Art Information Research Articles

Using a modified technology acceptance model in hospitals

Purpose The use of information technology in the health care sector and especially in hospitals offers great potential for improving the quality of services provided and the efficiency and effectiveness of the personnel, but also for reducing the organizational expenses. However, the main question that arises according to the literature is whether hospital personnel are willing to use state of the art information technology while performing their tasks. This study attempts to address this issue by developing and testing a modified technology acceptance model taking into consideration other relevant models found in the literature. Method The original TAM has been extended to include some exogenous variables in order to examine HIS acceptance by Greek hospital personnel. Correlation, explanatory and confirmation factor analysis was performed to test the reliability and validity of the measurement model. The structural equation modeling technique has also been used to evaluate the causal model. Results The results indicate that perceived usefulness, ease of use, social influence, attitude, facilitating conditions and self-efficacy significantly affect hospital personnel behavioral intention. Training has a strong indirect impact on behavioral intention through the mediators of facilitating condition and ease of use. Furthermore, the existence of significant positive effects between self-efficacy and social influence, perceived usefulness and anxiety, and facilitating conditions and social influence is also supported. Conclusions The proposed model can explain 87% of the variance of behavioral intention indicating that the core constructs of the technology acceptance models have a strong and statistically significant influence on hospital personnel usage intention.

Beyond bags of words

Current state of the art information retrieval models treat documents and queries as bags of words. There have been many attempts to go beyond this simple representation. Unfortunately, few have shown consistent improvements in retrieval effectiveness across a wide range of tasks and data sets. Here, we propose a new statistical model for information retrieval based on Markov random fields. The proposed model goes beyond the bag of words assumption by allowing dependencies between terms to be incorporated into the model. This allows for a variety of textual and non-textual features to be easily combined under the umbrella of a single model. Within this framework, we explore the theoretical issues involved, parameter estimation, feature selection, and query expansion. We give experimental results from a number of information retrieval tasks, such as ad hoc retrieval and web search.

Representações da natureza: mapas e gravuras produzidos durante o domínio neerlandês no Brasil (1624/1654)

The discoveries and conquest of the New World spawned an icrease in interest for the exotic products which, from the sixteenth century onwards, became part of the European collections appearing in botanical gardens and curiosity cabinets. This paper shall analyse maps and engravings produced during the Dutch rule as an attempt to synthesize the period since they offer delimitations as well as detailed illustrations of the territory, including references to nature and the inhabitants, and serve as both source of information and works of art. The Dutch presence in Brazil during the seventeenth century, though short, left us a treasure trove of data about the region, which amounts to a rich body of texts and iconography, offering us a picture of how priviledged a space Dutch Brazil was for the development of the sciences and the arts on American ground, specially in the city governed by Maurits Van Nassau.

Common Dysmorphic Syndromes in the NICU

Neonatologists are responsible for the care of newborns who have a wide variety of critical illnesses, including complications of multiple congenital anomalies. This review article provides an overview of state-of-the art information on the diagnosis and management of a number of genetic disorders frequently encountered in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU). The latest diagnostic tool for children who have unknown syndromes (array comparative genomic hybridization) as well as Internet-based search engine databases that can be accessed from the NICU are examined.

Bringing peer review to patents

Tougher examination of patent applications reduces anti–commons effects while reducing the frequency and costs of litigation. Modelled after open source/free software collaborations, the “Peer to Patent” initiative seeks to improve the quality of patents by developing a Web–based infrastructure whereby volunteer experts external to the PTO’s review applications, assemble prior art information, and submit the results of their collective work back to the Patent Office examiner. This paper endorses the spirit and goals of the “Peer to Patent” initiative, but questions its reliance on the open source model. A discussion of the functions of peer review, the meaning of peer, and the motivations of the reviewers in different contexts indicates that editorial peer review — not open source — can provide a more effective model for integrating peer review of patent applications into PTO practices.

Plant Epigenetics. Annual Plant Reviews, Volume 19

Recently there have been remarkable advances in our understanding of epigenetic mechanisms in plants. Given the rapid increase in publication of scientific papers involved in plant epigenetics, a book that provides comprehensive coverage of recent knowledge is earnestly desired by plant scientists. Plant Epigenetics edited by Peter Meyer is published just at the right moment. This book contains nine chapters authored by known researchers who have published several ‘hot’ papers in this field. Transgene silencing is one of the prominent issues in transgenic plants in order to keep reliable activity of transgenes. Chapter 1 describes the molecular mechanism of transgene silencing from various points of view. Based on recent arguments on the silencing effects, valuable strategies for the prevention of transgene silencing are proposed. RNA interference (RNAi) has provided a new paradigm for our functional understanding of biological processes since its discovery using Caenorhabditis elagans in 1998. Chapter 2 introduces the up-to-date model of pathways and protein machinery of RNAi. Recent information on RNAi-related proteins including double-stranded RNA-processing enzymes (DCLs), argonaute proteins/PAZ and PIWI domain proteins, and RNA-dependent RNA polymerases, is comprehensively supplied. Chapter 3 describes RNA-directed DNA methylation (RdDM) that connects the two different events of RNAi and the well-known epigenetic regulation. The latter part of this book, Chapters 4–9, review rather topical issues in relation to plant epigenetics, i.e., heterochromatin, paramutation, genomic imprinting, nucleolar dominance, virus-induced gene silencing, and microRNAs, respectively. Each chapter compactly summarizes recent advancements in the individual fields. In Chapter 7, for example, the author provides a compact, yet informative overview of current knowledge and future challenges in the field of genomic imprinting in relation to DNA methylation and chromatin modification. Imprinting is not limited to mammals; in fact genomic imprinting was first described using maize in 1970. The other chapters will also inspire the reader by their concise but informative descriptions of the intricate interplay of DNA and RNA elements, chromatin structures, different patterns of post-translational modifications, and even the position of the gene loci in the chromosome and genome. Plant Epigenetics thoroughly covers this rapidly developing and expanding field in plant science. The chapters are well written and provide clear, concise and informative views on the individual fields in plant epigenetics. Both researchers and students will find this book a valuable source of state-of-the art information on plant epigenetics.

Who needs subject gateways, portals or hubs?

Early users of the internet and the World Wide Web soon realised that there was a need to gather together links to sites of interest to art and design researchers. The Art, Design, Architecture and Media (ADAM) information gateway attempted to satisfy this demand, whilst also helping to develop appropriate methodologies and standards. One of ADAM’s successors, Artifact, adopted an expanded role and provided additional services. Artifact subsequently became part of Intute: Arts and Humanities, which covers a broader range of subjects. Surveys, usage figures and social bookmarking sites such as del.icio.us suggest that some – but not all – users and potential users appreciate the services that gateways, portals and hubs can provide.

20 YEARS OF ABORIGINAL WOODCARVING IN ARNHEM LAND, AUSTRALIA: USING ART SALES RECORDS TO EXAMINE THE DYNAMICS OF SCULPTURE PRODUCTION

ABSTRACT The growth of the Aboriginal Arts Industry in Australia over the last few decades has seen an increase in the number of indigenous communities producing woodcarvings. The timber used for carving is derived from locally available tree species. Whilst the practice relies on the continued supply of timber from native forests, very little is known about the harvesters and their production of sculpture. A long-term community art centre sales database from the Maningrida region of central Arnhem Land was used to examine the changes the sculpture sector has experienced over the last 20 years. The results show that sculpture production has grown rapidly over the last two decades. Arts production is a flexible economic activity and carving is a popular artistic medium. One language community in the region produces the majority of pieces and major shifts in the age demography and gender of sculpture producers attest to the social and cultural sustainability of carving production in the region. This large dataset from Maningrida Arts and Culture illuminates the changing dynamics of arts production and highlights the importance of compiling similar detailed and historical arts information for other regions.

