Information Gathering Process Research Articles

Individual differences in learning behaviours in humans: Asocial exploration tendency does not predict reliance on social learning

A number of empirical studies have suggested that individual differences in asocial exploration tendencies in animals may be related to those in social information use. However, because the ‘exploration tendency’ in most previous studies has been measured without considering the information-gathering processes, it is yet hard to conclude that the animal asocial exploration strategies may be tied to social information use. Here, we studied human learning behaviour in both asocial and social two-armed bandit tasks. By fitting reinforcement learning models including asocial and/or social decision processes, we measured each individual's (1) asocial exploration tendency and (2) social information use. We found consistent individual differences in the exploration tendency in the asocial tasks. We also found substantive heterogeneity in the adopted learning strategies in the social task: Nearly one-third of participants used predominantly the copy-when-uncertain strategy, while the remaining two-thirds were most likely to have relied only on asocial learning. However, we found no significant individual association between the exploration frequency in the asocial task and the use of the social information in the social task. Our results suggest that the social learning strategies may be independent from the asocial exploration strategies in humans.

Information Seeking Behavior of Students: A St. Dominic College of Asia (SDCA) Information Gathering Process

A Study conducted to determine the information seeking behavior of the SDCA freshmen students using the 10-process Barbara Stripling and Judy Pitt’s methods and instrument designed by Rodney Marshall modified into 30-item questionnaire. This study employs total summation of all freshmen students of St. Dominic College of Asia (SDCA) as respondents obtained from the college registrars. Among the Seven Hundred four (704) currently enrolled students, more than 50% of the questionnaire were retrieved and were used as basis in analyzing the results. Results reveal that SDCA students garnered a weighted mean score 5.007 with an equivalent description of “Agree” in the overall scores in the information seeking process. Among the 10 processes, indicators on “Evaluating & Learning from Experience” garnered the highest mean score of 5.569 and with an equivalent qualitative description of “Moderately Agree” in comparison with the indicators on “ Using Information Technologies” with a score mean of 4.341 and with an equivalent qualitative description of “Neither Agree nor Disagree” as the lowest among the all indicators. Other indicators are as follows; “Determining the Requirements” obtained a mean score of 5.107 and with an equivalent qualitative description of “Agree”, “Identifying the Topics” as an indicator obtained a mean score of 4.864 with an equivalent qualitative description of “Agree. Indictor on ”Information from Mass Media” also garnered a qualitative description of “Agree” with an equivalent mean score of 4.871.”Evaluating Information” obtained a mean score of 5.156 with equivalent qualitative description of also “Agree”. Similar qualitative description was also obtained by indicator on “Organizing and Synthesizing” with a mean score of 4.956.Indicators on “ Presentation of Information” and “ Ethics on Legality of Information” both obtained also a qualitative description of “Agree” and with mean scores of 4.977 and 5.041 respectively. Among the independent variables studied, only courses shows differences among the scores of the 10-process approach with the Pre-Dent students garnering the highest mean of 5.290 with an equivalent description of “Agree” against lowest group from the Bachelor Science of Biology students with a mean score of 4.291, with an equivalent description of “Agree”. Other factors were examined were gender and age.

The effect of interruption on the decision-making process

AbstractPrevious research has shown that interruptions can lead to delays and errors on the interrupted task. Such research, however, seldom considers whether interruptions cause a change in how information is processed. The central question of this research is to determine whether an interruption causes a processing change. We investigate this question in a decision-making paradigm well-suited for examining the decision-making process. Participants are asked to select from a set of risky gambles, each with multiple possible stochastic outcomes. The information gathering process is measured using a mouse-click paradigm. Consistent with past work, interruptions did incur a cost: An interruption increased the time and the amount of information needed to make a decision. Furthermore, after an interruption, participants did seem to partially “restart” the task. Importantly, however, there was no evidence that the information gathering pattern was changed by an interruption. There was also no overall cost to the interruption in terms of choice outcome. These results are consistent with the idea that participants recall a subset of pre-interruption information, which was then incorporated into post-interruption processing.

