Improving web database search incorporating users query information

The growing importance and need of data processing for information extraction is vital for Web databases. Due to the sheer size and volume of databases, retrieval of relevant information as needed by users has become a cumbersome process. Information seekers are faced by information overloading - too many result sets are returned for their queries. Moreover, too few or no results are returned if a specific query is asked. This paper proposes a ranking algorithm that gives higher preference to a user’s current search and also utilizes profile information in order to obtain the relevant results for a user’s query.

Conversation, community and kids: blogging for youth at Gold Coast City Council libraries

In late 2007, Gold Coast City Council libraries embarked on an online library project, designed to ramp up libraries’ online services to customers. As part of this project, the Young People’s team identified a need to connect with youth aged 12 to 16 in the online environment, in order to create a direct channel of communication with this market segment and encourage them to engage with the library. Blogging was identified as an appropriate means of communicating with both current and potential library customers from this age group. The Young People’s team consequently prepared a concept plan for a youth blog for launch in Children’s Book Week 2008 and are working towards development of management and administrative models and documentation and implementation of the blog itself. While many libraries have been quick to take up Web 2.0-style services, there has been little formal publication about the successes (or failures) of this type of project. Likewise, few libraries have published about the planning, management, and administration of such services. The youth blog currently in development at Gold Coast City Council libraries will be supported by a robust planning phase and will be rigorously evaluated as part of the project. This paper will report on the project (its aims, objectives and outputs), the planning process, and the evaluation activities and outcomes.

Taking stock of temporary organizational forms : a systematic review and research agenda

This paper brings together the research on temporary organizational forms. Despite a recent surge in publications on this topic, there have been few attempts to integrate knowledge on what we know of such temporary forms of organization. In order to correct this, an integrative framework is proposed around four central themes: time, team, task and context. Within each of these themes, the paper offers an overview of the literature, the gaps in what we know, and what future directions might be taken by scholars hoping to contribute to this important and rapidly growing field.

Middle India as revealed by Chetan Bhagat

The middle classes form the bulk of Indian migrants who head for Australian shores today. Yet, within Australia, general knowledge of the conditions that drive Indians’ determined search for opportunities overseas is limited to the few who have contact with international students and migrants from the sub-continent, and the skewed, melodramatic antics of Bollywood. It is my suggestion that a broader understanding of the underlying reasons that push Indians to migrate to societies like Australia can be had through readings of Chetan’s Bhagat’s four hugely popular novels: Five Point Someone, One night @the Call Center, The 3 mistakes of My life and Two States. Bhagat is a graduate of India’s famed Indian Institute of Technology and a former Non-Resident Indian investment banker who has since returned to live in Delhi. His experiences make him the perfect mouthpiece for middle India and his paperbacks depict that stratum of Indian society’s obsessions with social mobility, marriage, regional and religious divides with great sympathy and conviction. Drawing on observations made during a recent visit to India, I illustrate what an exploration of Bhagat’s paperbacks reveals about everyday, contemporary India and what it adds to Australian understandings of Indians and India today.

Gatekeeping, gatewatching, real-time feedback : new challenges for Journalism

How bloggers and other independent online commentators criticise, correct, and otherwise challenge conventional journalism has been known for years, but has yet to be fully accepted by journalists; hostilities between the media establishment and the new generation of citizen journalists continue to flare up from time to time. The old gatekeeping monopoly of the mass media has been challenged by the new practice of gatewatching: by individual bloggers and by communities of commentators which may not report the news first-hand, but curate and evaluate the news and other information provided by official sources, and thus provide an important service. And this now takes place ever more rapidly, almost in real time: using the latest social networks, which disseminate, share, comment, question, and debunk news reports within minutes, and using additional platforms that enable fast and effective ad hoc collaboration between users. When hundreds of volunteers can prove within a few days that a German minister has been guilty of serious plagiarism, when the world first learns of earthquakes and tsunamis via Twitter – how does journalism manage to keep up?

