Analyzing the problem of unsustainable health information systems in less-developed economies: Case studies from Tanzania and Mozambique

Most of donor-supported information technology (IT)–based projects developed or implemented in less-developed economies (LDEs) end up as complete or partial failures or unsustainable. Notably, a number of intra-organizational and external factors are associated with this problem, including inadequate infrastructure and human resource capacity, fragmented donor policy, and lack of policies to manage the sustainability problem. Accordingly, IT initiatives are often donor-driven, top-down, and hijacked by top managers who (normally) do not have adequate skills, but have enormous power to enforce such initiatives across organizational hierarchies.

In analyzing the concepts from sustainability and institutionalization, key insights towards a better understanding of the problem of unsustainability are developed. It is argued that health information systems (HISs) become sustainable if they are institutionalized in the sense of being integrated into the everyday routine of the user organization. However, a sustainable HIS should also be flexible enough to allow changes as the user needs change. Moreover, introduction of a new HIS is not only a technical change, but requires the cultivation and institutionalization of a new kind of culture.

Through a comparative case analysis of the HIS development and implementation processes in Tanzania and Mozambique, we have identified two sets of relationships, between the Ministry of Health (MoH) and donor agencies and between the MoH and software development agencies as critical and contributing factors to the unsustainability of a HIS. Given this setting, we highlight three key strategies for dealing with the problem of unsustainability in LDEs: (a) integration of a HIS, (b) local shaping of new cultures, and (c) cultivation approach to systems development. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

A viral system algorithm to optimize the car dispatching in elevator group control systems of tall buildings

Nowadays is very common the presence of tall buildings in the business centres of the main cities of the world. Such buildings require the installation of numerous lifts that are coordinated and managed under a unique control system. Population working in the buildings follows a similar traffic pattern generating situations of traffic congestion. The problem arises when a passenger makes a hall call wishing to travel to another floor of the building. The dispatching of the most suitable car is the optimization problem we are tackling in this paper. We develop a viral system algorithm which is based on a bio-inspired virus infection analogy to deal with it. The viral system algorithm is compared to genetic algorithms, and tabu search approaches that have proven efficiency in the vertical transportation literature. The experiments undertaken in tall buildings from 10 to 24 floors, and several car configurations from 2 to 6 cars, provide valuable results and show how viral system outperforms such soft computing algorithms.     

‘Long autonomy or long delay?’ The importance of domain in opinion mining

Nowadays, people do not only navigate the web, but they also contribute contents to the Internet. Among other things, they write their thoughts and opinions in review sites, forums, social networks, blogs and other websites. These opinions constitute a valuable resource for businesses, governments and consumers. In the last years, some researchers have proposed opinion extraction systems, mostly domain-independent ones, to automatically extract structured representations of opinions contained in those texts. In this work, we tackle this task in a domain-oriented approach, defining a set of domain-specific resources which capture valuable knowledge about how people express opinions on a given domain. These resources are automatically induced from a set of annotated documents. Some experiments were carried out on three different domains (user-generated reviews of headphones, hotels and cars), comparing our approach to other state-of-the-art, domain-independent techniques. The results confirm the importance of the domain in order to build accurate opinion extraction systems. Some experiments on the influence of the dataset size and an example of aggregation and visualization of the extracted opinions are also shown.     

A semantic role labelling-based framework for learning ontologies from Spanish documents

Currently, most of the information available in the Web is adapted primarily for human consumption, but there is so much information that can no longer be processed by a person in a reasonable time, either in digital or physical formats. To solve this problem, the idea of the Semantic Web arose. The Semantic Web deals with adding machine-readable information to Web pages. Ontologies represent a very important element of this web, as they provide a valid and robust structure to represent knowledge based on concepts, relations, axioms, etc. The need for overcoming the bottleneck provoked by the manual construction of ontologies has generated several studies and research on obtaining semiautomatic methods to learn ontologies. In this sense, this paper proposes a new ontology learning methodology based on semantic role labeling from digital Spanish documents. The method makes it possible to represent multiple semantic relations specially taxonomic and partonomic ones in the standardized OWL 2.0. A set of experiments has been performed with the approach implemented in educational domain that show promising results.     

Salt Concentration Effects in Planar Light‐Emitting Electrochemical Cells

Incorporation of ions in the active layer of organic semiconductor devices may lead to attractive device properties like enhanced injection and improved carrier transport. In this paper, we investigate the effect of the salt concentration on the operation of light‐emitting electrochemical cells, using experiments and numerical calculations. The current density and light emission are shown to increase linearly with increasing ion concentration over a wide range of concentrations. The increasing current is accompanied by an ion redistribution, leading to a narrowing of the recombination zone. Hence, in absence of detrimental side reactions and doping‐related luminescence quenching, the ion concentration should be as high as possible.     

Steric Crowding Makes Challenging C(sp3)-F Reductive Eliminations Feasible

A high-yielding fluorination of (triphos)Pt-R(+) has been achieved using an array of F(+) sources, with XeF(2) yielding R-F in minutes. The C-F coupling proved to be a stereoretentive process that proceeds via a concerted reductive elimination from a putative dicationic Pt(IV) center. The larger the steric congestion of the (triphos)Pt-C(sp3) (+) complexes, the more efficient the fluorination, seemingly a result of sterically accelerated C-F reductive elimination along with simultaneous deceleration of its competing processes (β-H elimination).