XOR-Based Routing Protocols in Vehicular Ad Hoc Networks: How Well Do They Perform?

This paper presents a performance analysis of exclusive-or logical operator (XOR)-based flat routing protocols in high mobility conditions, considering a vehicular ad hoc network (VANET) formed in a highway scenario. The main advantage of XOR-based routing is related to their logarithmic requirement of information per node in order to perform traffic forwarding, providing the basis to achieve better scalability levels for the routing mechanism convergence. First, this paper describes a protocol that incorporates several adaptations of the existing XOR-based routing algorithms for wired networks, in order to cope with the network mobility. Then it is proposed an improved version of it, XORi, which modifies the protocol’s information gathering process to accommodate the specific dynamic nature of VANETs topology in highways. Finally, the performance of XOR-based protocols is compared with other topology-based and position-based routing protocols. Simulation results allow us to characterize the performance of this class of protocols through the comparison of the path availability, end-to-end path delay, average path length and path duration. When a moderate density of nodes is considered, simulations show that XOR-based algorithms achieve almost the same path availability rate as link state algorithms, such as OLSR, and for high density of nodes, XOR-based algorithms scale better in terms of delay when compared to source routing algorithms, such as DSR.

The correlation of the definitions «maintenance of the state water cadastre» and «cadastral process»

Water resources in the system of sustainable development of Ukraine are some of strategic and vital natural resources. However, such resource like water, is dependent to the influence of technical progress, and if contaminated, perhaps can be exhausted. Therefore, in modern conditions of the rapid economic development of our state, there is a need in the formation and implementation of state policy of sustainable water use, which will allow us to solve complex urgent problems (inefficient water use, unreasonable water use strategy, unsatisfactory construction and operation of water management systems, the lack of clear environmental standards and criteria, and others) in the shortest possible time. In our opinion the solution of the problems, which were noted above, is impossible without a complete display of dynamic natural environment and monitoring the impact of human activities on the integration of the virtual playback of anthropogenic and natural environment.A lot of scientists continue to study the legal regulation of maintenance of the natural resource cadastres, including water cadastre and the procedural regulation of various aspects of activity of management bodies in the sphere of ecology, including cadastral, in particular, A. P. Getman, V. M. Yermolenko, I. I. Karakash, V. I. Andreitsev, V. V. Nosik, Y. S. Shemshuchenko, Z. V. Yaremak and others. Despite their significant contribution to the development of the problems in this area, there was put out of sight a special study of the state water cadastre and cadastral process that is relevant nowadays.Purpose of the article is the study of the definitions «maintenance of the state water cadastre» and «cadastral process», as well as the determination and justification of the corresponding relationship between the specified definitions.The maintenance of cadastre is a complex notion, which represents not only the safekeeping of electronic and/or paper information carrier within the prescribed period, but the rapid introduction into the inventory of all information received from all state bodies authorized to maintain the cadastre. Maintenance of state water cadastre can be understood in a broad and narrow sense.Being closely linked to natural resource management the cadastral process does not cover all management activities, but only that part, the implementation of which contains the application of substantive law. Beyond the cadastral process there is located the part of management, which is associated with the formation of bodies of public administration. Such activity is controlled by the administrative-legal regulations and is related to the sphere of legal regulation of administrative law, and therefore is a component of the administrative process. Due to the diversity of procedural steps of the cadastral process it has a certain commonality. Including certain types of procedural activities of the competent authorities, which are regulated by the procedural rules of environmental law, the cadastral process is united by the common subject of legal regulation as a specific group of the public relations in natural resources management.The analysis of theoretical studies concerning the raised question enables us to draw the following conclusions that in essence the term «cadastral process» applies not only to the state water cadastre, but also to other types of natural resources cadastres (the state land cadastre, the state forest cadastre, the state cadastre of the animal world, the state cadastre of occurrence and manifestations of minerals and others). If you compare the correlation of such notions as «maintenance» and «cadastral process», you come to the conclusion that these terms are related as the part and the whole. In our case, the cadastral process will appear as a general term, and maintaining the state water cadastre will appear as its part which, accordingly, has certain peculiarities caused by specificity of the object in towards of which the cadastre has been maintained. So, the process of gathering information, view received data, quantitative and qualitative characteristics of a natural object will be specific to each cadastre, and so on.

