E-COMMERCE: A NEW BUSINESS MODEL FOR THE FOOD SUPPLY/DEMAND CHAIN

The use of electronic commerce for quality control and cost cutting efficiencies by the food and agricultural industries in the United States is the focus of this paper. The food industry engages in e-commerce through 1.) Internet shopping for consumers called business-to-consumer (B2C) e-commerce 2.) Business-to-business (B2B) Internet market discovery exchanges used by food suppliers at any point in the supply chain, and 3.) Business-to-business (B2B) relationships that reduce costs and increase efficiencies in the procurement, storage and delivery of food to retail stores or distribution centers. This third use of e-commerce is the most highly developed and widely adopted. It allows retailers to share information about consumers' purchases and preferences with food manufacturers and farmers and for tracking food products' characteristics, source, and movement from production to consumer. This circle of information allows high quality and consistent products to be consumed at lower prices. This paper is about the development of e-commerce in the food industry, the economic concepts and goals that it meets, and the changes it brings to the industry. E-commerce both fosters and demands vertical coordination. It favors consolidation of firms. It changes the business culture from one of adversarial relationships to one of cooperation and trust. It changes the historical supply chain into a supply/demand loop while it lowers the cost of food. Policy issues arise around monopoly power, privacy, a diminution of variety, and the demise of small, undercapitalized firms.Industrial Organization, Marketing,

E-COMMERCE IN AGRICULTURE: DEVELOPMENT, STRATEGY, AND MARKET IMPLICATIONS

Marketing,

BCBSA Blue Annual 2001

BCBSA Blue Annual 2001

Mapping the Current Landscape of Research Library Engagement with Emerging Technologies in Research and Learning: Final Report

The generation, dissemination, and analysis of digital information is a significant driver, and consequence, of technological change. As data and information stewards in physical and virtual space, research libraries are thoroughly entangled in the challenges presented by the Fourth Industrial Revolution:1 a societal shift powered not by steam or electricity, but by data, and characterized by a fusion of the physical and digital worlds.2 Organizing, structuring, preserving, and providing access to growing volumes of the digital data generated and required by research and industry will become a critically important function. As partners with the community of researchers and scholars, research libraries are also recognizing and adapting to the consequences of technological change in the practices of scholarship and scholarly communication. Technologies that have emerged or become ubiquitous within the last decade have accelerated information production and have catalyzed profound changes in the ways scholars, students, and the general public create and engage with information. The production of an unprecedented volume and diversity of digital artifacts, the proliferation of machine learning (ML) technologies,3 and the emergence of data as the “world’s most valuable resource,”4 among other trends, present compelling opportunities for research libraries to contribute in new and significant ways to the research and learning enterprise. Librarians are all too familiar with predictions of the research library’s demise in an era when researchers have so much information at their fingertips. A growing body of evidence provides a resounding counterpoint: that the skills, experience, and values of librarians, and the persistence of libraries as an institution, will become more important than ever as researchers contend with the data deluge and the ephemerality and fragility of much digital content. This report identifies strategic opportunities for research libraries to adopt and engage with emerging technologies,5 with a roughly fiveyear time horizon. It considers the ways in which research library values and professional expertise inform and shape this engagement, the ways library and library worker roles will be reconceptualized, and the implication of a range of technologies on how the library fulfills its mission. The report builds on a literature review covering the last five years of published scholarship, primarily North American information science literature, and interviews with a dozen library field experts, completed in fall 2019. It begins with a discussion of four cross-cutting opportunities that permeate many or all aspects of research library services. Next, specific opportunities are identified in each of five core research library service areas: facilitating information discovery, stewarding the scholarly and cultural record, advancing digital scholarship, furthering student learning and success, and creating learning and collaboration spaces. Each section identifies key technologies shaping user behaviors and library services, and highlights exemplary initiatives. Underlying much of the discussion in this report is the idea that “digital transformation is increasingly about change management”6 —that adoption of or engagement with emerging technologies must be part of a broader strategy for organizational change, for “moving emerging work from the periphery to the core,”7 and a broader shift in conceptualizing the research library and its services. Above all, libraries are benefitting from the ways in which emerging technologies offer opportunities to center users and move from a centralized and often siloed service model to embedded, collaborative engagement with the research and learning enterprise

