Upscaling a sharing approach

Places of inquiry: Research and advanced education in modern universities

Purpose– Considering the perceived significance of librarians and information experts as professional information seekers and information seeking educators and of the institutional setting of information work, very little is known about the information practices of librarians and information professionals, their contexts and implications for libraries and their users. The aim of this study is to explore the information interactions of library professionals within and in relation to the context of the setting of the library.Design/methodology/approach– The analysis is based on a qualitative case study of a large North European city library. Material was collected using information seeking diaries, interviews and ethnographic observation in the library space.Findings– The information practices of librarians are contextual to the setting of the library within which the meeting of the assumptions of library users, of the use of that particular system plays a significant role. The systemic interplay of librarians, library users and other parts of the system constrains the breadth of the available information at libraries, but at the same time, keeping to a particular set of shared norms and practices of library use also facilitates the use of the system.Research limitations/implications– The generalisability of the findings is limited by the fact that they are based on an individual case study.Practical implications– The systemic nature of library and its reproduction in a process of structuration underlines the need to develop information services in libraries from a holistic perspective that takes into account the practical implications of the shared norms and assumptions of how a library should work.Originality/value– There is little earlier research on the information practices of library and information professionals, particularly with specific reference to its implications for libraries and their users.

A large portion of scientific results is based on analysing and processing research data. In order for an eScience experiment to be reproducible, we need to able to identify precisely the data set which was used in a study. Considering evolving data sources this can be a challenge, as studies often use subsets which have been extracted from a potentially large parent data set. Exporting and storing subsets in multiple versions does not scale with large amounts of data sets. For tackling this challenge, the RDA Working Group on Data Citation has developed a framework and provides a set of recommendations, which allow identifying precise subsets of evolving data sources based on versioned data and timestamped queries. In this work, we describe how this method can be applied in small scale research data scenarios and how it can be implemented in large scale data facilities having access to sophisticated data infrastructure. We describe how the RDA approach improves the reproducibility of eScience experiments and we provide an overview of existing pilots and use cases in small and large scale settings.

Agency and structure in the life-world of Aboriginal children in Central Australia

Advances in digital infrastructure and increased accessibility to a broader swath of society has promoted open innovation on digital platforms at the largest scale in our history. While the increased participation of society in helping to solve a broad range of problems is something to be celebrated, we should also recognize that this scaling-up has introduced several challenges that require us as a discipline to revisit how we envision the orchestration of open innovation. These challenges pertain to the social mechanisms that are traditionally leveraged to orchestrate open innovation and inherent human biases that can be counterproductive to bringing problems and ideal solutions together. In this research, we advance a theoretical framework that gives primacy to the role of algorithms in orchestrating open innovation on digital platforms at large scale. Owing to their superiority in processing vast amounts of data and recognizing patterns at large scale, we see algorithms as playing an important complementary role alongside human participants in the open innovation process. We conclude by outlining an initial research agenda.

In this response to the case-study of BT, it is explained how privatisation, competition and regulation form part of a complex system of industrial evolution. The paper examines the dynamics of BT culture, and seeks to draw out how privatisation has changed behaviour. It argues that the past fifteen years have been a period of experiment and learning that has greatly changed the culture of residual control. The net impact of these changes has been more favourable than the Milan study perhaps suggests. The importance of counterfactuals in carrying out cost/benefit analysis is underlined and it is emphasised that large scale policy choice must be understood in the context of a comparison of two imperfect institutional systems; no set of institutions is likely to achieve in practice all that can be imagined in theory.