A guideline for integrating dynamic areas of interests in existing set-up for capturing eye movement: Looking at moving aircraft.

Today, capturing the behavior of a human eye is considered a standard method for measuring the information-gathering process and thereby gaining insights into cognitive processes. Due to the dynamic character of most task environments there is still a lack of a structured and automated approach for analyzing eye movement in combination with moving objects. In this article, we present a guideline for advanced gaze analysis, called IGDAI (Integration Guideline for Dynamic Areas of Interest). The application of IGDAI allows gathering dynamic areas of interest and simplifies its combination with eye movement. The first step of IGDAI defines the basic requirements for the experimental setup including the embedding of an eye tracker. The second step covers the issue of storing the information of task environments for the dynamic AOI analysis. Implementation examples in XML are presented fulfilling the requirements for most dynamic task environments. The last step includes algorithms to combine the captured eye movement and the dynamic areas of interest. A verification study was conducted, presenting an air traffic controller environment to participants. The participants had to distinguish between different types of dynamic objects. The results show that in comparison to static areas of interest, IGDAI allows a faster and more detailed view on the distribution of eye movement.

Le crowdsourcing au service de la collecte d’informations marketing : le cas Clic and Walk

Le déploiement des Technologies de l’Innovation et de la Communication (TIC) permet aux organisations d’avoir recours à un fournisseur singulier : la foule. Il est alors question de crowdsourcing pour qualifier cette forme d’externalisation. En matière de crowdsourcing tous les individus parmi la foule sont susceptibles d’apporter leurs ressources et compétences afin de générer de la valeur pour une organisation. Tandis que la contribution de la foule s’exerce dans de nombreux registres, notre recherche s’intéresse plus spécifiquement à la mobilisation de la foule dans un processus de collecte d’informations marketing. Dans une perspective qualitative, fondée sur l’étude de cas Clic and Walk, nous analysons les caractéristiques et les enjeux associés à cette modalité de crowdsourcing . Codes JEL : O32

A case study of vocal features associated with galvanic skin response to stressors in a clinical interaction

ObjectiveWe investigated vocal characteristics associated with physiologically determined stressful episodes by means of post-hoc acoustic analyses of speech recorded in a clinical setting. Our research addressed the understudied question of which vocal features may serve as cues naturally occurring stress and is the first to explore this issue in a pitch accent language. MethodsThe vocal profile of a single female patient interacting with a physician was analyzed with standard speech analysis software for acoustic indicators of stress-related arousal determined by galvanic skin response measurements. ResultsVocal jitter, representing an aspect of voice quality perceived as hoarseness, appeared to increase during and immediately after skin conductance response intervals. Skin conductance levels during the response intervals were negatively correlated with acoustic features used to approximate the perception of voice unsteadiness (slope and standard deviation of fundamental frequency). ConclusionAn acoustic analysis of vocal properties of speech uttered during independently detected skin conductance response intervals revealed individual patterns for some acoustic features linked to stress in earlier studies. Practice implicationsNon-invasive methods of arousal detection in physician-patient communication based on acoustic analyses of vocal profiles may, in combination with other analyses, help identify stressful events and thus improve the process of medical information gathering and decision-making.

