Aesthetics and credibility in web site design

Web sites often provide the first impression of an organization. For many organizations, web sites are crucial to ensure sales or to procure services within. When a person opens a web site, the first impression is probably made in a few seconds, and the user will either stay or move on to the next site on the basis of many factors. One of the factors that may influence users to stay or go is the page aesthetics. Another reason may involve a user’s judgment about the site’s credibility. This study explores the possible link between page aesthetics and a user’s judgment of the site’s credibility. Our findings indicate that when the same content is presented using different levels of aesthetic treatment, the content with a higher aesthetic treatment was judged as having higher credibility. We call this the amelioration effect of visual design and aesthetics on content credibility. Our study suggests that this effect is operational within the first few seconds in which a user views a web page. Given the same content, a higher aesthetic treatment will increase perceived credibility.     

The French defence industry in the knowledge management era: A historical overview and evidence from empirical data

In the defence industry the recent development of a ‘market for technology’, the creation of new European high-technology companies as well as transformations in government agencies have driven firms to reposition their technological and organizational skills. Our objective is to show that the transformations that have occurred in the past 10 years have not only redefined skills and the organization of production, but also have given a more strategic place to knowledge management (KM) practices. We provide a contextual and historical overview based on qualitative interviews, in order to better understand the relation between KM and innovative behaviour in this industry. We build an original industrial and technological database comprising various samples that provides quantitative information concerning KM and innovative practices. The results of the statistical analysis reveal the specificity of firms in this industry. Taking account of the size of these firms and their technological intensity, we show that the behaviour of defence industry firms in terms of KM practices, differs from that of other firms. This is evident from their technological performance, and innovation and patenting intensity. This structural tendency is explained as an innovative behaviour in the French national innovation system rather than merely a ‘trend’.     

From knowledge to added value: A comparative, panel-data analysis of the innovation value chain in Irish and Swiss manufacturing firms

The innovation value chain (IVC) divides the innovation process into three separate links or activities: knowledge gathering, knowledge transformation and knowledge exploitation. Here, we report a comparative panel data analysis of the IVC in Ireland and Switzerland. Both economies are small, very open and depend significantly on innovation to maintain competitive advantage. In recent years, however, R&D and innovation growth in Ireland has been markedly stronger than that in Switzerland. We investigate these differences through the ‘lens’ of the IVC. Significant similarities exist between some aspects of firms’ innovation behaviour in each country: strong complementarities emerge between external knowledge sources and between firms’ internal and external knowledge. And, in both countries, in-house R&D and links to customers prove important drivers of innovation. Innovation drives productivity growth in different ways in the two countries, however, through product change in Switzerland and through process change in Ireland. Other differences in the determinants of innovation performance linked to ownership and firms’ institutional context emphasise the systemic nature of innovation and the legacy of past patterns of industrial development.     

Online community information seeking: The queries of three communities in Southwestern Ontario

This paper presents not only mycommunityinfo.ca (MCI) as an innovative World Wide Web (WWW)-based community information (CI) site, but also how its unique approach to facilitating online CI searching on the Web reveals through empirical data how people use such information and communication technologies (ICTs) to address their everyday information needs. The geographic focus for this study is on three communities in Southwestern Ontario. MCI collects unobtrusively query data that are logged daily from its own Web site, the Web sites of three municipal governments, and one municipal agency from this region. One year’s worth of these data was supplied to determine the types of CI that are sought through Web searching. A content analysis of a large purposive sample of all of MCI’s query data reveals more specific and diverse conceptual CI needs between and within communities than those reported in other studies employing different data collection methods. As a result, using a centralized approach to online CI access via the WWW by other CI providers such as the 211 network may be a disservice to its users. Additionally, the findings demonstrate how a thorough analysis of such data may improve the informational content and overall design of municipal government Web sites. The analysis of these data also has the potential of improving current CI taxonomies.     

Activity theory for understanding and managing system innovations

This study aims to show how activity theory in the socio-technical systems paradigm can assist in understanding and managing system innovation. We conceptualize socio-technical systems to address societal needs as activity systems and system innovations as transformations of such systems. Transformations result from resolving contradictions that develop due to technical and social change within and between the activities carried out by various agencies to fulfill societal needs. Along this line, the explanation of system innovations focuses on identifying emerging contradictions, resolution initiatives, and their outcomes, whereas the governance of system innovations can be carried out by interactively developing policies through successive interventions to resolve contradictions. We demonstrate the employment of activity theory to understand the transformation of the recorded music socio-technical system towards streaming, as well as to facilitate the management of the transition of the olive oil-producing sector at the regional level towards a circular economy through the adoption of innovative waste-processing technology.     

Discovering power laws in computer programs

The power-law regularities have been discovered behind many complex natural and social phenomenons. We discover that the power-law regularities, especially the Zipf’s and Heaps’ laws, also exist in large-scale software systems. We find that the distribution of lexical tokens in modern Java, C++ and C programs follows Zipf–Mandelbrot law, and the growth of program vocabulary follows Heaps’ law. The results are obtained through empirical analysis of real-world software systems. We believe our discovery reveals the statistical regularities behind computer programming.     