Apollinaire Bouchardat (1806-1886) et son Formulaire magistral

The anniversary of Bouchardat two centuries ago (1806) is a opportunity to reanalyse his book Nouveau Formulaire Magistral, published during more than 90 years (1840-1932), and to emphasize its interest for historians. This book, addressed to physicians and pharmacists, is a huge source of information on health care during the XIXth century. One can find data on Paris' hospitals, as well as usual pharmaceutical formulas or information on spa. Bouchardat and its formulary reflect also the main opinions during this century where pharmaceutical specialties are not well accepted by health care professionals who considered that it was a way for the patients to take care of their diseases without the control of a physician. Bouchardat is also a precursor if one consider that a number of similar books were published after the late phase of the XIXth century to help doctors to prescribe properly the drugs. Some of them will be published on several years, as for the Bouchardat's formulary. Finally, Bouchardat appears as an encyclopaedist of pharmacy and medicine. He succeeded to give a unique synthesis of state of the art information for his time, using his double training of pharmacist and physician. It is probably why this book survived more than 40 years after the death of the initial author.

Wireless networking in tunnelling projects

Emerging collaborative technologies and working methods often require tremendous engineering and organisational efforts for successful implementation of information and communication technologies (ICTs). According to a research conducted in Turkish construction industry, most of the problems that occur during the construction phase are due to lack of co-operation and communication between designers and contractors and lack of prompt expert decisions during on-site engineering. Similar to any major construction project, tunnelling project’s success is highly dependent on collaborative team work where communication and information exchange take place between project members. Distributed collaborative teamwork, as the case in most of the large scale construction projects as well as tunnelling projects, empowered by state of the art information and communication technology, promises more efficient work processes, reduced travelling needs, and increased opportunities for project communication. Following the fast development of mobile computing in recent years, many sectors have adopted mobile devices and wireless technologies enabling real-time information transfer thereby improving business processes. For some years, the feasibility of implementing wireless solutions to construction sites has been researched. Potentially, mobile and wireless technologies enable construction staff to be more flexible in terms of location and time. For better use of mobile collaboration in construction projects, mobile technologies and construction sector have to be examined in some detail to implant the most suitable technology for real-time information access and improved collaboration of distributed teams in construction. However, case studies in construction are very limited in number and scope. This paper discusses and proposes an implementation scenario of wireless networking in Marmaray; a multi-site tunnelling project in Istanbul. Benefits, possible problems and cost assessments are discussed.

Special issue: Hybrid intelligent systems in ensembles

Efforts to artificially produce intelligence via association of computing methodologies to cooperatively achieve higher performance system requirements have reached considerable maturity. In many fields, hybrid systems have succeeded to provide theoretical basis and methodological support to build real world applications. For instance, intelligent systems applications in areas such as modeling, control, optimization, classification, forecasting, information search and retrieval, image processing and recognition are common nowadays. The Fifth International Conference on Hybrid Intelligent Systems HIS’05 was a major forum that brought state of the art information to researchers and practitioners that came worldwide. Neural networks, evolutionary computation, fuzzy systems, learning, search, support vector machines, clustering, classification, swarm intelligence, agents, artificial intelligence, to mention a few, were among the techniques used in hybrid systems suggested by authors in their papers. This special issue collects contributions that nurture hybrid intelligent systems growth, emphasizing a balance between new developments and applications. The papers selected for this special issue focus on hybrid intelligent systems in ensembles. Committees or ensembles are receiving more attention from the computational intelligence community in order to improve the performance of pattern recognition systems. They produce a consensus decision that is potentially more accurate than individual models. This strategy is particularly useful when the available committee members are individually efficient and err in different regions of the feature space. After preliminary indications made by conference papers reviewers, anonymous referees did a second refereeing process. The result is a comprehensive and representative set of papers whose content mirror the quality of the conference. The first paper, entitled Evolutionary multiobjective optimization for the design of fuzzy rule-based ensemble classifiers, by Ishibuchi and Nojima, presents a hybrid system, based on evolutionary multiobjective optimization algorithms, applied to the design of fuzzy rule-based ensemble classifiers. The idea is to attain a better performance by creating an ensemble, with high diversity, in a high-dimensional pattern classification problem. To reduce the curse of dimensionality problem, that is, the exponential increase in the total number of possible rules with the increase in the number of attributes, authors proposed a two-stage fuzzy rule selection scheme, where, in the first stage, a pre-specified number of promising fuzzy rules are generated as candidate rules, and in the second stage a genetic rule selection algorithm is applied to the set of candidate rules to construct fuzzy rule-based classifiers with high accuracy and high interpretability. The proposed hybrid system was applied to six high-dimensional data sets, providing interesting results.

