Are U.K. Citizens Satisfied With E-Government Services? Identifying and Testing Antecedents of Satisfaction

Citizens’ satisfaction is acknowledged as one of the most significant influences for e-government adoption and diffusion. This study examines the impact of information quality, system quality, trust, and cost on user satisfaction of e-government services. Using a survey, this study collected 1518 valid responses from e-government service adopters across the United Kingdom. Our empirical outcomes show the five factors identified in this study have a significant impact on U.K. citizens’ satisfaction with e-government services.     

Distributed Video Coding using Turbo Trellis Coded Modulation

Distributed Video Coding (DVC) has been proposed for increasingly new application domains. This rise is apparently motivated by the very attractive features of its flexibility for building very low cost video encoders and the very high built-in error resilience when applied over noisy communication channels. Yet, the compression efficiency of DVC is notably lagging behind the state-of-the-art in video coding and compression, H.264/AVC in particular. In this context, a novel coding solution for DVC is presented in this paper, which promises to improve its rate-distortion (RD) performance towards the state-of-the-art. Here, Turbo Trellis Coded Modulation (TTCM), with its attractive coding gain in channel coding, is utilized and its resultant impact in both pixel domain and transform domain DVC framework is discussed herein. Simulations have shown a significant gain in the RD performance when compared with the state-of-the-art Turbo coding based DVC implementations.

Do Agile Managed Information Systems Projects Fail Due to a Lack of Emotional Intelligence?

Information Systems Frontiers - Agile development methodologies (ADM) have become a widely implemented project management approach in Information Systems (IS). Yet, along with its growing...     

Assessing the performance of a waste characterization expert system

Scientists at the Mississippi State University Diagnostic Instrumentation and Analysis Laboratory and the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory (INEEL) have developed an expert system for a noninvasive characterization of containerized radiological waste. The characterization of the containers is necessary for determining their proper disposition. Three prototypes were developed, with each using a different method of handling uncertainty - a fuzzy system, a Bayesian network system, and a neural network system. The performance of each expert system was assessed to determine how well it modeled the decisions made by the INEEL domain expert. The prototype systems were also analyzed to measure the agreement in their decisions, the domain expert's decisions, and the decisions made by two additional experts. The neural network prototype was further analyzed to determine how consistent it was in its assessments. This paper describes the analysis of the performance of the three expert system prototypes.     

Microencapsulated Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG powders: relationship of powder physical properties to probiotic survival during storage

Freeze-dried commercial Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG (LGG) were encapsulated in an emulsion-based formulation stabilized by whey protein and resistant starch and either spray-dried or freeze-dried to produce probiotic microcapsules. There was no difference in loss of probiotics viability after spray drying or freeze drying. Particle size, morphology, moisture sorption, and water mobility of the powder microcapsules were examined. Particle size analysis and scanning electron microscopy showed that spray-dried LGG microcapsules (SDMC) were small spherical particles, whereas freeze-dried LGG microcapsules (FDMC) were larger nonspherical particles. Moisture sorption isotherms obtained using dynamic vapor sorption showed a slightly higher water uptake in spray-dried microcapsules. The effect of water mobility, as measured by nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectroscopy, at various water activities (a(w) 0.32, 0.57, and 0.70) and probiotic viability during storage at 25 °C was also examined. Increasing the relative humidity of the environment at which the samples were stored caused an increase in water mobility and the rate of loss in viability. The viability data during storage indicated that SDMC had better storage stability compared to FDMC. Although more water was adsorbed for spray-dried than freeze-dried microcapsules, water mobility was similar for corresponding storage conditions because there was a stronger water-binding energy for spray-dried microcapsule. This possibly accounted for the improved survival of probiotics in spray-dried microcapsules.     

Investigating the impact of citizens’ trust toward the successful adoption of e-government: A multigroup analysis of gender,age, and internet experience

This research particularly aims to investigate how the individual differences in gender, age, and internet experience influence citizens’ trust in e-government’s adoption. The findings of the study revealed that females are confident and have a more positive evaluation of online services compared to males. Interestingly, this study found that old people display greater trust in e-government as compared to the levels of trust reported by younger people. The results also show that internet experience influences citizens’ trust positively.     

Open data and its usability: an empirical view from the Citizen’s perspective

Government legislation and calls for greater levels of oversight and transparency are leading public bodies to publish their raw datasets online. Policy makers and elected officials anticipate that the accessibility of open data through online Government portals for citizens will enable public engagement in policy making through increased levels of fact based content elicited from open data. The usability and benefits of such open data are being argued as contributing positively towards public sector reforms, which are under extreme pressures driven by extended periods of austerity. However, there is very limited scholarly studies that have attempted to empirically evaluate the performance of government open data websites and the acceptance and use of these data from a citizen perspective. Given this research void, an adjusted diffusion of innovation model based on Rogers’ diffusion of innovations theory (DOI) is proposed and used in this paper to empirically determine the predictors influencing the use of public sector open data. A good understanding of these predictors affecting the acceptance and use of open data will likely assist policy makers and public administrations in determining the policy instruments that can increase the acceptance and use of open data through an active promotion campaign to engage-contribute-use.     

E-government adoption: A cultural comparison

E-government diffusion is an international phenomenon. This study compares e-government adoption in the U.K. to adoption in the U.S. In particular, this study seeks to determine if the same factors are salient in both countries. Several studies have explored citizen acceptance of e-government services in the U.S. However, few studies have explored this phenomenon in the U.K. To identify the similarities and differences between the U.K. and the U.S. a survey is conducted in the U.K. and the findings are compared to the literature that investigates diffusion in the U.S. This study proposes a model of e-government adoption in the U.K. based on salient factors in the U.S. A survey is administered to 260 citizens in London to assess the importance of relative advantage, trust and the digital divide on intention to use e-government. The results of binary logistic regression indicate that there are cultural differences in e-government adoption in the U.K. and the U.S. The results indicate that of the prevailing adoption constructs, relative advantage and trust are pertinent in both the U.S. and the U.K., while ICT adoption barriers such as access and skill may vary by culture. Implications for research and practice are discussed.

Iterative wyner-ziv decoding for unidirectional distributed video coding

Unidirectional distributed video coding (DVC) is one of the untouched areas of DVC, which has to be necessarily employed when the feedback channel is not available. Thus, to serve that purpose, proposed is a unidirectional distributed video coding using a parallel Wyner-Ziv architecture. Simulation results show that up to 6.5 dB PSNR gain can be obtained with the proposed codec over the conventional DVC codec with no feedback channel at the same bit rate and the computational cost     

Enhanced survival of spray-dried microencapsulated Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG in the presence of glucose

The survival of spray dried Lactobacillus rhamnosus GG (LGG) preparations encapsulated in whey protein isolate (WPI)-maltodextrin, WPI-maltodextrin-glucose, WPI-inulin, and WPI-inulin-glucose mixtures during storage at 25 °C (11%, 57% and 70% relative humidity, RH) was examined. The glass transition temperature of each encapsulant formulation was also assessed. RH was most important for maintaining viability over time; the inclusion of glucose improved viability, irrespective of when all formulations were in a glassy or rubbery state. When LGG microcapsule powders were stored at the same RH, the addition of glucose in the encapsulant formulation had a greater influence on survival of LGG during storage than the maintenance of a glassy state. Both the maintenance of a glassy state during storage and the incorporation of glucose in the encapsulant formulation were required for optimal survival of probiotic microcapsule powders prepared from fresh cultures.

Practical significance

The incorporation of glucose into the encapsulant formulation prior to spray drying of protein-carbohydrate based LGG formulations improves the survival of LGG during long term storage.