Statistical Semantic Classification of Crisis Information

The rise of social media as an information channel during crisis has become key to community response. However, existing crisis awareness applications, often struggle to identify relevant information among the high volume of data that is generated over social platforms. A wide range of statistical features and machine learning methods have been researched in recent years to automatically classify this information. In this paper we aim to complement previous studies by exploring the use of semantics as additional features to identify relevant crisis in- formation. Our assumption is that entities and concepts tend to have a more consistent correlation with relevant and irrelevant information, and therefore can enhance the discrimination power of classifiers. Our results, so far, show that some classification improvements can be obtained when using semantic features, reaching +2.51% when the classifier is applied to a new crisis event (i.e., not in training set)

Blockchain, Leadership And Management: Business AS Usual Or Radical Disruption?

The Internet provided the world with interconnection. However, it did not provide it with trust. Trust is lacking everywhere in our society and is the reason for the existence of powerful intermediaries aggregating power. Trust is what prevents the digital world to take over. This has consequences for organisations: they are inefficient because time, energy, money and passion are wasted on verifying everything happens as decided. Managers play the role of intermediaries in such case: they connect experts with each others and instruct them of what to do. As a result, in our expert society, people's engagement is low because no one is there to inspire and empower them. In other words, our society faces an unprecedented lack of leadership. Provided all those shortcomings, the study imagines the potential repercussions, especially in the context of management, of implementing a blockchain infrastructure in any type of organisation. Indeed, the blockchain technology seems to be able to remedy to those issues, for this distributed and immutable ledger provides security, decentralisation and transparency. In the context of a blockchain economy, the findings show that value creation will be rearranged, with experts directly collaborating with each others, and hierarchy being eliminated. This could, in turn, render managers obsolete, as a blockchain infrastructure will automate most of the tasks. As a result, only a strong, action-oriented, leadership would maintain the organisation together. This leadership-in-action would consist in igniting people to take action; coach members of the organisations so that their contribution makes sense in the greater context of life

An Automated System to Classify Stellar Spectra I

Analyses of stellar spectra often begin with the determination of a number of parameters that define a model atmosphere. This work presents a prototype for an automated spectral classification system that uses a 15 nm-wide region around Hbeta, and applies to stars of spectral types A to K with normal (scaled solar) chemical composition. The new tool exploits synthetic spectra based on plane-parallel flux-constant model atmospheres. The input data are high signal-to-noise spectra with a resolution greater than about 0.1 nm. The output parameters are forced to agree with an external scale of effective temperatures based on the Infrared Flux Method. The system is fast -- a spectrum is classified in a few seconds-- and well-suited for implementation on a web server. We estimate upper limits to the 1-sigma random error in the retrieved effective temperatures, surface gravities, and metallicities as 100 K, 0.3 dex, and 0.1 dex, respectively.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures; to appear in MNRA

The Crescent Student Newspaper, February 11, 2009

Student newspaper of George Fox University.https://digitalcommons.georgefox.edu/the_crescent/2321/thumbnail.jp

Examining the issues & challenges of email & e-communications. 2nd Northumbria Witness Seminar Conference, 24-25 Oct 2007 Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne.

These proceedings capture the content of the second Witness Seminar hosted by Northumbria University’s School of Computing, Engineering and Information Sciences. It followed the success of the first witness seminar in terms of its format and style but differed in that it focused on one topic - managing email and other electronic communications technologies from a records perspective. As before the witnesses were invited to share their views and opinions on a specific aspect taking as their starting point a pertinent published article(s). Three seminars explored the business, people and technology perspectives of email and e-communications, asking the following questions: What are the records management implications and challenges of doing business electronically? Are people the problem and the solution? Is technology the problem or panacea? The final seminar, 'Futurewatch', focused on moving forward, exploring new ways of working, potential new technologies and what records professionals and others need to keep on their radar screens