Design and Implementation of an Open Source Indexing Solution for a Large Set of Radiological Reports and Images

This paper hopes to share the insights we experienced during designing, building, and running an indexing solution for a large set of radiological reports and images in a production environment for more than 3 years. Several technical challenges were encountered and solved in the course of this project. One hundred four million words in 1.8 million radiological reports from 1989 to the present were indexed and became instantaneously searchable in a user-friendly fashion; the median query duration is only 31 ms. Currently, our highly tuned index holds 332,088 unique words in four languages. The indexing system is feature-rich and language-independent and allows for making complex queries. For research and training purposes it certainly is a valuable and convenient addition to our radiology informatics toolbox. Extended use of open-source technology dramatically reduced both implementation time and cost. All software we developed related to the indexing project has been made available to the open-source community covered by an unrestricted Berkeley Software Distribution-style license

Teaching Case: Paid Search Wars

This case analyzes the complex interactions between firms in the interrelated areas of search engines and portals after the dot com crash of 2000. Overture, a 1998 start-up, had transformed the online advertising market through the innovation of paid search, in which advertisers bid for top position for search terms. These results were provided to the portals and appeared alongside organic search results when a search was done. But Overture became a victim of its own success as the portals used their audience control to gain a greater share of advertising revenues. Google entered the paid search market in 2002 which ultimately led to Overture losing its independence and becoming a Yahoo subsidiary in 2003. As Google grew rapidly and expanded into other markets Yahoo and MSN attempted without success to counteract its influence. By February 2008 Google had been the clear winner of this rivalry, with Yahoo severely weakened. This culminated in an attempted Microsoft takeover of Yahoo with the main aim of stopping Google, a development Google was determined to prevent. This led to Google cooperating with Yahoo on paid search and Microsoft subsequently withdrawing its bid in May 2008

From diversity to convergence : British computer networks and the Internet, 1970-1995

The Internet's success in the 21st century has encouraged analysts to investigate the origin of this network. Much of this literature adopts a teleological approach. Works often begin by discussing the invention of packet switching, describe the design and development of the ARPANET, and then examine how this network evolved into the Internet. Although the ARPANET was a seminal computer network, these accounts usually only briefly consider the many other diverse networks that existed. In addition, apart from momentary asides to alternative internetworking solutions, such as the Open Systems Interconnection (OSI) seven-layer reference model, this literature concentrates exclusively on the ARPANET, the Internet, and the World Wide Web. While focusing on these subjects is important and therefore justified, it can leave the reader with the impression that the world of networking started with the ARPANET and ended with the Internet. This thesis is an attempt to help correct this misconception. This thesis analyses the evolution of British computer networks and the Internet between the years 1970 and 1995. After an introduction in Chapter 1, the thesis analyses several networks. In Chapters 2 and 3, the focus is on academic networks, especially JANET and SuperJANET. Attention moves to videotex networks in Chapter 4, specifically Prestel, and in Chapter 5, the dissertation examines electronic mail networks such as Telecom Gold and Cable & Wireless Easylink. Chapter 6 considers online services, including CompuServe, American Online, and the Microsoft Network, and the thesis ends with a conclusion in Chapter 7. All of the networks discussed used protocols that were incompatible with each other which limited the utility of the networks for their users. Although it was possible that OSI or another solution could have solved this problem, the Internet's protocols achieved this objective. This thesis shows how the networks converged around TCP/IP

La orientación al mercado y el efecto de la adopción de tecnologías Web 2.0 y el aprendizaje organizativo en la capacidad de innovación: estudio empírico en empresas del sector hotelero de España

