Information scraps: how and why information eludes our personal information management tools

In this paper we describe information scraps -- a class of personal information whose content is scribbled on Post-it notes, scrawled on corners of random sheets of paper, buried inside the bodies of e-mail messages sent to ourselves, or typed haphazardly into text files. Information scraps hold our great ideas, sketches, notes, reminders, driving directions, and even our poetry. We define information scraps to be the body of personal information that is held outside of its natural or We have much still to learn about these loose forms of information capture. Why are they so often held outside of our traditional PIM locations and instead on Post-its or in text files? Why must we sometimes go around our traditional PIM applications to hold on to our scraps, such as by e-mailing ourselves? What are information scraps' role in the larger space of personal information management, and what do they uniquely offer that we find so appealing? If these unorganized bits truly indicate the failure of our PIM tools, how might we begin to build better tools? We have pursued these questions by undertaking a study of 27 knowledge workers. In our findings we describe information scraps from several angles: their content, their location, and the factors that lead to their use, which we identify as ease of capture, flexibility of content and organization, and avilability at the time of need. We also consider the personal emotive responses around scrap management. We present a set of design considerations that we have derived from the analysis of our study results. We present our work on an application platform, jourknow, to test some of these design and usability findings

IETF standardization in the field of the Internet of Things (IoT): a survey

Smart embedded objects will become an important part of what is called the Internet of Things. However, the integration of embedded devices into the Internet introduces several challenges, since many of the existing Internet technologies and protocols were not designed for this class of devices. In the past few years, there have been many efforts to enable the extension of Internet technologies to constrained devices. Initially, this resulted in proprietary protocols and architectures. Later, the integration of constrained devices into the Internet was embraced by IETF, moving towards standardized IP-based protocols. In this paper, we will briefly review the history of integrating constrained devices into the Internet, followed by an extensive overview of IETF standardization work in the 6LoWPAN, ROLL and CoRE working groups. This is complemented with a broad overview of related research results that illustrate how this work can be extended or used to tackle other problems and with a discussion on open issues and challenges. As such the aim of this paper is twofold: apart from giving readers solid insights in IETF standardization work on the Internet of Things, it also aims to encourage readers to further explore the world of Internet-connected objects, pointing to future research opportunities

The Design of a Distributed Database for Doctoral Studies Management

This paper aims to create a system that manages doctoral school requirements. The management of doctoral school implies administration of information like PhD personal information, Supervisors, Teachers, and other information that may be useful. We will debate on distributed database term as the proposed database project will have the same structure for four universities. Each university will be able to work on this database by accessing its own set of data and properly using the information received. This project will track the creation of a database to manage all the information needed and provide answers using these data.Distributed Database, Fragmentation, Top-Down Design Process

Institutional Analysis of Financial Market Fragmentation in Sub-Saharan Africa: A Risk-Cost Configuration Approach

financial markets, institutions, risk-cost analysis, sub-Saharan Africa

Institutional governance barriers for the development and implementation of climate adaptation strategies

Abstract In this paper we summarise the main social barriers to adaptation presented in climate literature – the inherent uncertainty of climate change, fragmentation, institutional voids, short term horizon of politicians and policies, and the motives and willingness to start adapting. We have linked these topics to theories in public administration to explore if there is interesting overlap that could be beneficial for our understanding of institutional governance barriers for developing and implementing adaptation strategies. We conclude that there are strong interdependencies between what has been signalled in adaptation literature as barriers to adaptation and what has been theorised in public administration literature. However, barriers in the development of adaptation have been hardly discussed in climate adaptation literature. Therefore we argue that in order to understand factors that stagnate the development and implementation of adaptation policy strategies, existing theories of public administration could prove very valuable. Keywords; barriers; adaptation strategies; institutions; governance

Educational Technology as Seen Through the Eyes of the Readers

In this paper, I present the evaluation of a novel knowledge domain visualization of educational technology. The interactive visualization is based on readership patterns in the online reference management system Mendeley. It comprises of 13 topic areas, spanning psychological, pedagogical, and methodological foundations, learning methods and technologies, and social and technological developments. The visualization was evaluated with (1) a qualitative comparison to knowledge domain visualizations based on citations, and (2) expert interviews. The results show that the co-readership visualization is a recent representation of pedagogical and psychological research in educational technology. Furthermore, the co-readership analysis covers more areas than comparable visualizations based on co-citation patterns. Areas related to computer science, however, are missing from the co-readership visualization and more research is needed to explore the interpretations of size and placement of research areas on the map.Comment: Forthcoming article in the International Journal of Technology Enhanced Learnin