Actualities in logistics and transport

The increasing flow of commodities represents a fundamental component of the actual changes within the economic systems at global, regional and local frameworks. It must be pointed that these changes have not a quantity substance only, but at the same time, a structural and an operational one. The structural changes refer in the essence to the production systems and the operational ones to the transport systems and, compulsory, to the distribution. So, being given this situation, the essential problem is not the origin and the destination of the freight flow, but the way of displacement. New distribution systems appear simultaneously with the production systems, a fact bringing in front the logistics field and freight forwarding.logistics services, ICT - Information and Communication Technologies, 3PL - third-party logistics providers

The effect of new technologies on civic participation models

The development of new technologies will enable decentralization and freedom of communication for large numbers of people, by overcoming the barriers that once rendered direct participation of society unfeasible. The continued development of information and communication technologies (ICT) makes it possible for people to participate in political life. Today, the use of e-tools is becoming a way of adapting democracy to the needs of contemporary states and strengthening civil society. The aim of this paper is to answer questions about the essence of ICT and forms of civic engagement through electronic forms of participation. The author seeks answers to the following questions: How does ICT influence political processes? How do electronic communication systems create the conditions for the political engagement of citizens? Can the use of information technologies have a real impact on participation

Defrauding the Public Interest: A Critical Examination of Reengineered Audit Processes and the Likelihood of Detecting Fraud

In the past few years, most of the major international public accounting firms have reengineered their audit processes to improve the cost effectiveness of completing an audit and to focus on value-added services for clients. The reengineered audit processes generally focus on a client’s business processes and the information systems used by the client to generate financial information. In essence, the new audit approaches deemphasize direct testing of the underlying transactions and account balances. Such an approach emphasizes analytical procedures as the main source of substantive evidence. During this same time period, however, the profession (through the AICPA) explicitly acknowledged the profession’s responsibility for fraud detection. The main premise of this paper is that the increased emphasis on systems assessments is at odds with the profession’s position regarding fraud detection because most material frauds originate at the top levels of the organization, where controls and systems are least prevalent and effective. As such, the profession may be paying lip service to fraud detection, while at the same time changing the audit process in a manner that is less effective at detecting the most common frauds

The Effects of Technology and Innovation on Society

Various models of the information society have been developed so far and they are so different from country to country that it would be rather unwise to look for a single, allencompassing definition. In our time a number of profound socio-economic changes are underway. The application of these theories and schools on ICT is problematic in many respects. First, as we stated above, there is not a single, widely used paradigm which has synthesised the various schools and theories dealing with technology and society. Second, these fragmented approaches do not have a fully-fledged mode of application to the relationship of ICT and (information) society. Third, SCOT, ANT, the evolutionary- or the systems approach to the history of technology when dealing with information society – does not take into account the results of approaches studying the very essence of the information age: information, communication and knowledge. The list of unnoticed or partially incorporated sciences, which focuses on the role of ICT in human information processing and other cognitive activities, is much longer

University of Sheffield TREC-8 Q & A System

The system entered by the University of Sheffield in the question answering track of TREC-8 is the result of coupling two existing technologies - information retrieval (IR) and information extraction (IE). In essence the approach is this: the IR system treats the question as a query and returns a set of top ranked documents or passages; the IE system uses NLP techniques to parse the question, analyse the top ranked documents or passages returned by the IR system, and instantiate a query variable in the semantic representation of the question against the semantic representation of the analysed documents or passages. Thus, while the IE system by no means attempts “full text understanding", this approach is a relatively deep approach which attempts to work with meaning representations. Since the information retrieval systems we used were not our own (AT&T and UMass) and were used more or less “off the shelf", this paper concentrates on describing the modifications made to our existing information extraction system to allow it to participate in the Q & A task

Footprints of information foragers: Behaviour semantics of visual exploration

Social navigation exploits the knowledge and experience of peer users of information resources. A wide variety of visual–spatial approaches become increasingly popular as a means to optimize information access as well as to foster and sustain a virtual community among geographically distributed users. An information landscape is among the most appealing design options of representing and communicating the essence of distributed information resources to users. A fundamental and challenging issue is how an information landscape can be designed such that it will not only preserve the essence of the underlying information structure, but also accommodate the diversity of individual users. The majority of research in social navigation has been focusing on how to extract useful information from what is in common between users' profiles, their interests and preferences. In this article, we explore the role of modelling sequential behaviour patterns of users in augmenting social navigation in thematic landscapes. In particular, we compare and analyse the trails of individual users in thematic spaces along with their cognitive ability measures. We are interested in whether such trails can provide useful guidance for social navigation if they are embedded in a visual–spatial environment. Furthermore, we are interested in whether such information can help users to learn from each other, for example, from the ones who have been successful in retrieving documents. In this article, we first describe how users' trails in sessions of an experimental study of visual information retrieval can be characterized by Hidden Markov Models. Trails of users with the most successful retrieval performance are used to estimate parameters of such models. Optimal virtual trails generated from the models are visualized and animated as if they were actual trails of individual users in order to highlight behavioural patterns that may foster social navigation. The findings of the research will provide direct input to the design of social navigation systems as well as to enrich theories of social navigation in a wider context. These findings will lead to the further development and consolidation of a tightly coupled paradigm of spatial, semantic and social navigation