El propósito fundamental de la presente tesis fue el de establecer las relaciones existentes entre la orientación al mercado, la adopción de tecnologías Web 2.0 el aprendizaje organizativo, la capacidad de innovación y el desempeño organizativo. Una de las razones principales de estudiar estas relaciones tiene que ver con el interés que las tecnologías Web 2.0 han despertado en el mundo académico y por los resultados positivos que las empresas han reportado por su adopción; tales como: la mejora de la comunicación, la gestión de conocimiento, el aprendizaje organizativo y la colaboración. Por otra parte, la literatura y los estudios empíricos relacionados al efecto de las tecnologías Web 2.0 y su aplicación son aún limitados. Los resultados del presente trabajo aportan a la comprensión de la importante influencia que estas tecnologías tienen en diversas competencias organizativas. Para realizar el estudio, primero se revisaron las principales vertientes económicas y administrativas, divididas en enfoques dinámicos y estáticos para alcanzar y sostener ventajas competitivas. Con base en la revisión y considerando las variables del estudio se eligió el Enfoque de la empresa basada en competencias; considerado como un enfoque, dinámico, sistémico, holístico y cognitivo. Posteriormente se realizó una revisión bibliográfica de las variables de estudio y se establecieron las relaciones, con base en un sustento teórico. Se planteó el modelo teórico y se formularon las hipótesis del estudio. Para comprobar el modelo y las hipótesis planteadas se llevó a cabo un trabajo empírico, seleccionando para ello el sector hotelero Español de cuatro y cinco estrellas. El estudio se realizó en 244 empresas y se utilizó la metodología de ecuaciones estructurales para probar el modelo y comprobar las hipótesis. Los resultados permitieron demostrar el modelo y las hipótesis planteadas. Finalmente, se elaboraron varias conclusiones de cada uno de los componentes de la tesis, se discutieron las limitaciones del estudio y se sugirieron futuras líneas de investigación.Zegarra Saldaña, A. (2014). La orientación al mercado y el efecto de la adopción de tecnologías Web 2.0 y el aprendizaje organizativo en la capacidad de innovación: estudio empírico en empresas del sector hotelero de España [Tesis doctoral no publicada]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/36547TESI

“INDUSTRIAL LEGISLATURES”: CONSENSUS STANDARDIZATION IN THE SECOND AND THIRD INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTIONS

Consensus standardization is a social process in which technical experts from public, private, and non-profit sectors negotiate the direction and shape of technological change. Scholars in a variety of disciplines have recognized the importance of consensus standards as alternatives to standards that arise through market mechanisms or standards mandated by regulators. Rather than treating the consensus method as some sort of timeless organizational form or ever-present alternative to markets or laws, I argue that consensus standardization is itself a product of history. In the first two chapters, I explain the origins and growth of consensus standards bodies between 1880 and 1930 as a reaction to and critique of the existing political economy of engineering. By considering the standardization process—instead of the internal dynamics of a particular firm or technology—as the primary category of analysis, I am able to emphasize the cooperative relations that sustained the American style of competitive managerial capitalism during the Second Industrial Revolution. In the remaining four chapters, I examine the processes of network architecture and standardization in the creation of four communications networks during the twentieth century: AT&T’s monopoly telephone network, the Internet, digital cellular telephone networks, and the World Wide Web. Each of these four networks embodied critiques—always implicit and frequently explicit—of preceding and competing networks. These critiques, visible both in the technological design of networks as well as in the institutional design of standard-setting bodies, reflected the political convictions of successive generations of engineers and network architects. The networks described in this dissertation were thus turning points in the century-long development of an organizational form. Seen as part of a common history, they tell the story of how consensus-based institutions became the dominant mode for setting standards in the Third Industrial Revolution, and created the foundational standards of the information infrastructures upon which a newly globalized economy and society—the Network Society—could grow

The Web as a Historical Corpus: Collecting, Analysing and Selecting Sources on the Recent Past of Academic Institutions

The goal of this thesis is to understand the impact that the transition from analogue to born-digital sources will have on the way historians collect, analyse and select primary evidences. This thesis aims in particular at addressing the simultaneous scarcity and abundance of digital materials and at dealing with these issues by combining the historical method with methodologies from the fields of internet studies and natural language processing. The case study of this work is focused on recollecting sources on the recent past of Italian academic institutions, with specific attention to the University of Bologna. The dissertation is organised in three main parts. Part I offers an extensive overview of the academic background where this thesis is settled. Next, the so-called scarcity issue is addressed, by considering university websites as primary sources for the study of the recent past of academic institutions. With a combination of traditional sources and methods together with solutions from the field of internet studies, Part II presents how the digital past of the University of Bologna has been reconstructed. The collected resources allowed to address the second issue, namely the large abundance of born-digital sources. Part III focuses on collecting, analysing and selecting materials from large collections of academic publications. In particular, it is remarked on the importance of adopting methods from the field of natural language processing in a highly critical way. This point is stressed by presenting a case-study focused on identifying interdisciplinary collaborations through the analysis of a corpus of Ph.D. dissertations. Based on the case-studies presented, the final part of the dissertation describes how this work intends to be a contribution both to the research in digital humanities and in historiography