Simulation in public sector management: a case study

We detail the development and application of a simulation model to aid decision making concerning the procedures followed in the Office of Film and Literature Classification, by forecasting the effects of possible management initiatives. The major variables are — the number of censors, the volume of publications to be classified (with special emphasis on computer technology publications) and the procedures, in particular, the number of censors with decision-making powers. A model of the system was developed using Extend; a simulation software package designed to aid decision support. This model was used to investigate the utilization of "decision-makers", and to identify and locate the bottlenecks, in the system under a number of different scenarios suggested by the client. There is also the flexibility to include additional duties that might be imposed on the Office.     

Applying reliability measurement: a case study

The problem of knowing when to stop testing software is considered, focusing on the strategy of stopping when a reliability level or rate of failure occurrence acceptable to the customer is reached. The system's reliability is monitored throughout the system test, and the system is released to the field only when the measured reliability is at or above this objective. This approach was applied to test-failure data collected on Remote Measurement System-Digital 1, a large telecommunications testing system that had already gone through system test and been released to the field. The RMS-D1 failure data, which consisted of command-response errors versus commands executed, had been routinely collected by the system-test organization during testing. The testing phase analyzed, the load test, was an operational-profile-driven test in which a controlled load was imposed on the system reflective of the system's busy-hour usage pattern. It was found to be feasible to apply the reliability-measurement approach in real time, to systems actually undergoing system test, given a controlled load-test environment.<>     

Asynchronous measurement and control: a case study on motor synchronization

The synchronization between two electrical motors (master and slave) is studied. To reduce the costs of the master–slave combination, the slave motor is mounted with a very low-resolution encoder (one pulse per revolution). Since the position measurements are asynchronous in time, standard control and analysis techniques are not applicable. Two methods are proposed to deal with these cheap, low-resolution encoders: the hybrid and the asynchronous control scheme. The presented controllers are successfully tested on a real industrial master-multi-slave system as is used for mailing machines.     

Immediate usability: a case study of public access design for a community photo library

This paper describes a novel instantiation of a digital photo library in a public access system. It demonstrates how designers can utilize characteristics of a target user community (social constraints, trust, and a lack of anonymity) to provide capabilities, such as unrestricted annotation and uploading of photos, which would be impractical in other types of public access systems. It also presents a compact set of design principles and guidelines for ensuring the immediate usability of public access information systems. These principles and guidelines were derived from our experience developing PhotoFinder Kiosk, a community photo library. Attendees of a major HCI conference (CHI 2001 Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems) successfully used the tool to browse and annotate collections of photographs spanning 20 years of HCI-related conferences, producing a richly annotated photo history of the field of human–computer interaction. Observations and usage log data were used to evaluate the tool and develop the guidelines. They provide specific guidance for practitioners, as well as a useful framework for additional research in public access interfaces.     

Prioritisation of public investments in social infrastructures using multicriteria value analysis and decision conferencing: a case study

Not‐for‐profit private organisations that provide social services to children, the elderly and the disabled apply for financial support to develop or to renew their social infrastructures, through the Portuguese Institute for Social Welfare. In the context of scarce financial resources, the Institute decision‐makers felt the need to adopt an improved “rationality” in resource allocation, in order to increase transparency and to ensure that the collective best use is made of a limited budget. This paper describes the socio‐technical process followed in building a multicriteria value model, under a decision conferencing framework in which participation and interaction among decision‐actors were key features in the development of the three main phases of problem structuring, evaluation and prioritisation.     

Playful public participation in urban planning: A case study for online serious games

The aim of this paper is to study the implementation of online games to encourage public participation in urban planning. Its theoretical foundations are based on previous work in public participatory geographical information systems (PP GISs), play and games, with a special focus on serious games. Serious games aim to support learning processes in a new, more playful way. We developed the concept of playful public participation in urban planning, including playful elements such as storytelling, walking and moving, sketching, drawing, and games. A group of students designed an online serious public participatory game entitled NextCampus. The case study used in NextCampus was taken from the real-world question of a possible move of a university campus to a new location in the city of Hamburg, Germany. The development of the serious public participatory game NextCampus resulted in a physical prototype, user interface design, and a computational model of the game. The NextCampus game was tested with the help of two groups of urban planning students and presented to three external experts who provided valuable recommendations for further development. The critical comments questioned the level of complexity involved in such games. The positive comments included recognition of the potential for joy and the playfulness a game like NextCampus could evoke.     

Lake area measurement using AVHRR A case study

Abstract

We note the importance of remote sensing of lake level and area changes for climate research; we discuss the initial need to monitor level and area simultaneously, and note that ERS-1 will be suitably equipped for the task, carrying a radar altimeter and the Along-Track Scanning Radiometer (ATSR). A simple area measurement technique is investigated and we show that the area of Lough Neagh (area 390 km²) can be measured using data from the Advanced Very High Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) instrument (similar to ATSR), by using channel-2 in the day and channels-4 and -5 at night, to an accuracy of ～ 1 per cent, which is well within our estimates for the requirement.     

Incentives in production: a case study

The motivation, rationale, and experiences of implementing an incentive scheme in a large petrochemical plant in the People's Republic of China for the purpose of conserving the consumption of cooling water is described. Experimental implementation in a section of a plant is described in detail. A few incentive-induced features uncovered after analyzing the experimental data are reported. A mathematical model with several variations is presented. A better predictive property of the incentive scheme in comparison to a more conventional method is proved analytically. The effectiveness of the scheme is shown by the amount of water conserved, and by the management's decision for plantwide adoption of the scheme. Practical issues encountered in experimental implementation, extensions of the scheme to more general situations, and theoretical problem inspired by the experiment are discussed     

Exploring university perceptions of IS implementation and attributes of success: a case study of public universities in Thailand

ABSTRACT

This study aims to gain a better understanding of public university implementation of organizational information systems (IS). Mixed methods research was used, including initial exploration, telephone interviews, and a self-administered mail survey. The data were gathered from university personnel at 40 public universities in Thailand, and the research focused on the university student-registration systems (S-R). The study results highlight the different perceptions between two response groups: administrators and system users. The results show different perceptions of IS implementation and attributes that define IS implementation success. The results also serve as important suggestions that need to be recognized by administrators and practitioners for effectively planning the implementation of organizational IS in public universities.     

