Institutional pressures and mindful IT management: The case of a container terminal in China

Although it has been only ten years in operations, Yantian International Container Terminals Limited (YICT) has evolved as a world-class container terminal and become the first Chinese port to receive the Best Global Container Port of the Year award for 2005–2006, as well as being designated China's best container terminal in terms of operational efficiency for 2008. A success factor of YICT is its extensive use of IT in managing and enhancing the productivity and services of the port operations. Premised upon Institutional Theory and the organizational mindfulness perspectives (preoccupation with failure and success, reluctance to simplify interpretations, sensitivity to operations, commitment to resilience, and reliance on expertise over formal authority) and using case study methodology, we examined the institutional pressures faced by YICT in its IT management (ITM), and determined how YICT coped with its institutional pressures during its IT development.     

Global data computation in chordal rings

Existing Global Data Computation (GDC) protocols for asynchronous systems are round-based algorithms designed for fully connected networks. In this paper, we discuss GDC in asynchronous chordal rings, a non-fully connected network. The virtual links approach to solve the consensus problem may be applied to GDC for non-fully connected networks, but it incurs high message overhead. To reduce the overhead, we propose a new non-round-based GDC protocol for asynchronous chordal rings with perfect failure detectors. The main advantage of the protocol is that there is no notion of rounds. Every process creates two messages initially, with one message traversing in a clockwise direction and visiting each and every process in the chordal ring. The second message traverses in a counterclockwise direction. When there is direct connection between two processes, a message is sent directly. Otherwise, the message is sent via virtual links. When the two messages return, the process decides according to the information maintained by the two messages. The perfect failure detector of a process need only detect the crash of neighboring processes, and the crash information is disseminated to all other processes. Analysis and comparison with two virtual links approaches show that our protocol reduces message complexity significantly.     

Development of a web-based insulin decision aid for the elderly: usability barriers and guidelines

Universal Access in the Information Society - In recent years, researchers have attempted to shift patient decision aids (PDAs) from paper-based to web-based to increase its accessibility. Insulin...     

How useful are strategic plans for information systems?

Although much research has been done in the area of strategic planning for information systems (IS), relatively less research has focused on the output of the IS planning process, namely, the IS plan. This paper examines the usefulness of IS plans through a field survey of 136 IS executives. Results indicate that IS plans are generally perceived to be useful for supporting business objectives, improving systems integration, exploiting information technology (IT) for competitive advantage, and prioritising IS development projects. Conversely, IS plans are perceived to be less useful for clarifying the role of IS, evaluating IS performance, anticipating surprises and crisis, and adapting to unanticipated situations. Implications of these results are discussed.     

A unified approach to multistage frequency-response masking filter design using the WLS technique

This paper presents a unified approach to the optimal design of sharp linear-phase finite-impulse-response (FIR) digital filters synthesized using the multistage frequency-response masking (FRM) technique. In this approach, the design of a k-stage FRM filter is achieved in a recursive manner. The minimax design problem arising at each step of the synthesis process is converted into a corresponding weighted least-squares (WLS) problem. The WLS problem is highly nonlinear with respect to the coefficients of the filter. Consequently, it is decomposed into several linear least-squares (LS) problems, each of which can be solved analytically. It is then solved iteratively by using an alternating variable approach. Numerical design examples are included to demonstrate the effectiveness of the method.     

Adoption of the Internet and WAP-enabled phones in Singapore

The Internet, and more recently mobile phones have seen tremendous growth over the past few years. This paper examines the adoption of the Internet and WAP-enabled mobile phones in Singapore. Specifically, we compare users of WAP-enabled mobile phones and non-WAP-enabled mobile phones in terms of profile of Internet users, Internet activities and issues relating to WAP-enabled mobile phones. The results indicate that short messaging system (SMS) and caller ID are popular functions for mobile phone users. Respondent also use the mobile phone for buying cinema/concert tickets and accessing personalised news. These results provide researchers and practitioners with some insights on the adoption of the Internet and WAP-enabled mobile phones. For researchers, such insights would be useful in understanding the adoption phenomenon, while for practitioners, such insights would provide some basis for adopting certain policies to promote adoption.     

