of the pandemic, we expanded our forecasting capabilities beyond traditional weather variables like temperature and relative humidity, as we were involved in a project, in collaboration with NASA scientists, to understand the effects of COVID-19 in the upcoming forest fire season. We will soon have job openings in market research, software engineering, data science, marketing and sales. We were recently awarded a highly competitive National Science Foundation Small Business Research Grant to further develop our forecasting technology and to bring it to market. We are excited about future opportunities for Benchmark Labs and for the region. What does growth look like over the next few years? ![]() Our interns have made us a better company by bringing new voices and experiences to solve our technical challenges. From the company perspective, we believe in giving back to the community and in providing those first training and work opportunities to local students, and we couldn’t be happier with the human and technical capabilities of our current and past interns. ASD’s Internship Program aided us in finding local talent in the areas of software engineering and business research. We became aware of Advancing San Diego thanks to the great team at The Maritime Alliance and the Bluetech Incubator. How did you find out about Advancing San Diego and how your experience has been? Tell us a little bit about your interns and the value they bring. We understood that although microclimates create substantial environmental differences between farms, those differences are not reflected in the weather forecasts available to asset managers, as the current generation of weather models divide the world in grids and everyone inside a grid box receives exactly the same forecast. We founded Benchmark Labs to improve operational margins of farmers by bringing state of the art environmental forecasting technologies to farmers all over the world. Why was your company founded, and what are your current points of focus? We recently moved our headquarters from San Francisco to San Diego with the help of EDC, and our main office is at UTC, courtesy of The BlueTech Incubator. We do so by incorporating in-situ IoT sensor data, machine learning techniques, and weather information to provide actionable forecasts tailored to specific locations and sensors. Tell us about your company?īenchmark Labs provides asset-specific environmental forecasting for the agricultural, energy, and insurance sectors. Read on for more about ASD intern host Benchmark Labs. As part of the third cohort of host companies, Benchmark Labs is a leading provider of IoT-based weather forecasting solutions for the agriculture, energy, and insurance sectors. In this feature, we sat down with Carlos Gaitan, CEO and Co-Founder at Benchmark Labs. To date, ASD has placed 93 student-interns in local businesses, with $455,000 in total wages and support services paid. A key issue for these companies has been a lack of time and resources to recruit the skilled talent necessary to continue their growth.Īs students are closing out their Spring business internship experiences, EDC has rolled out this blog series to highlight the innovative local companies that comprise the third cohort of the program, and the interns they hosted. This program targets small employers with 100 employees or less, which comprise 98 percent of all businesses in San Diego, employ nearly two thirds of San Diegans, and account for 70 percent of job growth. The Advancing San Diego (ASD) Internship Program launched in Summer 2020 in a remote-capacity amid the COVID-19 pandemic and aims to provide up to 100 San Diego-based employers with fully subsidized interns. ![]() ![]() ![]() The reboot received a mostly positive reception, with critics praising Andrew Garfield's performance, the visual style, James Horner's musical score, and the realistic re-imagining and portrayal of the title character, but criticized the number of underdeveloped story-lines, noting the film's deleted scenes. The film premiered on Jin Tokyo, and was released in the United States on July 3, ten years after the release of Spider-Man (2002), in 2D, 3D, and IMAX 3D formats. Tie-ins included a video game by Beenox and Activision. Sony Pictures Entertainment built a promotional website, releasing many previews and launched a viral marketing campaign, among other moves. Michael Riva's last film as production designer was Django Unchained, released five months later and Ziskin's last film as producer was The Butler, released one year later in 2013. Michael Riva and one of the producers Laura Ziskin, who died on Jand June 12, 2011, respectively. ![]() This was also the final American film to be scored by James Horner and released during his lifetime, three years before his death on Jfrom an aircraft accident, as well as the penultimate film for both production designer J. 3ality Technica provided 3D image processing, while Sony Pictures Imageworks handled CGI effects. The film entered post-production in April 2011. Using Red Digital Cinema Camera Company's RED Epic camera, principal photography started in December 2010 in Los Angeles before moving to New York City. New designs were introduced from the comics, such as artificial web-shooters. During pre-production, the main characters were cast in 2010. Columbia Pictures opted to reboot the franchise with the same production team along with Vanderbilt to stay on with writing the next Spider-Man film, while Sargent and Kloves helped with the script as well. In the film, after Peter Parker is bitten by a genetically altered spider, he gains newfound, spider-like powers and ventures out to save the city from the machinations of a mysterious reptilian foe.