User community vs. producer innovation development efficiency: A first empirical study

In this paper we report upon a first empirical exploration of the relative efficiency of innovation development by product users vs. product producers. In a study of over 50 years of product innovation in the whitewater kayaking field, we find users in aggregate were approximately 3× more efficient at developing important kayaking product innovations than were producers in aggregate. We speculate that this result is driven by what we term “efficiencies of scope” in problem-solving. These can favor an aggregation of many user innovators, each spending a little, over fewer producer innovators benefitting from higher economies of scale in product development. We also note that the present study explores only one initial point on what is likely to be a complex efficiency landscape.     

大卫vs.歌利亚:奥巴马为何获胜?

全球瞩目的2008年美国大选已经降下帷幕,民主党候选人奥巴马以压倒优势的选票和选举人票,成为美国历史上第一位有黑人血统的总统。目前,尚未走马上任的奥巴马,声望在美国甚至全世界如日中天,各国政要纷纷来电祝贺,来美出席世界金融高峰会议的外国首脑要求与他会晤(他以不是在职总统为由而婉拒,仅派代表去致意),无数商家把奥巴马当作金字招牌,推出各种商品而大发其财,仿佛奥巴马早已是美国众望所归的政治领袖,他当选总统乃理所当然之事,水到渠成之果。     

投影技术大战:LCD vs.DLP

如果你对数码投影机领域还比较陌生，那么你不必花费大量时间去商店了解LCD和DLP的异同，本文将对此进行详细的分析。     

Print vs. electronic resources: A study of user perceptions,preferences, and use

The arrival and proliferation of electronic resources and digital libraries have a number of significant impacts on the use of print resources and traditional libraries. This study explores the extent to which graduate students in a metropolitan university setting use print and electronic resources. Reading preferences and use of print and electronic resources vary among different disciplines. Graduate students seem to expect a hybrid of print and electronic resources. They desire to meet their information needs through a mix of print and online resources, even though reasons for supplementing another type of resource differ. Circumstances that affect the selection of use between digital libraries and traditional libraries are also discussed.     

Intelligent topic selection for low-cost information retrieval evaluation: A New perspective on deep vs. shallow judging

While test collections provide the cornerstone for Cranfield-based evaluation of information retrieval (IR) systems, it has become practically infeasible to rely on traditional pooling techniques to construct test collections at the scale of today’s massive document collections (e.g., ClueWeb12’s 700M+ Webpages). This has motivated a flurry of studies proposing more cost-effective yet reliable IR evaluation methods. In this paper, we propose a new intelligent topic selection method which reduces the number of search topics (and thereby costly human relevance judgments) needed for reliable IR evaluation. To rigorously assess our method, we integrate previously disparate lines of research on intelligent topic selection and deep vs. shallow judging (i.e., whether it is more cost-effective to collect many relevance judgments for a few topics or a few judgments for many topics). While prior work on intelligent topic selection has never been evaluated against shallow judging baselines, prior work on deep vs. shallow judging has largely argued for shallowed judging, but assuming random topic selection. We argue that for evaluating any topic selection method, ultimately one must ask whether it is actually useful to select topics, or should one simply perform shallow judging over many topics? In seeking a rigorous answer to this over-arching question, we conduct a comprehensive investigation over a set of relevant factors never previously studied together: 1) method of topic selection; 2) the effect of topic familiarity on human judging speed; and 3) how different topic generation processes (requiring varying human effort) impact (i) budget utilization and (ii) the resultant quality of judgments. Experiments on NIST TREC Robust 2003 and Robust 2004 test collections show that not only can we reliably evaluate IR systems with fewer topics, but also that: 1) when topics are intelligently selected, deep judging is often more cost-effective than shallow judging in evaluation reliability; and 2) topic familiarity and topic generation costs greatly impact the evaluation cost vs. reliability trade-off. Our findings challenge conventional wisdom in showing that deep judging is often preferable to shallow judging when topics are selected intelligently.     