Coordination arrival control for multi‐agent systems

The coordination arrival problems of first‐order multi‐agent systems with the arriving structure and the time structure requirements are considered for the cases with no obstacle and obstacle. To describe the distributed coordination arrival problems, we first introduce needed definitions, such as coordination arrival, threat point, and arrival structure. By selecting the estimated value of the arriving time of the agent as variable, we then develop a central estimating algorithm, which is used to construct the arriving protocols. Based on the estimating algorithm, we build and analyze coordination arriving protocols for the proposed coordination arrival problems. Several simulation examples are presented to validate the proposed algorithms. Copyright © 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Effects of substrate temperature on electrical and structural properties of copper thin films

This paper addresses the effects of substrate temperature on electrical and structural properties of dc magnetron sputter-deposited copper (Cu) thin films on p-type silicon. Copper films of 80 and 500 nm were deposited from Cu target in argon ambient gas pressure of 3.6 mTorr at different substrate temperatures ranging from room temperature to 250 °C. The electrical and structural properties of the Cu films were investigated by four-point probe and atomic force microscopy. Results from our experiment show that the increase in substrate temperature generally promotes the grain growth of the Cu films of both thicknesses. The RMS roughness as well as the lateral feature size increase with the substrate temperature, which is associated with the increase in the grain size. On the other hand, the resistivity for 80 nm Cu film decreases to less than 5 μΩ-cm at the substrate temperature of 100 °C, and further increase in the substrate temperature has not significantly decreased the film resistivity. For the 500 nm Cu films, the increase in the grain size with the substrate temperature does not conform to the film resistivity for these Cu films, which show no significant change over the substrate temperature range. Possible mechanisms of substrate-temperature-dependent microstructure formation of these Cu films are discussed in this paper, which explain the interrelationship of grain growth and film resistivity with elevated substrate temperature.     

MicroRNAs as Potential Biomarkers in the Differential Diagnosis of Lipomatous Tumors and Their Mimics

Adipocytic tumors are the most common subtype of soft tissue tumors. In current clinical practice, distinguishing benign lipomas from well-differentiated liposarcomas (WDLPS), as well as dedifferentiated liposarcomas (DDLPS) from their morphologic mimics, remains a significant diagnostic challenge. This is especially so when examining small biopsy samples and without the aid of additional ancillary tests. Recognizing the important role that microRNAs (miRNAs) play in tumorigenesis and their potential utility in tumor classification, we analyzed routine clinical tissue samples of benign and malignant lipomatous tumors, as well as other sarcoma mimics, to identify distinguishing miRNA-based signatures that can aid in the differential diagnosis of these entities. We discovered a 6-miRNA signature that separated lipomas from WDLPS with high confidence (AUC of 0.963), as well as a separate 6-miRNA signature that distinguished DDLPS from their more aggressive histologic mimics (AUC of 0.740). Functional enrichment analysis unveiled possible mechanistic involvement of these predictive miRNAs in adipocytic cancer-related biological processes and pathways such as PI3K/AKT/mTOR and MAPK signaling, further supporting the relevance of these miRNAs as biomarkers for adipocytic tumors. Our results demonstrate that miRNA expression profiling may potentially be used as an adjunctive tool for the diagnosis of benign and malignant adipocytic tumors. Further validation studies are warranted.     

Power Efficient SDR Implementation of IEEE 802.11a/p Physical Layer

Software defined physical layer modems can be considered the new trend in the field of communications. Differently from dedicated hardware, software can be easily modified to implement a large variety of standards on the same platform. The use of software can significantly reduce development costs, but generally comes at the price of an increase in silicon area and power consumption. For different reasons, this price is something that is not always convenient or even possible to pay, as in the case of low-cost ICs implementing a single waveform, or even multi-mode modems embedding legacy IPs already available in hardware. In particular, power consumption overhead can be prohibitive for mobile terminals or in general for battery-powered devices. The very first challenge for a computing fabric to be competitive is to find and implement the right trade-off between flexibility and performance. This was the guideline for the design of the Block Processing Engine (BPE), a template architecture conceived for power-efficient baseband processing. The BPE core feature is a mixed-grain instruction set balancing general-purpose fine-grain instructions with more specific coarse-grain instructions wrapping custom hardware modules. To further limit the power consumption, the BPE also implements instruction-pipelining, variable-size SIMD and multi-task support. To prove the efficiency of such an approach, a dual-mode IEEE 802.11a/p receiver has been implemented.