A quantitative comparison on file folder structures of two groups of information workers

This study compares file folder structures on personal computers of two groups of information workers, administrative staff and PhD students. A set of quantitative measures are calculated which disclose the differences and similarities between folder structures of the two user groups. The results shows that the group conducting more administrative activities has broader and shallower folders than the PhD group who performs more research activities, and the folders of the PhD group are more populated over deeper levels of the trees than those of the administrative group. The study improves our understanding of the various quantitative measures in investigating personal computer folder structures, and furthermore contributes to our knowledge of the information organization structure in personal information systems. © 2014 IEEE.published_or_final_versio

Latin American "free-trade unionism" and the cold War: an analysis based on educational policies

The political education of workers and their leaders was viewed as a strategic concern in the cold war period’s bipolar world. This article discusses how this issue was dealt with by Latin American reformist trade unions grouped together in the Inter-American Regional Organization of Workers (ORIT, for its Spanish acronym), analyzing the educational policies promoted by its Inter-American Institute for Labor Studies (IIES), focusing specifically on its educational program for trade union instructors. We argue that the nature of the education provided changed, shifting from a rationale based on explicit ideological confrontation to a more focalized technical type of training. We claim that this shift started in the early 1960s, when the Alliance for Progress was launched.Fil: Scodeller, Gabriela Noemi. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - Mendoza. Instituto de Ciencias Humanas, Sociales y Ambientales; Argentina. Universidad de Buenos Aires; Argentin

Positive health: The passport approach to improving continuity of care for low income South African chronic disease sufferers

Research Problem: The South African health system faces numerous challenges associated with its status as a middle-income developing nation. Wasteful expenditure and poor clinical outcomes arise from inefficient inter-organizational communication of patient information and the lack of a centralized health database. Research question: How does the experience of chronic disease patients with their health information inform the development of future health records in low income population groups? Proposition: Exploration of patient and health care workers experiences of medical records can inform their future development to enhance continuity of care. Objectives, methodology, procedures and outcome: Identification of an appropriate format, technological basis and functional design of a prototype medical record system by means of a phenomenological study conducted through in-depth interviews of patients and doctors in order to improve clinical care. Left and right hermeneutics were used to analyse the data and develop themes. Findings: Health records play a critical role in the clinics workflow processes, document the patients' management and clinical progress. They are an important intermediary in the relationship between the patient and the facility. Inefficiencies in the paper-based system lead to ineffective consultations, loss of continuity of care and discord between practitioners and patients. Improvement of the records format is required to provide ubiquitous access to health and improve patient health literacy

Information scraps: how and why information eludes our personal information management tools

In this paper we describe information scraps -- a class of personal information whose content is scribbled on Post-it notes, scrawled on corners of random sheets of paper, buried inside the bodies of e-mail messages sent to ourselves, or typed haphazardly into text files. Information scraps hold our great ideas, sketches, notes, reminders, driving directions, and even our poetry. We define information scraps to be the body of personal information that is held outside of its natural or We have much still to learn about these loose forms of information capture. Why are they so often held outside of our traditional PIM locations and instead on Post-its or in text files? Why must we sometimes go around our traditional PIM applications to hold on to our scraps, such as by e-mailing ourselves? What are information scraps' role in the larger space of personal information management, and what do they uniquely offer that we find so appealing? If these unorganized bits truly indicate the failure of our PIM tools, how might we begin to build better tools? We have pursued these questions by undertaking a study of 27 knowledge workers. In our findings we describe information scraps from several angles: their content, their location, and the factors that lead to their use, which we identify as ease of capture, flexibility of content and organization, and avilability at the time of need. We also consider the personal emotive responses around scrap management. We present a set of design considerations that we have derived from the analysis of our study results. We present our work on an application platform, jourknow, to test some of these design and usability findings