VIEWER TAGGING IN ART MUSEUMS: COMPARISONS TO CONCEPTS AND VOCABULARIES OF ART MUSEUM VISITORS

As one important experiment in the social or user-generated classification of online cultural heritage resources collections, art museums are leading the effort to elicit keyword descriptions of artwork images from online museum visitors. The motivations for having online viewers— presumably largely non-art-specialists—describe art images are (a) to generate keywords for image and object records in museum information retrieval systems in a cost-effective way and (b) to engage online visitors with the artworks and with each other by inviting visitors to express themselves and share their descriptions of artworks. This paper explores the question of how effective non-specialist art keyworders can be in capturing (“tagging”) potentially useful concepts and terms for use in art information retrieval systems. To do this, the paper compares evidence from art museum visitor studies which describe how non-specialist art viewers react to and describe artworks and use museum-supplied information in their initial encounters with artworks. A theoretical model of artwork interpretation derived from art museum visitor research provides a framework with which to examine both the activity and the products of artwork tagging for image and information retrieval.

Exploring innovative approaches for using ICT for rural women's adult education in Ghana

This paper examines opportunities in emerging technologies and their potentials for improving the lot of rural women in Ghana through adult education. Through a web-based (internet) and literature search, this paper reviewed the potentials of some of these innovative approaches for empowering rural women in Ghana. Though rural populations in Ghana generate 56% of the total national household income (GLSS 4, 2000), poor infrastructural development in their communities and limited access to resources affect their productivity and development. Meanwhile due to new technological developments, there have been innovative approaches for reaching the unreached with state of the art information resources. From the search, it became clear that Ghana already has an extensive telecommunications network that reaches every region in the country; and a considerable experience in rural adult education programs, which when effectively explored could help reduce the learning curve to a significant degree. In addition, there are currently available on the market several technologies that avoid many of the technical constraints, especially electrical energy that prevent the use of technologies for community education. Harnessing the potentials of these innovative technologies for rural adult education will help bridge the rural-urban divide. Ghana Journal of Development Studies Vol. 2(2) 2005: 62-76

Implementing a State of the Art Automation Control, Scada and Information System into an Existing Manually Operated 20 MGD WWTP Below Budget, On Schedule and Without Process Interruption

Implementing a State of the Art Automation Control, Scada and Information System into an Existing Manually Operated 20 MGD WWTP Below Budget, On Schedule and Without Process Interruption

Changing roles, changing realities: Australian art librarians in a brave new world

As we all cope with an e-everything world, libraries are moving to accommodate WOW (words on the web) as well as POP (print on paper) in their collections. This has led to a realignment in organisational structures, particularly in university contexts. This paper addressed two major issues: firstly the challenges that major institutional reorganisations in Australia have placed on universities and, in particular, on art schools; secondly the way these challenges may be met, based on actions and solutions to improve access to Australian visual arts information resources which followed from an extensive survey by the National Library of Australia in co-operation with ARLIS/ANZ. These results encourage art libraries to develop partnerships and networking with their parent institution and other libraries and cultural institutions on a national level.

