Environmental Scanning as Information Seeking andOrganizational Knowing

Environmental scanning is the acquisition and use of information about events, trends, andrelationships in an organization\u27s external environment, the knowledge of which would assistmanagement in planning the organization\u27s future course of action. Depending on the organization\u27sbeliefs about environmental analyzability and the extent that it intrudes into the environment tounderstand it, four modes of scanning may be differentiated: undirected viewing, conditioned viewing,enacting, and searching. We analyze each mode of scanning by examining its characteristicinformation needs, information seeking, and information use behaviors. In addition, we analyzeorganizational knowing processes by considering the sensemaking, knowledge creating and decisionmaking processes at work in each mode

Innovation in the Knowing Organization: A Case Study of an e-Commerce Initiative

This paper explores the dynamics of information- and knowledge-based activities in one ofthe world’s leading foreign exchange banks and its development of an innovative online trading system.These activities are analyzed using the framework of “the knowing organization,†which postulates thatlearning and innovation in organizations result from managing holistically the activities of sensemaking,knowledge creation, and decision-making (Choo 1998, 2002). In sensemaking, project members at thebank were driven by their shared beliefs about the competition, customers and technology to enact thechallenge of building an online dealing system. Knowledge creation focused on filling perceived gaps,and involved both expanding non-traditional capabilities within the group and acquiring expertise fromoutside the group. Decision making at the enterprise level to approve the project was formal andprocedural, while decision making at the operational level was open and entrepreneurial. As predictedby the model, the interactions between these activities were vital. The outcome of sensemaking providedthe context for knowledge creation and decision making, while the results of knowledge creationprovided expanded resources for decision making. The three sets of activities were integrated throughstrong leadership, group norms of trust and openness, and a set of shared vision and values

Modelling the volatility of currency exchange rate using GARCH model

This paper attempts to study GARCH models with their modifications, in capturing the volatility of the exchange rates. The parameters of these models are estimated using the maximum likelihood method. The performance of the within-sample estimation is diagnosed using several goodness-of-fit statistics and the accuracy of the out-of-sample and one-step-ahead forecasts is evaluated using mean square error. The results indicate that the volatility of the RM/Sterling exchange rate is persistent. The within sample estimation results support the usefulness of the GARCH models and reject the constant variance model, at least within-sample. The Qstatistic and LM tests suggest that long memory GARCH models should be used instead of the short-term memory and high order ARCH model. The stationary GARCH-M outperforms other GARCH models in out-of-sample and one-step-ahead forecasting. When using random walk model as the naive benchmark, all GARCH models outperform this model in forecasting the volatility of the RM/Sterling exchange rates

Analysis of the Effects of Technological and Organizational Features on Intranet and Portal Usage

The paper’s purpose is to analyze the effects of technological and organizational features on intranet and portal usage. Technological features comprise common intranet functions such as collaboration, search engine, personalization, workflow and content management. Intranet organizational features were associated with intranet support team’s profile, existence of specific budget for the intranet project and relationship with users. The research model was based on TAM, TTF and on several checklists from intranet literature. A survey was conducted with intranet managers from 98 Brazilian and 70 Portuguese organizations. Factor analysis revealed intranet integration features as a separate construct from technological features. The results showed that many analyzed intranets were at the basic stages. There was evidence that intranet integration and organizational features had more impact on intranet quality and usage than technological features

Risk factors, prevalence, and co-Morbidities of Hypertension in adult villagers in Kampung Tajau Laut, Kudat, Sabah, Malaysia

Introduction: Hypertension is a condition where there is persistently raised pressure in the blood vessels. In Malay-sia, higher prevalence of hypertension could be explained by lifestyle factors such as higher rates of obesity, excess dietary intake of sodium and fat and lack of physical activity. The main objective of this study was to determine the prevalence, risk factors and co-morbidities of hypertension in villagers aged 18 years and above in Kampung Tajau Laut, Kudat, Sabah. Methods: Non-probability convenience sampling method was used to select a total of 210 villagers for interview, anthropometric examinations and blood pressure measurements. House to house and face to face interview by trained year four medical students done using a pretested validated questionnaire. The ques-tionnaire contained data on socioeconomic status, tobacco use, physical activity, diet, extra-salt use, family history of hypertension, co-morbidity, anthropometric measurements and blood pressure. Results: Respondents noted to be hypertensive were 67.6%, and out of this, 61.3% were undiagnosed. There was a significant association between hypertension and family history (Chi-squared test=38.280, p=0.000), hypertension and smoking status (Chi-squared test=7.673, p= 0.006), hypertension and obesity (Chi-squared test= 8.731, p=0.003), hypertension and gender (Chi-squared test=5.126, p=0.024), hypertension and age (Chi-squared test=26.110, p=0.000) of respondents. There was no significant association between hypertension with vegetable intake, fruit intake, physical activity, marital status, ethnicity, economic status, level of education, and occupational status of respondents. Half of the known hyperten-sive respondents have comorbidities with most commonly being dyslipidaemia and diabetes mellitus. Conclusion: Hypertension was found to have a significant association with family history, smoking status, obesity, age and gender among the studied population

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe