The Measurement of Business Intelligence

Based on a literature review, this article identifies and assesses measurement approaches for two different purposes: determining the value of BI and managing the BI process within an organization.     

一种新的网络化无创血压实时监测系统

随着生活节奏的加快,血压相关性疾病的发病率日渐增高,人们对健康的关注度也逐渐提高。目前,针对人们对健康监测系统通用性、易用性、高精度的基本特征需求,设计了一种新的网络化无创血压实时监测系统。该系统通过检测光电容积脉搏波(PPG)与心电图(ECG)信号,建立血管腔模型进行血压测量,降低测量过程的复杂度和不适感,并结合机器学习方法融合人体特征,进一步提高血压测量准确度。同时利用无线传输技术将测量结果发送至智能终端,且结合历史数据信息进行健康评估,为不同用户提供准确、有效的健康服务,对于血压相关性疾病的预防和治疗发挥重要的指导作用。此外,该系统对于中老年人群的实时健康监护,尤其是独居老人具有重要的研究意义。     

Internet Technology and Social Capital:How the Internet Affects Seniors’ Social Capital and Wellbeing

Although it is increasingly obvious that the Internet is changing human life; the details of this change are not yet clear. A major debate in current literature involves the capacity of the Internet to enhance social capital and wellbeing in old age. In this regard, the present study attempts to investigate the relationships between Internet use and older people’s social capital and wellbeing. An online survey was conducted at the University of Sydney. 222 seniors responded to the survey. The measures used included a wide range of instruments related to the Internet use, social capital and wellbeing. Respondents used the Internet for various purposes, including seeking information, entertainment, commerce, communication, and finding new people. The main findings of the study were that the relationships between Internet use, social capital and wellbeing is a complex construct and the Internet has different effects on social capital and wellbeing resulting from different use of this technology. The study results revealed that the Internet is a 2‐edged sword with the ability to both harm and help. According to the findings of this study, using the Internet can be helpful for older adults if they are aware how they use it.     

Crossing boundaries in Facebook: Students’ framing of language learning activities as extended spaces

Young people’s interaction online is rapidly increasing, which enables new spaces for communication; the impact on learning, however, is not yet acknowledged in education. The aim of this exploratory case study is to scrutinize how students frame their interaction in social networking sites (SNS) in school practices and what that implies for educational language teaching and learning practices. Analytically, the study departs from a sociocultural perspective on learning, and adopts conceptual distinctions of frame analysis. The results based on ethnographic data from a Facebook group in English-learning classes, with 60 students aged between 13 and 16 from Colombia, Finland, Sweden and Taiwan indicate that there is a possibility for boundary crossing, which could generate extended spaces for collaborative language-learning activities in educational contexts where students combine their school subject of learning language and their communicative use of language in their everyday life. Such extended spaces are, however, difficult to maintain and have to be recurrently negotiated. To take advantage of young people’s various dynamic communicative uses of language in their everyday life in social media, the implementation of such media for educational purposes has to be deliberately, collaboratively and dynamically negotiated by educators and students to form a new language-learning space with its own potentials and constraints.     

Understanding the impact of social media usage among organizations

This study investigates the antecedents and impact of social media usage in organizations. This study uses the technology, organization, and environment framework and includes certain antecedent factors that are specific to social media usage in organizations. The items to measure different purposes of social media usage in organizations were developed, which contribute to the enhancement of social media usage measurement. This study develops and tests an integrated model that contributes to the scholarly research on social media and information systems. The study also helps organizations to understand the benefits of social media usage and provides a justification for investments in social media by organizations.     

Social media and the introductory statistics course

The popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube begs the question of how such sites might be used for educational purposes within classroom settings. This paper presents a review of some of the educational uses of Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube within college classrooms. Because of the lack of published reports on the use of social media within statistics classrooms, the authors share their own examples of how social media can be used within the introductory statistics classroom, and they outline recommendations and considerations for other instructors who might want to explore the use of social media in their own courses.     

Plant species identification using digital morphometrics: A review

Plants are of fundamental importance to life on Earth. The shapes of leaves, petals and whole plants are of great significance to plant science, as they can help to distinguish between different species, to measure plant health, and even to model climate change. The growing interest in biodiversity and the increasing availability of digital images combine to make this topic timely. The global shortage of expert taxonomists further increases the demand for software tools that can recognize and characterize plants from images. A robust automated species identification system would allow people with only limited botanical training and expertise to carry out valuable field work.We review the main computational, morphometric and image processing methods that have been used in recent years to analyze images of plants, introducing readers to relevant botanical concepts along the way. We discuss the measurement of leaf outlines, flower shape, vein structures and leaf textures, and describe a wide range of analytical methods in use. We also discuss a number of systems that apply this research, including prototypes of hand-held digital field guides and various robotic systems used in agriculture. We conclude with a discussion of ongoing work and outstanding problems in the area.     

The stress-buffering effect of self-disclosure on Facebook: An examination of stressful life events,social support,and mental health among college students

Stressful life events are viewed as the leading cause of psychological distress. Self-disclosure, however, could buffer the deleterious impact of stress on mental health. Recent studies show that college students are likely to engage in self-disclosure on social network sites (SNSs), but it is unclear to what extent they benefit from doing that. This study examined the effect of self-disclosure on SNSs on young adults’ mental health. Survey data were collected from a probability sample of 560 university students. The results show that people tend to open up on Facebook when in times of stress and that self-disclosure on Facebook moderates the relationship between stressful life events and mental health. Facebook disclosure was also positively associated with enacted social support on Facebook, which led to increased perceived social support, enhanced life satisfaction, and reduced depression. SNSs, therefore, serve as a promising avenue for delivering health care and intervention.     

Social Exclusion in Later Life: A Systematic Review of the Literature

In the last decade, there has been a growing awareness regarding social exclusion. Considering the ageing population and the likelihood of older people being socially excluded, the aims of this article are to: (1) review existing studies concerning social exclusion in later life; and (2) identify how environmental and life-course perspectives are presented in studies focusing on social exclusion in later life. A systematic review in seven scientific databases was conducted to explore the peer-reviewed evidence. In total, 26 articles were included and analysed. Findings describe the variety of methods, conceptualisation, dimensions and measures used in this recent area of research. Determinants of social exclusion in later life are discussed and life-course and environmental perspectives are examined. The discussion highlights the complex character of the concept and measurement of social exclusion, and the presence of general and age-specific dimensions of social exclusion in later life. The time and context relativity and the need for life-course and environmental perspectives on social exclusion in later life are discussed. Finally, future directions of research are discussed.     

Activity recognition using eye-gaze movements and traditional interactions

The need for intelligent HCI has been reinforced by the increasing numbers of human-centered applications in our daily life. However, in order to respond adequately, intelligent applications must first interpret users’ actions. Identifying the context in which users’ interactions occur is an important step toward automatic interpretation of behavior. In order to address a part of this context-sensing problem, we propose a generic and application-independent framework for activity recognition of users interacting with a computer interface. Our approach uses Layered Hidden Markov Models (LHMM) and is based on eye-gaze movements along with keyboard and mouse interactions. The main contribution of the proposed framework is the ability to relate users’ interactions to a task model in variant applications and for different monitoring purposes. Experimental results from two user studies show that our activity recognition technique is able to achieve good predictive accuracy with a relatively small amount of training data.     

Mobile social group sizes and scaling ratio

Social data mining has become an emerging area of research in information and communication technology fields. The scope of social data mining has expanded significantly in the recent years with the advance of telecommunication technologies and the rapidly increasing accessibility of computing resources and mobile devices. People increasingly engage in and rely on phone communications for both personal and business purposes. Hence, mobile phones become an indispensable part of life for many people. In this article, we perform social data mining on mobile social networking by presenting a simple but efficient method to define social closeness and social grouping, which are then used to identify social sizes and scaling ratio of close to “8”. We conclude that social mobile network is a subset of the face-to-face social network, and both groupings are not necessary the same, hence the scaling ratios are distinct. Mobile social data mining.     

Computers in the teaching of differential equations

The purposes, methodology and contents of a computer oriented first course in differential equations are described. The course is open to those in the life sciences as well as to mathematics and physical science majors and presumes neither previous computer experience nor more than a minimal background in calculus. One of the features of the course is the parallel treatment given to analytic and numeric solution approaches. The latter uses a flowchart language as its teaching medium with computer library programs being available for extensive numerical work.     

The role of personality in shaping social networks and mediating behavioral change

In this paper, we exploit different facets of the Friends and Family study to deal with two personality-related tasks of paramount importance for the user modeling and ubiquitous computing fields. First, we propose and validate an approach for automatic classification of personality traits based on the ego-networks’ structural characteristics. Our classification results show that (i) mobile phones-based behavioral data can be superior to survey ones for the purposes of personality classification from structural network properties and (ii) particular feature set/network type combinations promise to perform better with given personality traits. Then, we investigate the mediating role played by personality in the context of inducing behavioral change, specifically increasing daily physical activity using social strategies (social comparison and peer pressure). Our results confirm the role played by Extraversion and Neuroticism. Extroverts exposed to a social comparison strategy are positively associated with an increase in physical activity level, while they tend to decrease physical activity level if they are exposed to a peer pressure intervention strategy. Regarding Neuroticism dimension, neurotic people tend to increase their physical daily activity level if they are exposed to a social comparison strategy. Our findings may have implications in designing personality-based behavioral change strategies and suggest to incorporate users’ personality models in the implementation of persuasive systems.     

Life Course Pathways to Later Life Wellbeing: A Comparative Study of the Role of Socio-Economic Position in England and the U.S.