Abstract A45: Racial differences in psychosocial barriers to initiate prostate cancer treatment information seeking

Abstract Purpose: All men diagnosed with prostate cancer must undergo the complex process of treatment decision-making. Research indicates that most men are not prepared to fully interact with the information environment when they are initially diagnosed. The reasons behind this lack of preparedness are not fully understood. More information is needed about psychosocial facilitators and barriers to information gathering before appropriate interventions can be developed. The purpose of this research was to explore the different types of psychosocial assistance that men might need to help them begin gathering treatment information. Methods: A purposive sample of 63 African-American and Caucasian men treated for or actively monitoring localized prostate cancer (Stage T1 or T2) was recruited to participate. All recruitment was completed via cancer registries, newspaper ads, and word-of-mouth. All participants completed a 30-45 minute self-administered survey on a laptop or touchscreen computer. Data collected included: (1) demographic information and (2) information about their self-reported levels of (a) confidence, (b) confusion, (c) worry, (d) comfort, (e) ease, and (f) organization during their initial searches for treatment information. All men received a $25.00 honorarium for participating. Results: The mean age of participants was 64.17 years. Participants were between six months to 10 years post prostate cancer diagnosis (mean = 5.21 years, SD= 3.23). At the initial search for treatment information, the majority of men (82.5%) were not confident they knew all of the right information to look for and were not confident they could find answers for all of their questions (79.3%). When psychosocial barriers were compared by race, one significant relationship was found. A greater proportion of African Americans (19.2%) found the initial information gathering process more difficult than their Caucasian counterparts (13.5%) (p < .05). Conclusions: Knowing what to look for and where to find answers is a common problem for both African American and Caucasian prostate cancer patients. Interventions need to be developed that make initial searches for information easier for African-American men. Citation Format: Heather Guerreso, Jarrett Johnson, Levi Ross. Racial differences in psychosocial barriers to initiate prostate cancer treatment information seeking. [abstract]. In: Proceedings of the Eighth AACR Conference on The Science of Health Disparities in Racial/Ethnic Minorities and the Medically Underserved; Nov 13-16, 2015; Atlanta, GA. Philadelphia (PA): AACR; Cancer Epidemiol Biomarkers Prev 2016;25(3 Suppl):Abstract nr A45.

A Simple, Visually Oriented Communication System to Improve Postoperative Care Following Microvascular Free Tissue Transfer: Development, Results, and Implications.

Background Communication, particularly transmission of information between the surgical and nursing teams, has been identified as one of the most crucial determinants of patient outcomes. Nonetheless, transfer of information among and between the physician and nursing teams in the immediate postoperative period is often informal, verbal, and inconsistent. Methods An iterative process of multidisciplinary information gathering was undertaken to create a novel postoperative communication system (the "Pop-form"). Once developed, nurses were surveyed on multiple measures regarding the perceived likelihood that it would improve their ability to provide directed patient care. Data were quantified using a Likert scale (0-10), and statistically analyzed. Results The Pop-form records and transfers operative details, specific anatomic monitoring parameters, and senior physician contact information. Sixty-eight nurses completed surveys. The perceived usefulness of different components of the Pop-form system was as follows: 8.9 for the description of the procedure; 9.3 for the operative diagram; 9.4 for the monitoring details and parameters; and 9.4 for the direct contact information for the appropriate surgical team member. All respondents were in favor of widespread adoption of the Pop-form. Conclusion This uniform, visual communication system requires less than 1 minute to compose, yet formalizes and standardizes inter-team communication, and therefore shows promise for improving outcomes following microvascular free tissue transfer. We believe that this simple, innovative communication tool has the potential to be more broadly applied to many other health care settings.