Reengineering helps improve materials procurement in Indian oil refinery

The materials management function is always a major concern to the management of any organisation as high inventory and inefficient procurement processes have a significant effect on profitability. The problems multiply in the face of a very dynamic business environment, as is the present case in India. Hence, the existing system of materials planning, procurement processes and inventory management require reviewing with respect to the changed business environment. This study shows a radical improvement in materials procurement function of an Indian petroleum refinery through Business Process Reengineering (BPR) by analysing current process, identifying key issues, deriving paradigm shifts and developing reengineered processes through customer value analysis. BPR has been carried out on existing processes of 'material planning and procurement' and 'warehousing and surplus disposal'. The reengineered processes for the materials management function triggered several improvement projects that were identified by the group of executives who took part in the reengineering exercise. Those projects were implemented in an integrated framework, with the application of state of the art information technology tools and building partnership alliance among all stakeholders. Considerable improvements in overall functions of the organisation are observed, along with financial benefits. Copyright © 2006 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd.

Interrelationships Between the Autonomic Nervous System and Atrial Fibrillation

Mechanisms responsible for atrial fibrillation are not completely understood but the autonomic nervous system is a potentially potent modulator of the initiation, maintenance, termination and ventricular rate determination of atrial fibrillation. Complex interactions exist between the parasympathetic and sympathetic nervous systems on the central, ganglionic, peripheral, tissue, cellular and subcellular levels that could be responsible for alterations in conduction and refractoriness properties of the heart as well as the presence and type of triggered activity, all of which could contribute to atrial fibrillation. These dynamic inter-relationships may also be altered dependent upon other neurohumoral modulators and cardiac mechanical effects from ventricular dysfunction and congestive heart failure. The clinical implications regarding the effects of the autonomic nervous system in atrial fibrillation are widespread. The effects of modulating ganglionic input into the atria may alter the presence or absence of atrial fibrillation as has been highlighted from ablation investigations. This article reviews what is known regarding the inter-relationships between the autonomic nervous system and atrial fibrillation and provides state of the art information at all levels of autonomic interactions.

Opsoclonus myoclonus syndrome in neuroblastoma a report from a workshop on the dancing eyes syndrome at the advances in neuroblastoma meeting in Genoa, Italy, 2004

Opsoclonus-myoclonus syndrome (OMS) is a rare neurologic syndrome that, in children, associates with neuroblastoma in more than half of the cases. The etiology of this condition is thought to be immune mediated, but, though immunosuppressive therapies may ameliorate the acute symptoms, no effective treatment to prevent the common neuropsychologic sequelae has been established. This paper summarizes the results obtained at the 2004 Advances in Neuroblastoma Research meeting, providing status of the art information on immune pathogenesis, clinical features, acute and chronic neurologic manifestations, current and novel therapeutic approaches. It is emphasized that, due to the rarity of OMS in general and neuroblastoma-associated OMS in particular, international collaborations are needed to better define the pathogenesis and therapy of this disease, propose common evaluation criteria and identify new treatment modalities.

REDARTE-SP: networking art information resources in São Paulo

Art information providers in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil, include libraries, archives, and documentation sections in art museums and cultural centers. In 1998 REDARTE-SP, a network of these services in the city, was created to facilitate discussion of theoretical, technical and organizational issues facing art information services and to formulate collaborative projects. The subsequent exchange of ideas, discussion of successful practices and development of shared projects empowers art information professionals, contributes to improving the quality of art information services and products, provides better use of the available resources and widens the circle of users.

Brilliant grey: the color of documentary resources at the Fundación Espigas in Buenos Aires

Grey literature, documentation published outside traditional commercial channels, is not very often taken into account by art librarians in Argentina, judging by searches on online databases. However, experience with grey literature at the Fundación Espigas, the highly specialized Argentinian art information center in Buenos Aires, is changing this point of view. The Center’s database offers access to a great corpus of such publications, especially to ephemera such as private view cards, pamphlets, auction catalogues, catalogues of solo and group exhibitions and posters. This ‘minimal documentary information’ has an important place as a resource, and would prove invaluable for any research project on Argentine art in the future. Indeed this material is not grey but unexpectedly brilliant at providing rich and hidden information.