‘Best’ for whom?: the tension between ‘best practice’ ERP packages and diverse epistemic cultures in a university context

The idea that so-called ‘best’ business practices can be transferred to organizations when they purchase enterprise resource planning (ERP) software packages is a major selling point of these packages. Yet recent research has illustrated a gap between the espoused theory of a best practice solution and the theory-in-use experienced by those who install software with such a design. As researchers begin to examine the difficult process by which organizations recast the best practices model handed down to them by consultancies and software vendors in an effort to make the software ‘work for them’ in practice, it is equally important that we begin to understand the reasons that such a gap exists. To this end, we analyze the strategic partnership between a multinational software vendor and a university who together designed a ‘best practice’ ERP package for the higher education industry. Through the theoretical lens of ‘epistemic cultures’ we argue that in organizational contexts made up of more than one epistemic culture, the use of a best practice model will be problematic because, by definition, the model mandates one epistemological position through the software design. This is counter to a university's loosely coupled organizational form.     

‘I'm a completely different person at home’: using digital technologies to connect learning between home and school

This paper reports on a qualitative study exploring children's, parents', and teachers' experiences of communication between home and school and connections between children's learning at school and home in order to consider how using digital technologies to mediate the home–school relationship might support children's learning. Parents, teachers, and children welcomed the idea of using digital technologies to communicate between home and school, hoping that more timely communication could avoid problems at school. There were few connections between learning at home and in school; participants saw school and home as separate domains and the boundaries between the two were strongly maintained. It is argued that for connections to be made between learning at home and in school, elements of both need to be drawn together in a space in which both are valued, and that digital technologies could support the creation of such virtual third spaces.     

Correction to ‘Mixed ℋ︁2/ℋ︁∞ Nonlinear Filtering’

In Section 5 of Aliyu and Boukas (Int. J. Robust Nonlinear Control 2009; 19 :394–417), the authors have presented certainty‐equivalent filters for the mixed ??₂/??_∞ filtering problem for affine nonlinear systems. Sufficient conditions for the solvability of the problem with a finite‐dimensional filter are given in terms of a pair of coupled Hamilton–Jacobi–Isaacs equations (HJIEs). In this note, we supply a correction to these HJIEs. Moreover, for linear systems this correction is not necessary. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On the workload and ‘phaseload’ allocation problems of short reliable production lines with finite buffers

Serial flow or production lines are modeled as tandem queueing networks and formulated as continuous-time Markov chains to investigate how to maximize throughput or minimize the average work-in-process (WIP) when the total service time and the total number of service phases among the stations are fixed (these are the workload and ‘phaseload’ allocation problems, respectively). This paper examines both the effect of the kind of service time distribution on the optimal workload allocation in order to maximize throughput or minimize the average WIP of perfectly reliable production lines.

The new approach of this work is the differentiation of the number of service phases of the service time distribution which is assumed to be of phase type at all stations of the flow line and the placement of storage space (buffers) between any two successive stations in order to examine the effect of these factors to the form of the optimal workload vector t and the optimal service phase vector ph.     

Beyond ‘mobility’: A new understanding of moving with technology

We report a surprising experience with mobile technology: the lead author found herself seeing and acting differently while running over part of her usual running track with the exercise‐tracking application ‘Strava’ on her phone, even without focal attention to the app. We apply the method of problematization to a detailed empirical account of this experience, in conjunction with a literature analysis of taken‐for‐granted assumptions underpinning research on ‘mobile technology use’. This reveals that, while the relationship of attention, perception, movement and technology was a key element of the surprise, these themes are not well accounted for in current IS literature. In response, we employ William Gibson's ecological theory of visual perception to reinterpret the empirical account and thereby build a new understanding of the human plus mobile technology that we term moving‐with‐technology. We introduce to IS: moving‐with‐technology as a new analytical perspective; the new phenomena of digital sub‐species, digital‐niches and asynchronous co‐location; and stimulus for new ecologically oriented ‘mobile methods’. Moving‐with‐technology also has practical implications for urban planners who are using data from digital trace‐making tools such as Strava in their decision‐making, thereby generating what we call ecological feedback loops.     

Beyond the ‘digital natives’ debate: Towards a more nuanced understanding of students' technology experiences

The idea of the ‘digital natives’, a generation of tech‐savvy young people immersed in digital technologies for which current education systems cannot cater, has gained widespread popularity on the basis of claims rather than evidence. Recent research has shown flaws in the argument that there is an identifiable generation or even a single type of highly adept technology user. For educators, the diversity revealed by these studies provides valuable insights into students' experiences of technology inside and outside formal education. While this body of work provides a preliminary understanding, it also highlights subtleties and complexities that require further investigation. It suggests, for example, that we must go beyond simple dichotomies evident in the digital natives debate to develop a more sophisticated understanding of our students' experiences of technology. Using a review of recent research findings as a starting point, this paper identifies some key issues for educational researchers, offers new ways of conceptualizing key ideas using theoretical constructs from Castells, Bourdieu and Bernstein, and makes a case for how we need to develop the debate in order to advance our understanding.     

A new digital watermarking evaluation and benchmarking methodology using an external group of evaluators and multi‐criteria analysis based on ‘large‐scale data’

Digital watermarking evaluation and benchmarking are challenging tasks because of multiple evaluation and conflicting criteria. A few approaches have been presented to implement digital watermarking evaluation and benchmarking frameworks. However, these approaches still possess a number of limitations, such as fixing several attributes on the account of other attributes. Well‐known benchmarking approaches are limited to robust watermarking. Therefore, this paper presents a new methodology for digital watermarking evaluation and benchmarking based on large‐scale data by using external evaluators and a group decision making context. Two experiments are performed. In the first experiment, a noise gate‐based digital watermarking approach is developed, and the scheme for the noise gate digital watermarking approach is enhanced. Sixty audio samples from different audio styles are tested with two algorithms. A total of 120 samples were evaluated according to three different metrics, namely, quality, payload, and complexity, to generate a set of digital watermarking samples. In the second experiment, the situation in which digital watermarking evaluators have different preferences is discussed. Weight measurement with a decision making solution is required to solve this issue. The analytic hierarchy process is used to measure evaluator preference. In the decision making solution, the technique for order of preference by similarity to the ideal solution with different contexts (e.g., individual and group) is utilized. Therefore, selecting the proper context with different aggregation operators to benchmark the results of experiment 1 (i.e., digital watermarking approaches) is recommended. The findings of this research are as follows: (1) group and individual decision making provide the same result in this case study. However, in the case of selection where the priority weights are generated from the evaluators, group decision making is the recommended solution to solve the trade‐off reflected in the benchmarking process for digital watermarking approaches. (2) Internal and external aggregations show that the enhanced watermarking approach demonstrates better performance than the original watermarking approach. © 2016 The Authors. Software: Practice and Experience published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.     

Building text classifiers using positive,unlabeled and ‘outdated’ examples

Learning from positive and unlabeled examples (PU learning) is a partially supervised classification that is frequently used in Web and text retrieval system. The merit of PU learning is that it can get good performance with less manual work. Motivated by transfer learning, this paper presents a novel method that transfers the ‘outdated data’ into the process of PU learning. We first propose a way to measure the strength of the features and select the strong features and the weak features according to the strength of the features. Then, we extract the reliable negative examples and the candidate negative examples using the strong and the weak features (Transfer‐1DNF). Finally, we construct a classifier called weighted voting iterative support vector machine (SVM) that is made up of several subclassifiers by applying SVM iteratively, and each subclassifier is assigned a weight in each iteration. We conduct the experiments on two datasets: 20 Newsgroups and Reuters‐21578, and compare our method with three baseline algorithms: positive example‐based learning, weighted voting classifier and SVM. The results show that our proposed method Transfer‐1DNF can extract more reliable negative examples with lower error rates, and our classifier outperforms the baseline algorithms. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

More than providing ‘solutions’: towards an understanding of customer‐oriented citizenship behaviours of IS professionals

Information systems (IS) support in organizations has undergone dramatic changes over the years. IS professionals in the support function have become an important knowledge source to colleagues who seek assistance with their IS usage. Our understanding of IS professionals' customer‐oriented behaviours is limited, however. Focusing on IS post‐implementation support and drawing upon organizational citizenship behaviour (OCB) theory, this paper seeks to understand IS professionals' citizenship behaviours in supporting colleagues. Our analysis of 630 support tasks performed by IS professionals with regard to two systems at three periods reveals five types of customer‐oriented OCB: anticipation, education, justification, personalization‐technology and personalization‐business. Our results also show different associations between four contextual factors of IS support (i.e. system, user, task and problem) and the OCBs. In instances of user deficiency, more personalization‐business and anticipation OCBs were observed across all the four problem domains (functionality, data, workflow and role). By contrast, in instances of system deficiency, more personalization‐technology OCBs were observed among the two problem domains of data and functionality. Moreover, the occurrence of OCBs revealed a temporal pattern such that personalization‐business OCBs are more pronounced in early post‐implementation periods whereas anticipation OCBs and personalization‐technology OCBs become more dominant later. The categorization scheme of the customer‐oriented OCB, the OCB dynamics and the patterns between OCB types and the contextual factors advance our understanding of the evolving and challenging work of organizational IS support. Our findings extend the OCB literature on customer orientation and enrich the limited studies on knowledge‐intensive IS support work. Practical implications of the findings on IS management and policies are discussed.     

Factors affecting the dynamics of a π‐cell (Invited Paper)

Abstract— The basic factors related to the dynamics of a π‐cell device are reviewed. Specifically, the director dynamics are studied for the case of a periodic drive voltage that is sometimes referred to as “impulse drive.” It is found for this type of drive waveform the desired bend state is more stable against the twisting effect of transverse electric fields found in AMLCD devices. This effect causes the reduction in light transmission due to “impulse drive” to be smaller in π‐cell devices than is expected to be found in other AMLCD modes.     

Enacting language games: the development of a sense of ‘we‐ness’ in online forums

A sense of ‘we‐ness’– enacted through collective identity and culture – is both crucial in online, remote contexts, and particularly difficult to develop in such settings. Using Wittgenstein's concept of language games, we examine how participants of two online forums construct collective identity and culture through their discursive practices. We suggest a strong performative interpretation of the notion of language games, i.e. members of a community produce a sense of we‐ness through their participation in the language game while also defining their expected behaviours and actions. We illustrate how the notion of language games offers an approach for researching and analysing the emergence of collective identity and culture in online forums.     

Revealing the ‘real’ me, searching for the ‘actual’ you: Presentations of self on an internet dating site

This paper considers the presentation of self on an internet dating site. Thirty men and 30 women were interviewed about their online dating experiences. They were asked about how they constructed their profiles and how they viewed other individuals’ profiles. Which types of presentations of self led to more successful offline romantic relationships were also investigated. Additionally, gender differences were examined. In line with previous research on presentation of self online, individuals were quite strategic in their online presentations. However, important differences between initiating a relationship on an internet dating site and other spaces (online and offline) included the type of self disclosed as well as the depth of breadth of information individuals self-disclosed about themselves before any one-on-one conversations took place.     

‘Because it’s boring, irrelevant and I don’t like computers’: Why high school girls avoid professionally-oriented ICT subjects

The current paper details results from the Girls and ICT survey phase of a three year study investigating factors associated with low participation rates by females in education pathways leading to professional level information and communications technology (ICT) professions. The study is funded through the Australian Research Council’s (ARC) Linkage Grants Scheme. It involves a research partnership between Education Queensland (EQ), industry partner Technology One and academic researchers at (affiliation removed for review purposes). Respondents to the survey were 1453 senior high school girls. Comparisons were drawn between Takers (n = 131) and Non Takers (n = 1322) of advanced level computing subjects. Significant differences between the groups were found on four questions: “The subjects are interesting”; “I am very interested in computers”; “The subject will be helpful to me in my chosen career path after school”; and “It suited my timetable”. The research has demonstrated that senior high school girls tend to perceive advanced computing subjects as boring and they express a strong aversion to computers.     

