The Espoused Theories of IS: A Study of General Editorial Statements.

In the IS field there has been an ongoing tradition to study the publication output of the community in order to evaluate the current and potential situation of IS research. In this work, we follow a different strategy and study what IS research claims to be. We look at those so-called 'espoused theories of IS' as found in the General Editorials Statements (GES) of IS journals. Based on the AISWorld journal ranking, we collected GES for 30 leading IS journals for the years 1997 and 2007. We applied thematic, lexicometric, and factor analyses to the datasets of the 1997 and the 2007 GES. Our results show that the representation of IS research in the GES has changed little over the last decade.Espoused Theory; Information Systems (IS); Research; Expectations; General Editorial Statement (GES); IS Journals; Thematic Analysis; Lexicometric Analysis;

Community on the watch: making sense of is research through the lens of espoused theories of is

Community on the Watch: Making Sense of IS Research through the Lens of Espoused Theories of IS In the IS field there has been an ongoing tradition to study the publication output of the community in order to evaluate the current and potential situation of IS research. In this work, we follow a different strategy and study what IS research claims to be. We look at those so-called 'espoused theories of IS' as found in the General Editorials Statements (GES) of IS journals. Based on the AISWorld journal ranking, we collected GES for 30 leading IS journals for the years 1997 and 2007. We applied thematic, lexicometric, and factor analyses to the datasets of the 1997 and the 2007 GES. Our results show that the representation of IS research in the GES has changed little over the last decade.: Espoused Theory, Information Systems (IS), Research, Expectations, General Editorial Statement (GES), IS Journals, Thematic Analysis, Lexicometric Analysis.

The Espoused Theories of IS: A Study of General Editorial Statements

In the IS field there has been the ongoing debate about a potential identity crisis, which has led researchers to study the output of the community in order to evaluate where IS research currently is and where it could potentially be. This has resulted in various proposals for IS research ‘in practice’. This research follows a different strategy and studies what IS research is claimed to be (the espoused theories of IS). The section of IS journals’ General Editorials Statements (GES), that is, the informative section offered by most journals where they position themselves with regard to potential authors, already contains the answer. Basing our study on the AISWorld journal ranking, we collected GES for a sample of 30 IS journals for the years 1997 and 2007. We applied thematic, lexicometric, and factor analyses to the datasets of the 1997 and the 2007 GES. The results of the analyses show how the institutionalized discourse about IS research has changed over the last decade

Concurrent Algebras for VLSI Design

As the size and complexity of VLSI chips increases, designers are beginning to rely more and more on automated chip design systems to help layout, route, or even design circuits. silicon compilers convert the functional description of a system to a mask level design of a chip that implements the system. In order to ease the task of describing the system, and to help analyse and verify its working, the description languages are based on algebraic systems. A typical circuit has a number of actions occurring at any given time. So we use concurrent algebras as the basis for the description languages. In this paper, we survey algebras that enable the description and analysis of concurrent systems. We examine them particularly from the point of view of using them to implement systems in VLSI. We therefore concentrate on the basics of each algebra, and omit features that are not readily implementable, such as recursion. We will look at four algebras: trace theory, path expressions, Milner's calculus of communicating systems (CCS), and an algebra of finite events (CAFE). We choose the first three since each has been used in some form of silicon compiler or other automated hardware design s)"Item, and together they demonstrate all the features found in higher level description systems for hardware. The fourth is an algebra that we are developing to address the problems of describing systems of events of finite duration. In chapter 2 we introduce an informal net notation and the concept of observers, which we use in the next four chapters to describe each algebra briefly. In chapter 7, we compare the algebras in terms of their treatment of independence, the type of parallel composition they use, and the inter-event dependencies they allow. We end by explaining the relative advantages and disadvantages of the algebras in various situations. The goal hoped that this comparative discussion of the algebras is to aid in the design of process description languages to be used in silicon compilers

Dirichlet belief networks for topic structure learning

Recently, considerable research effort has been devoted to developing deep architectures for topic models to learn topic structures. Although several deep models have been proposed to learn better topic proportions of documents, how to leverage the benefits of deep structures for learning word distributions of topics has not yet been rigorously studied. Here we propose a new multi-layer generative process on word distributions of topics, where each layer consists of a set of topics and each topic is drawn from a mixture of the topics of the layer above. As the topics in all layers can be directly interpreted by words, the proposed model is able to discover interpretable topic hierarchies. As a self-contained module, our model can be flexibly adapted to different kinds of topic models to improve their modelling accuracy and interpretability. Extensive experiments on text corpora demonstrate the advantages of the proposed model.Comment: accepted in NIPS 201

Ontology-mediated query answering over temporal data: a survey

We discuss the use of various temporal knowledge representation formalisms for ontology-mediated query answering over temporal data. In particular, we analyse ontology and query languages based on the linear temporal logic LTL, the multi-dimensional Halpern-Shoham interval temporal logic HSn, as well as the metric temporal logic MTL. Our main focus is on the data complexity of answering temporal ontology-mediated queries and their rewritability into standard first-order and datalog queries

Colonization of the bovine uterus by Candida kefyr

Abstract Background While fungal infections of the bovine uterus are well-known diseases in pregnant cattle, very limited knowledge exists on the presence and significance of fungi in the uterus of non-pregnant cows. Presence of fungi in the uterine lumen of postpartum (pp) cows has been reported, but little attention has been paid to this as most studies of the bovine pp uterus have focused on bacteria. Case presentation Microscopy of uterine lavage cytology slides of three cows from one herd revealed the presence of numerous yeast-like organisms, which were located either free in the fluid or within macrophages. Two of the cows were around 30 days pp, while the third was 7 months pp. None of the cows had been treated with antibiotics. Culturing of the flush samples was unsuccessful, but Sanger sequencing of DNA extracted from an endometrial biopsy of one of the cows revealed the presence of Candida kefyr (Kluyveromyces marxianus). Fluorescence in situ hybridization examination of endometrial tissue sections of two cows using probes targeting 18S rRNA of the K. marxianus group was performed and revealed the presence of yeast cells on the endometrium. Histology was performed and demonstrated hyphal and non-hyphal yeast-like organisms on the surface of endometrium and in the crypts. Tissue invasion was restricted to the superficial part of the epithelium and although endometrial inflammation was present, this was mild and considered as not being caused by the fungi. One of the cows became pregnant and delivered a normal calf at term, while the two others were not bred. Conclusions Candida kefyr is commonly isolated from milk of cows with mastitis, but has not been reported in association with other diseases of cattle. The infection was present as a monoculture in all three cows, but the fungi had only colonized the uterine lumen and the endometrial surface. Only a mild non-suppurative endometrial inflammation was present, but within the uterine luminal content, many macrophages having phagocytized yeast cells were present. Re-examination of the cows did not reveal a persistent infection, so the infection probably resolved spontaneously