206701749
Using the lens of Max Weber's theory of bureaucracy
Kurt Lewin famously proclaimed, ¿There is nothing so practical as good theory¿, signifying that a good theory lends itself to being applied in a variety of contexts. This paper uses the lens of Max Weber¿s theory of bureaucracy to examine contemporary EGovernment related research and literature. Two major, prevailing themes emerge from this exercise. The first theme that emerges is that IT (information technology) is a tool for `reforming¿ bureaucracy. The second, somewhat contradictory, theme is that EGovernment failure may be explained as a consequence of bureaucracy. Each of these themes is discussed in detail. These themes are also explored via case studies. The paper concludes that current E-Government research does not offer adequate clarity on the issue of how E-Government and bureaucracy impact each other in reciprocal ways; and calls for future research into these issues.
18557608
Performance Paradox : Information Technology Investments and Administrative Performance in the Case of the 50 U.S. State Governments
This study introduces the terminology of performance paradox in the context of IT (information technology) investment and use. Although it is somewhat related to the concept of productivity paradox, in the case of performance paradox, the dependent variable (i.e., the measure of performance) is not productivity, but some other measure of performance. This paper presents the results of a study that examined the relationship between IT investments by the 50 state governments of the United States and the administrative performance of these state governments. There are two parts to this study. In the first part, IT investments by state governments were related to multiple measures of state government performance, namely performance in financial management, human resource management, information technology management, capital management, and managing for results. In the second part of the study, IT investments by state governments were related to projected state government budget deficits. State budget deficits are used as a performance measure because they are an indicator of state government planning performance. Structural equation modeling was performed to analyze the data. The results indicate incidence of performance paradox. It appears as though the more U.S. state governments invest in IT, the worse they perform. However, there are also indications that with the passage of time, the relationship between IT investment and performance shows improvement. Thus, over time, the performance paradox becomes less pronounced. In some cases, it appears that past investments in IT actually help future performance.
15680776
Veterans and internet use: implications for career preparation and development support
This research compares internet usage by veterans of the U.S. armed forces with internet usage by two reference groups - an educational-elite group and an educational-non-elite group. In terms of overall use, veterans are found to use the internet significantly less than members of the educational-elite reference group. This is cause for concern. Somewhat reassuringly, veterans are found to use the internet significantly more than members of the non-elite reference group.Effective and efficient use of the internet can potentially be enormously helpful to veterans in their transition out of armed forces life; and can help them adjust to, and get ahead in, civilian life and careers. This research suggests that agencies that look after veterans' interests, and provide counseling and training services to them, may find it rewarding to focus some of their attention towards increasing veterans' use of the internet. Thus this research has implications for issues related to career preparation and development support for veterans.
1788457
SQL Queries Over Unstructured Text Databases
Text documents often embed data that is structured in nature. By processing a text database with information extraction systems, we can define a variety of structured "relations" over which we can then issue SQL queries. Processing SQL queries in this text-based scenario presents multiple challenges. One key challenge is efficiency: information extraction is a time-consuming process, so query processing strategies should pick efficient extraction systems whenever possible, and also minimize the number of documents that they process. Another key challenge is result quality: extraction systems might output erroneous information or miss information that they should capture; also, efficiency-related query processing decisions (e.g., to avoid processing large numbers of useless documents) may compromise result completeness. To address these challenges, we characterize SQL query processing strategies in terms of their efficiency and result quality, and discuss the (user-specific) tradeoff between these two properties.
21804891
Unsupervised texture segmentation using Gabor filters
Abstract This paper presents a texture segmentation algorithm inspired by the multi-channel filtering theory for visual information processing in the early stages of human visual system. The channels are characterized by a bank of Gabor filters that nearly uniformly covers the spatial-frequency domain, and a systematic filter selection scheme is proposed, which is based on reconstruction of the input image from the filtered images. Texture features are obtained by subjecting each (selected) filtered image to a nonlinear transformation and computing a measure of “energy” in a window around each pixel. A square-error clustering algorithm is then used to integrate the feature images and produce a segmentation. A simple procedure to incorporate spatial information in the clustering process is proposed. A relative index is used to estimate the “true” number of texture categories.
40224479
Morphological similarity: A 3D molecular similarity method correlated with protein-ligand recognition
Recognition of small molecules by proteins depends on three-dimensional molecular surface complementarity. However, the dominant techniques for analyzing the similarity of small molecules are based on two-dimensional chemical structure, with such techniques often outperforming three-dimensional techniques in side-by-side comparisons of correlation to biological activity. This paper introduces a new molecular similarity method, termed morphological similarity (MS), that addresses the apparent paradox. Two sets of molecule pairs are identified from a set of ligands whose protein-bound states are known crystallographically. Pairs that bind the same protein sites form the first set, and pairs that bind different sites form the second. MS is shown to separate the two sets significantly better than a benchmark 2D similarity technique. Further, MS agrees with crystallographic observation of bound ligand states, independent of information about bound states. MS is efficient to compute and can be practically applied to large libraries of compounds.
5061452
Mragyati : A System for Keyword-based Searching in Databases
The web, through many search engine sites, has popularized the keyword-based search paradigm, where a user can specify a string of keywords and expect to retrieve relevant documents, possibly ranked by their relevance to the query. Since a lot of information is stored in databases (and not as HTML documents), it is important to provide a similar search paradigm for databases, where users can query a database without knowing the database schema and database query languages such as SQL. In this paper, we propose such a database search system, which accepts a free-form query as a collection of keywords, translates it into queries on the database using the database metadata, and presents query results in a well-structured and browsable form. Th eysytem maps keywords onto the database schema and uses inter-relationships (i.e., data semantics) among the referred tables to generate meaningful query results. We also describe our prototype for database search, called Mragyati. Th eapproach proposed here is scalable, as it does not build an in-memory graph of the entire database for searching for relationships among the objects selected by the user's query.
5467372
Organizing and Searching the World Wide Web of Facts - Step One: The One-Million Fact Extraction Challenge
Due to the inherent difficulty of processing noisy text, the potential of the Web as a decentralized repository of human knowledge remains largely untapped during Web search. The access to billions of binary relations among named entities would enable new search paradigms and alternative methods for presenting the search results. A first concrete step towards building large searchable repositories of factual knowledge is to derive such knowledge automatically at large scale from textual documents. Generalized contextual extraction patterns allow for fast iterative progression towards extracting one million facts of a given type (e.g., Person-BornIn-Year) from 100 million Web documents of arbitrary quality. The extraction starts from as few as 10 seed facts, requires no additional input knowledge or annotated text, and emphasizes scale and coverage by avoiding the use of syntactic parsers, named entity recognizers, gazetteers, and similar text processing tools and resources.