A Technology Proposal for a Management Information System for the Director’s Office, NAL.

This technology proposal attempts in giving a viable solution for a Management Information System (MIS) for the Director's Office. In today's IT scenario, an Organization's success greatly depends on its ability to get accurate and timely data on its operations of varied nature and to manage this data effectively to guide its activities and meet its goals. To cater to the information needs of an Organization or an Office like the Director's Office, information systems are developed and deployed to gather and process data in ways that produce a variety of information to the end-user. MIS can therefore can be defined as an integrated user-machine system for providing information to support operations, management and decision-making functions in an Organization. The system in a nutshell, utilizes computer hardware and software, manual procedures, models for analysis planning, control and decision-making and a database. Using state-of-the-art front-end and back-end web based tools, this technology proposal attempts to provide a single-point Information Management, Information Storage, Information Querying and Information Retrieval interface to the Director and his office for handling all information traffic flow in and out of the Director's Office

Platform Evolution: A Study of TripAdvisor

The recent commercial expansion of social media platforms challenges their origin as places of networking and community building and raises important questions as regards their status as institutional entities. After briefly reviewing the literature on platforms and ecosystems, we conduct a longitudinal case study of TripAdvisor. Our findings show the critical role networking and social data have historically played in positioning TripAdvisor as a hub in a vast digital travel ecosystem. At the same time, our analysis unravels the growing diversification of data types linked to the roles performed by different types of actors (e.g. end users, advertisers, business owners, online travel agencies). The shifting nature of these roles and the data types they produce largely account for the patterns of platform evolution and its market position

Report of the Stanford Linked Data Workshop

The Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources (SULAIR) with the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR) conducted at week-long workshop on the prospects for a large scale, multi-national, multi-institutional prototype of a Linked Data environment for discovery of and navigation among the rapidly, chaotically expanding array of academic information resources. As preparation for the workshop, CLIR sponsored a survey by Jerry Persons, Chief Information Architect emeritus of SULAIR that was published originally for workshop participants as background to the workshop and is now publicly available. The original intention of the workshop was to devise a plan for such a prototype. However, such was the diversity of knowledge, experience, and views of the potential of Linked Data approaches that the workshop participants turned to two more fundamental goals: building common understanding and enthusiasm on the one hand and identifying opportunities and challenges to be confronted in the preparation of the intended prototype and its operation on the other. In pursuit of those objectives, the workshop participants produced:1. a value statement addressing the question of why a Linked Data approach is worth prototyping;2. a manifesto for Linked Libraries (and Museums and Archives and …);3. an outline of the phases in a life cycle of Linked Data approaches;4. a prioritized list of known issues in generating, harvesting & using Linked Data;5. a workflow with notes for converting library bibliographic records and other academic metadata to URIs;6. examples of potential “killer apps” using Linked Data: and7. a list of next steps and potential projects.This report includes a summary of the workshop agenda, a chart showing the use of Linked Data in cultural heritage venues, and short biographies and statements from each of the participants

Financial globalization: Unequal blessings

This paper presents a framework to analyze financial globalization. It argues that financial globalization needs to take into account the relation between money (particularly in its role as store of value), asset and factor price flexibility, and contractual and regulatory institutions. Countries that have the “blessed trinity” (international currency, flexible exchange rate regime, and sound contractual and regulatory environment) can integrate successfully into the (imperfect) world financial markets. But developing countries normally display the “unblessed trinity” (weak currency, fear of floating, and weak institutional framework). The paper defines and discusses two alternative avenues (a “dollar trinity” and a “peso trinity”) for developing countries to safely embrace international financial integration while the blessed trinity remains beyond reach.

The Individual Alternative Minimum Tax and the Intersection of the Bush Tax Cuts: A Proposal for Permanent Reform

The foregoing article begins with a critical examination of the AMT, its purpose, policy rationale, and the manner that it is calculated. Next, the article discusses the mushrooming number of individuals subject to the AMT, and the author posits that the AMT, in its current form, is neither achieving its intended purpose nor fulfilling its policy objective given the increasing number of unintended middle and upper middle class taxpayers subject to the tax. Next, the author critically examines the Bush tax cuts from 2001 to 2004, and concludes that the Bush tax cuts, and the fact that the AMT parameters are not indexed for inflation, are primarily responsible for the increasing number of middle and upper middle class taxpayers subject to the AMT. Next, the article discusses and criticizes as inadequate band-aid fixes, current Congressional use of yearly AMT exemption amount increases to temporarily mitigate the increasing number of individuals subject to the AMT. Finally, the article proposes several permanent AMT solutions, which include exempting from the AMT altogether taxpayers with AGI of $250,000 or less. The article concludes that such exemption would not only align the AMT with its original purpose and policy objective, but would also restore confidence in our voluntary self-assessment system by permanently eliminating middle and upper middle class taxpayers from the burden and complexities of computing the AMT