ĭevelopment of the film began with the cancellation of Spider-Man 4 in January 2010, ending director Sam Raimi's Spider-Man film series that originally featured Tobey Maguire as the titular superhero. The film was directed by Marc Webb and written by James Vanderbilt, Alvin Sargent and Steve Kloves from a story by Vanderbilt, and stars Andrew Garfield, Emma Stone, Rhys Ifans, Denis Leary, Campbell Scott, Irrfan Khan, Martin Sheen, and Sally Field. It is the fourth theatrical Spider-Man film produced by Columbia Pictures and Marvel Entertainment, a reboot of the series following Sam Raimi's 2002–2007 Spider-Man trilogy, and the first of the two The Amazing Spider-Man films. The Amazing Spider-Man is a 2012 American superhero film based on the Marvel Comics character Spider-Man and sharing the title of the character's longest-running comic book series of the same name. ![]() ![]() ![]() "It's unusual for a first job to get to work on such a high-profile project, so it's a great situation for him." When I checked in with Max recently, he told me he couldn't believe what he was working on," John said. "When I'm teaching I use examples from that game sometimes. In a particularly satisfying twist for John, one of his students who graduated from the master's program in 2017, Max Fisher, has been working at Toys for Bob on the remastered games. ![]() The Spyro Reignited Trilogy, developed by Novato-based Toys for Bob and published by Activision, is scheduled for release on September 21, 2018. "The remastered version is essentially the same game-they've tried to match it as much as possible-but it looks really beautiful and modern." "If you played the original game today, it would look dated because the graphics are not up to the same level as today's games," John explained. Remastering the games means rebuilding them from scratch with updated graphics and other features. Twenty years ago, John was a producer at Universal Interactive Studios, where he worked with the development team at Insomniac Games on the first three games in the Spyro series, released from 1998 to 2000. ![]() At this week's massive Comic-Con International convention in San Diego, the Spyro games will be the focus of a panel on Thursday, July 19, featuring Michael John, teaching professor and vice chair of the UC Santa Cruz Games & Playable Media master's program, and others involved in the creation of the original games and the newly remastered collection. For fans of the classic videogame Spyro the Dragon, the upcoming release of a remastered version of the original Spyro trilogy is exciting news. ![]() ![]() ![]() This function of transferring data to HDD, I mentioned it at the beginning of the article. Then click on the tab "Form" and select item "Create Image". In the main window of the program, we see the RAM disk we have formed. After completing all the necessary actions, press the OK button. In section File System Options choose NTFS. In the window Mount options we indicate the letter. We return to the window for adding a RAM disk. Not a lot, but what the launch speed of programs will be later. If you have 12 GB of RAM, but 8 GB is available, then you should take about 4-6 GB. You can see how much memory is available in Task Manager under the Performance tab of the Memory section. It is important to note that you cannot use more than the volume used by the system. In field "The size" we set the amount of RAM that you are ready to select. This will add a new RAM disk.Ī window will open where you need to fill in some information. Open the SoftPerfect RAM Disk utility and click on the green plus sign. Let's say you have already downloaded and installed the utility. Here is a link to the program, the site is in English, but figuring out how to download is not difficult. Its price is $ 29, but you can use the free trial version and try out the functionality. The utility really has many advantages, which means that such software will not be distributed for free. ![]() Fortunately, the program does it automatically. If you will use a RAM partition for temporary files, then using the function of transferring data to a hard disk is not important, but when storing important files on RAM, it makes sense to transfer files to the HDD when the device is turned off. When you turn off the