Quantitative Analysis of Nursing Observation Employing a Portable Eye-Tracker

Background: Observation is an important skill for making appropriate nursing decisions and engaging in good practice. However, experts’ observation behavior and cognitive processes cannot be easily verbalized or documented in an objective and accurate manner. Quantitative analysis of the observation behavior of nurses with rich clinical experience will yield effective educational data for fostering and improving nursing students’ observation skills. Objectives: To improve nursing assessment education, the differences in the information gathering processes between clinical nurses and nursing students were analyzed by using a portable eye-tracker. Design: An experimental study. Settings: The experiment was performed at a university in Japan. Participants: The participants were 11 clinical nurses with at least 5 years of clinical experience for postoperative patients, and 10 fourth-year nursing students. Methods: In a mock hospital room, wherein we recreated a situation where a patient in postoperative day 1 was confined to a bed, participants wore an eye-tracking camera and engaged in nursing observation to make an early postoperative ambulation assessment of the patient. Participants’ gaze points and gaze fixation durations were extracted from the gaze measurement data and compared. Results: Clinical nurses had shorter observation times and gaze durations than did nursing students, and focused more on the patient chart, intravenous drip, and indwelling drain. Students gazed for longest at the measuring devices for vital signs. Conclusions: We quantitatively analyzed differences in nursing observation according to clinical experience. Although no significant difference was found in gaze points, nursing students had a greater tendency to focus on information that was numerically displayed. Nurses with clinical experience conducted observations by gazing at information that they needed to focus on the most according to the patients’ postoperative course.

The Effect Of Credit Rating Categories On Analysts' Information Environment: Evidence From The Korean Market

<p>Credit ratings have been widely utilized for their ability to convey information to investors easily and quickly. Credit ratings agencies have prospered due to their superior positions in the information-gathering process in the business world. However, recent news about grade reversals, abrupt downgrades, and unanticipated bankruptcy suggests that the market value of credit ratings may have been overstated. Hence, in this study, we evaluate the legitimacy of the suggestion that credit rating categories may provide analysts with useful information.</p><p> </p><p>In order to measure the variables in the information environment, we use analyst forecasts. Differences between forecasts in the various rating categories are found to be statistically significant. Furthermore, a comparative analysis of information intensity for ungraded firms with that of other firms demonstrates that overestimates of ungraded firms create problems of the same nature as those in the information environment of firms with speculative grades.</p><p> </p><p>In the inter- and intra-category analyses, various factors determine the transparency of the information environment for firms of investment grade, including accruals quality, conservatism, the interest coverage ratio, and the proportion of intangible assets. However, for less credible firms, such as speculative or ungraded firms, these determinants do not function as expected. We find that the interest coverage ratio may be used to provide detailed differentiation between less credible firms. This paper introduces a new approach to credit rating categories and related strategies, emphasizing the importance of the ability to repay debt.</p>

Overcoming barriers and uncertainties in the adoption of residential solar PV

In recent years decreasing hardware costs have driven down the installed price of solar photovoltaic (PV) systems and spurred adoption. However, system cost is not the only barrier faced by solar adopters. Potential adopters also face various informational barriers, leading to high indirect costs during the information search process. There is a significant gap in the literature for empirical work on solar adoption linking how the information context (installer marketing; neighbors with solar, i.e., peer effects; etc.) interacts with a potential adopter's motivations to impact decision outcomes. To address this gap we present results of a new survey on the decision-making process of residential PV adopters in northern California. The main aspects of our analysis include: salient motivating factors, information gathering process, peer effects, role of installers, and factors driving the choice of outright purchase versus third-party ownership (e.g., leasing) modes of adoption. We find that installers and neighbors play important, but often supplementary, roles throughout the decision-making process and have influence on both the decision to adopt as well as on the mode of adoption. Furthermore, expected financial returns and concerns about operations and maintenance are the main determining factors for the mode of adoption.

Refining the definition of information literacy:

A recently-conducted phenomenographic research study described six ways of experiencing information literacy (IL) in nursing practice. These findings and a re-interpretation of those of several other studies into IL experience, appear to show that such experience is always focused on context-specific knowledge creation. This suggests that those definitions of IL which focus on information gathering processes but not on their outcomes could be refined in a way which shows its role and value in a more explicit manner. Such a refinement might yield greater understanding and prominence for IL outside the information professions.

