Latest Buzzword Research Articles

Upgrading products, upgrading work? Interorganizational learning in global food value chains to achieve the Sustainable Development Goals

Upgrading is the latest buzzword in global value chain research, especially with regard to producers in countries of the Global South: participation in global food value chains has the potential of raising smallholder incomes and achieving decent work, very much in the spirit of the Sustainable Development Goals. However, we argue that the conceptual foundation of upgrading, which is at the heart of many value chain development initiatives, deserves scrutiny and a stronger focus on interorganizational learning among value chain actors to serve its purpose.Global value chains have the potential of contributing to the achievement of multiple Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). In agriculture, the integration of producers into food value chains has created new employment in farming and processing, although it may also lead to precarious jobs, forced labor, and riskier environments for farmers and workers. The “upgrading” concept put forward by value chain researchers claims to address these concerns as it describes how producers can improve their position within a value chain, and hence, their livelihoods. The paper critically evaluates the conceptual foundation of “upgrading” and its applicability in food value chain governance for the realization of SDGs related to responsible production and decent work. An overlooked element contributing to upgrading and the achievement of these SDGs is learning among value chain actors. The paper argues how the shortcomings in the concept can be addressed in practice through interorganizational learning in multi-stakeholder platforms.

Regulating your actions

It is becoming the latest buzz word in education, but what exactly is ‘self-regulation’, why is it so important, and what can we, as childminders, do to help young children?

Consumer-Centric Care: Latest Buzzword or New Reality?

With the industry in flux as federal healthcare reform legislation debates continue, leaders are preparing for what the post-Affordable Care Act world might look like. Predictions include patients assuming more responsibility for healthcare costs and therefore behaving like consumers, including choosing providers based on perceived value. What actions should chief nurse executives take to ensure the nursing enterprise responds to rising consumerism in healthcare?

Making Refuge

The term refugees has become the latest buzzword, causing people to eitherspew hate speech or extend a warm welcome – thereby creating a firmdividing line. There is so much discussion about refugees that peoplesometimes forget the very individuals who are forced to stand astride thatdividing line. Who are they? What are their stories? What does it mean tobe a refugee? How are they coping once they reach the United States?How are their lives impacted by this divisive debate? What are the strugglesthey continue to have? How are they influencing the larger communitieswhere they live? Catherine Besteman addresses all of these questions(and more) in her timely study, Making Refuge: Somali Bantu Refugeesand Lewiston, Maine.Besteman introduces the book by speaking of her yearlong stay in Banta,Somalia, as part of her anthropological fieldwork during the late 1980s, justbefore civil war broke out. She then immediately shifts the lens to Lewiston,Maine, in the year 2010, home to a large Somali refugee community. Juxtaposingthese two worlds to frame her inquiry, she delves into Banta’s pre-warhistory: a simple yet harmonious village life built around communitarianismand happiness within poverty, of agriculture and the “rule” of village elders, ofpre-defined gender roles and extended families ...

Gamification Is Simply Bells and Whistles

Gamification has become the latest buzzword in the learning community. It is the addition of game mechanics elements to learning content in order to motivate learners. But, most claims about the efficiency of gamification of learning are theoretical. Various studies have demonstrated gamification relies on extrinsic motivators, which may work in the short term but have negative impacts on the long term as it undermines students' intrinsic motivation to learn. Gamification is nothing more than bells and whistles: It is fun at first, but it quickly becomes annoying. In the end, isn't the reliance of gamification to make content more interesting a sign that the content itself is boring?

Survey of context information fusion for ubiquitous Internet-of-Things (IoT) systems

Abstract Internet-of-Things (IoT) is the latest buzzword, havings its origins in the erstwhile Sensor Networks. Sensor Networks produce a large amount of data. According to the needs this data requires to be processed, delivered and accessed. This processed data when made available with the physical device location, user preferences, time constraints; generically called as context-awareness; is widely referred to as the core function for ubiquitous systems. To our best knowledge there is lack of analysis of context information fusion for ubiquitous sensor networks. Adopting appropriate information fusion techniques can help in screening noisy measurements, control data in the network and take necessary inferences that can help in contextual computing. In this paper we try and explore different context information fusion techniques by comparing a large number of solutions, their methods, architectures and models. All the surveyed techniques can be adapted to the IoT framework.

