Third-party Sources Research Articles

The Best Leadership Model for Organizational Change Management: Transformational Leadership

Internet and information technology are creating a new opportunity for consumers to share their product evaluations online (Avery, Resnick and Zeckhauser 1999). Amazon.com started to offer consumers an option to post their comments on products on its website in 1995. Currently, Amazon.com has about 10 millions consumer reviews on all its product categories, and these reviews are regarded as one of the most popular and successful features of Amazon (New York Times, Feb. 24, 2004). In recent years, an increasing number of online sellers (e.g., BevMo.com, BN.com, cduniverse.com, circuitcity.com, GameStop.com, computer4sure.com, c-source.com, half.com, goodguys.com, wine.com) are adopting the same strategy. These online sellers invite users of their products to post personal product evaluations on the sellers’ websites or provide their customers consumer review information offered by some third-party sources such as Epinions.com and CNET.com. Online consumer reviews are common for many product categories such as apparel, books, electronics, games, videos, music, beverages, games, and wine. Small business is often regarded as entrepreneurship-driven. There are many reasons for this, e.g.: (1) The entrepreneur and leader as a person plays a much more vital role than in large firms and, (2) entrepreneurial and leadership spirit are not weakened by considerable hierarchies and can more easily pervade the firm. Welsh & White's (1981) statement on the differences between small and big business seems to apply. Management research, in particular in the area of small business, is by now not sufficiently linked with entrepreneurship theory. However, entrepreneurship theory offers a lot regarding the evolutionary management of SMEs. It is the intention of this conceptual and theory-based paper to scrutinize this linkage and to identify useful insights for the leadership management of SMEs. Leader itself can be identified as the person who leads or commands a group, organization, or country. Even though defining a leader by the existence of followers has a long tradition, but it is not useful in attempting to improve the leadership of organizations. However, we define “leader” as an ordinary human being with both a commitment to produce a result whose realization would be extraordinary given the current circumstances as seen by the participants, and the integrity to see this commitment through to its realization. In this study, we investigated one mechanism of action, exploring how the consistency of transformational leadership effectiveness across hierarchical levels influenced the implementation of a strategic initiative in organizational change management. The research concludes that a multi-functional approach of transformational leadership that fits the managerial challenges of the small business best.

Google Data Studio

Google Data Studio is a new data visualization program designed as a user-friendly tool for representing complex datasets in an attractive and clear fashion. Data Studio’s core function is interpretation of social media and web analytics; however, its support of data sources like MySQL and spreadsheets suggests Data Studio could be used by researchers to interpret their own data in an equally user-friendly fashion. While Data Studio relies on the usual mix of chart and graphs to convey meaning, it enhances them with features including the ability to integrate multiple sources into a single report, dynamic data updating, and interactive visualizations. Data Studio’s support for third-party data sources could use further development; however, it is a promising resource for budding data visualizers.

Groundwater monitoring of the deep aquifer for the construction phase of the Crossrail project

The Crossrail project is a new underground railway through the heart of London. It will connect with 110 km of new or upgraded sections of surface rail to Reading, Shenfield and Abbey Wood. The route runs through typical London Basin geology. Ground investigations began during the 1990s and continued to 2012. A total of 1314 groundwater monitoring devices were installed and monitored at regular intervals. The groundwater monitoring strategy adopted by the project in preparation for and during construction included (1) establishment of a robust baseline and system for measuring changes to the baseline, (2) establishment of a series of sentinel wells to monitor any possible migration of third-party contamination sources and provide advance warning for construction dewatering sites and (3) performance of pumping tests. The sentinel wells were located to provide sufficient time to allow mitigation measures to be put into place without cessation of construction dewatering, thereby minimizing risk to the project. The pumping tests were carried out to demonstrate constructability, aid in the design of construction dewatering systems and provide support for the consent submissions on the impact of dewatering. Instrumentation was transferred to, and monitored by, the construction contractors but data were collated centrally by Crossrail. Contractors added their own instruments located either within or immediately adjacent to the structure to confirm dewatering levels or risk of base heave. The data were used for regular reporting to the Environment Agency in support of the dewatering permits and ensuring no interruption of supply to licensed abstractors.

Model for Digital Services in Libraries

With the new method of information delivery for the library, the quality of service and Digital Library issues become paramount importance. Various model and framework have been proposed to evaluate the Quality of Service in Digital Library. Unfortunately, features that contribute towards the Digital Library services quality have not been factored into the design of most existing quality of services model in Digital Library. This paper presented a result of hypothesis testing which eventually proposed a new conceptual model on the service quality of the digital library. This model incorporated two new features that determine the right third-party source services. It also offers an opportunity for further investigation for evaluating the service quality effectiveness in the digital library. It is conforming to the study backgrounds through a variety of research designs and settings by examination of the hypotheses presented in this study. Survey research designs employing third party sources services as a sample in the model would best match the requirements for validating the proposed framework. The result shows that all three hypotheses are supported. As a result, we propose a conceptual model for evaluating the service quality of the digital library and further analyze the effectiveness model with several contributing features grouped as a thirdparty source.

Social context summarization using user-generated content and third-party sources

In the context of social media, users mutually share their interests of an event mentioned in a Web document. Its content can also be found in different news providers with a writing variation. This paper presents a framework which exploits the support of social context (user-generated content such as comments or tweets and third-party sources such as relevant documents retrieved from a search engine) to extract high-quality summaries. The extraction was formulated in two steps: sentence scoring and selection. The scoring is modeled as a learning to rank problem, which employs Ranking SVM to mutually exploits sentences, user-generated content, and third-party sources in the form of features to cover summary aspects. For the selection, summaries are extracted by using a score-based or voting method. For evaluation, three datasets of sentence and highlight extraction in two languages were taken as a case study. Experimental results indicate that by integrating user-generated content and third-party sources, our framework obtains improvements of ROUGE-scores over state-of-the-art methods for single-document summarization.

Double Play! Examining the Relationship Between MLB’s Corporate Social Responsibility and Sport Spectators’ Behavioral Intentions

This study examined the impact of exposure to corporate social responsibility (CSR) messages on individuals’ attitudes and behavioral intentions toward a Major League Baseball (MLB) team’s CSR efforts. Using a 2 (information source: team source or a third-party source) × 2 (CSR initiatives: efforts to help cancer patients or military appreciation recognition) with two nonfactorial control conditions (team source or a third-party source) experimental design, this study aims to identify how factors such as information source, perceived sincerity, and different types of CSR activities impact a MLB team’s CSR messaging on social media. Path analysis was used to examine significant paths between variables; results indicated that CSR messages generated a halo effect, thus providing implications for how MLB teams should develop CSR strategies and most effectively communicate about these efforts. Theoretical and practical implications of study results are discussed.

Categorizing corporate social responsibility (CSR) initiatives in B2B markets: the why, when and how

PurposeThis paper aims to address the questions of why, when and how business-to-business (B2B) firms engage in sustainability initiatives. The authors believe that this is the first attempt to address all three questions in a single paper, and one of the earliest to focus on these in B2B markets.Design/methodology/approachThe sustainability initiatives of B2B firms throughout the value/supply chain were examined. Input data came from external sources and the firms themselves. Two conceptual frameworks were developed, illustrating why firms partake in sustainability initiatives and when and how they may do so.FindingsThis paper provides two conceptual frameworks that address why, when and how firms get involved in sustainability initiatives, and how they can better communicate their involvement to stakeholders.Research limitations/implicationsTo obtain a broader perspective of B2B firms’ involvement in sustainability initiatives, a variety of third-party sources were used, augmented with data from firm websites. Examples of firms the authors selected were constrained by the collection of firms described in student research papers.Practical implicationsThis paper suggests useful guidelines for firms considering starting or expanding sustainability initiatives by providing frameworks that address why, when and how firms do so, with examples of firms illustrating engagement in each area. It also provides communication guidelines, necessary for enhancing stakeholder relations.Social implicationsIntegrating environmental sustainability within a firm’s strategy can improve corporate image and increase efficiency, while contributing to a better world environment.Originality/valueA review of the corporate social responsibility (CSR) literature indicated that most research has focused on business-to-consumer markets. This paper addresses CSR in B2B markets, examining players at all levels of the value/supply chain: manufacturers, channel intermediaries and end-users.

The Nanjing Massacre as recorded in American sources

ABSTRACTDuring the Nanjing Massacre, American figures who remained in Nanjing, or who took an interest in Nanjing’s plight despite not being present in the city, produced copious reports, observations, records, and analyses with respect to the events that unfolded, forming highly unique third-party sources on the history of the Nanjing Massacre, and disseminated them across China, Europe, and the United States. The American sources recorded the facts of the massacres, rape, looting, arson, narcotics trafficking, implementation of a “comfort women” system, and other atrocities committed by the Japanese Army, and revealed the actions taken by Japan to conceal its war crimes; their evidentiary value was demonstrated during the war crimes trials in Tokyo and Nanjing. The documents were produced during the course of the Americans’ efforts to provide humanitarian aid to Chinese soldiers and civilians, but at the same time, they also reflect these figures’ consideration for American interests in China.

W(H)Ither the Tax Gap?