“Transfer shock” is a well-known phenomenon during the process of articulation, when students move from short-cycle applied programs to more academic longer-cycle study programs. In the US context this problematic transition has been observed in students transferring from community colleges into the traditional university system. In Ireland's binary higher education structure, one set of institutions, known as Institutes of Technology (IoTs) allow for this transition to take place entirely within individual institutions. This paper is part of an ongoing investigation into one such IoT, where engineering students who achieve high grades at the end of 3-year (so-called Level 7) “ordinary degree” programs frequently transfer into the 3rd year of 4-year Level 8 “honors degree” programs, with surprisingly successful outcomes. One surprise derives from the fact that the students who enter Level 7 engineering programs are deemed at the outset to be academically less able, particularly in mathematics, than those who go directly into Level 8 programs from secondary school. Relatively little work has been done on this transition to date. In the 3rd and 4th year of many honors engineering programs within this institution it is not unusual to have 30–50% of the students coming from an ordinary degree background, the majority from within the institution itself — with others transferring from other IoTs in Ireland. Previous research has shown that students from this background initially struggle in the 3rd year of the honors degree program when compared with students who have proceeded directly through the honors program, before going on to successfully graduate. Can this be attributed to ‘transfer shock’ even though most of these students are continuing in an institution and with faculty that they are already familiar with? In order to examine this phenomenon we interview students from several engineering disciplines at various points in this transition. We explore the perceptions of the students regarding this transition and, based on the information coming from the interviews, we conduct a large scale survey to be administered to articulating students across engineering programs in the institution. The preliminary results of this survey are also presented here.

Although historians have examined the process of pre-colonial political integration, little attention has been paid to the complementary patterns of ethnic and cultural assimilation. The Chikunda, who were initially slaves on the Zambezi prazos, provide an excellent example of this phenomenon. Over the course of several generations, captives from more than twenty ethnic groups submerged their historical, linguistic, and cultural differences to develop a new set of institutions and a common identity. The decline of the prazo system during the first half of the nineteenth century generated large scale migrations of Chikunda outside of the lower Zambezi valley. They settled in Zumbo, the Luangwa valley and scattered regions of Malawi where they played an important role in the nineteenth-century political and military history of south central Africa.

If we want to assume digital rural areas, the focus must be on industrial prosperity, adhere to quality first, green agriculture, and take the structural reform of the agricultural supply side as a guide to further promote the construction speed of modern agricultural industrial system, management system, and production system, thereby improving agricultural productivity, competitiveness, and innovation, and promoting the realization of an agricultural power. In the new era, the system engineering of digital rural projects is relatively complex. It is necessary to adopt advanced system engineering ideas and methods, arrange top-level design, institutional setting, innovative technology, talent cultivation, and optimize operation modes, in order to achieve an information service platform and achieve digital rural revitalization.

Purpose – There is limited evidence on how differences in economic environments affect the demand for and supply of auditing. Research on audit pricing has mainly focused on large client markets in developed economies; in contrast, the purpose of this paper is to focus on the small client segment in the emerging economy of Thailand which offers a choice between auditors of two different qualities. Design/methodology/approach – This paper is based on a random stratified sample of small clients in Thailand qualifying for audit exemption. The final sample consists of 1,950 firm-year observations for 2002-2006. Findings – The authors find evidence of product differentiation in the small client market, suggesting that small firms view certified public accountants as superior and pay a premium for their services. The authors also find that audit fees have a positive significant association with leverage, metropolitan location and client size. Audit risk and audit opinion are not, however, significantly associated with audit fees. Furthermore, the authors find no evidence that clients whose financial year ends in the auditors’ busy period pay significantly higher audit fees, and auditors engage in low-balling on initial engagements to attract audit clients. Research limitations/implications – The research shows the importance of exploring actual decisions regarding audit practice and audit pricing in different institutional and organizational settings. Originality/value – The paper extends the literature from developed economies and large/listed market setting to the emerging economy and small client market setting. As far as the authors are aware, this is the first paper to examine audit pricing in the small client market in an emerging economy.

This chapter deals with a particular field within digital anthropology—that of personal communication. It shows that the advent of digital technologies has had particularly personal consequences, because communication itself is so central to the way relationships are constituted and negotiated. Restrictions of access to certain websites and to mobile phones and other communication channels are therefore to be understood as attempts to preserve the boundaries between social spheres and as forms of organizational control on attention. The availability of multiple channels has become a vehicle for circumventing institutional regulations and for enabling communication between people in different institutional settings. Synchronicity/asynchronicity is without doubt the factor that has the strongest effect on communication practices, because it carries such strong implications for social interaction. Just as in the case of intimate and personal communication, anthropology has much to offer to explain the interaction between digital media and the social norms, agency and practices that emerge in their usage.