Drivers of satisfaction and dissatisfaction for overseas service consumers : a critical incident technique approach

This is one of the few studies in the academic literature that directly addresses inward exporting of customer services, which is a topic that has gained less attention from an international services marketing point of view. The objective of this study is to explore the drivers of satisfaction and dissatisfaction for overseas service customers of higher education in Australia. Critical incident technique (CIT) method was used to collect and analyse the data and a total of 107 critical incidents were collected. Findings from this study show that service satisfaction and dissatisfaction for international students derive from: elements of the core service (educational service performance), personal sources (international student performance), and the external environment (socialization and host environment performance). Additionally, results show that the drivers of satisfaction and dissatisfaction for international students are not necessarily the same. Limitations relating to the specific sector of higher education and the cross sectional natures of the data are addressed.

Internationalisation of emerging market firms : an exploratory study of Chilean companies

Purpose This paper explores how firms from a Latin American market internationalise using the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm as a theoretical foundation. Specifically, it examines the internationalisation process of three Chilean companies that have become relevant international players. Design/methodology/approach Drawing on interviews with company managers, as well as industry data and corporate reports, this paper provides insights into the successful internationalisation process of emerging market firms. Findings The findings of this study suggest that specific capabilities and resources, such as belonging to a family conglomerate, domestic and foreign partnerships and networks, innovation and market orientation, and an experienced management team, are required for emerging market firms to internationalise and improve their performance in foreign markets. Originality/value This study is one of the few to address the internationalisation process of Chilean companies.

Multimedia search capabilities of Chinese language search engines

This paper reports results from a study exploring the multimedia search functionality of Chinese language search engines. Web searching in Chinese (Mandarin) is a growing research area and a technical challenge for popular commercial Web search engines. Few studies have been conducted on Chinese language search engines. We investigate two research questions: which Chinese language search engines provide multimedia searching, and what multimedia search functionalities are available in Chinese language Web search engines. Specifically, we examine each Web search engine's (1) features permitting Chinese language multimedia searches, (2) extent of search personalization and user control of multimedia search variables, and (3) the relationships between Web search engines and their features in the Chinese context. Key findings show that Chinese language Web search engines offer limited multimedia search functionality, and general search engines provide a wider range of features than specialized multimedia search engines. Study results have implications for Chinese Web users, Website designers and Web search engine developers. © 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

Organizations as distinction generating and processing systems: Niklas Luhmann's contribution to organization studies

Niklas Luhmann's theory of social systems has been widely influential in the German-speaking countries in the past few decades. However, despite its significance, particularly for organization studies, it is only very recently that Luhmann's work has attracted attention on the international stage as well. This Special Issue is in response to that. In this introductory paper, we provide a systematic overview of Luhmann's theory. Reading his work as a theory about distinction generating and processing systems, we especially highlight the following aspects: (i) Organizations are processes that come into being by permanently constructing and reconstructing themselves by means of using distinctions, which mark what is part of their realm and what not. (ii) Such an organizational process belongs to a social sphere sui generis possessing its own logic, which cannot be traced back to human actors or subjects. (iii) Organizations are a specific kind of social process characterized by a specific kind of distinction: decision, which makes up what is specifically organizational about organizations as social phenomena. We conclude by introducing the papers in this Special Issue. Copyright © 2006 SAGE.

Efficient modular exponentiation-based puzzles for denial-of-service protection

Client puzzles are moderately-hard cryptographic problems neither easy nor impossible to solve that can be used as a counter-measure against denial of service attacks on network protocols. Puzzles based on modular exponentiation are attractive as they provide important properties such as non-parallelisability, deterministic solving time, and linear granularity. We propose an efficient client puzzle based on modular exponentiation. Our puzzle requires only a few modular multiplications for puzzle generation and verification. For a server under denial of service attack, this is a significant improvement as the best known non-parallelisable puzzle proposed by Karame and Capkun (ESORICS 2010) requires at least 2k-bit modular exponentiation, where k is a security parameter. We show that our puzzle satisfies the unforgeability and difficulty properties defined by Chen et al. (Asiacrypt 2009). We present experimental results which show that, for 1024-bit moduli, our proposed puzzle can be up to 30 times faster to verify than the Karame-Capkun puzzle and 99 times faster than the Rivest et al.'s time-lock puzzle.

