Applying the principles of interpretive field research: An example of an IS case study on shared services

All sound research commence with the selection of a research paradigm. The chosen research paradigm is significant in shaping the researcher’s perspectives of the world and it is a vital step in any study’s’ research design. There are different paradigms that IS researchers can choose from; amongst which the interpretive paradigm is growing in acceptance.. Though interpretive research has emerged as an important strand in Information Systems (IS), guidelines on how to conduct interpretive research and how to evaluate them have been scarce. Klein and Myers presented seven principles with examples for each from three case examples. While these principles are much valued, there is a lack of support for novice researchers on how to embed these principles in an overall research design, which could help with the aid of a detailed example that has done so. Thus, this paper aims to address this gap, and presents how Klein and Myers’s principles were applied within an example study that investigated shared services in the Malaysian Higher Education context. The example study adopted the interpretive paradigm as the most suited approach that fitted their research questions and goals. More details about the selection and adoption of the Klein and Myers’s guidelines in the context of the shared services research case study are presented in the paper.

Writing fashion’s future: the gods and monsters of the Anthropocene

This paper identifies two narratives of the Anthropocene and explores how they play out in the realm of future-looking fashion production. Each narrative draws on mythic comparisons to gods and monsters to express humanity’s dilemmas, albeit from different perspectives. The first is a Malthusian narrative of collapse and scarcity, brought about by the monstrous, unstoppable nature of human technology set loose on the natural world. In this vein, philosopher Slavoj Zizek (2010) draws on Biblical analogies, likening ecological crisis to one of the four horsemen of the apocalypse. To find a myth to suit the present times, novelist A.S Byatt (2011) proposes Ragnarök, a Norse myth in which the gods destroy themselves. In contrast, the second narrative is one of technological cornucopia. Stewart Brand (2009, 27), self-described ‘eco-pragmatist’ writes, ‘we are as gods and we have to get good at it’. In his view, human technologies offer the only hope to mitigating the problems caused by human technology – Brand suggests harnessing nuclear power, bioengineering of crops and the geoengineering of the planet as the way forward. Similarly, the French philosopher Bruno Latour (2012, 274), exhorts us to “love our monsters”, likening our technologies to Doctor Frankenstein’s monster – set loose upon the world, and then reviled by his creator. For both Brand and Latour, human technology may be monstrous, but it must also be turned toward solutions. Within this schema, hopeful visions of the future of fashion are similarly divided. In the techno-enabled cornucopian future, the fashion industry embraces wearable technology, speed and efficiency. Technologies such as waterless dyeing, 3D printing and self-cleaning garments shift fashion into a new era of cleaner production. Meanwhile, in the narrative of scarcity, a more cautious approach sees fashion return to a new localism and valuing of the hand-made in a time of shrinking resources. Through discussion of future-looking fashion designers, brands, and activists, this paper explores how they may align along a spectrum to one of these two grand narratives of the future. The paper will discuss how these narratives may unconsciously shape the perspective of both producers and users around the fashion of today and the fashion of tomorrow. This paper poses the question: what stories can be written for fashion’s future in the Anthropocene, and are they fated, or can they be re-written?

Management of multi-scale forest resource data over time

During the last decades there has been a global shift in forest management from a focus solely on timber management to ecosystem management that endorses all aspects of forest functions: ecological, economic and social. This has resulted in a shift in paradigm from sustained yield to sustained diversity of values, goods and benefits obtained at the same time, introducing new temporal and spatial scales into forest resource management. The purpose of the present dissertation was to develop methods that would enable spatial and temporal scales to be introduced into the storage, processing, access and utilization of forest resource data. The methods developed are based on a conceptual view of a forest as a hierarchically nested collection of objects that can have a dynamically changing set of attributes. The temporal aspect of the methods consists of lifetime management for the objects and their attributes and of a temporal succession linking the objects together. Development of the forest resource data processing method concentrated on the extensibility and configurability of the data content and model calculations, allowing for a diverse set of processing operations to be executed using the same framework. The contribution of this dissertation to the utilisation of multi-scale forest resource data lies in the development of a reference data generation method to support forest inventory methods in approaching single-tree resolution.