For decades, policy makers and politicians have railed against the “tax gap,” or the difference between what taxpayers are legally obligated to pay in taxes and what they actually pay in taxes. To close the gap, Congress has instituted numerous reforms, with varying degrees of success. Notwithstanding these efforts, the tax gap has largely remained intact, and, if anything, its size has gradually grown over the last several decades. However, the tax gap may well begin to diminish in size (or “wither” away), if not immediately then over time. Three developments will help narrow the tax gap’s size. First, the ubiquity of credit cards, debit cards, and smartphone payment apps has purged cash—the erstwhile driving engine of the tax gap—from its use in many economic transactions. Second, the availability of third-party sources of information, combined with the universal use of computerization to store, access, and analyze information, has significantly curtailed a taxpayer’s ability to hide income here in the United States or overseas. Third, broad economic trends such as concentration and globalization have generated a workforce dynamic in which taxpayers generally are employed by large business enterprises (where individual tax compliance is fairly high) rather than in traditional mom-and-pop businesses (where individual tax compliance is typically low). The implications associated with a lower tax gap are vast. Even beyond the usual considerations associated with greater tax compliance (e.g., increased revenues, reduced noncompliance-induced inefficiencies, and improved horizontal and vertical equity of tax burdens), taxpayers would experience a shift in the labor market and an adjustment in the prices paid for consumer goods and services. Also, rather than conducting audits and deterring noncompliance, the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) would be able to dedicate a greater share of its limited resources to other pressing agenda items, such as assisting taxpayers in their compliance endeavors. There are, of course, other countervailing economic trends that may subvert the forces that will act to reduce the tax gap, so its future path remains highly uncertain (and hence the alternative use of “whither”). Also, for a whole host of reasons, especially reductions in IRS funding, the tax gap will not be closed anytime soon. Nevertheless, the tide against tax noncompliance may finally be turning.

Trust Dynamics in Innovation Networks: The Chicago Life Science Cluster

Knowledge exchange and collaboration in innovation networks is based on trust. Individuals and organizations within the network further play an important role in creating trusting relationships. Using this as a basis, the article explores the dynamics of trust when relationships and positions within the network change. Counter to the expectation that relationships are formalized in this scenario, the article shows that in the Chicago case, trust is layered. The article concludes that third-party sources of information about trustworthiness are strategically established as a layer in the network and that individuals translate past interactions into lasting organizations that can facilitate trust.

On the Potential Abuse of IGMP

In this paper we investigate the vulnerability of the Internet Group Management Protocol (IGMP) to be leveraged for denial-of-service (DoS) attacks. IGMP is a connectionless protocol and therefore susceptible to attackers spoofing a third-party victim's source address in an effort to coax responders to send their replies to the victim. We find 305K IGMP responders that will indeed answer queries from arbitrary Internet hosts. Further, the responses are often larger than the requests, hence amplifying the attacker's own expenditure of bandwidth. We conclude that attackers can coordinate IGMP responders to mount sizeable DoS attacks.

High-Level Toolset For Comprehensive Visual Data Analysis and Model Validation

The paper is devoted to the new method of high-level scientific visualization, comprehensive visual analysis and model validation tools development using new version of client-server scientific visualization system SciVi as an example. The distinctive features of the methods implemented are ontology-based automated adaptation to third-party data sources from various application domains and to specifics of the visualization problems as well as multiplatform portability of the software solution. High-level tools for semantic filtering of the rendered data are presented. These tools improve visual analytics capabilities of SciVi enabling to validate solvers’ or/and data sources’ models in more comprehensive form and to reduce uncertainties due to the explicit representation of hidden features of data.

Focusing on Small Data to drive big results

Big Data has become ubiquitous and making sense of it is getting increasingly complex and, as a result, more costly. Although organisations continue to make strides towards a robust integration of structured and unstructured data types, the opportunity to leverage small-scale data to enable key business decisions, remains considerable. There are many ways in which organisations, especially small and mid-size, can be data-driven, and still make effective decisions at a low cost. This paper explores the benefits of creating ad-hoc analyses and insights through the utilisation of small-scale, standalone and third-party sources of data, namely, Small Data. Numerous case studies will be presented, including media mix studies, customer segmentation and event-based marketing, with each having three characteristics in common: high business impact, increased speed to decision and cost savings.

Treatment Controversies in Adult ADHD.

Treatment Controversies in Adult ADHD.

Learning from Heterogeneous Data Sources: An Application in Spatial Proteomics.