The influence of early life, accumulation and social mobility on wellbeing in later life in the U.S. and England is investigated. Using cross-sectional data from the Health and Retirement Study (HRS) and the English Longitudinal Study of Ageing (ELSA), we estimate multivariate regressions of hedonic and eudemonic measures of wellbeing on these life course mechanisms, controlling for age, gender, ethnic background, partnership status, health and wealth. On the level of the life course mechanisms, there is mixed evidence regarding the critical impact of early life, strong evidence for an association between accumulation and eudemonic wellbeing and a moderate negative effect of downward social mobility. While the relation between hedonic wellbeing and life course mechanisms is unclear or in a different direction than anticipated, eudemonic wellbeing is clearly related to accumulation and mobility in both countries and to early life in the U.S. On the societal level, the major observation is that the life course has a larger influence in the U.S. than in England.     

Development of a sensory gate–ball game system for the aged people

Recently, medical advances have been increasing the size of the aged population. With rapidly developing technology, computers are now essential parts in our daily life, and the number of the aged people using computers is also increasing continuously. But user interfaces and contents for the aged people have not been developed actively yet. In this paper, we present a 3D sensory gate–ball game system which can be played by the aged people easily. This game system is based on 3D graphics and uses a realistic gate–ball stick and balls as interfaces, so it can improve both physical and mental health of the aged people. Because our game is a sensory game, it is easy to play at home without an outdoor playground. Finally, we made a survey about an experiment after users played the game and show results of the survey.     

Effective coordination in the software process - historical perspectives and future directions

A critical factor in delivering quality software products is the quality of the software process. Software development is characterized by its multi-party activity (MPA), and a major challenge in managing the software process is the coordination of its constituent activities, resources and people. In this paper, we review approaches and techniques for managing multi-party activity in the software process in terms of their originating domain and the coordination features they address. Malone and Crowston's framework of coordination dependencies is adopted to consider common dependencies between activities and to classify the different approaches that have been taken to their management in software engineering. Some observations are made regarding strategies for achieving effective coordination and on areas for further investigation.     

Computer mediated communication for social and academic purposes: Profiles of use and University students’ gratifications

The present study approaches the Internet as a social space, where university students make use of computer mediated communication (CMC) applications, i.e. e-mail, instant messaging and social network sites, in order to satisfy social and academic needs. We focus on university students, because they represent one of the most avid groups of CMC users and additionally, because they are expected to carry their perceptions of media with them into the work place and their social life. In order to investigate this issue, we conducted an empirical research using, as a target group, a sample of students from a specific Greek University. Grounded in the “uses and gratifications” perspective, we investigated the various profiles of CMC use by students along with (a) the students’ perceptions about social and academic usefulness of CMC applications, (b) the extent up to which these perceptions are correlated with students’ prior experience with the use of CMC applications, and (c) how both of these factors can predict the frequency of present use of CMC for social or academic purposes respectively. The results reveal that although these three CMC applications constitute “functional alternatives” (media that satisfy similar needs) they are different to the degree of their “functionality” for the gratification of social and academic needs. Furthermore, the degree of CMC use by students is not correlated with the years of CMC experience, but with the profile of use that students dynamically adopt according to their daily needs and preferences. The results provide evidence for the current CMC use by university students and can be useful for the implementation of further academic policies regarding CMC use in Higher Education settings.     

Experiential learning approach for requirements engineering education

The use of requirements engineering (RE) in industry is hampered by a poor understanding of its practices and their benefits. Teaching RE at the university level is therefore an important endeavor. Shortly before students become engineers and enter the workforce, this education could ideally be provided as an integrated part of developing the requisite business skills for understanding RE. Because much social wisdom is packed into RE methods, it is unrealistic to expect students with little organizational experience to understand and appreciate this body of knowledge; hence, the necessity of an experiential approach. The course described in this paper uses an active, affective, experiential pedagogy giving students the opportunity to experience a simulated work environment that demonstrates the social/design–problem complexities and richness of a development organization in the throes of creating a new product. Emotional and technical debriefing is conducted after each meaningful experience so that students and faculty, alike can better understand the professional relevancies of what they have just experienced. This includes an examination of the many forces encountered in industrial settings but not normally discussed in academic settings. The course uses a low-tech social simulation, rather than software simulation, so that students learn through interaction with real people, and are therefore confronted with the complexity of true social relationships.     

Implementation of the personal healthcare services on automotive environments

One of the main purposes of personal healthcare devices is for elderly people with chronic illness that needs a health monitoring continuously in common life. There are several standard specifications for personal healthcare devices to interact each other safely and compatibly. Depending on evolution of technology, the elderly and the chronic disease can have their own personal healthcare devices, and they can monitor themselves easily. However, some kind of limitation is still remaining in their life even if they have powerful smart devices. In situation that they need to drive and go to get treatment and to prepare medicine, automotive system does not support interfaces for personal healthcare devices. Therefore, we discuss about several standards of the personal healthcare devices and interfaces for connection of personal healthcare device. Also, automotive environments that include various network interfaces for infotainment and interconnection between infotainment system and devices and platform are considered. After that, we propose several implementations of personal healthcare services to support standard of personal healthcare devices on automotive system.