Sex, crime and morality

Over the last few decades, there has been a marked increase in media and debate surrounding a specific group of offences in modern Democratic nations which bear the brunt of the label ‘crimes against morality’. Included within this group are offences related to prostitution and pornography, homosexuality and incest and child sexual abuse. This book examines the nexus between sex, crime and morality from a theoretical perspective. This is the first academic text to offer an examination and analysis of the philosophical underpinnings of sex-related crimes and social attitudes towards them and the historical, anthropological and moral reasons for differentiating these crimes in contemporary western culture. The book is divided into three sections corresponding to three theoretical frameworks: - Part 1 examines the moral temporality of sex and taboo as a foundation for legislation governing sex crimes - Part 2 focuses on the geography of sex and deviance, specifically notions of public morality and the public private divide - Part 3 examines the moral economy of sex and harm, including the social construction of harm. Sex, Crime and Morality will be key reading for students of criminology, criminal justice, gender studies and ethics, and will also be of interest to justice professionals.

Complexity, evolution, and the structure of demand

This chapter argues that evolutionary economics should be founded upon complex systems theory rather than neo-Darwinian analogies concerning natural selection, which focus on supply side considerations and competition amongst firms and technologies. It suggests that conceptions such as production and consumption functions should be replaced by network representations, in which the preferences or, more correctly, the aspirations of consumers are fundamental and, as such, the primary drivers of economic growth. Technological innovation is viewed as a process that is intermediate between these aspirational networks, and the organizational networks in which goods and services are produced. Consumer knowledge becomes at least as important as producer knowledge in determining how economic value is generated. It becomes clear that the stability afforded by connective systems of rules is essential for economic flexibility to exist, but that too many rules result in inert and structurally unstable states. In contrast, too few rules result in a more stable state, but at a low level of ordered complexity. Economic evolution from this perspective is explored using random and scale free network representations of complex systems.

The RatSLAM project : robot spatial navigation

Rats are superior to the most advanced robots when it comes to creating and exploiting spatial representations. A wild rat can have a foraging range of hundreds of meters, possibly kilometers, and yet the rodent can unerringly return to its home after each foraging mission, and return to profitable foraging locations at a later date (Davis, et al., 1948). The rat runs through undergrowth and pipes with few distal landmarks, along paths where the visual, textural, and olfactory appearance constantly change (Hardy and Taylor, 1980; Recht, 1988). Despite these challenges the rat builds, maintains, and exploits internal representations of large areas of the real world throughout its two to three year lifetime. While algorithms exist that allow robots to build maps, the questions of how to maintain those maps and how to handle change in appearance over time remain open. The robotic approach to map building has been dominated by algorithms that optimise the geometry of the map based on measurements of distances to features. In a robotic approach, measurements of distance to features are taken with range-measuring devices such as laser range finders or ultrasound sensors, and in some cases estimates of depth from visual information. The features are incorporated into the map based on previous readings of other features in view and estimates of self-motion. The algorithms explicitly model the uncertainty in measurements of range and the measurement of self-motion, and use probability theory to find optimal solutions for the geometric configuration of the map features (Dissanayake, et al., 2001; Thrun and Leonard, 2008). Some of the results from the application of these algorithms have been impressive, ranging from three-dimensional maps of large urban strucutures (Thrun and Montemerlo, 2006) to natural environments (Montemerlo, et al., 2003).