Generation and trapping of a mesoderm biased state of human pluripotency

We postulate that exit from pluripotency involves intermediates that retain pluripotency while simultaneously exhibiting lineage-bias. Using a MIXL1 reporter, we explore mesoderm lineage-bias within the human pluripotent stem cell compartment. We identify a substate, which at the single cell level coexpresses pluripotent and mesodermal gene expression programmes. Functionally these cells initiate stem cell cultures and exhibit mesodermal bias in differentiation assays. By promoting mesodermal identity through manipulation of WNT signalling while preventing exit from pluripotency using lysophosphatidic acid, we ‘trap’ and maintain cells in a lineage-biased stem cell state through multiple passages. These cells correspond to a normal state on the differentiation trajectory, the plasticity of which is evidenced by their reacquisition of an unbiased state upon removal of differentiation cues. The use of ‘cross-antagonistic’ signalling to trap pluripotent stem cell intermediates with different lineage-bias may have general applicability in the efficient production of cells for regenerative medicine

TERMS: Techniques for electronic resources management

Librarians and information specialists have been finding ways to manage electronic resources for over a decade now. However, much of this work has been an ad hoc and learn-as-you-go process. The literature on electronic resource management shows this work as being segmented into many different areas of traditional librarian roles within the library. In addition, the literature show how management of these resources has driven the development of various management tools in the market as well as serve as the greatest need in the development of next generation library systems. TERMS is an attempt to create a series of on-going and continually developing set of management best practices for electronic resource management in libraries

The relationship between retrievability bias and retrieval performance

A long standing problem in the domain of Information Retrieval (IR) has been the influence of biases within an IR system on the ranked results presented to a user. Retrievability is an IR evaluation measure which provides a means to assess the level of bias present in a system by evaluating how \emph{easily} documents in the collection can be found by the IR system in place. Retrievability is intrinsically related to retrieval performance because a document needs to be retrieved before it can be judged relevant. It is therefore reasonable to expect that lowering the level of bias present within a system could lead to improvements in retrieval performance. In this thesis, we undertake an investigation of the nature of the relationship between classical retrieval performance and retrievability bias. We explore the interplay between the two as we alter different aspects of the IR system in an attempt to investigate the \emph{Fairness Hypothesis}: that a system which is fairer (i.e. exerts the least amount of retrievability bias), performs better. To investigate the relationship between retrievability bias and retrieval performance we utilise a set of 6 standard TREC collections (3 news and 3 web) and a suite of standard retrieval models. We investigate this relationship by looking at four main aspects of the retrieval process using this set of TREC collections to also explore how generalisable the findings are. We begin by investigating how the retrieval model used relates to both bias and performance by issuing a large set of queries to a set of common retrieval models. We find a general trend where using a retrieval model that is evaluated to be more \emph{fair} (i.e. less biased) leads to improved performance over less fair systems. Hinting that providing documents with a more equal opportunity for access can lead to better retrieval performance. Following on from our first study, we investigate how bias and performance are affected by tuning length normalisation of several parameterised retrieval models. We explore the space of the length normalisation parameters of BM25, PL2 and Language Modelling. We find that tuning these parameters often leads to a trade off between performance and bias such that minimising bias will often not equate to maximising performance when traditional TREC performance measures are used. However, we find that measures which account for document length and users stopping strategies tend to evaluate the least biased settings to also be the maximum (or near maximum) performing parameter, indicating that the Fairness Hypothesis holds. Following this, we investigate the impact that query length has on retrievability bias. We issue various automatically generated query sets to the system to see if longer or shorter queries tend to influence the level of bias associated with the system. We find that longer queries tend to reduce bias, possibly due to the fact that longer queries will often lead to more documents being retrieved, but the reductions in bias are in diminishing returns. Our studies show that after issuing two terms, each additional term reduces bias by significantly less. Finally, we build on our work by employing some fielded retrieval models. We look at typical fielding, where the field relevance scores are computed individually then combined, and compare it with an enhanced version of fielding, where fields are weighted and combined then scored. We see that there are inherent biases against particular documents in the former model, especially in cases where a field is empty and as such see the latter tends to both perform better and also lower bias when compared with the former. In this thesis, we have examined several different ways in which performance and bias can be related. We conclude that while the Fairness Hypothesis has its merits, it is not a universally applicable idea. We further add to this by noting that the method used to compute bias does not distinguish between positive and negative biases and this influences our results. We do however support the idea that reducing the bias of a system by eliminating biases that are known to be negative should result in improvements in system performance