Cloud Attack Detection with Intelligent Rules

Cloud is the latest buzz word in the internet community among developers, consumers and security researchers. There have been many attacks on the cloud in the recent past where the services got interrupted and consumer privacy has been compromised. Denial of Service (DoS) attacks effect the service availability to the genuine user. Customers are paying to use the cloud, so enhancing the availability of services is a paramount task for the service provider. In the presence of DoS attacks, the availability is reduced drastically. Such attacks must be detected and prevented as early as possible and the power of computational approaches can be used to do so. In the literature, machine learning techniques have been used to detect the presence of attacks. In this paper, a novel approach is proposed, where intelligent rule based feature selection and classification are performed for DoS attack detection in the cloud. The performance of the proposed system has been evaluated on an experimental cloud set up with real time DoS tools. It was observed that the proposed system achieved an accuracy of 98.46% on the experimental data for 10,000 instances with 10 fold cross-validation. By using this methodology, the service providers will be able to provide a more secure cloud environment to the customers.

A Framework for Analyzing Anonymous Network Topology

Nowadays, Internet privacy becomes more and more important and sensitive, and has been one of the latest buzz words to hit the Internet world. In response to protect the privacy of Internet users, a variety of privacy enhancing technologies (PETs) have emerged. As one of privacy enhancing technologies, anonymous communication has been extensively studied from various aspects by researchers. Node churn is frequent in anonymous network, which make it difficult to maintain a stable network topology, therefore it is necessary to get more insight into the overall anonymous network topology. In this work, in order to better grasp the present situation of research, we investigate existing organizations and universities which study anonymous communication from the perspective of network topology, and related projects. Then we survey related papers to anonymous communication published in recent years, which focus on the analysis of node selection (especially in the Tor). In addition, we present a framework of anonymous communication network topology, and a visual illustration of this analysis that shows the progression of the research of network topology and node discovery in anonymous communication. Finally, some related problems and follow-up study are presented to be studied deeply in future.

Wrist Wars: Smart Watches vs Traditional Watches

Wearable technology is the latest buzzword doing rounds in Technology forums with humongous growth expected in next few years. Of various devices, Smart Watches have shown most promise. A lot of companies have already launched Smart Watches or have indicated an interest to explore this area. In this paper, we try to understand the following: Definition of Watch and how a Watch has changed over years, What are the Mechanism to keep time. How does a watch function. What is a Smart Watch? Its Past and Present, What are features that Smart Watch provides. How useful are these features? Target Segment for Smart Watch. What factors could dictate decision of consumer to buy Smart Watch? What is the outlook for Smart watch Market? How would Traditional watches fare once Smart watches become mainstream, Authors Conclusion around Smart Watches ability to disrupt the Traditional Watch market.

Social Media WOM: Definition, Consequences and Inter-relationships

Social media is the latest buzzword in the world of marketing and communication. Billions of people are using different social media sites on a daily basis. A significant proportion of consumers refer to reviews of products and services posted on social media before making their purchase decisions. In the process, the word of mouth or WOM messages posted by fellow users on social media sites play an important role. In this research article, we study how social media WOM influences the decision making of the recipient consumer. Based on study of the extant literature and consequent analysis, we present a set of research propositions and a conceptual model. The main relationships that we study are the impact of social media WOM on consumer purchase intention and brand attitude. We also study the role of key correlates in the context namely perceived risk, source credibility, social media website, perceived product knowledge and involvement level. The primary contributions of this research article are distinguishing the roles of positive and negative WOM, bringing WOM to the context of social media and studying the roles of key correlates.

Social media risk: Taming the tiger without stifling innovation

‘Social media’ is no longer just the latest buzzword or an experiment for cutting-edge marketing teams. The way customers are communicating is changing, with online conversations about the majority of organisations taking place right now. However, what is the potential impact on an organisation if something goes wrong? This paper looks at how to keep control of social media assets without stifling innovation and competitive advantage.