Testing simplified protein models of the hPin1 WW domain

The WW domain of the human Pin1 protein for its simple topology and the large amount of experimental data is an ideal candidate to assess theoretical approaches to protein folding. The purpose of the present work is to compare the reliability of the chemically-based Sorenson/Head-Gordon (SHG) model and a standard native centric model in reproducing through molecular dynamics simulations some of the well known features of the folding transition of this small domain. Our results show that the G\={o} model correctly reproduces the cooperative, two-state, folding mechanism of the WW-domain, while the SHG model predicts a transition occurring in two stages: a collapse followed by a structural rearrangement. The lack of a cooperative folding in the SHG simulations appears to be related to the non-funnel shape of the energy landscape featuring a partitioning of the native valley in sub-basins corresponding to different chain chiralities. However the SHG approach remains more reliable in estimating the $\Phi$-values with respect to G\={o}-like description. This may suggest that the WW-domain folding process is stirred by energetic and topological factors as well, and it highlights the better suitability of chemically-based models in simulating mutations.Comment: RevTex4: 12 pages and 13 eps-figure file

Accounting for interned Japanese-American civilians during World War II: Creating incentives and establishing controls for captive workers

On February 19, 1942, following the attack on Pearl Har­bor and the declaration of war against Japan, President Roosevelt is­sued Executive Order 9066 which empowered the Secretary of War to exclude any and all persons from designated areas in the United States. Shortly thereafter, some 120,000 civilians of Japanese descent were prohibited from living, working, or traveling on the West Coast. By October 1942, over 100,000 evacuees were relocated and con­fined to ten remote internment camps for the duration of the war. The War Relocation Authority (WRA) administered these camps and had the responsibility to feed, house, educate, and provide em­ployment for the evacuees. This article describes the WRA\u27s use of ac­counting information and situates the role of accounting within a la­bor-process framework. It initially discusses labor-process theory and provides an overview of the internment episode and cooperative ac­counting in the U.S. It then focuses on particular accounting policies, procedures, and reports that were used by the WRA to manage en­terprises, monitor internment activities, and socialize evacuees with American capitalistic values

Supporting document management in complex multitask environments

In this thesis, the challenges for the support of information workers in the domain of personal information management are addressed. In Chapter 1 three major challenges are identified: 1) information overload and fragmentation, 2) multitasking within an unstructured, frequently interrupted workflow, and 3) increasing mobility demand. It has been argued that dedicated support of current needs in personal information management will help to overcome the challenges, reduce information and cognitive overload, and facilitate performance of information workers. Investigating the current needs of information workers, one has to focus on those that are currently supported by paper document management and transfer the mechanisms of this support to the digital domain. Our studies have addressed the role of paper documents in dealing with each of the three identified challenges. In the first study, presented in Chapter 2, paper document management has been discussed in relation with information overload and fragmentation. The study used contextual interviewing technique, with participants interviewed at their workplace. The results showed that information workers keep actively using task-related collections of paper documents. By grouping task-related documents from different origins together, information workers create a representation of a "stable state" within a task, which helps to resume the task after an interruption that is almost inevitable in a multitasking environment. To investigate task-switching patterns, related to document manipulation, and factors influencing the occurrence of the patterns, an observational study was performed, described in Chapter 3. This study identified eight task switching patterns, which varied in the explicitness of an indication of a task state in the environment and in the level of subject’s activity directed to indicate the task state at the moments of switching. Among the identified influencing factors, the reason for the switch (self-switching or external interruption) had an effect on the occurrence of subjectactive patterns. Self-switching usually resulted in user-active document manipulation in the environment which could not be observed during external interruptions. The domain where the last action was performed also had an influence on the switching pattern, with active manipulation of documents occurring more often in the physical than in the digital domain. It has been concluded that, while switching tasks in an unstructured multitasking workflow, manipulation of paper documents plays an important role in creating a stable state at the moments of switching between tasks. We hypothesized that paper documents possess visually distinctive attributes that are associated with the semantics of the related tasks. By manipulating task-related documents at the moments of task switching, these visually distinctive attributes change, reflecting the changes in the task state. This hypothesis has been tested in a study using triad elicitation interview technique in combination with laddering, presented in Chapter 4. As a result, we developed a clustered model of relationships among identified visual cues of paper documents and semantic judgments of the tasks. The relationships among clusters have been analyzed based on three criteria: content-dependency, flexibility, and effort, which together define ease of manipulation for each cluster of visual cues. It has been concluded that physical environment, in particular, task-relevant paper documents, allow flexible encoding of task-related semantic cues into available environmental visual cues. This mechanism needs to be transferred to the digital domain, especially to support mobility of information workers. This research suggested that the extensive use of paper documents in the digital era can be largely explained by the embodiment of paper as a part of physical environment in which a human acts. Chapter 5 summarized the results of all studies into a set of requirements for the design of a personal information management system. We proposed a layered framework for presenting the requirements from the point of view of task decomposition and discussed the needs of the information workers related to each layer. For each of the aforementioned layers within the framework, requirements for the design of a digital system were presented and discussed in detail. Chapter 6 revised the challenges discussed in Chapter 1 from the point of view of the findings, summarized methodology and contribution of the research and reflected on the most prominent results