Wisdom and narcissism as predictors of transformational leadership

- Purpose Although leadership and organizational scholars have suggested that the virtue of wisdom may promote outstanding leadership behavior, this proposition has rarely been empirically tested. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationships between transformational leadership, narcissism, and five dimensions of wisdom as conceptualized by the well-established Berlin wisdom paradigm. General mental ability and emotional intelligence were considered relevant control variables. - Design/methodology/approach Interview, test, and questionnaire data were obtained from 77 employees of a high school and from two or three colleagues of each employee. Data were analyzed using hierarchical regression analyses. - Findings After controlling for general mental ability and emotional intelligence, narcissism and the wisdom dimension relativism of values and life priorities were negatively related to transformational leadership, and the wisdom dimension recognition and management of uncertainty was positively related to transformational leadership. The other three wisdom dimensions, rich factual knowledge about life, rich procedural knowledge about life, and lifespan contextualism, were not significantly related to transformational leadership. - Research limitations/implications Limitations to be addressed in future studies include the cross-sectional design and the relatively small and specialized sample. - Practical implications Tentative implications for leadership training and development are outlined. - Originality/value This multi-method and multi-source study represents the first empirical investigation that examines links between well-established wisdom and leadership constructs in the work context.

A review of the application of molecular genetics for fisheries management and conservation of sharks and rays

Since the first investigation 25 years ago, the application of genetic tools to address ecological and evolutionary questions in elasmobranch studies has greatly expanded. Major developments in genetic theory as well as in the availability, cost effectiveness and resolution of genetic markers were instrumental for particularly rapid progress over the last 10 years. Genetic studies of elasmobranchs are of direct importance and have application to fisheries management and conservation issues such as the definition of management units and identification of species from fins. In the future, increased application of the most recent and emerging technologies will enable accelerated genetic data production and the development of new markers at reduced costs, paving the way for a paradigm shift from gene to genome-scale research, and more focus on adaptive rather than just neutral variation. Current literature is reviewed in six fields of elasmobranch molecular genetics relevant to fisheries and conservation management (species identification, phylogeography, philopatry, genetic effective population size, molecular evolutionary rate and emerging methods). Where possible, examples from the Indo-Pacific region, which has been underrepresented in previous reviews, are emphasized within a global perspective. (C) 2012 The Authors Journal of Fish Biology (C) 2012 The Fisheries Society of the British Isles

Wisdom in the military context

On the basis of the Berlin wisdom paradigm, we define wisdom in the military context as expert knowledge and judgment concerning in extremis military operations. We measured wisdom in the military context by asking participants to give advice to an inexperienced officer facing an in extremis operation; subsequently, we coded their responses. Data were provided by 74 senior noncommissioned officers (NCOs) in the U.S. defense forces. In support of convergent validity, wisdom in the military context was positively related to general objective wisdom and general self-assessed wisdom. Relationships of wisdom in the military context and general objective wisdom with Big Five personality characteristics were nonsignificant, whereas general self-assessed wisdom was positively related to extraversion, agreeableness, and openness to experience, and it was negatively related to neuroticism. The findings provide initial support for the validity of the new wisdom in the military context measure. We discuss several implications for future research and practice regarding wisdom in the military context.

The application of one health approaches to henipavirus research

Henipaviruses cause fatal infection in humans and domestic animals. Transmission from fruit bats, the wildlife reservoirs of henipaviruses, is putatively driven (at least in part) by anthropogenic changes that alter host ecology. Human and domestic animal fatalities occur regularly in Asia and Australia, but recent findings suggest henipaviruses are present in bats across the Old World tropics. We review the application of the One Health approach to henipavirus research in three locations: Australia, Malaysia and Bangladesh. We propose that by recognising and addressing the complex interaction among human, domestic animal and wildlife systems, research within the One Health paradigm will be more successful in mitigating future human and domestic animal deaths from henipavirus infection than alternative single-discipline approaches. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2013.

Bayesian model comparison in cosmology with Population Monte Carlo

We use Bayesian model selection techniques to test extensions of the standard flat LambdaCDM paradigm. Dark-energy and curvature scenarios, and primordial perturbation models are considered. To that end, we calculate the Bayesian evidence in favour of each model using Population Monte Carlo (PMC), a new adaptive sampling technique which was recently applied in a cosmological context. The Bayesian evidence is immediately available from the PMC sample used for parameter estimation without further computational effort, and it comes with an associated error evaluation. Besides, it provides an unbiased estimator of the evidence after any fixed number of iterations and it is naturally parallelizable, in contrast with MCMC and nested sampling methods. By comparison with analytical predictions for simulated data, we show that our results obtained with PMC are reliable and robust. The variability in the evidence evaluation and the stability for various cases are estimated both from simulations and from data. For the cases we consider, the log-evidence is calculated with a precision of better than 0.08. Using a combined set of recent CMB, SNIa and BAO data, we find inconclusive evidence between flat LambdaCDM and simple dark-energy models. A curved Universe is moderately to strongly disfavoured with respect to a flat cosmology. Using physically well-motivated priors within the slow-roll approximation of inflation, we find a weak preference for a running spectral index. A Harrison-Zel'dovich spectrum is weakly disfavoured. With the current data, tensor modes are not detected; the large prior volume on the tensor-to-scalar ratio r results in moderate evidence in favour of r=0.

