The Effects of the Quantification of Faculty Productivity: Perspectives from the Design Science Research Community

In recent years, efforts to assess faculty research productivity have focused more on the measurable quantification of academic outcomes. For benchmarking academic performance, researchers have developed different ranking and rating lists that define so-called high-quality research. While many scholars in IS consider lists such as the Senior Scholar’s basket (SSB) to provide good guidance, others who belong to less-mainstream groups in the IS discipline could perceive these lists as constraining. Thus, we analyzed the perceived impact of the SSB on information systems (IS) academics working in design science research (DSR) and, in particular, how it has affected their research behavior. We found the DSR community felt a strong normative influence from the SSB. We conducted a content analysis of the SSB and found evidence that some of its journals have come to accept DSR more. We note the emergence of papers in the SSB that outline the role of theory in DSR and describe DSR methodologies, which indicates that the DSR community has rallied to describe what to expect from a DSR manuscript to the broader IS community and to guide the DSR community on how to organize papers for publication in the SSB

The Burqa Ban: Legal Precursors for Denmark, American Experiences and Experiments, and Philosophical and Critical Examinations

As the title of the article suggests, “The Burqa Ban”: Legal Precursors for Denmark, American Experiences and Experiments, and Philosophical and Critical Examinations, the authors embark on a factually investigative as well as a reflective response. More precisely, they use The 2018 Danish “Burqa Ban”: Joining a European Trend and Sending a National Message (published as a concurrent but separate article in this issue of INTERNATIONAL STUDIES JOURNAL) as a platform for further analysis and discussion of different perspectives. These include case-law at the international level while focusing attention on recent rulings and judicial reasoning by the ECtHR and the ECJ; critical thought-experiments in religion, morality, human rights, and the democratic public space; a contextualized account of burqa-wearing interventions by federal and state governments and, moreover, various courts in the United States; and philosophical commentary and, in some instances, criticism of the Danish and/or European (French, etc.) approach. The different contributions have different aims. The section on case-law at the international level reports on those central judgments that, in effect, helped to pave the path for the Kingdom of Denmark’s burqa ban. Concerning the concurring judges at the ECtHR, the opinions served to uphold a preexisting ban and to grant a wide margin of appreciation to the national authorities, thereby limiting the Court’s own review. As regards to the ECJ, the legality of company rules that contain a policy of neutrality for the workplace was examined, with a similar outcome. The authors who discuss religion, morality, human rights and the democratic public space are endeavoring to, respectively, appeal to ethics as a testing stone for law and to both challenge and address several forms of “expressivist worry” in connection with face veils. In doing so, the authors ask a number of thought-provoking questions that hopefully will inspire public policymakers to careful analysis. While the section that is devoted to American perspectives highlights a comprehensive survey of political and legal responses to, in particular, full-face veils like the burqa, the relevant author also incorporates public perceptions and, in the course of examining these, draws a parallel to “the fate” of the hoodie. The constitutionality of burqa-wearing in America, so it also appears, is partially an open question, but differentiating between religious, political, or personal reasons is a de jure premise. Given that the Danish legislators who drafted law L 219 to ban burqa-wearing in public places rely on a reference to political Islam, they relegate religious and personal reasons to the private domain, thereby also adopting secularism as a premise. This is explored in the last author response of the article, more precisely, in an account of the underlying materialism that, in turn, is applied to Muslim women. If policymakers and legislators engaged in Thinking Things Through exercises, they could, as a minimum, avoid law-making strategies that are not in the spirit of the theory they themselves invoke, albeit tacitly. While the aim of, as it were, arresting culturally self-contradicting legislators is unique for the section in question, all the authors who contribute to the joint research project have one end-goal in common, namely to inform about important perspectives while at the same time opening up for parameters for (more) fruitful, constructive and (if need be) critical debate in the future. With this in mind, four recommendations are presented by the research director for the project. Legally, politically, socially and culturally, conflict-resolution should not translate the relationship between rulers and the ruled into a separation ideology, an instance of controllers versus the controlled. All things being equal, that is the objective limit for a democratic society