Patterns of internationalisation of corporate technology: location vs. home country advantages

Given the trends towards increasing globalisation of markets and of production, the globalisation of technology remains a subject of considerable interest to analysts and policy makers in the 1990s. This paper provides some new empirical observations for debate and discussion on the patterns of technological activities of large firms outside their home countries. It is based on a systematic analysis of the US patenting activities of 220 of the most internationalised firms in terms of their technology in the 1990s. Although firms are active outside their home countries in the `high technology' fields (such as Computers, Pharmaceuticals, Telecommunications, Image and Sound and Materials), quite a sizeable proportion of their foreign activities are concerned with process and machinery technologies. Moreover, a comparison of the technological advantage of the company at home and the advantage of the location shows that in a large majority of cases, firms tend to locate their technology abroad in their core areas where they are strong at home. These results suggest that adapting products and processes and materials to suit foreign markets and providing technical support to off-shore manufacturing plants remain major factors underlying the internationalisation of technology. They are also consistent with the notion that firms are increasingly engaging in small scale activities to monitor and scan new technological developments in centres of excellence in foreign countries within their areas of existing strength. However there is little evidence to suggest that even these most internationalised firms routinely go abroad to compensate for their weakness at home.     

Understanding the effects of a social media service failure apology: A comparative study of customers vs. potential customers

Service failure apologies on social media are a new crisis communication outlet trend used by companies to apologise to affected customers quickly and offer solutions, ultimately to restore customers' trust and brand loyalty. This paper contributes to the nascent literature on companies' social media service failure apologies and fills a gap in the social commerce literature by recognising that due to the open and public nature of social media, these apologies may reach not just affected customers, but also unintended audiences such as potential customers among the general public, which could potentially damage a company's reputation and market share. An online survey administered to 241 customers and 271 non-customers of a famous mobile phone brand, which used YouTube to apologise to its customers for a service failure incident, is used to explore potential behavioural outcomes, after exposure to the apology. Findings confirm that both customers and non-customers of the service provider may become exposed to a social media service failure apology. The hypothesised model predicts behavioural intentions to remain a customer after exposure to the social media service apology better than behavioural intentions to become a customer, even though relationships hold for both groups. Theoretical and managerial implications are discussed.     

Entrepreneurship and subjective vs objective institutional performance: A decade of US hospital data

Regional entrepreneurial activity can importantly affect the performance of local public service institutions. Yet, the literature explaining these relationships suffers from five methodological challenges: 1) inferred direction of influence; 2) unavailability of representative data; 3) blurring of objective and subjective performance; 4) a lack of longitudinal data; 5) and a lack of fine-grained regional data. This paper relies on a rich dataset from the ubiquitous institution of hospitals to explore these effects and overcome these challenges. We discriminate between objective and subjective institutional performance, suggesting that both performance categories deserve empirical attention, and may react differently to entrepreneurship. Our empirical approach applies econometric, mixed-effects regression models to a novel longitudinal dataset representing the entire hospital population in over 3000 U.S. counties between 2006 and 2018 merged with two sources of entrepreneurial activity at the county level. Interestingly, the results suggest divergent relationships: regional entrepreneurial activity positively affects objective institutional performance and also negatively affects subjective performance. Further, an institution's research designation attenuates the effect on subjective performance. These findings suggest that institutional performance is an often-overlooked byproduct of regional entrepreneurial activity and offer significant theoretical and policy implications.     

代达罗斯对伊卡洛斯 九十余年前发生在英国的一场“科玄论战”

1923年,英国遗传学家霍尔丹在剑桥大学发表了一篇题为《代达罗斯,或科学与未来》的演讲,畅想科学应用的未来,提出科学将造福人类并对传统道德提出挑战。翌年,著名哲学家罗素发表《伊卡洛斯,或科学的未来》予以回应,警告人类对科学的滥用将导致毁灭性的灾难。本文介绍论辩双方的主要观点,并在一战前后西方社会文化的背景和"两种文化"论题的语境中分析这一争论的意义,最后回到同期发生在中国大地上的"科玄论战",对中国近代思想史上的这一重大事件进行重新审视。     

Globalization of Japanese culture: Economic power vs. cultural power, 1989-2002

This article examines the reasons why Japanese cultural products have not penetrated other countries. It also explicates the recent trends in Japan's expansion of its cultural products and Japan's direct investment in the global cultural market to ascertain whether this new development is a sign that Japan is attempting to gain an important role in global communication. It concludes that Japan was not able to successfully build its communication power to a degree comparable to its status as the second largest economic power and its second largest media consumption market.     