The social orders of family mealtime

This study examined the everyday practices of families within the context of family mealtime to investigate how members accomplished mealtime interactions. Using an ethnomethodological approach, conversation analysis and membership categorization analysis, the study investigated the interactional resources that family members used to assemble their social orders moment by moment during family mealtimes. While there is interest in mealtimes within educational policy, health research and the media, there remain few studies that provide fine-grained detail about how members produce the social activity of having a family meal. Findings from this study contribute empirical understandings about families and family mealtime. Two families with children aged 2 to 10 years were observed as they accomplished their everyday mealtime activities. Data collection took place in the family homes where family members video recorded their naturally occurring mealtimes. Each family was provided with a video camera for a one-month period and they decided which mealtimes they recorded, a method that afforded participants greater agency in the data collection process and made available to the analyst a window into the unfolding of the everyday lives of the families. A total of 14 mealtimes across the two families were recorded, capturing 347 minutes of mealtime interactions. Selected episodes from the data corpus, which includes centralised breakfast and dinnertime episodes, were transcribed using the Jeffersonian system. Three data chapters examine extended sequences of family talk at mealtimes, to show the interactional resources used by members during mealtime interactions. The first data chapter explores multiparty talk to show how the uniqueness of the occasion of having a meal influences turn design. It investigates the ways in which members accomplish two-party talk within a multiparty setting, showing how one child "tells" a funny story to accomplish the drawing together of his brothers as an audience. As well, this chapter identifies the interactional resources used by the mother to cohort her children to accomplish the choralling of grace. The second data chapter draws on sequential and categorical analysis to show how members are mapped to a locally produced membership category. The chapter shows how the mapping of members into particular categories is consequential for social order; for example, aligning members who belong to the membership category "had haircuts" and keeping out those who "did not have haircuts". Additional interactional resources such as echoing, used here to refer to the use of exactly the same words, similar prosody and physical action, and increasing physical closeness, are identified as important to the unfolding talk particularly as a way of accomplishing alignment between the grandmother and grand-daughter. The third and final data analysis chapter examines topical talk during family mealtimes. It explicates how members introduce topics of talk with an orientation to their co-participant and the way in which the take up of a topic is influenced both by the sequential environment in which it is introduced and the sensitivity of the topic. Together, these three data chapters show aspects of how family members participated in family mealtimes. The study contributes four substantive themes that emerged during the analytic process and, as such, the themes reflect what the members were observed to be doing. The first theme identified how family knowledge was relevant and consequential for initiating and sustaining interaction during mealtime with, for example, members buying into the talk of other members or being requested to help out with knowledge about a shared experience. Knowledge about members and their activities was evident with the design of questions evidencing an orientation to coparticipant’s knowledge. The second theme found how members used topic as a resource for social interaction. The third theme concerned the way in which members utilised membership categories for producing and making sense of social action. The fourth theme, evident across all episodes selected for analysis, showed how children’s competence is an ongoing interactional accomplishment as they manipulated interactional resources to manage their participation in family mealtime. The way in which children initiated interactions challenges previous understandings about children’s restricted rights as conversationalists. As well as making a theoretical contribution, the study offers methodological insight by working with families as research participants. The study shows the procedures involved as the study moved from one where the researcher undertook the decisions about what to videorecord to offering this decision making to the families, who chose when and what to videorecord of their mealtime practices. Evident also are the ways in which participants orient both to the video-camera and to the absent researcher. For the duration of the mealtime the video-camera was positioned by the adults as out of bounds to the children; however, it was offered as a "treat" to view after the mealtime was recorded. While situated within family mealtimes and reporting on the experiences of two families, this study illuminates how mealtimes are not just about food and eating; they are social. The study showed the constant and complex work of establishing and maintaining social orders and the rich array of interactional resources that members draw on during family mealtimes. The family’s interactions involved members contributing to building the social orders of family mealtime. With mealtimes occurring in institutional settings involving young children, such as long day care centres and kindergartens, the findings of this study may help educators working with young children to see the rich interactional opportunities mealtimes afford children, the interactional competence that children demonstrate during mealtimes, and the important role/s that adults may assume as co-participants in interactions with children within institutional settings.

Towards lifelong navigation and mapping in an office environment

This paper addresses the challenge of developing robots that map and navigate autonomously in real world, dynamic environments throughout the robot’s entire lifetime – the problem of lifelong navigation. Static mapping algorithms can produce highly accurate maps, but have found few applications in real environments that are in constant flux. Environments change in many ways: both rapidly and gradually, transiently and permanently, geometrically and in appearance. This paper demonstrates a biologically inspired navigation algorithm, RatSLAM, that uses principles found in rodent neural circuits. The algorithm is demonstrated in an office delivery challenge where the robot was required to perform mock deliveries to goal locations in two different buildings. The robot successfully completed 1177 out of 1178 navigation trials over 37 hours of around the clock operation spread over 11 days.