Integration of natural hazards, risk and climate change into spatial planning practices

Most countries of Europe, as well as many countries in other parts of the world, are experiencing an increased impact of natural hazards. It is often speculated, but not yet proven, that climate change might influence the frequency and magnitude of certain hydro-meteorological natural hazards. What has certainly been observed is a sharp increase in financial losses caused by natural hazards worldwide. Eventhough Europe appears to be a space that is not affected by natural hazards to such catastrophic extents as other parts of the world are, the damages experienced here are certainly increasing too. Natural hazards, climate change and, in particular, risks have therefore recently been put high on the political agenda of the EU. In the search for appropriate instruments for mitigating impacts of natural hazards and climate change, as well as risks, the integration of these factors into spatial planning practices is constantly receiving higher attention. The focus of most approaches lies on single hazards and climate change mitigation strategies. The current paradigm shift of climate change mitigation to adaptation is used as a basis to draw conclusions and recommendations on what concepts could be further incorporated into spatial planning practices. Especially multi-hazard approaches are discussed as an important approach that should be developed further. One focal point is the definition and applicability of the terms natural hazard, vulnerability and risk in spatial planning practices. Especially vulnerability and risk concepts are so many-fold and complicated that their application in spatial planning has to be analysed most carefully. The PhD thesis is based on six published articles that describe the results of European research projects, which have elaborated strategies and tools for integrated communication and assessment practices on natural hazards and climate change impacts. The papers describe approaches on local, regional and European level, both from theoretical and practical perspectives. Based on these, passed, current and future potential spatial planning applications are reviewed and discussed. In conclusion it is recommended to shift from single hazard assessments to multi-hazard approaches, integrating potential climate change impacts. Vulnerability concepts should play a stronger role than present, and adaptation to natural hazards and climate change should be more emphasized in relation to mitigation. It is outlined that the integration of risk concepts in planning is rather complicated and would need very careful assessment to ensure applicability. Future spatial planning practices should also consider to be more interdisciplinary, i.e. to integrate as many stakeholders and experts as possible to ensure the sustainability of investments.

Organisational culture and quality management system implementation in Indonesian construction companies

The study of the organisational culture in the construction industry is still in the stage of debate (Oney-Yazıcı et al., 2007). Despite the complexities involved in measuring the culture of the construction industry (Tijhuis and Fellows, 2012), this culture is regarded as being worthy of research, especially in relation to the organisational culture needed to support quality management systems (Koh and Low, 2008; Watson and Howarth, 2011) and to improve organisational effectiveness, and therefore, organisational performance (Coffey, 2010; Cheung et al., 2011). A number of recent studies have examined the construction companies’ organisational culture within the context of the use of Cameron and Quinn’s Competing Value Framework (CVF), as well as the use of their Organizational Culture Assessment Instrument (OCAI) as the conceptual paradigm for the analyses (Thomas et al., 2002; Nummelin, 2006; Oney- Yazıcı et al., 2007; Koh and Low, 2008). However, there has been little research based on the use of Cameron and Quinn’s CVF-OCAI tool for identifying types of construction companies’ organisational culture and their influences on the implementation of QMS-ISO 9001. Research output and information is also very limited relating to the strength of the companies’ organisational culture driving an effective QMS-ISO 9001 implementation, affecting the companies’ effectiveness. To rectify these research gaps, the research has been aimed to study organisational culture types (based on CVF) and their influences on the implementation of QMS-ISO 9001:2008 principles and elements, which eventually lead to improved companies’ quality performance. In order to fully examine the status of the QMS being implemented, the research has studied the relationships of the barriers of QMS implementation with the implementation of QMS-ISO 9001:2008 principles and elements and with the business performance of the companies, as well as the examination of the relationships of the implementation of QMS-ISO 9001:2008 principles and elements with the companies’ business performance. The research output has been the development of fundamental and original studies on the study topics, to provide the knowledge for improvements in Indonesian construction companies’ quality performance and quality outcomes.

