Application Development Productivity Tools: A Survey Of Importance and Popularity

Application development productivity is becoming an increasingly important issue in the MIS department. Unfortunately, dramatic improvements in hardware performance have not been matched with corresponding advances in software development, even though there have been significant investments in productivity tools. This article identifies a range of productivity tools and presents results from a survey of MIS managers that reveals which specific tools are being used and their relative importance to software development productivity.     

The (Uncertain) Future of Libraries in a Google World

Abstract

Libraries are in competition with other entities that provide information access to students, scholars and the general public. This constitutes a radical change in the information environment. The library profession's failure to take seriously the change that has taken place in the information environment, and to respond with fundamental changes of its own, may well spell disaster for the library as we know it.     

Messages from the Eagle

ABSTRACT

Each year Dacus Library teaches library use to over a thousand freshmen in introductory Writing classes. In the summer of 2000, two reference librarians undertook a revision of the basic methodology of teaching library use to freshmen. This change was necessitated by staff shortages, coupled with increasing enrollment. The resulting virtual tour, which was introduced in fall 2000, combined an existing audio-tape tour with one hour of classroom instruction. The university's mascot, an eagle, was used to lead the students on a tour of all three floors of Dacus Library, with explanations of each location pictured. In addition, the eagle was used to describe and explain the online catalog. The new virtual tour, while still a work in progress, is considered to be a success by students, library faculty and staff, and Writing instruction faculty. You can visit the Dacus Library tour at www.winthrop.edu/dacus/About/Tapetour/Exercises/assignment2.htm.     

Federated Searching

ABSTRACT

With an increasing number of libraries implementing federated searching to help users negotiate the complex electronic database environment, it is important to note how users are being instructed to use these resources. This article presents the results of examinations of the Web sites of Association of Research Libraries (ARL) member institutions that currently use federated search products. It analyzes help guides and search tips related to federated searching to determine what concepts are being explained to users and how the information is being communicated. The result of the evaluation of these Web sites is a list of “best practice” guidelines that may be used by librarians creating their own federated searching guides. doi:10.1300/J136v12n03_03     

Using Courseware Discussion Boards to Engage Graduate Students in Online Library Workshops

ABSTRACT

Librarians at Oregon State University (OSU) Libraries used the discussion board features of Blackboard courseware to create an interactive experience for graduate students at a distance who could not attend the on-campus “Literature Review Workshops.” These recently developed workshops have been extremely popular with graduate students across the disciplines and have generated a growing demand from distance education graduate students and faculty to offer similar information online. Reluctant to simply deliver content via an online tutorial, librarians sought to duplicate the workshop atmosphere by making the sessions available for a short time-period online, asking participants to respond to discussion questions at specific points in the workshop, and offering audio-mediated online demonstrations of tools and resources. Student feedback and follow-up requests for more workshops support the perception that this approach offered a rewarding learning experience that addressed their specific adult learning needs.     

The Sadeian interface: computers and catharsis

This paper explores the limitations of contemporary interface design and offers the potential of more profound forms of interaction by drawing on the rich and much older heritage of interactive art. Whilst HCI design is preoccupied with making the computer more simple to use, installation work, kinetic sculpture, and interactive multimedia art forms have generally been more concerned with the predicament of human/technological negotiation, whilst remaining a salient form of human communication. HCI activity sets out to make the complex systems of computing easy to understand and use, whilst interactive art often uses simple technology to make complex, inspiring and esoteric statements and experiences. In many ways the more simple and 'low resolution' the technology the more immersive, acute and intimate the experience. 'Low resolution' examples such as telephone-sex-lines are explored alongside more immersive systems, such as biofeedback interfaces, and other interactive experiments drawn from the 'technic' strand of art history.     

Dynamic evolution of collective emotions in social networks: a case study of Sina weibo

Emotion is a fundamental object of human existence and determined by a complex set of factors. With the rapid development of online social networks (OSNs), more and more people would like to express their emotion in OSNs, which provides wonderful opportunities to gain insight into how and why individual emotion is evolved in social network. In this paper, we focus on emotion dynamics in OSNs, and try to recognize the evolving process of collective emotions. As a basis of this research, we first construct a corpus and build an emotion classifier based on Bayes theory, and some effective strategies (entropy and salience) are introduced to improve the performance of our classifier, with which we can classify any Chinese tweet into a particular emotion with an accuracy as high as 82%. By analyzing the collective emotions in our sample networks in detail, we get some interesting findings, including a phenomenon of emotion synchronization between friends in OSNs, which offers good evidence for that human emotion can be spread from one person to another. Furthermore, we find that the number of friends has strong correlation with individual emotion. Based on those useful findings, we present a dynamic evolution model of collective emotions, in which both self-evolving process and mutual-evolving process are considered. To this end, extensive simulations on both real and artificial networks have been done to estimate the parameters of our emotion dynamic model, and we find that mutual-evolution plays a more important role than self-evolution in the distribution of collective emotions. As an application of our emotion dynamic model, we design an efficient strategy to control the collective emotions of the whole network by selecting seed users according to k-core rather than degree.     

基于在线检测技术的敏捷软件开发方法的模型

针对敏捷软件开发方法尚未从本质上消除控制滞后性的问题,运用发酵调控学领域的在线检测技术和反馈控制技术,设定三个控制目标函数,设置若干检测参数及控制参数,建立基于在线检测技术以及反馈控制技术的敏捷软件开发方法的模型,研究控制变量、可测变量与控制目标变量三者之间的关系,从而解决控制滞后问题,实现敏捷软件过程的优化。     

节点在线率和资源热度相关的P2P存储系统副本复制和修复策略

在半结构化的P2P存储系统结构下,副本是提高数据可用性的有效保证.本文结合资源所在节点的在线率和资源访问的频度来衡量所需要的资源副本数量.它较好地反映了高动态P2P网络中节点的行为特征,并据此设计了冗余数据修复策略.实验表明,设计的方法虽然占用了一定的维护带宽,但是网络中资源的可用率得到了显著提高.     

考试网上报名系统的技术实现框架探讨

随着Internet互联网技术及电子政务网站建设的飞速发展,无处不在的网络应用为社会考试报名提供了可靠、快捷的报名通道。通过分析当前考试网上报名系统使用的社会需求,本文结合网报系统的系统开发模式、工具,从系统用户管理、考生报名、考务管理及超级用户管理等模块对名系统的技术实现框架作了初步的探讨。