Futility and resistance

I am a science fiction writer, and I, as it happened, read the Dourish–Bell paper about science fiction and ubicomp. It’s good. I learned things from it. This duo knows a hell of a lot more about science fiction than most science fiction people will ever know about ubiquitous computing. Ever since I first read Mark Weiser’s paper, back in days of yore, I wanted to write some science fiction about ubicomp. Recently, I fulfilled this ambition, after spending a lot of time, an almost absurd amount of time, like four interminable years, hanging out with ubicomp people. I taught ubicomp in a design school. I wrote a little book about ubicomp for MIT Press. I addressed a major ubicomp gig in San Diego. I’m one of the few guys in the world who knows, or even pretends to know, the differences between ubiquitous, ambient, pervasive and physical computings. Was this labor necessary to me? Did it make good sense to dabble in this arena? The answer is no. Clearly no. Yet despite that, I did complete my long-awaited ubicomp novel. It’s coming out in early 2009 and is called THE CARYATIDS. It’s about a group of women working in tech support in the mid twenty-first century. THE CARYATIDS is remarkably well informed on the subject of ubicomp. There has never been a work of fiction so exquisitely ubicomp-inspired. Yet, since ubicomp is a diffuse, rapidly moving field, this work is already out of date before its publication. There’s scarcely a word in that novel about the latest sexy buzzword in ubicomp, ‘‘urban informatics.’’ As for the interface design issues... I wasn’t much into interface design when composing CARYATIDS, because like most science fiction writers, I much prefer cool gizmos to thorny, impossible issues like ‘‘context awareness.’’ So, well, I wouldn’t say I’m ashamed of my novel, but I do wish I had 4 years to do it over. However, as Steve Jobs wisely says, ‘‘Real Artists Ship.’’ So, if I were asked to advise my fellow science fiction writers about some possible detente relationship with ubicomp, I would, much like Dourish and Bell here, gently try to get them to shy away. Or rather, I would deliberately take a cool and remote overview, rather like the one in the Dourish–Bell paper, which substitutes easy, popular science fiction TV shows for the dense, gnarly, self-involved world of written science fiction. From my profession’s perspective, the equivalent approach here would be to urge people to stay away from Tim O’Reilly, Tom Igoe’s textbooks and Nokia white papers, and spend maybe a quick couple of weeks glomming up a Google search for WIRED articles and IEEE spectrum. Really—as a science fiction writer—that is more than you need for your own specific purposes. Then I’d sum up by saying—you know?—in the long run, it’s not about speculative technologies. It’s all about *law, culture, governance and money!* You’ll get perfectly adequate results in thinking about computation of any kind, if you blow off the deep geeks and the laboratory work, and concentrate fully on the puissant interests of lawyers, activists, bureaucrats and bankers. For instance, everybody knows that Xerox PARC was cram full of deep-thinking geniuses, not just Weiser, father of ubicomp, but a couple dozen similar heavy guys. These earnest pioneers were into the graphic user interface, multiuser games, peripheral computing, portable tablets, innovation after innovation that made or broke dozens of companies, except for Xerox. Xerox, for what surely seemed sound businesslike reasons, seemed to concentrate entirely on pleasing its investors. Creating document services for lawyers, activists, bureaucrats and bankers. With B. Sterling (&) Austin, TX, USA e-mail: bruces@well.com

Factors at Play in Tertiary Curriculum Gamification

The compulsion to include games and game related mechanism in education is great among educators who want to engage and motivate today’s students and the latest buzzword in this domain is gamification. However, without a thorough understanding of what a gamified curriculum looks like, how it can best be applied and why it might engross students, it cannot be effectively applied. This research examined a gamified course curriculum structure and evaluated its use in two university level subjects. The objective was to gage student enjoyment and engagement with a heavily gamified curriculum and to understand the aspects that make the practice useful in education. Factor analysis of the dataset revealed the possibility of a six dimensional model of curriculum gamification worthy of future study.

Problems and Prospects of Commodity Futures Broking: A Depositary Participants Survey in East and West Godavari Districts of Andhra Pradesh INDIA

latest buzzword in the financial literature is Derivatives the birth of which is traced back to 1973 when Fisher and Myron Scholes published an article on European Call Option valuation. In the last decade, many emerging and transition economies have started introducing derivative contracts. As was the case when commodity futures were first introduced on the Chicago Board of Trade (CBOT) in 1865, policy makers and regulators in these markets were concerned about the impact of futures on the underlying cash market. One of the reasons for this concern was the belief that futures trading attract speculators, who can destabilize spot prices. The safety and economy in communications, which enable a deficiency in one place to be, supplied from the surplus of another render the fluctuations of prices much less extreme than formerly. This effect is much promoted by the existence of speculative merchant. Speculators, therefore, have a highly useful office in the economy of society. Since, futures encourage speculation, the debate on the impact of speculators intensified when futures contracts were first introduced for trading; beginning with commodity futures and moving on to financial futures and recently futures on weather and electricity. However, this traditional favorable view towards the economic benefits of speculative activity has not always been acceptable to regulators.

