Coping knowledge boundaries between information system and business disciplines: An intellectual capital perspective

Information system development can be considered a collaboration between users and developers. The inability to leverage the localized knowledge embedded in these two stakeholders hinders software development work to achieve high performance. Exploring the ways to counter this difficulty is then critical. This study applies an intellectual capital perspective to address the issues around spanning the knowledge boundary between developers and users. Our findings highlighted how important effective knowledge boundary spanning is to both product and project quality. Furthermore, three dimensions of intellectual capital increased the degree to which knowledge boundary spanning was effective.     

Application of a biogenic extra cellular ice nucleator for food processing: effects on the freeze-thaw stability of fish actomyosin from tilapia

The effect of biogenic extra cellular ice nucleators (ECINs) on gel‐forming capacity and textural stability of a fish actomyosin (AM) gel system subjected to controlled freeze‐thaw (FT) cycles was studied. Stability changes were quantified by measuring the degree of retention of Ca²⁺ ATPase activity and changes in protein surface hydrophobicity. Results showed that different concentrations of ECIN suppressed Ca²⁺ ATPase activity loss during FT cycles depended quantitatively on ECIN concentration. After three FT cycles, Ca²⁺ ATPase activity retention was 76.20% with the highest ECIN concentration and 20.10% without ECIN, and surface hydrophobicity of AM with ECIN was 150.67, whereas the corresponding value of the control sample was 208.70. By measuring changes in surface hydrophobicity, we observed that ECIN significantly reduces denaturation of AM protein caused by FT cycling. Our data show that ECIN contributes a significant protective effect on gel‐forming capacity of fish and textural stability of fish AM during FT cycling. This demonstrates for the first time that ECINs have the potential to help stabilise the texture of fish AM and potentially other food products during frozen storage.     

Sensory and Nutritive Qualities of Food

Coverage of original research on flavor, color, and texture assessment, both quantitative and subjective; nutritional properties; nutraceuticals; and quality attributes as influenced by processing/storage/packaging     

Multiobjective Optimal Design of Sewerage Rehabilitation by Using the Nondominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II

Application of multiobjective optimization in sewerage rehabilitation management is not widespread due to the limitation of data collection and complex optimization process. Thus, a few researches in literature focused on sewerage rehabilitation optimization, and only considered two-objective optimization usually between the service life and the direct cost instead of a social cost. A sewerage rehabilitation multiobjective optimization decision support system (SRMOS) was developed for sewerage rehabilitation management in this study. The nondominated sorting genetic algorithm-II was used to design a set of Pareto surfaces with desirable rehabilitation effectiveness at the lowest cost by providing optimal plans comprising a construction method and substitute material. The SRMOS was applied to a real sewerage system to provide tradeoff solutions for three conflicting objectives, which are minimizing rehabilitation cost, maximizing pipe service, and minimizing traffic disruption. Compared with the experts' manual estimation, the plan derived from the SRMOS enables saving nearly 20 % of the rehabilitation cost. The contours of the rehabilitation cost show the equivalent relation between the traffic disruption and service life of pipes. The results indicate that increasing the number of objectives can make up the drawback of cost hard to be quantified and can also facilitate deriving practical plans for reference in decision-making.     

Sewer pipe defects diagnosis assessment using multivariate analysis on CCTV video imagery

Closed circuit television (CCTV) technology has been commonly used to inspect underground pipe defects, and high CCTV image quality is a prerequisite for accurate defect diagnosis. An acceptance criterion for CCTV inspection videos is critical for ensuring accurate diagnosis and preventing disputes between employers and contractors. This paper used multivariate statistical methods to evaluate the overall quality of CCTV images and to define an acceptance criterion for CCTV videos. Numerous CCTV images from a sewer inspection project were assessed and their quality, consisting of similarity in luminance and contrast distortions, was calculated by comparing a set of ideal images. Principal component analysis (PCA) and redundancy analysis (RDA) grouped the CCTV videos into homogeneous segments with similar image quality and provided a visual acceptance criterion for CCTV inspection videos. Furthermore, RDA triplot indicated that the contrast improvement of CCTV images can effectively enhance image quality and increase the diagnosis efficiency.     

