537 research outputs found
Helping children think: Gaze aversion and teaching
No full textLooking away from an interlocutor's face during demanding cognitive activity can help adults answer challenging arithmetic and verbal-reasoning questions (Glenberg, Schroeder, & Robertson, 1998). However, such `gaze aversion' (GA) is poorly applied by 5-year-old school children (Doherty-Sneddon, Bruce, Bonner, Longbotham, & Doyle, 2002). In Experiment 1 we trained ten 5-year-old children to use GA while thinking about answers to questions. This trained group performed significantly better on challenging questions compared with 10 controls given no GA training. In Experiment 2 we found significant and monotonic age-related increments in spontaneous use of GA across three cohorts of ten 5-year-old school children (mean ages: 5;02, 5;06 and 5;08). Teaching and encouraging GA during challenging cognitive activity promises to be invaluable in promoting learning, particularly during early primary years
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The applicability of e-procurement in the UK public sector: an exploratory analysis
No full textIn recent years, interest in e-procurement systems has grown significantly, as commercial organisations have made substantial efficiency gains across the purchasing function through the application of such systems. However, the public sector and in particular government agencies have made relatively little progress towards the adoption of this technology. This research presents an exploratory study, which focuses on the application of e-procurement systems in the public sector. More specifically, the study seeks to explore the readiness of Public Sector organisations in terms of technology, process, people and compliance strategy by adopting an instrumental case study approach. The key findings suggest that the agency in question is not currently in a state of ‘readiness’ for e-procurement adoption. Additionally, a number of barriers exist that are likely to impede the rate of progress towards successful implementation.
Danny , Fiona Ellis-Chadwick and Neil F. Doherty
Benefits Realization through the Treatment of Organizational Issues
No full textInformation technology is now a ubiquitous and increasingly critical part of the fabric of the modern organization, supporting its day-to-day operations and all aspects of the decision-making process, as well as its strategic positioning. It is therefore not perhaps surprising that the implementation of a new technology or information system is likely to result in a wide array of impacts to the organization as well as the working lives of individual employees. There is a growing consensus within the literature that many such impacts are not deterministic and cannot therefore be easily predicted prior to a system’s implementation (e.g., DeSanctis & Poole, 1994). The corollary of this is that many of the consequences of an information system’s implementation will be unanticipated (Robey & Boudreau, 1999). While some of these unanticipated consequences, or incidental side effects, may be of a positive nature, negative impacts are also quite common, as IT-induced organizational change often results in user resistance and, in extreme cases, possibly even system rejection (Martinsons & Chong, 1999). Information systems projects may not be totally predictable, but it can be argued that many of their organizational impacts only remain unanticipated, because systems developers are reluctant to tackle the human and organizational aspects of IT (Doherty & King, 2005). Systems development projects have typically been viewed as exercises in technical change, rather than socio-technical change; “most investments in IT are technology-led, reflecting too technical an emphasis” (Clegg, 2000, p. 464). This is a dangerous strategy, because unforeseen and unresolved negative impacts may increase the likelihood of systems failure. Moreover, beneficial impacts, of both a planned and incidental nature, may not be fully realized without an appropriate program of organizational change. Indeed, Ward and Daniel (2006) argue convincingly that the unacceptably high levels of IT failures are largely due to the absence of formal “benefits realization” approaches that explicitly target the organizational change needed to deliver business benefits. Consequently, we would argue that if systems development projects are viewed as an exercise in organizational change, in which all potential organizational impacts are proactively and systematically analyzed, then many undesirable impacts could be avoided, while the planned benefits can be more effectively realized (Doherty & King, 2002). The importance of treating organizational issues may now be widely acknowledged (e.g., Clegg, 2000; Eason, 2001), but little progress has been made in the development of practical treatment approaches that have succeeded in making the transition from research laboratory to widespread commercial usage. The primary aim of this article is to present an innovative new benefitsoriented approach for their proactive treatment. However, in advance of this, it is important to establish the importance of treating organizational issues. </jats:p
Developing a framework for measuring physical distribution service quality of multi-channel and "pure player" internet retailers
No full textPurpose: Many traditional retailers use the internet as a complementary business channel and thus sell products through multiple channels. In contrast, "pure player" internet retailers only sell products via the internet. A proliferation of pure players over the past few years has intensified competition in the online shopping market and the question of who is better at offering physical distribution service quality (PDSQ), multi-channel retailers or pure players, is open to debate. Despite PDSQ's importance in an electronic commerce environment there are few studies to date and most have focused on general service quality of internet shopping. The purpose of this paper is to discuss this phenomenon and posit a conceptual framework for further investigation. Design/methodology/approach: This paper reviews the literature to develop variables and constructs for investigation following the first stage of Churchill's paradigm for scale development, which are presented in a framework based on the concept of order fulfilment as a key driver in electronic PDSQ, or e-PDSQ. Research limitations/implications: The framework is presented for future investigation, thus there is no empirical study in this paper. Practical implications: PDSQ has strategic importance for retailers to achieve competitive advantage and offer superior customer service, particularly for pure players as they are considered intangible services compared to their multi-channel competitors. This importance also extends to the e-commerce environment. Originality/value: Earlier work has provided insight into how e-PDSQ, represented by availability, timeliness and reliability, is affected by pricing, transactions and firms. This paper extends this work and presents an e-PDSQ framework to investigate differences between multi-channel and pure player retailers. © Emerald Group Publishing Limited.</p
The Asset Replacement Problem: State of the Art