Middleware for Mobile Sensing Applications in Urban Environments

Sensor networks represent an attractive tool to observe the physical world. Networks of tiny sensors can be used to detect a fire in a forest, to monitor the level of pollution in a river, or to check on the structural integrity of a bridge. Application-specific deployments of static-sensor networks have been widely investigated. Commonly, these networks involve a centralized data-collection point and no sharing of data outside the organization that owns it. Although this approach can accommodate many application scenarios, it significantly deviates from the pervasive computing vision of ubiquitous sensing where user applications seamlessly access anytime, anywhere data produced by sensors embedded in the surroundings. With the ubiquity and ever-increasing capabilities of mobile devices, urban environments can help give substance to the ubiquitous sensing vision through Urbanets, spontaneously created urban networks. Urbanets consist of mobile multi-sensor devices, such as smart phones and vehicular systems, public sensor networks deployed by municipalities, and individual sensors incorporated in buildings, roads, or daily artifacts. My thesis is that "multi-sensor mobile devices can be successfully programmed to become the underpinning elements of an open, infrastructure-less, distributed sensing platform that can bring sensor data out of their traditional close-loop networks into everyday urban applications". Urbanets can support a variety of services ranging from emergency and surveillance to tourist guidance and entertainment. For instance, cars can be used to provide traffic information services to alert drivers to upcoming traffic jams, and phones to provide shopping recommender services to inform users of special offers at the mall. Urbanets cannot be programmed using traditional distributed computing models, which assume underlying networks with functionally homogeneous nodes, stable configurations, and known delays. Conversely, Urbanets have functionally heterogeneous nodes, volatile configurations, and unknown delays. Instead, solutions developed for sensor networks and mobile ad hoc networks can be leveraged to provide novel architectures that address Urbanet-specific requirements, while providing useful abstractions that hide the network complexity from the programmer. This dissertation presents two middleware architectures that can support mobile sensing applications in Urbanets. Contory offers a declarative programming model that views Urbanets as a distributed sensor database and exposes an SQL-like interface to developers. Context-aware Migratory Services provides a client-server paradigm, where services are capable of migrating to different nodes in the network in order to maintain a continuous and semantically correct interaction with clients. Compared to previous approaches to supporting mobile sensing urban applications, our architectures are entirely distributed and do not assume constant availability of Internet connectivity. In addition, they allow on-demand collection of sensor data with the accuracy and at the frequency required by every application. These architectures have been implemented in Java and tested on smart phones. They have proved successful in supporting several prototype applications and experimental results obtained in ad hoc networks of phones have demonstrated their feasibility with reasonable performance in terms of latency, memory, and energy consumption.

IP Mobility in Wireless Operator Networks

Wireless network access is gaining increased heterogeneity in terms of the types of IP capable access technologies. The access network heterogeneity is an outcome of incremental and evolutionary approach of building new infrastructure. The recent success of multi-radio terminals drives both building a new infrastructure and implicit deployment of heterogeneous access networks. Typically there is no economical reason to replace the existing infrastructure when building a new one. The gradual migration phase usually takes several years. IP-based mobility across different access networks may involve both horizontal and vertical handovers. Depending on the networking environment, the mobile terminal may be attached to the network through multiple access technologies. Consequently, the terminal may send and receive packets through multiple networks simultaneously. This dissertation addresses the introduction of IP Mobility paradigm into the existing mobile operator network infrastructure that have not originally been designed for multi-access and IP Mobility. We propose a model for the future wireless networking and roaming architecture that does not require revolutionary technology changes and can be deployed without unnecessary complexity. The model proposes a clear separation of operator roles: (i) access operator, (ii) service operator, and (iii) inter-connection and roaming provider. The separation allows each type of an operator to have their own development path and business models without artificial bindings with each other. We also propose minimum requirements for the new model. We present the state of the art of IP Mobility. We also present results of standardization efforts in IP-based wireless architectures. Finally, we present experimentation results of IP-level mobility in various wireless operator deployments.

