A Review of “Managing Electronic Government Information in Libraries,Issues and Practices”

ABSTRACT

Included in this bibliography are Internet sites pertaining to the United States Congress. Covered are the official sites from Congress and its supporting agencies. In addition, there are unofficial sites that contain Congress-related information. These include general Web sites of interest groups, document collections sites, general Congress-related sites, voter information and e-mail sites, as well as sites providing access to newsgroups, newsletters, and bulletin boards.

There is a great deal of information on Congress to be found on the Internet. With public Internet stations popping up in libraries, and the increase in personal Internet accounts, the Internet can help technology meet democracy. And with the ever-increasing trend by government agencies, including the Government Printing Office, to move toward electronic information, it will be important to know where to find the information. Hopefully, this bibliography will help you locate the information you are seeking on Congress.     

Europe’s Open Smart Card Infrastructure

The European smart community has launched the Open Smart Card Infrastructure for Europe. David Jones, CTT’s Consulting Editor, questioned Jan van Arkel, co-chair of the e-Europe Smart Card Charter, about the new initiative.     

Big Data in Experimental Mechanics and Model Order Reduction: Today’s Challenges and Tomorrow’s Opportunities

Since the turn of the century experimental solid mechanics has undergone major changes with the generalized use of images. The number of acquired data has literally exploded and one of today’s challenges is related to the saturation of mining procedures through such big data sets. With respect to digital image/volume correlation one of tomorrow’s pathways is to better control and master this data flow with procedures that are optimized for extracting the sought information with minimum uncertainties and maximum robustness. In this paper emphasis is put on various hierarchical identification procedures. Based on such structures a posteriori model/data reductions are performed in order to ease and make the exploitation of the experimental information far more efficient. Some possibilities related to other model order reduction techniques like the proper generalized decomposition are discussed and new opportunities are sketched.     

Global sensitivity analysis based on Gini’s mean difference

Global sensitivity analysis has been widely used to detect the relative contributions of input variables to the uncertainty of model output, and then more resources can be assigned to the important input variables to reduce the uncertainty of model output more efficiently. In this paper, a new kind of global sensitivity index based on Gini’s mean difference is proposed. The proposed sensitivity index is more robust than the variance-based first order sensitivity index for the cases with non-normal distributions. Through the decomposition of Gini’s mean difference, it shows that the proposed sensitivity index can be represented by the energy distance, which measures the difference between probability distributions. Therefore, the proposed sensitivity index also takes the probability distribution of model output into consideration. In order to estimate the proposed sensitivity index efficiently, an efficient Monte Carlo simulation method is also proposed, which avoids the nested sampling procedure. The test examples show that the proposed sensitivity index is more robust than the variance-based first order sensitivity index for the cases with non-normal distributions.     

A Study on an Information Recommendation System that Provides Topical Information Related to User’s Inquiry for Information Retrieval

As the Internet has been commonly used in our everyday lives, we have been able to obtain large amount of information from it, whereas we have simultaneously had a problem that it is difficult to find proper information for us from the large amount of information on the Web. Although many information recommendation methods have been proposed in order to solve this problem, most recommendation methods are based on a large amount of user’s personal data such as operation log, schedule, etc – which means that we have to manage a large amount of personal data in the system in order to provide proper information to users, and it would be expensive to construct such a system. With this background, in this study, against aiming to construct a sophisticated information recommendation system based on large personal data, we propose a handy and not expensive information recommendation method, working beside a normal search engine, which does not depend on user profile data, but on topical news information.

Information Alignment and Task Coordination in Organizations: An ‘Information Clutch’ Metaphor

Abstract

Despite their rising popularity, distributed teams face a number of collaboration challenges that may potentially hinder their ability to productively coordinate their resources, activities, and information, often in dynamic and uncertain task environments. In this paper, we focus principally on the criticality of information alignment for supporting coordinated task performance in complex operational environments. As organizations become more expertise, geographically, and temporally distributed, appropriate alignment and coordination among distributed team members becomes more critical for minimizing the occurrence of information flow failures, poor decision-making, and degraded team performance. We first describe these coordination processes using the metaphor of an ‘information clutch’ that allows for smooth transitions of task priorities and activities in expert teams. We then present two case study examples that illustrate the potentially significant impact of information sharing and information alignment on productivity and coordination in organizations. We conclude with a discussion of future directions in this area.     