Making quantitative biomicrofluidics from microbore tubing and 3D-printed adapters

Microfluidic technology has tremendously facilitated the development of in vitro cell cultures and studies. Conventionally, microfluidic devices are fabricated with extensive facilities by well-trained researchers, which hinder the widespread adoption of the technology for broader applications. Enlightened by the fact that low-cost microbore tubing is a natural microfluidic channel, we developed a series of adaptors in a toolkit that can twine, connect, organize, and configure the tubing to produce functional microfluidic units. Three subsets of the toolkit were thoroughly developed: the tubing and scoring tools, the flow adaptors, and the 3D cell culture suite. To demonstrate the usefulness and versatility of the toolkit, we assembled a microfluidic device and successfully applied it for 3D macrophage cultures, flow-based stimulation, and automated near real-time quantitation with new knowledge generated. Overall, we present a new technology that allows simple, fast, and robust assembly of customizable and scalable microfluidic devices with minimal facilities, which is broadly applicable to research that needs or could be enhanced by microfluidics.     

水质转化的安全风险与过程控制

在天然水体和水处理及使用过程中，发生着一系列的水质转化，本文 针对这种转化的 安全风险和过程控制的重要方面进行了论述。由于水质及其循环利用的复杂性，水质转化过 程实质上是一个复合污染形成和变化的过程，在此过程中包含了复杂的物理、化学和生物反 应 ，而这些反应往往在不同的介质和界面发生，可能导致更毒性的污染物生成、污染效应协同 等结果，进而构成水质的生态安全与健康风险。本文结合自己的实验研究结果，介绍了在水 处理中通过控制水质转化过程、保障水质安全的典型方法。同时，根据本领域的发展趋势， 提出并简要阐述了有关的关键科学技术问题。     

Children’s interaction with cross-cultural and multilingual digital libraries. II. Information seeking,success, and affective experience

This paper reports the results of a study that investigated Arabic-speaking children’s interaction with the International Children’s Digital Library (ICDL) to find Arabic books on four tasks. Children’s information seeking activities was captured by using HyperCam software. Children’s success was assessed based on a measure the researchers developed. Children’s perceptions of and affective experience in using the ICDL was gathered through group interviews. Findings revealed that children’s information seeking behavior was characterized by browsing using a single function; that is, looking under “Arabic” from the Simple interface pull-down menu. Children were more successful on the fully self-generated, open-ended task than on the assigned and semi-assigned tasks. Children made suggestions for improving the Arabic collection and the design of the ICDL. The findings have implications for practitioners, researchers, and system designers.     

A privacy preserving homomorphic computing toolkit for predictive computation

Predictive computation now is a more and more popular paradigm for artificial intelligence. In this article, we discuss how to design a privacy preserving computing toolkit for secure predictive computation in smart cities. Predictive computation technology is very important in the management of cloud data in smart cities, which can realize intelligent computing and efficient management of cloud data in the city. Concretely, we propose a homomorphic outsourcing computing toolkit to protect the privacy of multiple users for predictive computation. It can meet the needs of large-scale users to securely outsource their data to cloud servers for storage, management and processing of their own data. This toolkit, using the Paillier encryption system and Lagrangian interpolation law, can implement most commonly basic calculations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication and division etc. It can also implement secure comparison of user data in the encrypted domain. In addition, we discuss how to implement the derivative of polynomial functions using our homomorphic computing encryption tool. We also introduce its application in neural networks. Finally, we demonstrate the security and efficiency of all our protocols through rigorous mathematical analysis and performance analysis. The results show that our toolkit is efficient and secure.     

辽宁特色产业基地建设与优化升级研究

辽宁特色产业基地发展进入到一个新阶段,应加快转变其发展方式,由松散集聚向集约集群转型,由投资驱动向创新驱动转型,由政府主导向市场化运行转型,由园区管理向基地管理转型,采取有效的对策,促进特色产业基地向优势产业发展,带动区域产业结构优化升级。     

Enhancing children’s activity in browsing/reading together by the installation of the BrowsReader in the children’s room of a library

Reading together draws much attention as a societal concern for children not only to yield emotional reaction but also to gradually advance intellectual thinking. We here aim to build a new environment, in which children’s browsing and reading of picture books together with families and/or friends is steadily enhanced, by installing the BrowsReader in the children’s room of a public library or a kindergarten. The original BrowsReader was a system to assist children in finding and reading picture books. The children, by gathering around the BrowsReader, can browse picture books and then choose and read a book by flipping pages on it. After reproducing each printed, digitized or web picture book as a surrogate picture book consisting of the front-cover image followed by the page images, we first introduce two basic notions: (i) an abstracted bookshelf, which presents the front-cover images of the surrogate picture books in the form where all are linearly arranged, with some of the images bundled in places, and (ii) a unified view, which presents each page of any surrogate picture book in a form that seems like a printed picture book’s page. We then specify, based on these notions, the improved version of the BrowsReader which can be installed in each children’s room so that children together with families and/or friends can easily browse a large number of surrogate picture books as if they are browsing in the physical bookshelves of the children’s room, and can read a wide variety of surrogate picture books as if they are reading ordinary printed picture books on a table. The improvement was carried out in a step by step process based on feedback and results from case studies, and its effects were clarified by seeing whether, in a new environment, the children’s activity in browsing/reading together were steadily enhanced when using the BrowsReader.     