PC, the program will transfer the data to the hard disk, and when turned on, back to the RAM disk. Why is this so important? The fact is that RAM is volatile memory, and when the computer is turned off, all data recorded on non-data is irretrievably destroyed. The program is in Russian, has a simple interface, but most importantly, it has the ability to transfer files from the RAM partition to the HDD. There is one interesting utility for creating a RAM partition - SoftPerfect RAM Disk. How to create a RAM disk with SoftPerfect RAM Disk In this article I will tell you how to create a RAM disk and move any programs and files to it. The access speed to such a disk is several times faster than in an SSD, so it makes sense to use it for software that you often use. Part of the volume is taken from it and a partition is created on which you can install programs and store files. I talked about what a RAM disk is and what functions it performs. OSFMount: support for third-party images of various formats It's friendly enough with new users and a piece of cake for more advanced ones.Which folders to add to the ram disk. An HDD becomes somehow noisy when it's running at full bandwidth, but this problem is nonexistent with RAMdisk.Īll in all, if you wish to experiment with creating virtual drives and testing their capabilities Dataram RAMDisk is the right tool for the job. Another positive aspect would be the noise. RAMdisk can prove its usefulness in speeding up processes like games, browsers, audio/video editing programs, CAD apps, software compilers, database managers, SETI operations, and more. In this case, a drive created with RAMDisk will completely wipe all data when the power is off, assuring no one else will get to it. How so? Well, data stored on a physical drive will stay there even after the machine was shut down, to make it easily retrievable once the power has been restored. One positive aspect of this storage environment is related to the security of information. Unlike any other physical drive, a virtual drive will store data from the system RAM, the value allocated upon creating the disk. RAMDisk has a particular method of storage. ![]() As for the newly created disk, no special treatment is in order. If you know what you are doing, go to View and check Advanced to make a couple of options pop up. The main tab will guide your trough setting up the allocated size and the initial format. The interface is nothing to get worried about. This being said, if your configuration includes a comfortable amount of RAM, you can speed things up even more by including this type of disk in your activity. More precisely, this application is capable of putting together a disk drive from the system memory only. Dataram RAMDisk is an interesting take on creating a virtual drive or something along those lines. ![]() ![]() ![]() At a couple of points, you’ll even hear the “definition of insanity” speech (one of these instances occurs while Vaas is watching a program showing yet another character from a previous game).Įven better, many of these areas are downright trippy and absurd to look at. There are tons of references and callbacks to past events, too. Some locations will feel familiar to long-time fans. Actor Michael Mando once again masterfully embodies the character in such a way that you’ll both hate and root for the character at the same time.įar Cry 6 Vaas: Insanity leads you on a romp through jungles that would remind you of Rook Island. Yes, the DLC does try to paint Vaas in a more sympathetic light. Throw in Jason Brody’s involvement (i.e., Vaas’ own failures haunting him), and you’ve got a recipe for disaster. Citra, meanwhile, is the most domineering and manipulative person he’s known. The crux of this story is the relationship between brother and sister (if they could truly be called as such). Citra then goads him into proving whether or not he could truly be her “perfect warrior.” Vaas then wakes in the “TV room” (i.e., the scene where he died in Far Cry 3). Vaas slowly succumbs to his injuries, all while his sister, Citra Talugmai, laughs and chides him for his weakness. Specifically, it shows his death at the hands of Jason Brody (the playable character in Far Cry 3). Once you begin, you’ll see a flashback from Vaas’ point of view. You can start Far Cry 6 Vaas: Insanity by clicking on the Add-Ons button in the main menu. For the most part, the narrative and voice acting don’t disappoint. It puts you in the shoes of Far Cry 3′s Vaas Montenegro, long-considered as one of the franchise’s most memorable villains. Fast forward to the present and we’ve got Far Cry 6 Vaas: Insanity.įar Cry 6 Vaas: Insanity is the first paid DLC that’s part of the Season Pass. Sadly, I did experience a number of issues from crashes to atrocious AI combatants. Combining action-packed sequences, tense moments, and over-the-top humor, it made for an engaging experience. Back in early October, I was able to review Far Cry 6. ![]() |
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