Issues of organizational cybernetics and viability beyond Beer’s viable systems model

The paper starts summarizing the claims of Beer’s viable systems model to identify five issues any viable organizations has to deal with in an unequivocal hierarchical structure of five interrelated systems. Then the evidence is introduced for additional issues and related viable structures of organizations, which deviate from Beer’s model. These issues are: (1) the establishment and (2) evolution of an organization; (3) systems for independent top-down control (like “Six Sigma”); (4) systems for independent bottom-up correction of performance problems (like “Kaizen”), both working outside a hierarchical structure; (5) pull production systems (“Just in Time”) and (6) systems for checks and balances of top-level power (like boards and shareholder meetings). Based on that an evolutionary approach to organizational cybernetics is outlined, addressing the establishment of organizations and possible courses of developments, including recent developments in quality and production engineering, as well as problems of setting and changing goal values determining organizational policies.     

Mobile Information Literacy: Supporting Students’ Research and Information Needs in a Mobile World

Mobile devices have changed everyday life and they have had a great impact in higher education. This article describes a pilot project in which an academic librarian at Lehman College, City University of New York, taught information literacy exclusively via mobile devices. The concept of mobile information literacy is also reviewed, and its role in current and future teaching practices is evaluated. Lessons learned from this project tell us that mobile information literacy, albeit in its infancy, could play an essential part in students’ learning, and therefore academic librarians could incorporate it as part of their practice.     

An analysis of a firm’s capacity in Mazda’s Keiretsu

Capacity is defined as the power resulting from the specific position of a company in a network organization. This article extends the theory of network organizations to examine Mazda’s Yokokai Keiretsu, and proposes a new approach to calculating a firm’s capacity in a network. Capacity is divided into two categories, take-in capacity and take-out capacity, and the gap between them is called the capacity difference. We analyze the impact of capacity difference as a determinant of corporate performance in network organizations, thus providing a new perspective for successful corporate management.     

Information systems ‘in the wild’: supporting activity in the world

One of the most important determinants of managerial effectiveness in achieving organisational objectives is the success in influencing subordinates, lateral peers and supervisors through influence tactics. However, little attention has been paid to the use of a communication medium in the context of influence tactics. Our objective is to study the frequency of these dyadic influence tactics on diverse communication media. The study involves a questionnaire-based survey conducted on Spanish post-graduate students who had been working in medium-sized or large companies during the last 2 years or more. The results suggest that the richness of the medium explains most similarities and differences in the frequency of influence tactics for different communication media. Furthermore, in the study of hard influence tactics in communication media with similar richness, it is necessary to introduce social aspects and the level of surveillance in order to explain it fully. This study helps managers to understand the relationships between influence tactics and the use of communication media in order to improve their communication effectiveness.     

Three tokens in Herman’s algorithm

Herman’s algorithm is a synchronous randomized protocol for achieving self-stabilization in a token ring consisting of N processes. The interaction of tokens makes the dynamics of the protocol very difficult to analyze. In this paper we study the distribution of the time to stabilization, assuming that there are three tokens in the initial configuration. We show for arbitrary N and for an arbitrary timeout t that the probability of stabilization within time t is minimized by choosing as the initial three-token configuration the configuration in which the tokens are placed equidistantly on the ring. Our result strengthens a corollary of a theorem of McIver and Morgan (Inf. Process Lett. 94(2): 79–84, 2005), which states that the expected stabilization time is minimized by the equidistant configuration.     

The Octagon in Leonardo’s Drawings

Mark Reynolds presents a study on Leonardo’s abundant use of the octagon in his drawings and architectural renderings. Specifically, he focuses on Leonardo’s applications of the octagon: in his studies and sketches of the centralized church, and for which we can find influences specifically from Brunelleschi, as well as from other fifteenth-century architects working with this type of religious structure; in his almost obsessive and frequently repetitious drawing of octagonal shapes and forms in his notebooks throughout his career; in his project for a pavilion while with the Sforzas in the last part of his period in Milan. Also examined are ways to develop the modules to accommodate and the θ rectangles. The application of the modular units, so far, have been within the square and its gridwork, but as the octagon has traditionally been used in the development of both the circle and the square, this shape is an interesting challenge in terms of linking the two-dimensional surface to the three-dimensional forms we are planning to generate. The object is to provide us with more insight as to why the octagon held so much fascination for Leonardo as one of the ultimate geometric expressions of grandeur and practicality in spatial organization, design, and development. Often in Leonardo’s drawings of octagons, precise geometric constructions were lacking; the master’s approach was freehand. The author seeks to learn if Leonardo’s sketches can be put to the rigors of strict geometric construction, and still be viable as accurate renderings of octagonal geometric spaces with his own geometric constructions of those same spaces.