Determining Factors for Adoption of Cloud Computing by Indian Academic Librarians

Cloud Computing has emerged as the latest buzzword in the Information Technology (IT) sector. Libraries are no longer an exception which are keen to migrate themselves from brick and mortar to the cloud. The present study tries to explore the factors that drive the adoption of cloud computing in academic libraries. The study investigates the impact of librarian‘s personal traits on adoption of cloud computing through Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). Questionnaire survey was conducted in 29 central university libraries in India, which were analysed through Pearson‘s correlation tests. The results revealed that TAM variables to a great extent catalysed the cloud computing adoption.

Gamification: The Latest Buzzword and the Next Fad

The term gamification seems to be the latest buzzword in the learning realm. The term describing the use of game mechanics in non-game contexts, has rapidly been hijacked by the industry as a marketing term. In a field where buzzwords seem to define the latest approaches, can we expect gamification to deliver the miracles the industry promises. When we look at the previous learning fads that were — Virtual Environments' and “Web 2.0” we can sincerely doubt it.

Can Digital Natives Level-Up in a Gamified Curriculum?

The compulsion to include games and game related mechanism in education is great among educators who want to engage and motivate today?s students and the latest buzzword in this domain is gamification. However, without a thorough understanding of what a gamified curriculum looks like, how it can best be applied and why it might engross students, it cannot be effectively applied. This research examined a gamified course curriculum structure and evaluated its use in two university level subjects. The objective was to gauge student enjoyment and engagement with a heavily gamified curriculum and to understand the aspects that make the practice useful in education. Exploratory factor analysis of the dataset revealed the possibility of a six dimensional model of curriculum gamification worthy of future study.

Corporate Governance and Firm Performance: An Empirical Analysis from Indian Manufacturing Sector

Corporate governance has become the latest buzzword in India triggered by the series of scandals and failures in the corporate world. The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of corporate governance on firm performance for a large representative sample of Indian manufacturing firms for the period 2001-2010. For the analysis purposes, we use five different but alternative measures of firm performance i.e., Return on Assets, Return on Equity, Net Profit Margin, Adjusted Tobin’s q and Stock Returns. We also utilize several alternative specifications and estimation techniques to test the robustness of estimation results. Results of the analysis show that corporate governance has a significant and sizable impact on Tobin’s q but its relationship with other firm performance measures does not seem to be very robust. The findings indicate that corporate governance improves the industrial performance in India but the linkage is not very strong as of now. This research can alert policy makers in the developing countries to the need for increasing the awareness of board in the context of corporate governance reforms.

Total Rewards & Pay-for-Performance

Compensation is an integral and decisive factor in employment relationship and hence an imperative part of the strategic thrust of human resource management. Pay-for-performance, total rewards etc are the latest buzzwords in the compensation world. Hypothetically, performance linked pay should improve organization performance and individual income. Yet, the compensation literature does not offer conclusive evidence for pay-performance sensitivity. This paper reviews various theoretical and empirical studies on pay for performance with an objective to find reasons for the missing link, if any. Major conclusions from the review include: 1) empirical findings support the incentive effects of pay; 2) criticisms against effectiveness of variable pay is majorly grounded in performance measurement issues; 3) in most instances, implementation or design issues caused failure of variable plans; and 4) success of pay-for-performance is contingent upon various individual, organizational and situational factors.

Securing Cloud Computing

Cloud computing is the latest buzz words in computing. There is significant excitement about Cloud computing and this has been building up over the past few years. Cloud computing offers several great benefits which include cost savings and easy access to state of the art resources, however when considering deploying critical applications and sensitive information to a public cloud environment, security concerns are a big challenge. Recent study has shown that security, privacy and legal issues are the main obstacles to the adoption of cloud services. This thesis looks at how a cloud service user can constantly place a check on the cloud service provider with respect to data security and in cases where there has been a breach of security agreement, how these breach can be traced using forensic tools by the provider. We implement a virtual environment to showcase our proposed solution and configure security and test out deployment using a forensic tool (Forensic Tool Kit).