Flexible sample selection strategies for transfer learning in ranking

Ranking is a central component in information retrieval systems; as such, many machine learning methods for building rankers have been developed in recent years. An open problem is transfer learning, i.e. how labeled training data from one domain/market can be used to build rankers for another. We propose a flexible transfer learning strategy based on sample selection. Source domain training samples are selected if the functional relationship between features and labels do not deviate much from that of the target domain. This is achieved through a novel application of recent advances from density ratio estimation. The approach is flexible, scalable, and modular. It allows many existing supervised rankers to be adapted to the transfer learning setting. Results on two datasets (Yahoo’s Learning to Rank Challenge and Microsoft’s LETOR data) show that the proposed method gives robust improvements.     

科技代工企业转型升级的自我更新与资源整合:以S集团为例

基于动态能力范式视角,采用案例研究法分析S集团从代工(OEM)向自主品牌生产(OBM)成功转型升级中资源基础的转变过程,总结提出针对科技代工企业转型升级的相关建议。     

Edwin Mansfield’s contributions to the economics of technology

Edwin Mansfield’s contributions to the economics of technology are summarized from the early 1960s through his death in 1997. Mansfield’s methodology is discussed, as are his contributions on: the diffusion of technical innovation, the effect of firm size on innovation, the role of academic and basic research in increasing innovation and productivity, international technology transfer and the inaccuracy of technological forecasts. The economics profession’s evaluation of the relative importance of Mansfield’s work is presented, using as evidence citation counts of his works collected from the Social Science Citation Index (SSCI). Identified as among Mansfield’s most important contributions are his work on the importance of academic research for industrial innovations, his empirical estimation of the rates of diffusion of different innovations, and his estimation of the private and social returns from investments in industrial innovations. Finally, we present Mansfield’s advice on the future of the economics of technology.     

Realizability-Preserving Transformations for Digital and Analog Filters

The theoretical basis for the design of analog and digital filters by prototype and transformation is studied. Necessary and sufficient conditions are developed for a transformation to preserve realizibility as well as the frequency response. The attendant structural properties of such transformations are developed and compared with the reactance transformations of classical analog filter theory. The superiority of direct analog-to-digital transformation to the Constantinides approach is proven.     

Investigating the information-seeking behaviour of academic lawyers: From Ellis’s model to design

Information-seeking is important for lawyers, who have access to many dedicated electronic resources. However there is considerable scope for improving the design of these resources to better support information-seeking. One way of informing design is to use information-seeking models as theoretical lenses to analyse users’ behaviour with existing systems. However many models, including those informed by studying lawyers, analyse information-seeking at a high level of abstraction and are only likely to lead to broad-scoped design insights. We illustrate that one potentially useful (and lower-level) model is Ellis’s – by using it as a lens to analyse and make design suggestions based on the information-seeking behaviour of 27 academic lawyers, who were asked to think aloud whilst using electronic legal resources to find information for their work. We identify similar information-seeking behaviours to those originally found by Ellis and his colleagues in scientific domains, along with several that were not identified in previous studies such as ‘updating’ (which we believe is particularly pertinent to legal information-seeking). We also present a refinement of Ellis’s model based on the identification of several levels that the behaviours were found to operate at and the identification of sets of mutually exclusive subtypes of behaviours.     

A framework of industrial knowledge spillovers in big-science centers

We employed the grounded theory method to construct a framework describing the distinctive mechanisms through which big-science centers generate industrial knowledge spillovers in the economy. Our focus is on large-scale big-science installations typically associated with experimental physics. We draw on social network, social capital, and inter-organizational learning theories to examine knowledge spillovers accruing to industrial partner companies in big-science-industry dyads. The context for the study is provided by CERN’s new particle accelerator project, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). In addition to building a grounded theory framework for the study of industrial knowledge spillovers, our study demonstrates the distinctive potential that big-science centers offer as a source of knowledge spillovers in national innovation systems.     

Group Behavior and Learning in Electronic Forums: A Sociotechnical Approach

The term community is widely and often uncritically used to characterize groupings of people who meet in electronic forums (e-forums). The research reported here shows how the casual use of the term community to characterize these groups can actually undermine their transformation into forms of social organization that are justifiably characterized as communities. This article examines how transforming a group into a community is a major accomplishment that requires special processes and practices. Primary data come from a particular project, the Inquiry Learning Forum (ILF), that aimed to develop "communities of practice" (CoPs) among high school science and mathematics teachers through an elaborate dedicated web site. We examine participants' behaviors in some of the differently structured forums within the ILF web site. While the project's developers expected CoPs to develop autonomously, there was no evidence of CoP formation in open public online forums. The article contrasts two approaches to building online communities that differ sharply: "IT-led community development" and "IT-supported community development." The experience of the ILF project shows that IT-led strategies community development strategies are much more difficult to make workable than are the "IT-supported" strategies.