International examples of large-scale systems-theory and practice IV: B2B e-commerce implementation in the Australian context

Two of the most commonly used classifications in IS research are the factor approach and the process approach. While many studies of IS implementation are undertaken using a factor approach, little research so far examines the process of e-commerce implementation, especially in relation to the implementation of e-commerce in business-to-business (B2B) relationships. A holistic understanding of implementation which combines both the factor and process approaches using a case study method, is suggested as particularly suitable because of its ability to capture the reality of e-commerce implementation in an organisation's natural environment and in much greater detail than is possible using one of these approaches alone. In this paper, therefore, we endeavour to contribute to what we perceive as a gap in the body of theory surrounding the implementation process in the business-to-business e-commerce literature. We describe the findings of multiple case studies involving ten major Australian e-commerce initiators. In addition to confirming our earlier finding of the importance of non-technical factors for the success of the implementation process we also present, through our case studies, the various management and business issues associated with the success or failure of B2B e-commerce implementation.

Problematising the mathematics curriculum : some examples from Australia and Japan

Problem solving is often seen as being the core of mathematics. While there are many examples of teaching for and about problem solving, there are relatively few examples of teaching mathematical content through problem solving. This paper uses data from three, apparently quite different, mathematics lessons from Australia and Japan to explore different ways in which mathematics can be taught successfully through problem solving and to analyse some of the characteristics of such lessons. It also attempts to identify some of the supports and constraints for adopting a problem solving approach to the teaching of mathematics that exist in the quite different contexts of Japan and Australia.

Interlink decision making index (IDMI) : a simple tool/concept to assist decision making for sustainability part 2 : calculation and examples of IDMI

There is an apparent gap between the LCA or other assessment's outcomes and its effective application in the decision making process. It is needed to provide to the decision makers a simple, less human interfered mechanism that integrates all the key criteria (environmental, economic, technical and safety etc.). The proposed index: Interlink Decision Making Index (IDMI) has all these features: simple, interlink (all criteria) and automatically and quantified influence of critical criteria (ie. no human weighting needed) and is able to assist the multi-criteria decision making for sustainability based on the outcomes of specific assessments (eg. LCA, BIA etc.). The index represents a pure numerical value and does not necessarily have any physical meanings, but it reflects the total merits of a particular option once the normal decision making criteria and (up to two) critical criteria (Ce) have been chosen. Then, without arbitrarily weighting process, the comparison and selection of the best possible option, ie. decision can be made based on the derived IDMI results. Two hypothetical examples are presented in the part 2 of the paper to demonstrate the application of the IDMI concept and it's differences with the traditional "tabular method" in the decision making process.

Content based image retrieval using unclean positive examples

Conventional content-based image retrieval (CBIR) schemes employing relevance feedback may suffer from some problems in the practical applications. First, most ordinary users would like to complete their search in a single interaction especially on the web. Second, it is time consuming and difficult to label a lot of negative examples with sufficient variety. Third, ordinary users may introduce some noisy examples into the query. This correspondence explores solutions to a new issue that image retrieval using unclean positive examples. In the proposed scheme, multiple feature distances are combined to obtain image similarity using classification technology. To handle the noisy positive examples, a new two-step strategy is proposed by incorporating the methods of data cleaning and noise tolerant classifier. The extensive experiments carried out on two different real image collections validate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme.