The effects of information request ambiguity and construct incongruence on query development

This paper examines the effects of information request ambiguity and construct incongruence on end user's ability to develop SQL queries with an interactive relational database query language. In this experiment, ambiguity in information requests adversely affected accuracy and efficiency. Incongruities among the information request, the query syntax, and the data representation adversely affected accuracy, efficiency, and confidence. The results for ambiguity suggest that organizations might elicit better query development if end users were sensitized to the nature of ambiguities that could arise in their business contexts. End users could translate natural language queries into pseudo-SQL that could be examined for precision before the queries were developed. The results for incongruence suggest that better query development might ensue if semantic distances could be reduced by giving users data representations and database views that maximize construct congruence for the kinds of queries in typical domains. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

Body size and ovarian cancer: case-control study and systematic review (Australia)

Objective: Although increased body mass is an established risk factor for a variety of cancers, its relation with cancer of the ovary is unclear. We therefore investigated the association between measures of body mass index (BMI) and ovarian cancer risk. Methods: Data from an Australian case-control study of 775 ovarian cancer cases and 846 controls were used to examine the association with BMI. We have also summarized the results from a number of other studies that have examined this association. Results: There was a significant increased risk of ovarian cancer with increasing BMI, with women in the top 15% of the BMI range having an odds ratio (OR) of 1.9 (95% confidence interval (CI), 1.3-2.6) compared with those in the middle 30%. Stratifying by physical activity showed a stronger effect among inactive women (OR = 3.0, 95% CI 1.3-6.9). The overall effect was consistent with the findings of most prior population-based case-control studies, while cohort studies reported positive effects closer to the null. Hospital-based studies gave variable results. Conclusions: Taken together, the evidence is in favor of a small to moderate positive relation between high BMI and occurrence of ovarian cancer.

Space: Irrealis objects in technology policy and their role in a new political economy

In this article, I show how new spaces are being prefigured for colonization in new economy policy discourses. Drawing on a corpus of 1.3 million words collected from legislatures throughout the world, I show the role of policy language in creating the foundations of an emergent form of political economy: The analysis is informed by principles from critical discourse analysis (CDA), classical political economy and critical media studies. It foregrounds a functional aspect of language called process metaphor to show how aspects of human activity are prefigured for mass commodification by the manipulation of realis and irrealis spaces. I also show how the fundamental element of any new political economy, the property element, is being largely ignored. Current moves to create a privately owned global space, which is as concrete as landed property - namely, the electromagnetic spectrum - has significant ramifications for the future of social relations in any global knowledge economy.

An optimal level of technology reliance on foreign partners in a global sourcing partnership: components procurement, technology management and market performance

Existing studies on global sourcing strategy have implicitly adopted a cJosed-systems perspective in which sourcing activities are managed within a multinational company across national boundaries. Produd and process innovations and components procurement that are jointly managed by a consortium of cooperating firms have not been examined. In this paper, we empiricallyexamine the issues concerning sourcing partnerships in an open-systems perspective. Findings suggest that even in a sourcing partnership arrangement with a foreign supplier, the principal firm's ability to procure and control the supply of major components has a positive bearing on its market performance.

The Metaphysics of Information The Power and the Glory of Machinehood

Não há disciplina em qualquer ramo da ciência, seja esta natural, social, humana, descritiva, experimental ou teórica, qualitativa ou quantitativa, que não tenha sido afectada a vários níveis da instrumentalidade, conceptualização, construção de modelos, escolha de metáforas heurísticas ou ontológicas, e sentidO da investigação, em alguns casos muito profunda e decisivamente, pela influência crescente da constelação informacional computacional. A investigação baseada em simulações por computador é uma “terceira espécie de ciência”, que se soma aos tipos teórico e físico-experimental de trabalho científico. A ciber-ciência é um lugar natural para simular ciência, ou meta-ciberciência, mas todo o conhecimento científico cai no domínio da meta-ciberciência ou da filosofia da ciência computacional. A meta-ciência simula a ciência(o estudo computacional da produção do conhecimento científico); a ciber-ciência é por definição simulatória; a ciber-ciência simula a Natureza; a Natureza, segundo alguns físicos, é ela mesma uma simulação. Receber a categoria da informação nas ciências da vida e nas ciências humanas e sociais, da maneira específica como tem vindo a ocorrer, traz um considerável lastro metafísico: os humanos como máquinas, ultrapassáveis por máquinas inteligentes ou “espirituais”. A informação emerge como a alavanca de Arquimedes para as nossas intervenções n o domínio da vida e do espírito, de máquinas informacionais naturais, com evidentes implicações para a ciência política.

Advanced side information creation techniques and framework for Wyner-Ziv video coding

Recently, several distributed video coding (DVC) solutions based on the distributed source coding (DSC) paradigm have appeared in the literature. Wyner-Ziv (WZ) video coding, a particular case of DVC where side information is made available at the decoder, enable to achieve a flexible distribution of the computational complexity between the encoder and decoder, promising to fulfill novel requirements from applications such as video surveillance, sensor networks and mobile camera phones. The quality of the side information at the decoder has a critical role in determining the WZ video coding rate-distortion (RD) performance, notably to raise it to a level as close as possible to the RD performance of standard predictive video coding schemes. Towards this target, efficient motion search algorithms for powerful frame interpolation are much needed at the decoder. In this paper, the RD performance of a Wyner-Ziv video codec is improved by using novel, advanced motion compensated frame interpolation techniques to generate the side information. The development of these type of side information estimators is a difficult problem in WZ video coding, especially because the decoder only has available some reference, decoded frames. Based on the regularization of the motion field, novel side information creation techniques are proposed in this paper along with a new frame interpolation framework able to generate higher quality side information at the decoder. To illustrate the RD performance improvements, this novel side information creation framework has been integrated in a transform domain turbo coding based Wyner-Ziv video codec. Experimental results show that the novel side information creation solution leads to better RD performance than available state-of-the-art side information estimators, with improvements up to 2 dB: moreover, it allows outperforming H.264/AVC Intra by up to 3 dB with a lower encoding complexity.

Syntheses, Molecular Structures, Electrochemical Behavior, Theoretical Study, and Antitumor Activities of Organotin(IV) Complexes Containing 1-(4-Chlorophenyl)-1-cyclopentanecarboxylato Ligands

The organotin(IV) compounds [Me2Sn(L)(2)] (1), [Et(2)sn(L)(2)] (2), [(Bu2Sn)-Bu-n(L)(2)] (3), [(n)Oct(2)Sn(L)(2)] (4), [Ph2Sn(L)(2)] (5), and [PhOSnL](6) (6) have been synthesized from the reactions of 1-(4-chlorophenyl)-1-cyclopentanecarboxylic acid (HL) with the corresponding diorganotin(IV) oxide or dichloride. They were characterized by IR and multinuclear NMR spectroscopies, elemental analysis, cyclic voltammetry, and, for 2, 3, 4 and 6, single crystal X-ray diffraction analysis. While 1-5 are mononuclear diorganotin (IV) compounds, the X-ray diffraction of 6 discloses a hexameric drumlike structure with a prismatic Sn6O6 core. All these complexes undergo irreversible reductions and were screened for their in vitro antitumor activities toward HL-60, BGC-823, Bel-7402, and KB human cancer cell lines. Within the mononuclear compounds, the most active ones (3, 5) are easiest to reduce (least cathodic reduction potentials), while the least active ones (1, 4) are the most difficult to reduce. Structural rearrangements (i.e., Sn-O bond cleavages and trans-to-cis isomerization) induced by reduction, which eventually can favor the bioactivity, are disclosed by theoretical/electrochemical studies.