Representations of sport in the revolutionary socialist press in Britain, 1988–2012

This paper considers how sport presents a dualism to those on the far left of the political spectrum. A long-standing, passionate debate has existed on the contradictory role played by sport, polarised between those who reject it as a bourgeois capitalist plague and those who argue for its reclamation and reformation. A case study is offered of a political party that has consistently used revolutionary Marxism as the basis for its activity and how this party, the largest in Britain, addresses sport in its publications. The study draws on empirical data to illustrate this debate by reporting findings from three socialist publications. When sport did feature it was often in relation to high profile sporting events with a critical tone adopted and typically focused on issues of commodification, exploitation and alienation of athletes and supporters. However, readers’ letters, printed in the same publications, revealed how this interpretation was not universally accepted, thus illustrating the contradictory nature of sport for those on the far left

Debating Africa : BBC's documentary "Heart & soul - return to Zanzibar"

This issue of ISJ carried another article in the irregular series "Debating and Documenting Africa", the first one having been published in volume 1, number 2 (June 2008). This issue carries a discussion between Katy Hickman, Senior Producer at BBC World Service Religion and Ethics and Prof. Abdul Sheriff, formerly Professor of History at the University of Dar es Salaam and Director of Zanzibar Museums and the author of forthcoming titles, Dhow Cultures of the Indian Ocean: Cosmopolitanism, Commerce and Islam and The Early Dhow Culture in the Indian Ocean: From the Periplus to the Portuguese. The context of this debate is BBC Radio’s "Return to Zanzibar" programme in their series, Heart & Soul. Setting the scene is Katy Hickman’s contact with Prof. Sheriff in which she enclosed an early outline of the programme. This is followed by Prof. Sheriff’s response which raises various key issue of relevance to the study of Africa. This is followed by Katy Hickman’s response which explains how the final version was influenced by points raised by Prof. Sheriff. Also included is a later piece by the presenter of the programme, Yasmin Alibhai-Brown. While not part of this discussion, the latter is included to provide the presenter’s perspective. All these provide a look behind the scene on debates that take place before programmes are made and bring out the key role that historians, researchers and academicians can, and need to play, in social communications. ISJ’s Editorial Board re-presents this debate to stimulate further discussion

Spartan Daily, April 16, 1934

Volume 22, Issue 105https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/2141/thumbnail.jp

SVS-JOIN : efficient spatial visual similarity join for geo-multimedia

In the big data era, massive amount of multimedia data with geo-tags has been generated and collected by smart devices equipped with mobile communications module and position sensor module. This trend has put forward higher request on large-scale geo-multimedia retrieval. Spatial similarity join is one of the significant problems in the area of spatial database. Previous works focused on spatial textual document search problem, rather than geo-multimedia retrieval. In this paper, we investigate a novel geo-multimedia retrieval paradigm named spatial visual similarity join (SVS-JOIN for short), which aims to search similar geo-image pairs in both aspects of geo-location and visual content. Firstly, the definition of SVS-JOIN is proposed and then we present the geographical similarity and visual similarity measurement. Inspired by the approach for textual similarity join, we develop an algorithm named SVS-JOIN B by combining the PPJOIN algorithm and visual similarity. Besides, an extension of it named SVS-JOIN G is developed, which utilizes spatial grid strategy to improve the search efficiency. To further speed up the search, a novel approach called SVS-JOIN Q is carefully designed, in which a quadtree and a global inverted index are employed. Comprehensive experiments are conducted on two geo-image datasets and the results demonstrate that our solution can address the SVS-JOIN problem effectively and efficiently