Learning Nonlinear Visual Processing from Natural Images

The paradigm of computational vision hypothesizes that any visual function -- such as the recognition of your grandparent -- can be replicated by computational processing of the visual input. What are these computations that the brain performs? What should or could they be? Working on the latter question, this dissertation takes the statistical approach, where the suitable computations are attempted to be learned from the natural visual data itself. In particular, we empirically study the computational processing that emerges from the statistical properties of the visual world and the constraints and objectives specified for the learning process. This thesis consists of an introduction and 7 peer-reviewed publications, where the purpose of the introduction is to illustrate the area of study to a reader who is not familiar with computational vision research. In the scope of the introduction, we will briefly overview the primary challenges to visual processing, as well as recall some of the current opinions on visual processing in the early visual systems of animals. Next, we describe the methodology we have used in our research, and discuss the presented results. We have included some additional remarks, speculations and conclusions to this discussion that were not featured in the original publications. We present the following results in the publications of this thesis. First, we empirically demonstrate that luminance and contrast are strongly dependent in natural images, contradicting previous theories suggesting that luminance and contrast were processed separately in natural systems due to their independence in the visual data. Second, we show that simple cell -like receptive fields of the primary visual cortex can be learned in the nonlinear contrast domain by maximization of independence. Further, we provide first-time reports of the emergence of conjunctive (corner-detecting) and subtractive (opponent orientation) processing due to nonlinear projection pursuit with simple objective functions related to sparseness and response energy optimization. Then, we show that attempting to extract independent components of nonlinear histogram statistics of a biologically plausible representation leads to projection directions that appear to differentiate between visual contexts. Such processing might be applicable for priming, \ie the selection and tuning of later visual processing. We continue by showing that a different kind of thresholded low-frequency priming can be learned and used to make object detection faster with little loss in accuracy. Finally, we show that in a computational object detection setting, nonlinearly gain-controlled visual features of medium complexity can be acquired sequentially as images are encountered and discarded. We present two online algorithms to perform this feature selection, and propose the idea that for artificial systems, some processing mechanisms could be selectable from the environment without optimizing the mechanisms themselves. In summary, this thesis explores learning visual processing on several levels. The learning can be understood as interplay of input data, model structures, learning objectives, and estimation algorithms. The presented work adds to the growing body of evidence showing that statistical methods can be used to acquire intuitively meaningful visual processing mechanisms. The work also presents some predictions and ideas regarding biological visual processing.

Offloading content routing cost from routers

The publish/subscribe paradigm has lately received much attention. In publish/subscribe systems, a specialized event-based middleware delivers notifications of events created by producers (publishers) to consumers (subscribers) interested in that particular event. It is considered a good approach for implementing Internet-wide distributed systems as it provides full decoupling of the communicating parties in time, space and synchronization. One flavor of the paradigm is content-based publish/subscribe which allows the subscribers to express their interests very accurately. In order to implement a content-based publish/subscribe middleware in way suitable for Internet scale, its underlying architecture must be organized as a peer-to-peer network of content-based routers that take care of forwarding the event notifications to all interested subscribers. A communication infrastructure that provides such service is called a content-based network. A content-based network is an application-level overlay network. Unfortunately, the expressiveness of the content-based interaction scheme comes with a price - compiling and maintaining the content-based forwarding and routing tables is very expensive when the amount of nodes in the network is large. The routing tables are usually partially-ordered set (poset) -based data structures. In this work, we present an algorithm that aims to improve scalability in content-based networks by reducing the workload of content-based routers by offloading some of their content routing cost to clients. We also provide experimental results of the performance of the algorithm. Additionally, we give an introduction to the publish/subscribe paradigm and content-based networking and discuss alternative ways of improving scalability in content-based networks. ACM Computing Classification System (CCS): C.2.4 [Computer-Communication Networks]: Distributed Systems - Distributed applications

Service Composition on a Mobile Phone

With the recent increase in interest in service-oriented architectures (SOA) and Web services, developing applications with the Web services paradigm has become feasible. Web services are self-describing, platform-independent computational elements. New applications can be assembled from a set of previously created Web services, which are composed together to make a service that uses its components to perform a certain task. This is the idea of service composition. To bring service composition to a mobile phone, I have created Interactive Service Composer for mobile phones. With Interactive Service Composer, the user is able to build service compositions on his mobile phone, consisting of Web services or services that are available from the mobile phone itself. The service compositions are reusable and can be saved in the phone's memory. Previously saved compositions can also be used in new compositions. While developing applications for mobile phones has been possible for some time, the usability of the solutions is not the same as when developing for desktop computers. When developing for mobile phones, the developer has to more carefully consider the decisions he is going to make with the program he is developing. With the lack of processing power and memory, the applications cannot function as well as on desktop PCs. On the other hand, this does not remove the appeal of developing applications for mobile devices.