Information and Analytical Support for Risk Assessment in the Management Accounting System of an Enterprise

The article describes the process of formation of an information base for risk assessment in the management accounting system of an enterprise. Information provided by the management accounting system at the present stage of development of market relations is becoming increasingly important for effective management and rational decision-making. Development of market relations in Russia and emergence of a large number of private (commercial) domestic and foreign entities have set new accounting tasks. One of them is to provide information to managers for managerial decision-making, and in this context, the need to create a system of internal information—the management accounting—have come to the fore. Traditionally, a management accounting system is understood as an organization’s system for collecting, recording, summarizing, and reporting on activities of the organization and its business units for planning, controlling, and managing these activities. The process of gathering information about the activities of the organization includes identifying, classifying, evaluating, and measuring business transactions and other economically significant events with a view to their subsequent reflection in the system of management accounting. In this regard, management accounting can be seen as the basis of the information system of an enterprise. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n5s4p348

Grouping and Read-Across Approaches for Risk Assessment of Nanomaterials.

Physicochemical properties of chemicals affect their exposure, toxicokinetics/fate and hazard, and for nanomaterials, the variation of these properties results in a wide variety of materials with potentially different risks. To limit the amount of testing for risk assessment, the information gathering process for nanomaterials needs to be efficient. At the same time, sufficient information to assess the safety of human health and the environment should be available for each nanomaterial. Grouping and read-across approaches can be utilised to meet these goals. This article presents different possible applications of grouping and read-across for nanomaterials within the broader perspective of the MARINA Risk Assessment Strategy (RAS), as developed in the EU FP7 project MARINA. Firstly, nanomaterials can be grouped based on limited variation in physicochemical properties to subsequently design an efficient testing strategy that covers the entire group. Secondly, knowledge about exposure, toxicokinetics/fate or hazard, for example via properties such as dissolution rate, aspect ratio, chemical (non-)activity, can be used to organise similar materials in generic groups to frame issues that need further attention, or potentially to read-across. Thirdly, when data related to specific endpoints is required, read-across can be considered, using data from a source material for the target nanomaterial. Read-across could be based on a scientifically sound justification that exposure, distribution to the target (fate/toxicokinetics) and hazard of the target material are similar to, or less than, the source material. These grouping and read-across approaches pave the way for better use of available information on nanomaterials and are flexible enough to allow future adaptations related to scientific developments.

Reality-Based Television Versus the Civil Right to Privacy: A Battle of Access

the general public has come under closer scrutiny from those who seek to obtain information about them, whether they like it or not, from technologies such as hidden cameras, Internet spyware, miniature recording devices, and super-telescopic photography lenses (e.g., Elder, Johnson, and Rishwain). Society's interest in voyeurism or curiosity (Baruh 202) appears to fuel a growing of television programming called reality TV. Its popularity has influenced traditional television journalistic newsgathering practices and along the way has created challenges regarding the public's right to privacy.In Wilson v. Layne and Berger v. Hanlon, the US Supreme Court's decisions affected newsgathering techniques that can be used by journalists while accompanying law enforcement officials during the execution of a search warrant. Shulman v. Group W Productions further altered the media's process of gathering information by clarifying access to emergency situations and access to patients where guarded personal information is exchanged between the victim and an emergency respondent.These decisions were meant to provide outlets with clear boundaries regarding the public's right to know versus the public's right to privacy or the First Amendment versus the Fourth (Esch; Gossett; C. Calvert). The outlets in question were print and broadcast news organizations in the Wilson and Berger decisions. The courts did not specify whether alternative programming provided by independent television production companies was included under the media ridealong decision.With the rise of reality-type information gathering, the question remains of whether or not these lines of privacy have been crossed (Mast). The theoretical and context of this research is to explore implications of decisions regarding privacy rights and apply them to justice (Erikson) and accident and emergency format (Kilborn; Bondebjerg) reality-type television programming.TheoreticalOrbe suggests using diverse methodological and theoretical approaches to critical scholarship (350). Cross-disciplinary research methods are employed during this article's exploratory study, including genre criticism (Butler 432) examining production techniques, critical analysis of reality television (Lunt; Hight), and critical or empirical studies (Trubek 585), where concepts are applied to sociological inquiry.Previous critical (CLS) are associated with application of social science and research on the behavior of actors (Trubek 600). Trubek postulates that a relationship exists between legal beliefs and practice (604) and social order and action. Critical empiricism (Coombe 71) in law is applicable in film theory, the ideological efficacy (118) of television. Causal research in CLS, proposes Tushnet, is an interminable critique (516) on social values. Miller posits the field of television borrows from CLS (3). CLS allows an opening in sociological research, with foundations providing a basis for critical application.This article examines the rise of the tabloid journalism type of reality television (Cavender and Fishman; B. Calvert et al.; Turner) and applies Prosser's torts on privacy to the production of nonfiction documentary-style programs, otherwise noted as reality-type television. The article focuses on one state case, Shulman v. Group W, and two federal cases, Berger v. Hanlon and Wilson v. Layne, to the application of reality television programming.Reality Television DefinedThere are many definitions of reality-based television programming. Prosise and Johnson, expanding on Cavender and Fishman, indicate a belief that reality programming blurs the line between news and entertainment . . . fact and fiction (Prosise and Johnson 73), where the videotaped interactions are presented to the audience as real rather than fictionalized encounters (e. …