Sustainable Paths for Data-Intensive Research Communities at the University of Melbourne: A Report for the Australian Partnership for Sustainable Repositories

This report presents the local project findings with a view to identifying how these findings may add to the knowledge base for informing an e-research strategy for the University of Melbourne. It also provides important considerations for how major Government initiatives in research policy and funding might impact on research data and records management requirements. Eleven research communities from diverse disciplines were consulted for an audit of their data management practices. Researchers from these communities represent a number of diverse disciplines: Applied Economics; Astrophysics; Computer Science and Software Engineering; Education; Ethnography; Experimental Particle Physics; Humanities informatics; Hydrology and Environmental Engineering; Linguistics; Medical informatics; Neuroscience and the Performing Arts. In addition to the specific findings for each group audited, the project findings also provide information about sustainability issues around research data management practices at the university

Addressing Information Asymmetry In The Social Contract: An Archival-diplomatic Approach To Open Government Data Curation

This thesis shows that the concepts and practices developed in the field of record-keeping can be applied to the curation of open government data to strengthen the trustworthiness of that data. It begins by situating open government data in the context of the social contract, which operates through the exchange of information. The thesis develops the notions of the ‘record-as-command’ and ‘data-as-command’ to explain the dialogical but asymmetrical information relationship between the individual and the state, which is modelled as a principal-agent problem. Using concepts from information economics, the study argues that open government data is the latest monitoring mechanism in a long history of government secrecy and openness. This establishes the significance of the curation of open government data beyond technical questions. The thesis then considers how trustworthiness has figured in thinking about record-keeping, identifying three core record-keeping controls; 1) metadata used to document 2) custodianship in 3) auditable systems. To show how these three broad controls have been put into practice, the study examines two examples of record-keeping guidance, one for paper records and one for hybrid records, which demonstrates the application of the three core controls across time and media. The study then looks for the presence or absence of these controls in government datasets published in Kenya and Australia. These analyses trace the datasets back to their source(s), at each step looking for evidence of custodial and curatorial interventions documented in metadata managed in auditable systems. The study’s contribution to open government data work is its demonstration of the value of record-keeping controls in the curation of data. Additionally, the study contributes new insights to information in the principal-agent problem of the social contract, contributes to archival theory and finds a need to foster critical data literacy in the body politic if open government data is to be read and used to correct information asymmetry

Disease diagnosis in smart healthcare: Innovation, technologies and applications

To promote sustainable development, the smart city implies a global vision that merges artificial intelligence, big data, decision making, information and communication technology (ICT), and the internet-of-things (IoT). The ageing issue is an aspect that researchers, companies and government should devote efforts in developing smart healthcare innovative technology and applications. In this paper, the topic of disease diagnosis in smart healthcare is reviewed. Typical emerging optimization algorithms and machine learning algorithms are summarized. Evolutionary optimization, stochastic optimization and combinatorial optimization are covered. Owning to the fact that there are plenty of applications in healthcare, four applications in the field of diseases diagnosis (which also list in the top 10 causes of global death in 2015), namely cardiovascular diseases, diabetes mellitus, Alzheimer’s disease and other forms of dementia, and tuberculosis, are considered. In addition, challenges in the deployment of disease diagnosis in healthcare have been discussed

Cybercrime awareness and reporting in the public sector in Botswana

Includes abstract.Includes bibliographical references.Different authors have reported on the problem of cybercrime and other concepts that are associated with it. The studies looking at the area of ICT and cybercrime are examined and assessed to identify gaps that exist. Nevertheless, most of these studies focused more on developed countries, and did not emphasise on the public sector. Therefore, their findings might not be appropriately applicable to governments in developing countries especially within the Africa context. This study seeks to investigate factors that are necessary to enable the Botswana public sector to properly report on cybercrime attacks. The ICT environment of Botswana government is explored to determine the extent of ICT utilisation in the public sector. Based on the literature survey, a research framework for reporting cybercrime for the Botswana public sector is formulated