Guanxi Networks and Creativity in Taiwanese Project Teams

Personal connections, also called guanxi in Chinese culture, are embedded within a network of interdependent social exchanges, providing access to resources, information and supports, therefore facilitating performance. Building guanxi networks means building social networks. Project teams are commonly used as fundamental units in organizations, partly in order to generate more creative ideas, and so this paper evaluates how project teams use their guanxi networks within and outside of their teams and across boundaries to stimulate their creative performance. Fifty‐four product development project teams with 293 members from high‐tech Taiwanese firms participated in this study. Findings suggested that, in a guanxi culture such as Taiwan's, in order to facilitate a project team's creative performance, the most important task is to develop a more cohesive social unit before the team extends its external networks, since Chinese culture regards people first as members of groups, and secondly as individuals.     

A note on the security of PAP

In this letter, we analyze the security of an RFID authentication protocol proposed by Liu and Bailey [1], called privacy and authentication protocol (PAP). We present two traceability attacks and an impersonation attack.     

Constructive semantics for instantaneous reactions

This paper presents some results towards a game-theoretic account of the constructive semantics of step responses for synchronous languages, providing a coherent semantic framework encompassing both non-deterministic Statecharts (as per Pnueli & Shalev) and deterministic esterel. In particular, it is shown that esterel arises from a finiteness condition on strategies whereas Statecharts permits infinite games. Beyond giving a novel and unifying account of these concrete languages the paper sketches a general theory for obtaining different notions of constructive responses in terms of winning conditions for finite and infinite games and their characterisation as maximal post-fixed points of functions in directed complete lattices of intensional truth-values.     

Discriminant subspace analysis: a Fukunaga-Koontz approach

The Fisher Linear Discriminant (FLD) is commonly used in pattern recognition. It finds a linear subspace that maximally separates class patterns according to the Fisher Criterion. Several methods of computing the FLD have been proposed in the literature, most of which require the calculation of the so-called scatter matrices. In this paper, we bring a fresh perspective to FLD via the Fukunaga-Koontz Transform (FKT). We do this by decomposing the whole data space into four subspaces with different discriminability, as measured by eigenvalue ratios. By connecting the eigenvalue ratio with the generalized eigenvalue, we show where the Fisher Criterion is maximally satisfied. We prove the relationship between FLD and FKT analytically, and propose a unified framework to understanding some existing work. Furthermore, we extend our our theory to Multiple Discriminant Analysis (MDA). This is done by transforming the data into intra- and extra-class spaces, followed by maximizing the Bhattacharyya distance. Based on our FKT analysis, we identify the discriminant subspaces of MDA/FKT, and propose an efficient algorithm, which works even when the scatter matrices are singular, or too large to be formed. Our method is general and may be applied to different pattern recognition problems. We validate our method by experimenting on synthetic and real data.     

Some Statistical-Estimation Methods for Stochastic Finite-State Transducers

Formal translations constitute a suitable framework for dealing with many problems in pattern recognition and computational linguistics. The application of formal transducers to these areas requires a stochastic extension for dealing with noisy, distorted patterns with high variability. In this paper, some estimation criteria are proposed and developed for the parameter estimation of regular syntax-directed translation schemata. These criteria are: maximum likelihood estimation, minimum conditional entropy estimation and conditional maximum likelihood estimation. The last two criteria were proposed in order to deal with situations when training data is sparse. These criteria take into account the possibility of ambiguity in the translations: i.e., there can be different output strings for a single input string. In this case, the final goal of the stochastic framework is to find the highest probability translation of a given input string. These criteria were tested on a translation task which has a high degree of ambiguity.     

Alphonse de Candolle's early scientometrics(1883, 1885) with references to recent trends in the field (1978–1983)

De Candolle analyzed in 1883 and 1885, respectively two important fields of human cultural evolution: the domestication of crop plants and the emergence of modern science. In hisHistoire de science et des savants depuis deux sciecles, principles were established, science indicators outlined, interactions examined and mathematical methods applied to the study of a selected data set related to scientific development. In order to compare national and international scientific communities twenty standard factors were considered and national participation in international scientific societies was analysed for 14 European countries and the United States.De Candolle was the first to analyse mathematically the number, dynamics and national distribution of scientists in their professional organisations, the specialization and professionalization of scientists and characterized the scientific potential of different countries with the number of international science society members per inhabitant per period (1750–1884). The role ofde Candolle as a forerunner of modern scientometrics and the science of science is revealed in a comparison of his work with recent trends. In the first five volumes of the journalScientometrics 51 papers were identified dealing with topics related to those dealt with byde Candolle.     

Second Life as a support element for learning electronic related subjects: A real case

Looking for more active and motivating methodological alternatives from the students’ perspective, which promote analysis and investigation abilities that make the student a more participative agent and some learning processes are facilitated, a practical study was conducted in the University of La Sabana (Chía, Colombia), in Computing Engineering (INF) and Agroindustrial Production Engineering (IPA) academic programs under the guiding question: Is Second Life an attractive tool for students, does it increment motivation, promote participation and facilitate learning processes in electronic related subjects in Engineering degrees?Second Life (SL) platform was then used as a traditional on-site class complement in electronic related subjects. A follow up was conducted with several groups during a year and a half, some students followed the subject with the traditional on-site methodology and others did it following a mixed methodology that combined traditional on-site lessons with virtual sessions trough SL, making a comparison and applying a quantitative as well as a qualitative methodology for the information analysis and recollection.After the specified study period it was found that using SL as part of the methodology, increments motivation toward electronic related subjects, and promotes participation and investigation, due to the fact that this tool makes learning possible in a funnier, more interactive and deeper way than if it had been taught in a master class. Having real-time access from a virtual classroom to all types of audiovisual information, helps more senses get involved in the learning process, making it more effective; nevertheless a weakness was detected related to the attention and concentration: students tend to get distracted, because their classroom is the computer and from there they have access not only to the many worlds of SL but to all the social networks and the Internet in general.