ENHANCING COMPUTER MEDIATED COMMUNICATION BY DESIGNING AN EMAIL PROTOTYPE: A CASE STUDY

In today\u27s modern world, computer supported cooperative work (CSCW) and computer mediated communication (CMC) are central and most crucial in the activities of organizations and in their success in achieving their goals and purposes. Organizations are established to achieve goals that one person cannot accomplish alone, and the knowledge that is collected by individuals should be reserved for the general use of the organizational community. Now, organizational workers need more than ever to share the knowledge they each gather, and they are involved in joint activities that need the support of information systems. Communication between individuals is at large extent in the form of computer mediated cooperation, and computerized applications ascribed as groupware (group support systems) include shared environments, whiteboards, electronic group calendars, chat rooms and more. Groupware systems support groups of people that work together by facilitating communication between them and by improving coordination. The overall success of organizations is certainly dependent on computer mediated communications that need to be designed to achieve a high level of mutual understanding and minimal occurrences of communication breakdowns. Perhaps the most widespread mode of CMC at work is email. Organizational workers are engaged in this asynchronous communication on a daily basis, having multiple contacts and the ability to preserve exchanged messages in an archive for future use. This study examines the possible ways to enhance CMC among users exchanging email messages in a company named Artigiani that specializes in manufacturing handles, hooks, hangers, and bathroom accessories. We closely Artigiani, and conducted content analysis of email messages. We were particularly interested in the exchanging of messages between customer service representatives (CSRs) and their customers which are professional workers such as carpenters, contractors, architects, interior designers and personal customers. CSRs in Artigiani are in great pressure to respond quickly to emails, and they feel stressed by the high volume of incoming messages, and by the fact that they tend to lose important items when they need them (such as previous messages exchanged, and items that they wish to attach to new messages). In addition, we identified communication breakdowns and misunderstanding that mainly result from differences in knowledge and perspectives of communicators. We follow previous work in CMC that stress the need for reinventing the email client, and put our focus on a communicational strategy called contextualization, which is the activity of providing the explicit addition of contextual information to a core message to ensure effective communication. We present a prototype for an email user interface that puts contextualization as a central component for enhancing effective CMC and for effectively managing and controlling organizational activities, especially the ongoing management of product ordering, and related decision making. examined communication i

A Rational Deconstruction of Landin's SECD Machine with the J Operator

Landin's SECD machine was the first abstract machine for applicative expressions, i.e., functional programs. Landin's J operator was the first control operator for functional languages, and was specified by an extension of the SECD machine. We present a family of evaluation functions corresponding to this extension of the SECD machine, using a series of elementary transformations (transformation into continu-ation-passing style (CPS) and defunctionalization, chiefly) and their left inverses (transformation into direct style and refunctionalization). To this end, we modernize the SECD machine into a bisimilar one that operates in lockstep with the original one but that (1) does not use a data stack and (2) uses the caller-save rather than the callee-save convention for environments. We also identify that the dump component of the SECD machine is managed in a callee-save way. The caller-save counterpart of the modernized SECD machine precisely corresponds to Thielecke's double-barrelled continuations and to Felleisen's encoding of J in terms of call/cc. We then variously characterize the J operator in terms of CPS and in terms of delimited-control operators in the CPS hierarchy. As a byproduct, we also present several reduction semantics for applicative expressions with the J operator, based on Curien's original calculus of explicit substitutions. These reduction semantics mechanically correspond to the modernized versions of the SECD machine and to the best of our knowledge, they provide the first syntactic theories of applicative expressions with the J operator

Designing an E-Mail Prototype to Enhance Effective Communication and Task Management: A Case Study

This paper deals with communicational breakdowns and misunderstandings in computer mediated communication (CMC) and ways to recover from them or to prevent them. The paper describes a case study of CMC conducted in a company named Artigiani. We observed communication and conducted content analysis of e-mail messages, focusing on message exchanges between customer service representatives (CSRs) and their contacts. In addition to task management difficulties, we identified communication breakdowns that result from differences between perspectives, and from the lack of contextual information, mainly technical background and professional jargon at the customers’ side. We examined possible ways to enhance CMC and accordingly designed a prototype for an e-mail user interface that emphasizes a communicational strategy called contextualization as a central component for obtaining effective communication and for supporting effective management and control of organizational activities, especially handling orders, price quoting, and monitoring the supply and installation of products

Growth of GaN films on porous SiC substrate by molecular-beam epitaxy

Porous SiC (PSiC) substrates were used for the growth of GaN by reactive molecular-beam epitaxy with ammonia as the nitrogen source. Improved quality of GaNfilms has been demonstrated for growth on PSiC substrates, as compared to that on standard 6H–SiC substrates. Cross-sectional transmission electron microscopy and electron diffraction showed a reduction in dislocation density and a higher degree of lattice and thermal relaxation in the GaNfilmsgrown on porous substrates. The submicron GaNfilms exhibit a rocking curve linewidth of 3.3 arcmin for (0002) diffraction and 13.7 arcmin for (101̄2) diffraction. Low-temperature photoluminescence showed an excitonic transition with a full width at half maximum of 9.5 meV at 15 K, as well as high quantum efficiency, on the GaN layer grown on PSiC when the thin skin layer on porous SiC was removed before growth