Extracting roads from dense point clouds in large scale urban environment

Feature extraction is significant for pattern analysis and classification. Those based on genetic algorithms are promising owing to their potential parallelizability and possible applications in large scale and high dimensional data classification. Most recently, Zhao et al. presented a direct evolutionary feature extraction algorithm(DEFE) which can reduce the space complexity and improve the efficiency, thus overcoming the limitations of many genetic algorithm based feature extraction algorithms(EFE). However, DEFE does not consider the outlier problem which could deteriorate the classification performance, especially when the training sample set is small. Moreover, when there are many classes, the null space of within-class scatter matrix(Sw) becomes small, resulting in poor discrimination performance in that space. In this paper, we propose a bagging evolutionary feature extraction algorithm(BEFE) incorporating bagging into a revised DEFE algorithm to improve the DEFE's performance in cases of small training sets and large number of classes. The proposed algorithm has been applied to face recognition and testified using the Yale and ORLface databases.

Purpose The purpose of this study is to collaborate with environmental engineering and management making an effort to provide evidence for the irresponsible behavior of small business set up in north India with special reference to Aligarh City. Corporates have huge accountability for sustainable development, and they cannot overlook the major responsibilities which are lying on their shoulders. CSR is related to the concept of “doing good” but, beyond “doing good” businesses have the responsibility for “avoiding bad” to avoid corporate social irresponsibility (CSI), such as damaging the environment by polluting land, water and air, cheating customers, violating human rights, or doing any unethical practices. Design/methodology/approach In this study, random groundwater samples were collected from “Aligarh Nagar Nigam” installed hand pumps from industrial influence areas of Aligarh during the month of October and November 2017. These samples were collected nearby small-scale metal plating industries plants. The samples analyzed by the Atomic Absorption Spectrometer (AAS) Perkin Elmer PinAAcle 900 F, for Fe, Mn, Pb, Zn, Cu and Cr (Jahromi et al., 2007; Chen and Teo, 2001; Bidari et al., 2007; Land and Hoops, 1973; de Oliveira et al., 2016; Akoto et al., 2016). In addition, some other parameters also taken in this study and the results obtained are compared with the World Health Organization (WHO) and Bureau of Indian Standard (BIS). Findings These results of the study revealed that the penetration of heavy metals like Cr, Pb, Cu, Zn, Fe and Mn into the soil is found much higher than the permissible limit stated by the government. The concentrations of metals in groundwater found to be within limits, but some metals are exceeding the standard limits in few samples. Concentrations of these heavy metals Cr>Cu>Pb>Fe>Mn are exceeding standard limits, Zn found within permissible limits as per WHO and BIS standard. This result proves to be a means to an end for an irresponsible behavior toward the society and environment which leads to serious health and environmental hazards. Research limitations/implications The results are beneficial for data generation on various quality parameters of groundwater. The results of this study help in proper decision-making by concerned authorities to prevent, reduce toxic levels and begin to take steps for making water fit for drinking and other purposes. The research is limited in Aligarh City and other cities are like Kanpur, Noida and Ghaziabad are also tested by taking samples of water, as these cities are extensively captured by SME’s and large scale industries. Practical implications The results of this study have several implications for both governmental and non-governmental practice and policy development. As society expects positive attitudes of the businesses toward CSR activities and concern about the environment, businesses, institutions and governments should pay more attention to promote the initiative of environment safety to intensify their public concern. The small business unit must know about the serious health hazards of discharging the waste water in the open and therefore regular checking of heavy metal contamination in the groundwater in these areas is needed and use of contaminated water must be prevented to lessen the health risk caused by using the metal contaminated groundwater. The small-scale industries should follow the guidelines for proper disposal of wastewater discharge. The water treatment technology should involve and take possible steps to remove heavy metals contamination. Originality/value This study provides real data to municipality and other government offices which can be used as a benchmark to plan strict policy to prohibit the open discharge of wastewater by industries.