Users as knowledge co-producers in the information system development project

This study investigates the role of users as knowledge co-producers in different stages of the information system development project. Data collected from 269 IS professionals supported our hypotheses that common knowledge has an impact on requirement determination, which, in turn, leads to better project performance. User-IS relationship can substitute the effect of common knowledge on requirement determination in the design stage and user review can ensure that the obtained requirements are actually carried out by developers in the development stage. As a result, higher project performance can be obtained. Discussion of the results and conclusions is also provided.     

Withholding effort in knowledge contribution: The role of social exchange and social cognitive on project teams

Few investigations have been made to determine what factors influence people in withholding knowledge from their colleagues. We created a construct, knowledge withholding (KW), defined as the likelihood that individuals contribute less knowledge to others in the organization than they could. We have formulated a model, based on social exchange theory and social cognition theory, to analyze the antecedents of KW from both personal and contextual perspectives. The contextual influencers were subdivided into dimensions of rational choice, normative conformity, and affective bonding to help in understanding KW. Results of a survey of 162 MIS alumni of a university, who had experienced software development, trust, distributive justice, and team-related work showed that personal outcome expectations had a substantial influence on KW.     

Automated diagnosis of sewer pipe defects based on machine learning approaches

In sewage rehabilitation planning, closed circuit television (CCTV) systems are the widely used inspection tools in assessing sewage structural conditions for non man entry pipes. Currently, the assessment of sewage structural conditions by manually interpretation on CCTV images seems inefficient, especially for several thousands of frames in one inspection plan. Also, the assessment work significantly involves engineers’ eye sight and professional experience. With a purpose of assisting general staffs in diagnosing pipe defects on CCTV inspection images, a diagnostic system by applying machine learning approaches is proposed in this paper. This research was first to use image process techniques, including wavelet transform and computation of co-occurrence matrices, for describing the textures of the pipe defects. Then, three neural network approaches, back-propagation neural network (BPN), radial basis network (RBN), and support vector machine (SVM), were adopted to classify pipe defect patterns, and their performances were compared and discussed. The diagnostic system of pipe defects was applied to a sewer system in the 9th district, Taichung City which is the largest city in middle Taiwan. The result shows that the diagnosis accuracy of 60% derived by SVM is the best and also better than the diagnosis accuracy of 57.4% derived by a Bayesian classifier.     

Factors affecting pass-along email intentions (PAEIs): Integrating the social capital and social cognition theories

While eWOM advertising has recently emerged as an effective marketing strategy among marketing practitioners, comparatively few studies have been conducted to examine the eWOM from the perspective of pass-along emails. Based on social capital theory and social cognitive theory, this paper develops a model involving social enablers and personal cognition factors to explore the eWOM behavior and its efficacy. Data collected from 347 email users have lent credit to the model proposed. Tested by LISREL 8.70, the results indicate that the factors such as message involvement, social interaction tie, affection outcome expectations and message passing self-efficacy exert significant influences on pass-along email intentions (PAEIs). The study result may well be useful to marketing practitioners who are considering email marketing, especially to those who are in the process of selecting key email users and/or designing product advertisements to heighten the eWOM effect.     

Understanding social loafing in knowledge contribution from the perspectives of justice and trust

Many studies have confirmed that social loafing can greatly undermine a group’s performance. The negative impact of social loafing is even more pronounced in knowledge contribution, since much valuable knowledge is implicit and thus easy to conceal. However, few studies have centered on investigating the effect of social loafing on knowledge contribution, namely, knowledge contribution loafing (KCL). The aim of this study is to develop an integrative understanding of major KCL antecedents in team projects. We employ as our theoretical framework the widely applied Social Exchange Theory (SET) and focus on two of its core concepts, trust and justice, each of which is in turn sub-divided into three types to facilitate a more comprehensive understanding. Through a cross-industry survey of 157 groups in Taiwan and after a partial least squares (PLS) analysis, the result of this study shows that KCL can be effectively diminished by raising interactional justice and benevolence-based trust. Additionally, we find that procedural, interactional and distributive justice as well as integrity-based trust also exert a positive effect on boosting benevolence-based trust.