A Markovian model for the hybrid manufacturing planning and control method ‘Double Speed Single Production Line’

In this paper, the hybrid production planning & control method Double Speed Single Production Line (DSSPL) is presented, modelled and its performances evaluated and compared to classical Production Planning and Control methods (PPC). DSSPL combines JIT/kanban and Material Requirement Planning for the production of different classes of products (A- and B-items based on a market or customer oriented analysis) on one single production line. By the use of a Markovian birth–death queuing model of a single-stage, two-product production system, the performance and the behavior of the basic DSSPL concept are analyzed and compared to the classical MRP concepts. Its capability to cope with limited resources is illustrated with an industrial case study where DSSPL has been implemented to solve coordination problems between a plastic molding feeder shop and the final assembly line of a micromotor producer.     

An H-minimax approach to the design of robust control systems, part II: All solutions, all-pass form solutions and the ‘best’ solution

We characterize all solutions to a robustness optimization problem as the solutions of a two-parameter interpolation problem. From this characterization it is easy to show that an all-pass form solution always exists as long as a solution exists. We also study the possibility of using non-all-pass form solutions and by introducing other optimization objectives (motivated by improvements in disturbance rejection and robust stability) we search for the 'best' solution.     

A heap-based implementation of the programming language Pascal

The implementation of Pascal known as Pascal ‘P’ was modified so that activation records for blocks (procedures and functions) were no longer allocated on a stack, but were instead allocated on a heap. This was done partly to test the feasibility of using Pascal ‘P’ for experimenting with extensions to Pascal, and partly to assess the efficiency of implementing Pascal procedures and functions in this way. The necessary changes to Pascal ‘P’ are described; where alternative strategies were possible, these are outlined and the reasons for the final choice given. The heap management algorithms used are presented and, in particular, their behaviour when managing the activation records of Pascal programs which do not involve dynamic variables is explained. Quantitative comparisons are made between Pascal ‘P’ and the version with heap-allocated activation records, to assess their relative efficiencies; these comparisons indicate that the modified system uses more storage, but it gives rise to only slightly longer execution times. Alternative heap management algorithms are discussed. Finally, some advantages of heap-allocated activation records are presented.     

Low voltage fast response display using dual π‐cells with quarter‐wave thickness

In this paper, a design for a fast response display consisting of dual π‐cells is investigated. The thickness of each liquid crystal cell layer is only half of a single LC cell device with the same retardation change, which results in about one quarter of the response time for a single π‐cell device. While this result is obviously anticipated, an additional advantage is that a good viewing angle can be achieved by using negative C plates, which allows a lower cost device with a more uniform black state across the area of the display than the case of a single cell compensated by a discotic compensator. We also propose a solution to solve parallax issue from two‐layer structure of liquid crystal cell, and it opens a window of opportunity for a device with two‐layer structure.     

EPS: An ‘elementary’ programming system for the Delft Parallel Processor

A programming system for synchronous parallel processors, like the DPP-84 working in synchronous mode, is proposed. In EPS a program consists of a collection of well-defined and separate units, described in a conventional procedure-oriented language like PASCAL or MODULA-2. The connection between the ‘elementary’ program units is laid in a supervisory ‘configuration’ program, which defines both the spatial and time relations between the units. The concept of ‘virtual’ parallel processing is introduced, which enables the construction of logical parallel programs, independent of the number of processing elements actually available.     

Reply to comments on ‘Sufficient conditions for the synthesis of H∞ fixed‐order controllers’

In this brief note Theorems 1 and 2 (Int. J. Robust Nonlinear Control 2000; 10 :1237–1242) are discussed in the light of the observations raised in Feng and Allen (Int. J. Robust Nonlinear Control). A simple correction to the proof of these theorems allows to keep the hypothesis on the possible rank deficiency of the system matrices B and C _y. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.