A review of interventions to support young workers : findings of the youth employment inventory

This Youth Employment Inventory (YEI) is based on available documentation of current and past programs and includes evidence from 289 studies of interventions from 84 countries in all regions of the world. The interventions included in the YEI have been analyzed in order to (i) document the types of programs that have been implemented to support young workers to find work; and (ii) identify what appears to work in terms of improving employment outcomes for youth. This report synthesizes the information from this inventory and a set of background reports to document the global experience with youth employment programs. As background, Section B provides a brief summary of the situation of young people in labor markets world-wide, and also reviews the existing literature on policies to address youth employment problems. Following this, we turn to the underlying framework and methodology used to assemble the youth employment inventory in Section C. In Section D, we consider the coverage of the YEI, which represents the sample of youth programs identified in our global search of the available documentation. In addressing the question of"what works", it is critical to pay close attention to the quality of the evaluation evidence. This is discussed in Section E. The study then turns to the analysis of the effectiveness of the interventions included in the inventory. The descriptive evidence is presented in Section F. In addition, the study undertakes an econometric meta-analysis to more systematically identify the determinants of program success and the results of this analysis are presented in Section G. Finally, conclusions and implications are drawn in Section H.Labor Markets,Labor Policies,Youth and Governance,,Adolescent Health

Electronic Communication for Professionals—Challenges and Opportunities

abstract: The 21st-century professional or knowledge worker spends much of the working day engaging others through electronic communication. The modes of communication available to knowledge workers have rapidly increased due to computerized technology advances: conference and video calls, instant messaging, e-mail, social media, podcasts, audio books, webinars, and much more. Professionals who think for a living express feelings of stress about their ability to respond and fear missing critical tasks or information as they attempt to wade through all the electronic communication that floods their inboxes. Although many electronic communication tools compete for the attention of the contemporary knowledge worker, most professionals use an electronic personal information management (PIM) system, more commonly known as an e-mail application and often the ubiquitous Microsoft Outlook program. The aim of this research was to provide knowledge workers with solutions to manage the influx of electronic communication that arrives daily by studying the workers in their working environment. This dissertation represents a quest to understand the current strategies knowledge workers use to manage their e-mail, and if modification of e-mail management strategies can have an impact on productivity and stress levels for these professionals. Today’s knowledge workers rarely work entirely alone, justifying the importance of also exploring methods to improve electronic communications within teams.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Civil, Environmental and Sustainable Engineering 201

Potential efficiency gains in the construction industry from the proper use of information technology

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 36).For many years, technological advances and new software have altered the face of the engineering design sector. Design companies have realized incredible efficiency gains and cost savings due to these improvements, but the construction sector has not been able to do the same. Unlike design firms, contractor businesses as a whole have not embraced IT advancements and taken steps to implement them across all types of construction projects in the most efficient and effective manner possible. Because of this half-hearted attitude towards technological improvements, the same efficiency gains and cost savings found in the design sector have not been attained in the construction sector. The thesis examines different types of IT advancements that have the potential to seriously benefit the construction sector, including electronic document management, 3D modeling, construction sequencing, and laser scanning. Several surveys performed by other engineers and academics interested in the field of information technology in the engineering and construction sector will be examined, and the results of these will provide the basis for discussion regarding the current state of IT saturation in the construction sector as well as its overall effectiveness in providing tangible benefits to users. In addition, this thesis also examines possible reasons for why these benefits are not being attained and offers some ideas and strategies that may improve the implementation of IT advancements in the construction industry.by Roberta L. Hsu.M.Eng