"Unconsciously Influenced":Alan Burns, Ian McEwan, and the Lasting Legacies of Postwar British Experimental Fiction Chris Clarke (bio) While Alan Burns, as Jeannette Baxter suggests, has appeared to historians of the novel to have "fallen off the literary map" since the 1960s, Burns and his contemporary experimental writers have resurfaced in recent discussions of postwar British fiction (55).1 For a brief moment in the late 1960s, Burns was at the heart of a constellation of experimental writers, including Eva Figes, B. S. Johnson, and Ann Quin, whose works revived literary modernism in an attempt to bring an alternative imaginary community into being. Burns's fiction won him the recognition of an influential cultural institution, the Arts Council of Great Britain, and its literary chair Angus Wilson. Burns subsequently became the inaugural Henfield Writing Fellow at the University of East Anglia in 1970, where he would advise Ian McEwan, the first student in its now-prestigious creative writing program. In his refracted autobiography, Sweet Tooth, McEwan evokes the strong supportive ties between postwar British experimental writing, the Arts [End Page 104] Council, and his early work, thus raising the question of why the legacies of Burns and his contemporaries have gone unacknowledged for so long. Sweet Tooth's Tom Haley, a budding writer, receives unconditional financial support from "a clandestine Arts Council" (140) and refers to Burns as "the best experimentalist in the country" (185). If Sweet Tooth insinuates that the Arts Council and British experimental fiction writing were catalysts to McEwan's early career, why was it the case that Burns and his contemporaries struggled to foster a readership for their work in a similarly supportive cultural climate? This essay explores the lasting imprint of postwar British experimental writing on contemporary fiction by tracing the ways in which the Arts Council contributed to the conditions for Burns and McEwan's divergent literary careers. Burns's experimental texts Europe After the Rain (1965), Celebrations (1967), Babel (1969), and Dreamerika (1972) present alternatives to institutionalized forms of power through the use of artistic practices associated with Dada and surrealism: parataxis, disjunction, visual and textual collages, and automatic and fold-in writing. Paradoxically, Burns emerged as an anti-institutional experimental writer backed by a significant cultural institution after the Arts Council awarded him a substantial grant following the publication of Celebrations. One can read this paradox as a repercussion of the cultural climate instantiated by the Arts Council, an institution set up by the modernist and economist John Maynard Keynes in 1945. Having supported the "fine arts exclusively" for the first twenty years of its existence, the Arts Council democratized its subsidy of the arts in the mid-1960s (Great Britain 3). In addition to increasing its support of institutions, such as the National Theatre and the Poetry Society, the body's expansion of its funding also had the effect of stimulating alternative and experimental arts.2 The Arts Council thereby reanimated, as Peter Barry argues, "a kind of dialectical confrontation between the thesis of the old and the antithesis of the new" (14). It encouraged cultural organizations to maintain existing and canonical arts, while at the same time giving writers, performers, and artists the opportunity to revive modernist artistic practices. I will argue that the relationship between the Arts Council and experimental writers such as Burns represents an instance of this dialectic between postwar modernist legacies, which provides a way to map how these innovators' attempts to create an alternative literary community continue to influence the work of celebrated contemporary authors. In order to explore how Burns's relationship with the Arts Council can shed new light on the lasting legacies of postwar British [End Page 105] experimental fiction, this essay draws on Michael Warner's analysis of the public. Reflecting in 1970 on his work's "limited readership" despite its backing by the Arts Council, Burns compares himself to "a shoemaker creating an exotic boot that I know will not be popular for another fifty years" (qtd. in Kitchen 21). Burns thus hints at how his work negotiates, as Warner puts it, the challenge of "bring[ing] a public into being when extant modes of address and intelligibility seem themselves...