基于转移成本和质量成本差异的软件提供商竞争博弈模型:SaaS vs. SWS

考虑了作为软件领域先行者的SWS提供商由于企业用户前期IT投资所引发的客户转移成本,以及SaaS与SWS之间日益减小的质量成本差异问题,构建了基于序贯博弈的经济模型。研究发现:转移成本对SWS提升产品质量、产品定价以及其利润水平具有正向的推动作用,而对SaaS提供商而言,这种作用是反向的;SaaS与SWS之间质量成本差异系数的减小对双方竞争策略的影响则取决于具体的转移成本环境;考虑到两因素的联合作用,随着质量成本差异系数的日趋减小,在不同的转移成本环境下,转移成本的高低对于软件提供商采取更加激进还是更加保守的投资策略至关重要。     

Evaluation of a personalized digital library based on cognitive styles: Adaptivity vs. adaptability

Personalization can be addressed by adaptability and adaptivity, which have different advantages and disadvantages. This study investigates how digital library (DL) users react to these two techniques. More specifically, we develop a personalized DL to suit the needs of different cognitive styles based on the findings of our previous work [Frias-Martinez, E., Chen, S. Y., & Liu, X. (2008) Investigation of behavior and perception of digital library users: A cognitive style perspective. International Journal of Information Management]. The personalized DL includes two versions: adaptive version and adaptable version. The results showed that users not only performed better in the adaptive version, but also they perceived more positively to the adaptive version. In addition, cognitive styles have great effects on users’ responses to adaptability and adaptivity. These results provide guidance for designers to select suitable techniques to develop personalized DLs.     

自主创新与技术引进对我国技术创新影响的比较研究

利用2000—2007年的省际面板数据,采用以Driscoll-Kraay方法估计标准误差的固定效应模型,分析了自主创新和以进口、出口、FDI为代表的技术引进分别对我国技术创新的影响大小,并进行了东、中、西部地区的比较研究。结果发现,在全国层面,自主创新与技术引进都促进了技术创新的发展,但技术引进仍然是主要的创新途径,自主创新的作用并不显著;而由于各地区消化吸收能力的差异和对外经济发展阶段的不同,在省际层面,东部的自主创新对技术创新贡献最大,中部技术引进贡献最大,在西部两者的作用比较平均而微弱。     

Hypertext vs boolean-based searching in a bibliographic database environment: A direct comparison of searcher performance

The purpose of this study is to carry out a direct comparison of a hypertext-based bibliographic retrieval system with a traditional Boolean-based retrieval system, each using the same database. Novice and experienced searchers were assigned to either a prototype hypertext system called HyperLynx or to a traditional Boolean system and were asked to perform a set of search tasks. The study revealed that the Boolean system performed better than the hypertext system for search tasks with a large number of relevant items. Searcher experience level did not play a significant role for either system. Findings of the study have implications for the design of future information retrieval systems that take advantage of the best features of both approaches for more effective and efficient retrieval of highly structured databases.     

Codification vs personalisation: A study of the information evaluation practice between aerospace and construction industries

In the emerging digital economy, the management of information in aerospace and construction organisations is facing a particular challenge due to the ever-increasing volume of information and the extensive use of information and communication technologies (ICTs). This paper addresses the problems of information overload and the value of information in both industries by providing some cross-disciplinary insights. In particular it identifies major issues and challenges in the current information evaluation practice in these two industries. Interviews were conducted to get a spectrum of industrial perspectives (director/strategic, project management and ICT/document management) on these issues in particular to information storage and retrieval strategies and the contrasting approaches to knowledge and information management of personalisation and codification. Industry feedback was collected by a follow-up workshop to strengthen the findings of the research. An information-handling agenda is outlined for the development of a future Information Evaluation Methodology (IEM) which could facilitate the practice of the codification of high-value information in order to support through-life knowledge and information management (K&IM) practice.     

Understanding electrokinetics at the nanoscale: A perspective

Electrokinetics promises to be the microfluidic technique of choice for portable diagnostic chips and for nanofluidic molecular detectors. However, despite two centuries of research, our understanding of ion transport and electro-osmotic flow in and near nanoporous membranes, whose pores are natural nanochannels, remains woefully inadequate. This short exposition reviews the various ion-flux and hydrodynamic anomalies and speculates on their potential applications, particularly in the area of molecular sensing. In the process, we revisit several old disciplines, with some unsolved open questions, and we hope to create a new one.