A Structured Methodology for Measurement Development

A conceptual framework is proposed in which measurement development is envisioned as a three-level hierarchically structured process constituted of stages, each one composed of activities performed through multiple tasks. The underlying assumptions are that the measurement is a designed-on-purpose process and the resources it requires should be justified on a pragmatic basis. The usefulness of the proposed methodology is then illustrated by applying it to an exemplary development of the measurement of the input–output transfer characteristic of an analog-to-digital converter and in the case of a research quality assessment. In this second case, the framework is also used to identify similarities and differences between this information gathering process and measurement.

AN AHP APPLICATION IN THE INVESTMENT SELECTION PROBLEM OF SMALL HYDROPOWER PLANTS IN TURKEY

<p>Turkey is a country that has had to deal with high electricity consumption due to its rapid growth and development. Attempts have been made to address this increase in demand by increasing the electricity supply by means such as boosting resources by privatization. The electricity generation sector has been privatized in Turkey; hence investors have been looking for the most appropriate electricity generation projects for a long while. Therefore, researchers and practitioners should focus on how the most suitable small hydropower plant project (SHPP) investments can be selected. In this study, the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) was applied to make the most appropriate and satisfying decision according to the decision makers, experts or investors for a SHPP investment from amongst some alternative SHPP investments in Turkey. All of these SHPPs were assumed to be in the pre-development investment stage, which indicated that their pre-feasibility and feasibility studies had not been presented or taken into consideration until this study was performed. This main constraint forced the researchers to obtain the data and information from the information forms such as the application document to the General Directorate of State Hydraulic Works during the data and information gathering process. The AHP model of this study was structured in four levels with five main criteria, seventeen basic criteria and five alternatives on the Super Decisions Software. The results indicated that Alternative 1 and Alternative 5 should be primarily investigated in detail in subsequent SHPP investment investigation steps.</p>

A Sequential Data Analysis Approach to Electronic Health Record Workflow.

Failure to understand clinical workflow across electronic health record (EHR) tasks is a significant contributor to usability problems. In this paper, we employed sequential data analysis methods with the aim of characterizing patterns of 5 clinicians' information-gathering across 66 patients. Two analyses were conducted. The first one characterized the most common sequential patterns as reflected in the screen transitions. The second analysis was designed to mine and quantify the frequency of sequence occurrence. We observed 27 screen-transition patterns that were employed from 2 to 7 times. Documents/Images and Intake/Output screens were viewed for nearly all patients indicating the importance of these information sources. In some cases, they were viewed more than once which may show that users are following inefficient patterns in the information gathering process. New quantitative methods of analysis as applied to interaction data can yield critical insights in robust designs that better support clinical workflow.