Emergency knowledge management and social media technologies: A case study of the 2010 Haitian earthquake

The US response to the 2010 Haiti Earthquake was a large effort coordinated by three major agencies that worked in tandem with the Government of Haiti, the United Nations, and many countries from around the globe. Managing this response effort was a complex undertaking that relied extensively on knowledge management systems (KMS). For the first time, however, US government agencies employed social media technologies such as wikis and collaborative workspaces as the main knowledge sharing mechanisms. In this research we present a case study developed through action research of how these social media technologies were used, what influences they made on knowledge sharing, reuse, and decision-making, and how knowledge was effectively (and at times ineffectively) maintained in these systems. First-hand knowledge of the response is used, offering strategies for future deployment of social media and important research questions that remain regarding social media as knowledge management systems, particularly for disaster and emergency management.     

The impact of cultural,ethnic, and national variables on attitudes towards the disabled in Israel: A review

Studies in Israel relating to attitudes of various ethnic, cultural and religious groups towards the disabled were reviewed. The results indicate that although there were differences in attitudes towards the disabled, these differences appear to be a function of interaction effects between many other variables and not necessarily only related to ethnic, cultural, and religious affiliation.     

Creativity and Life Cycles of Artists

Age curves, which relate age to creativity or exceptional achievements, seem to take two forms: some artists bloom early (Picasso), others later in life (Cézanne). We argue that this objective fact is not related to their mode of creation according to which some artists proceed by drawings made prior to the painting's execution, while others are more likely to imitate and achieve this through color and the process of painting itself. JEL numbers:Z10,Z11A very preliminary version of this paper was presented as a discussion at the conference Measuring Art: A Scientific Revolution in Art History, University of Chicago and American University of Paris, June 2003.     

Effects of external reward on paired associate learning in a group setting

A study was conducted to determine the effects of external reward in the form of prizes on the performance of college students in a paired-associate learning task in which subjects were asked to recall a real word associated with a nonsense word. Two groups, one of whom was offered a prize, received the S-R pairs with no aid (no mediators); and two groups, one of whom was offered a prize, received the S-R pairs with a sentence-pictorial aid mediator. Results of two-way ANOVA supported the hypothesis that the No Prize/Aided and No Prize/NonAided groups would exhibit performance of higher quality than the groups offered prizes. The dependent measure was number of correct responses over six trials.     

Misconceptions in Van den Broeck's representation of misconceptions about learning disability research

The methods and conclusions of Van den Broeck (in this issue) are evaluated from two perspectives: (a) statistical considerations and (b) theoretical models of IQ and achievement, specifically reading achievement. We consider the statistical model proposed by Van den Broeck for the regression-based discrepancy model (RDM) to be either irrelevant or conceptually inconsistent with current models of IQ and achievement. The resulting simulation produced exemplar cases that are not realistic in terms of practice. The theoretical representations of IQ and achievement were, in our understanding, inconsistent with contemporary models of either. We suggest that acceptable models support the use of the RDM as it has been proposed by us and by others as one component of the determination of the presence or absence of a learning disability.     

Perceived Role of Multimedia Instructional Materials on Multicriteria Technology and Engineering Decisions*

Studies have shown that it is difficult for people to deal with multicriteria decision‐making situations. Information technology tools such as decision‐support systems and expert systems have been developed in order to help them in such situations. Another tool that has been identified as helping managers understand complex engineering decision‐making situations is multimedia instructional materials. This research investigates the perceptions of business versus engineering students on improvement of their higher‐level cognitive skills when they participated in a multimedia‐based case study that used an expert system to model a complex engineering and technical problem. Two groups of students, business and engineering, participated in an experiment, where they analyzed the case study and made their recommendations. Two questionnaires measured their perceptions on the improvements achieved on different constructs. A structural equations model was developed in order to test the research hypotheses with business students being the experimental group and the engineering students as a control group. The major findings are no significant relationship between student major and higher‐order cognitive skills improvement, business students perceived more higher‐order skills improvement compared to engineering students, both groups perceived an improvement in learning‐driven factor, and business students valued learning‐driven factors more compared to engineering students. These results show that multimedia instructional materials were perceived to be very useful in making multicriteria engineering and technical decisions.     

Eye-Movement Control in RAN and Reading

The present study examined the visual scanning hypothesis, which suggests that fluent oculomotor control is an important component underlying the predictive relationship between Rapid Automatized Naming (RAN) tasks and reading ability. Our approach was to isolate components of saccadic planning, articulation, and lexical retrieval in 3 modified RAN tasks. We analyzed 2 samples of undergraduate readers (ages 17–27). We evaluated the incremental contributions of these components and found that saccadic planning to nonlinguistic stimuli alone explained roughly one third of the variance that conventional RAN tasks explained in eye movements registered during text reading for comprehension. We conclude that the well-established predictive role of RAN for reading performance is in part due to the individual ability to coordinate rapid sequential eye movements to visual nonlinguistic stimuli.