The looming crisis in federal records management

Federal records management faces many challenges today. Too few records, both in the traditional formats and the newer electronic ones, are being appraised or transferred to the National Archives when required. Although the National Archives and Records Administration has several major initiatives underway to remedy the problem, additonal actions must be taken as well.     

A new design method based on artificial bee colony algorithm for digital IIR filters

Digital filters can be broadly classified into two groups: recursive (infinite impulse response (IIR)) and non-recursive (finite impulse response (FIR)). An IIR filter can provide a much better performance than the FIR filter having the same number of coefficients. However, IIR filters might have a multi-modal error surface. Therefore, a reliable design method proposed for IIR filters must be based on a global search procedure. Artificial bee colony (ABC) algorithm has been recently introduced for global optimization. The ABC algorithm simulating the intelligent foraging behaviour of honey bee swarm is a simple, robust, and very flexible algorithm. In this work, a new method based on ABC algorithm for designing digital IIR filters is described and its performance is compared with that of a conventional optimization algorithm (LSQ-nonlin) and particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm.     

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.     

Collaborative filtering using orthogonal nonnegative matrix tri-factorization

Collaborative filtering aims at predicting a test user’s ratings for new items by integrating other like-minded users’ rating information. The key assumption is that users sharing the same ratings on past items tend to agree on new items. Traditional collaborative filtering methods can mainly be divided into two classes: memory-based and model-based. The memory-based approaches generally suffer from two fundamental problems: sparsity and scalability, and the model-based approaches usually cost too much on establishing a model and have many parameters to be tuned.     

Ranking of field association terms using Co-word analysis

Information retrieval involves finding some desired information in a store of information or a database. In this paper, Co-word analysis will be used to achieve a ranking of a selected sample of FA terms. Based on this ranking a better arranging of search results can be achieved. Experimental results achieved using 41 MB of data (7660 documents) in the field of sports. The corpus was collected from CNN newspaper, sports field. This corpus was chosen to be distributed over 11 sub-fields of the field sports from the experimental results, the average precision increased by 18.3% after applying the proposed arranging scheme depending on the absolute frequency to count the terms weights, and the average precision increased by 17.2% after applying the proposed arranging scheme depending on a formula based on “TF∗IDF” to count the terms weights.     

Collaborative information seeking: A field study of a multidisciplinary patient care team

Multidisciplinary teams are an essential aspect of modern organizational work. These teams often work in information-rich environments but little is known about their collaborative information seeking (CIS) behavior. We have been studying the CIS behavior of teams in the context of medical care. We conducted an ethnographic field study of a multidisciplinary patient care team in an emergency department to identify (a) team information needs and (b) situations that trigger collaborative information seeking activities. We identified seven categories of information needs as expressed by questions asked by team members. The majority of questions focused on medical information, but there were a larger than expected percentage of questions focusing on organizational information. We also identified three triggers for CIS activities. These triggers are: (1) lack of expertise, (2) lack of immediately accessible information, and (3) complex information needs. The questions and triggers highlight the importance of face-to-face communication during CIS activities and how CIS activities could lead to interruptive workplaces. We also discuss organizational and technical implications for supporting CIS behavior of teams.     

Agency problem, institutions, and technology policy: Explaining Taiwan's semiconductor industry development

Taiwan has made significant progress in the semiconductor industry with government agencies and bureaucrats as the driving forces over the past 30 years. Taiwan's impressive achievement in the semiconductor industry clearly indicates that the government failures and agency problem usually associated with deep government involvement did not occur in Taiwan. Why is that the case? This paper proposes a principal-agent framework for technology policy and applies the framework to discuss the institutional arrangements through which bureaucrats were controlled effectively in executing the semiconductor industry policies in Taiwan. By analyzing the institutional and organizational arrangements Taiwanese leaders made to mitigate the agency problem, this paper brings bureaucrats into the popular developmental state theory and emphasizes that the success of state intervention should not be taken for granted, and it also brings politics into technology policy analysis and stresses the importance and complexity of agency problem in technology policy.     

From “time pass” to transformative force: School-based human rights education in Tamil Nadu, India

This article presents data collected at the level of practice to highlight one non-governmental organization's approach to human rights education and how household-, school-, and community-level factors mediated student impact. Findings suggest that a variety of factors at the three levels contribute to the program's successful implementation in government schools serving marginalized students (where most HRE programs are in operation in India today). These responses emerge along a continuum from ‘time pass’—a commonly used term in India for anything that does not directly contribute to greater performance on high-stakes exams—to ‘transformative force’, wherein students internalize knowledge and values related to human rights and take action based on it. Responses to HRE were characterized in four areas and representative examples are provided of each: (1) personal changes; (2) attempts to intervene in situations of abuse; (3) reporting (or threatening to report) abuse; and (4) spreading awareness about human rights.     

A cue or two and I'll trust you: Determinants of trust in government organizations in terms of their processing and usage of citizens' personal information disclosed online

This article discusses the results of a large-scale Internet survey (with 1156 respondents) that investigated the cues and factors that could positively influence Dutch Internet users' trust in government organizations in terms of their usage and processing of citizens' personal data. Confidence in online privacy statements, as indicated by the results of this study, significantly influences trust in government organizations among Dutch Internet users with and without previous e-government experience. Among those with e-government experience, the quality of their online government transaction experience and a positive government organizational reputation can also increase their trust in government organizations, specifically in terms of how they process and use citizens' personal data.