Profiling a decade of information systems frontiers’ research

This article analyses the first ten years of research published in the Information Systems Frontiers (ISF) from 1999 to 2008. The analysis of the published material includes examining variables such as most productive authors, citation analysis, universities associated with the most publications, geographic diversity, authors’ backgrounds and research methods. The keyword analysis suggests that ISF research has evolved from establishing concepts and domain of information systems (IS), technology and management to contemporary issues such as outsourcing, web services and security. The analysis presented in this paper has identified intellectually significant studies that have contributed to the development and accumulation of intellectual wealth of ISF. The analysis has also identified authors published in other journals whose work largely shaped and guided the researchers published in ISF. This research has implications for researchers, journal editors, and research institutions

Intrafirm Conflicts and Interfirm Price Competition

We study interfirm price competition in the presence of horizontal and vertical intrafirm conflicts in each firm. Intrafirm conflicts are captured by a principal-agent framework with firms employing more than one agent and implementing a tournament incentive scheme. The principals offer premium incentives in the sense of revenue shares to which agents react by proposing a sales price. Introducing such intrafirm conflicts results in higher prices and lower effort levels. Increasing the number of agents lowers the optimal surplus share of the agents as well as the individual effort and the sales prices. Firm profits first increase and then decrease when employing more and more agents suggesting that principals should employ an intermediate number of agents.Price competition, Agency theory

The missa pro defunctis at the Catedral Metropolitana de la Asunción de la Santísima Virgen María a los Cielos: featuring the Misa de difuntos (1760) by Ignacio Jerusalem y Stella, maestro di capilla (1707-1769)

Thesis (DM) – Indiana University, Music, 2020The Misa de difuntos (1760) by Ignacio Jerusalem y Stella is a choral-orchestral setting of the Requiem Mass which offers a unique glimpse into the fusion of the European Classical and Spanish cathedral traditions. The Mass Ordinary movements are influenced by Mid-Eighteenth compositional style and technique, offering clear and straightforward harmonic progressions with largely homophonic choral interjections. The Mass Proper provides a suitable contrast with strong dissonances and ample use of chromaticism to evoke the textual themes of the Requiem. The Misa de difuntos (1760) was first discovered by me in Thomas Stanford’s Catálogo de los acervos musicales de las catedrales metropolitanas de México y Puebla de la Bibioteca Nacional de Antropología e Historia y ostras colecciones menores. Although it appeared as a simple entry in the catalog, its immense size of five hundred seventy-six pages and description of a chamber orchestra and chorus caught my attention. The music that constitutes the basis of my edition survives in a single manuscript, located in the Archivo del Cabildo Catedral Metropolitano de México (ACCMM) in Mexico City. I have not been able to travel to Mexico City, but I was granted access to the microfilm which is held at the Instituto Nacional de Antropología e Historia (INAH). Passages of the work required some philological emendation. Fortunately, Ignacio Jerusalem’s score and accompanying part books are remarkably free of errors and are well preserved. The majority of editorial decisio ns made were as a result of composer shorthand or misinterpretations on the part of the copyists. This edition serves promote the music of Ignacio Jerusalem y Stella and the vast numbers of unknown works that exist in the Mexican cathedral archives

A Discipline Divided: Globalization and Parochialism in Information Systems Research

This research note examines an apparent paradox in Information Systems (IS) research. This paradox relates to the parochial nature of much of the published IS research (both in terms of the chosen journal outlet and the literature cited), notwithstanding the global nature of the phenomena being investigated. It does so by reviewing author \u27nationality\u27 in four leading IS journals over a seven-year period (1994-2000), and by reviewing the \u27nationality\u27 of the literature cited by these authors. Two of the journals are published in the USA and two are published in Europe. Despite apparent recognition of increasing globalization in our field, brought about - in part at least - by information technology (IT), the data provide firm evidence that the IS discipline is marked by a distinct parochialism along national, or at least, regional lines. A reorientation appears to be required if leading IS journals are not to continue to be the unwitting mouthpieces of unwitting researchers, publishing the results of partial, culturally biased research. The findings also contain profound implications for published material based on citation analyses and on our understanding of what constitutes the appellation \u27international\u27 in our discipline