TCMI: a non-parametric mutual-dependence estimator for multivariate continuous distributions

Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery - The identification of relevant features, i.e., the driving variables that determine a process or the properties of a system, is an essential part of the...     

Structural redocumentation: a case study

Most software documentation typically describes the program at the algorithm and data-structure level. For large legacy systems, understanding the system's architecture is more important. The authors propose a method of reverse engineering through redocumentation that promises to extend the useful life of large systems     

Courseware validation: a case study

Abstract This paper discusses methods used and problems faced in the validation study of LOGICLANDIA , a courseware package for the learning and teaching of predicate logic in Italian upper secondary schools. The courseware underwent a medium scale evaluation process that involved about three hundred students. LOGICLANDIA's validation consisted of three main phases: subjective evaluation, in-house evaluation and field test. The study produced a number of indications of revision of the courseware material, as well as information about effectiveness of the educational approach and satisfaction of students. But rather than going into the details of the results of LOGICLANDIA's evaluation, the paper focuses on problems encountered and adopted solutions that can be generalised to similar cases.     

Brick handling: a case study

A small change in brick dimensions resulted in an increase in the perceived work-load of men loading and unloading pallets of bricks by hand. A laboratory study indicated that the change in brick dimensions required changes in grip pattern in order to unload bricks at the same rate, moving the same number at a time. These changed grip patterns resulted in increased upper body movement, increased chest-muscle activity and higher heart rates. These differences were reflected in higher subjective ratings of fatigue.     

Robustness analysis: a case study

The stability test of polynomials whose coefficients depend multilinearly on interval parameters is considered. The authors describe and compare four brute-force solution approaches. These are eigenvalue calculation, zero exclusion from a specified value set, algebraic tests of real and complex Hurwitz roots, and the parameter space method. They are applied to a simple example with two parameters and third-order polynomial. An interesting feature of the example is that it can have an isolated unstable point. The example may be useful as a benchmark for future approaches to the multilinear problem. All four methods are shown to be feasible for the simple example, but they require effort     

Information intermediaries for emergency preparedness and response: A case study from public health

Information intermediaries play a critical role in information supply chains for emergency preparedness. Yet, their responsibilities have not been adequately examined in the literature. Using a state public health department as an exemplar, we explore the roles and challenges experienced by one intermediary organization as it faced the unique challenges of deploying a public health emergency preparedness system. We further discuss the influence of stakeholder participation and commitment, inter-organizational collaboration, issues related to organizational structure and resources, and the challenges specific to developing and institutionalizing an IT system for emergency preparedness. Based on the public health case, a set of propositions focused on trust, coordination, information sharing and incentive alignment are developed to illustrate the role of information intermediaries.     

Interactive Videoconferencing for collaborative learning at a distance in the school of 21st century: A case study in elementary schools in Greece

The aim of this paper is to present the design, implementation and evaluation of the methodology which focuses on the pedagogical utilization of Interactive Videoconferencing (IVC) in the contemporary elementary school.     

Integrating test metrics within a software engineering measurement program at Eastman Kodak Company: A follow-up case study

This article provides an overview of an initial measurement program implemented within a software engineering organization at Eastman Kodak Company. It details the process used to integrate additional measures into the existing measurement process. The new measures are the result of development and measurement process evolution. The article describes the benefits, successes, cautions, and failures encountered during the evolution of this measurement program.     

RHC: a non-parametric cluster-based data reduction for efficient k-NN classification

Although the \(k\)-NN classifier is a popular classification method, it suffers from the high computational cost and storage requirements it involves. This paper proposes two effective cluster-based data reduction algorithms for efficient \(k\)-NN classification. Both have low preprocessing cost and can achieve high data reduction rates while maintaining \(k\)-NN classification accuracy at high levels. The first proposed algorithm is called reduction through homogeneous clusters (RHC) and is based on a fast preprocessing clustering procedure that creates homogeneous clusters. The centroids of these clusters constitute the reduced training set. The second proposed algorithm is a dynamic version of RHC that retains all its properties and, in addition, it can manage datasets that cannot fit in main memory and is appropriate for dynamic environments where new training data are gradually available. Experimental results, based on fourteen datasets, illustrate that both algorithms are faster and achieve higher reduction rates than four known methods, while maintaining high classification accuracy.     

Efficiency loss in a network resource allocation game: the case of elastic supply

We consider a resource allocation problem where individual users wish to send data across a network to maximize their utility, and a cost is incurred at each link that depends on the total rate sent through the link. It is known that as long as users do not anticipate the effect of their actions on prices, a simple proportional pricing mechanism can maximize the sum of users' utilities minus the cost (called aggregate surplus). Continuing previous efforts to quantify the effects of selfish behavior in network pricing mechanisms, we consider the possibility that users anticipate the effect of their actions on link prices. Under the assumption that the links' marginal cost functions are convex, we establish existence of a Nash equilibrium. We show that the aggregate surplus at a Nash equilibrium is no worse than a factor of 4/spl radic/2-5 times the optimal aggregate surplus; thus, the efficiency loss when users are selfish is no more than approximately 34%.