Sub-cellular localisation of proteins is an essential post-translational regulatory mechanism that can be assayed using high-throughput mass spectrometry (MS). These MS-based spatial proteomics experiments enable us to pinpoint the sub-cellular distribution of thousands of proteins in a specific system under controlled conditions. Recent advances in high-throughput MS methods have yielded a plethora of experimental spatial proteomics data for the cell biology community. Yet, there are many third-party data sources, such as immunofluorescence microscopy or protein annotations and sequences, which represent a rich and vast source of complementary information. We present a unique transfer learning classification framework that utilises a nearest-neighbour or support vector machine system, to integrate heterogeneous data sources to considerably improve on the quantity and quality of sub-cellular protein assignment. We demonstrate the utility of our algorithms through evaluation of five experimental datasets, from four different species in conjunction with four different auxiliary data sources to classify proteins to tens of sub-cellular compartments with high generalisation accuracy. We further apply the method to an experiment on pluripotent mouse embryonic stem cells to classify a set of previously unknown proteins, and validate our findings against a recent high resolution map of the mouse stem cell proteome. The methodology is distributed as part of the open-source Bioconductor pRoloc suite for spatial proteomics data analysis.

Opportunities to improve clinical summaries for patients at hospital discharge

BackgroundClinical summaries are electronic health record (EHR)-generated documents given to hospitalised patients during the discharge process to review their hospital stays and inform postdischarge care. Presently, it is unclear whether...

Spatio-temporal quality control: implications and applications for data consumers and aggregators

Quality control for real-time spatio-temporal data is often presented from the perspective of the original owner and provider of the data, and focuses on general techniques for outlier detection or uses domain-specific knowledge and rules to assess quality. The impact of quality control on the data aggregator and redistributor is neglected. As sensor networks proliferate, multiple providers can distribute and redistribute the same original sensor data. Relationships between providers become complex, with data acquired from original and third-party sources. One provider may acquire data from another, and so forth, resulting in larger data sets with value-added components such as quality indicators, but with costs such as increased lag between original observation times and (re)distribution times. The focus of this paper is to define and demonstrate quality control measures for real-time, spatio-temporal data from the perspective of an aggregator to provide tools for evaluation and comparison of overlapping, real-time, spatio-temporal data providers and for assessment and optimization of data acquisition, system operation and data redistribution. We define simple measures that account for temporal completeness and spatial coverage. The measures and methods developed are tested on real-world data and applications. Our results show that these simple measures combine to form methods that are useful in comparing providers and identifying patterns in data which can then be exploited to optimize system performance relative to bandwidth, and to assess the impact of provider quality control mechanisms. The simple measures presented demonstrate the utility of quantifying data quality from the perspective of the data aggregator and redistributor.

Processing contradictory brand information from advertising and social media: an application of the multiple-motive heuristic-systematic model

This study tested two major theoretical assumptions of the heuristic-systematic model – (1) concurrent information processing and (2) multiple processing motives – in a common advertising situation where contradictory brand information from different sources (e.g. a positive advertising claim [a persuasive argument] vs. negative consensus information from a third-party source [a persuasion cue]) was available to consumers with varying motivation (accuracy and defense motivation). Results showed that individuals employed different information processing strategies, depending on motivation type. Accuracy-motivated individuals engaged in concurrent (both cue- and argument-based) processing when involvement was high. Defense-motivated individuals sought positive valence, regardless of the level of involvement and type of information.

Antecedents of Consumer Preference for Information Sources for Acquiring Corporate Information

Previous research has largely ignored the information sources that consumers use for knowing the company behind the products. This research adds new insights to the corporate branding as well as to the information acquisition literatures by investigating the information sources consumers prefer for acquiring information about the company behind the products during pre-purchase information search. It further explores the influence of purchase situation risk and consumer characteristics (expertise with the product category, purchase involvement and need for cognition (NFC)) on consumer preference for different corporate information sources. Questionnaire-based data are gathered from 588 consumers. Regression analysis is used to test the hypotheses. The findings reveal that intrapersonal source is the most important source for the consumers to acquire corporate information. Among the external information sources, third-party sources are the most important followed by the company-controlled sources, whereas resellers and interpersonal sources are the least important sources to the consumers. Further, third-party sources, company-controlled sources and resellers are more important to consumers in high-risk purchases than in low-risk purchases. Consumers with high expertise prefer intrapersonal source and do not examine external sources. High-involvement consumers favour all types of information sources. Individuals with high NFC do not consult interpersonal sources, rather prefer to utilize intrapersonal source. This study would help corporate marketing practitioners in choosing the appropriate corporate information sources, and hence in devising successful corporate communication strategies.

Interference from the sea surface near the electrostatic system location

The solution of the problem of the spatial structure of the secondary electric field due to rough sea surface in the field of third-party sources. It is shown that the energy spectrum of two-dimensional components of the electric field is determined as a result of the two-dimensional spatial filter filters the energy spectrum of sea surface height. Shows the frequency characteristics of the spatial filter and temporal power spectra of the components of the electric field when driving electrostatic locator over the sea surface.