No full textIn this book chapter we summarize how the asset replacement problem has evolved over time. We provide a broad view of different modeling approaches, including the economic life, the repair cost limit, comprehensive cost minimization models, and we analyze in detail the parallel replacement models. We suggest a new model for parallel replacement that addresses some of the issues not yet solved in this area. Finally, we discuss the limitations of the current models from a theoretical and applied perspective and identify some of the challenges still faced by academics and practitioners working on this topi
Markov Constraints for Generating Lyrics with Style
No full textWe address the issue of generating texts in the style of an
existing author, that also satisfy structural constraints imposed by the
genre of the text. We focus on song lyrics, for which structural constraints
are well-defined: rhyme and meter. Although Markov processes
are known to be suitable for representing style, they are difficult
to control in order to satisfy non-local properties, such as structural
constraints, that require long distance modeling. We show that
the framework of Constrained Markov Processes allows us to precisely
generate texts that are consistent with a corpus, while being
controllable in terms of rhymes and meter, a result that no other technique,
to our knowledge, could achieve to date. Controlled Markov
processes consist in reformulating Markov processes in the context
of constraint satisfaction. We describe how to represent stylistic and
structural properties in terms of constraints in this framework and
we provide an evaluation of our method by comparing it to both pure
Markov and pure constraint-based approaches.We show how this approach
can be used for the semi-automatic generation of lyrics in the
style of a popular author that has the same structure as an existing
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Enhancing Field Service Operations via Fuzzy Automation of Tactical Supply Plan
No full textTactical supply planning (TSP) is an integral part of the end-to-end field resource planning process. It takes as input, constrained demand from the strategic plan at monthly (or quarterly) level, decomposes it to daily or weekly level and plans the capacity accordingly to meet the expected demand. The plan is then executed and sent to a work allocation system for on-the-day scheduling of individuals tasks to resources. A tactical supply plan ensures that there are enough resources available in the field on any given day. It highlights underutilised resources and offers recommendations on how best to deploy surplus resources. As such, TSP focuses on improving customer satisfaction by minimising operational cost and maximising right-first-time (RFT) objectives. In this chapter, we describe opportunities and challenges in automating tactical supply planning and present a fuzzy approach to address the challenges. The motivation is to minimise the effort required for producing a resource plan. More importantly, our objective is to leverage computation intelligence to produce optimised supply plan in order to increase RFT and the customer satisfaction
Improved broadband adaptive beamformer performance
No full textThe protection of wireless communications links against interference is a key concern in mission critical systems. In particular low probability of interception (LPI) systems which operate below the thermal noise floor of the receiver are particularly vulnerable. To protect against interference it is often necessary to include some form of active interference suppression. Broadband adaptive beamforming is one such technique which may be used to suppress interference by spatial and spectral filtering of the signals received by an array antenna. The hardware requirements of adaptive Beamforming systems are high in comparison to other approaches. As a result, the total number of adaptable weights realisable in the beamformer may be limited by the size, weight and power constraints of the system. This will limit the degrees of freedom in the beamformer and hence, the interference cancellation capability of the beamformer.The effectiveness of increasing the number of time-taps in space-time adaptive processors (STAP) as a method of increasing the number of interferers the beamformer can simultaneously cancel in an environment containing a mix of narrowband, partialband and broadband interference is studied. An alternative scheme to free up degrees of freedom in the beamformer is proposed based on frequency-domain excision to pre-filter narrowband interference before it reaches the beamformer. This approach frees up degrees of freedom in the beamformer, which would otherwise be consumed by the narrowband interference, for use in cancelling partialband and broadband interference. To enable the excision filters to identify narrowband interference while allowing partialband and broadband interference to pass through, a novel scheme is presented which produces a frequency mask that varies on a per-bin basis. Eigenanalysis of the beamformer's covariance matrix is used to explore the ability of frequency-domain excision to desensitise the beamformer to narrowband interference while bit error rate (BER) simulations demonstrate the enhanced interference protection the scheme affords an LPI communications link.Mismatches between the gain and phase responses of the radio-frequency (RF) front-end channels in broadband adaptive beamformers can limit their cancellation performance against higher power partialband and broadband interference. This performance limitation arises from the decorrelation experienced by the received signals across the array due to the interchannel mismatches. In STAP systems this performance limitation may be mitigated by increasing the number of taps per channel in the STAP. However, the computational complexity of adding additional time-taps tends to be high in STAP beamformers. Two new methods of interchannel mismatch compensation are proposed based on efficient frequency-domain methods. Simulations using software models and experiments using a hardware STAP system demonstrate the proposed techniques' ability to improve the cancellation performance where interchannel mismatches are limiting cancellation performance.<br/
Re-envisioning the role of benefits realisation in a world dominated by robots
No full textIn recent years there has been a great deal of academic and practitioner interest in the role of 'benefits realisation management' [BRM] approaches, as a means of proactively leveraging value from IT investments. However, as automated technologies are increasingly being introduced on the basis that they deliver more cost-efficient solutions than their human counterparts, important questions needs to be asked about how value should be defined in a world that is increasingly dominated by robots. Consequently, the aim of this work-in-progress paper is to explore, using the literature, how automated systems continue to replace the human agent, in a growing number of organisational contexts, before looking at how tools such as benefits realisation, may need to be modified to ensure that there is an appropriate balance between the social and the technical in the planning of future IS/IT investments. In so doing, this essay seeks to develop a provisional research agenda, which will hopefully help to shape future contributions to the domains of benefits realisation, sociotechnical approaches and IT evaluation
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