A comparison between e-government practices in Taiwan and New Zealand.

Few studies have focused on comparing the state of e-government in Western- and Non-Western settings, where the political, social, economic, and cultural environments can be markedly different. This paper compares the views of local authority policymakers in Taiwan and New Zealand, in order to judge the sophistication of their e-government initiatives via the formal and informal policies underpinning website development. Good level of agreement were observed between the Taiwanese and New Zealander respondents for the high levels of significance they attached to 3 key issues, which the authors argue are critical for successful e-government: Accessibility, Security and Privacy. Similarly, the policymakers agreed on a medium level of significance for the 7 key issues: E-procurement, Digital Divide, Private Sector, Taxation, Cultural Obstacles, IT Workforce, and Social Effects (and on a low level of significance for E-Tailing). It was concluded that government policymakers in both countries, in an era of commercial online social networking, are continuing to favour pushing(what they deem to be important) information to citizens, rather than creating collaborative service channels with citizens, contractors and suppliers or integrating separate service processes to satisfy all stakeholders. An attendant lack of commitment to promoting heightened (e-)democracy was also noted, especially in New Zealand

Social Support Among Student-Athletes and Coping Strategy Differences Among Student-Athletes and Non-Student-Athletes

College student-Athletes face a variety of challenges and stressors that are unique to their academic and athletic responsibilities, and the types of support and coping strategies they utilize are often different than those of their non-student-athlete peers. For example, Cosh & Tully (2015) found that college student-athletes reported additional stress due to academic and sport schedule clashes. These additional stressors illustrate the need for student-athletes to use additional resources as they deal with their complicated schedules. Yang et al. (2010) found that college student-athletes have friends, family, teammates, coaches, athletic trainers, physicians, and counselors available to them for support. Our study investigated the different coping strategies that student-athletes engage in compared to their non-student-athlete peers while looking at the amount of social support the student-athletes received compared to what they desired. Participants rated their frequency of utilizing various types of coping behavior on a scale of 1-5 using the brief COPE (Carver, 1997). To assess social support discrepancies, student-athletes rated their perceptions of perceived and desired support for each support type on a scale of 1-5. A series of dependent t-tests were performed to determine if there were differences between student-athletes and non-student-athletes in their coping responses. Additionally, we investigated if there were differences in social support by sport type and gender. Overall, we found that student-athletes engaged in more adaptive coping strategies than their non-student-athlete peers. Further, we found that student-athletes received more social support than they desired generally, although individual-based sport athletes received significantly less network and tangible support than their team-sport peers. Future studies could investigate the nature of the difference between network and tangible support received by individual-based athletes compared to team-based athletes

De l'utilisation de ATM pour le calcul distribué

Dans le cadre des calculs distribués sur réseau de stations, le réseau Ethernet reste le moyen d'interconnexion le plus utilisé. L'apparition récente de réseaux dits à «haut-débit» comme ATM semble offrir une alternative intéressante. Ce document envisage son utilisation à travers une synthèse d'articles à propos d'études de performances concernant les communications à travers un réseau ATM. Ces articles mettent en évidence le fait qu'ATM reste sans doute prometteur dans ce cadre, mais aussi qu'il reste encore quelques problèmes à résoudre avant d'obtenir entière satisfaction. Ces résultats sont complétés par une étude de performances locale

Herbicide Evaluation in Arkansas Rice, 1997

Weed control is economically important for production of rice, a major crop in Arkansas. These findings summarize efforts of the team of Arkansas scientists working on weed control strategies for rice during 1997. Various technologies were evaluated in field studies at five locations involving the major weed problems and rice production systems used in the state. Results from these studies will add to the arsenal of weed control options for producers. Highlights include synergists and safeners for herbicides to aid in control of propanil-resistant barnyardgrass; herbicides and flooding techniques for control of red rice and other weeds; and the use of transgenic rice cultivars for broadspectrum weed control. The preliminary results reported here generally warrant further testing for more advanced findings and for the labeling of new technologies, and finally are the basis for updating safe, effective, and economical recommendations to Arkansas rice producers

Tailoring of arteriovenous graft‑to‑vein anastomosis angle to attenuate pathological flow fields

Abstract Arteriovenous grafts are routinely placed to facilitate hemodialysis in patients with end stage renal disease. These grafts are conduits between higher pressure arteries and lower pressure veins. The connection on the vein end of the graft, known as the graft-to-vein anastomosis, fails frequently and chronically due to high rates of stenosis and thrombosis. These failures are widely believed to be associated with pathologically high and low flow shear strain rates at the graft-to-vein anastomosis. We hypothesized that consistent with pipe flow dynamics and prior work exploring vein-to-artery anastomosis angles in arteriovenous fistulas, altering the graft-to-vein anastomosis angle can reduce the incidence of pathological shear rate fields. We tested this via computational fluid dynamic simulations of idealized arteriovenous grafts, using the Bird-Carreau constitutive law for blood. We observed that low graft-to-vein anastomosis angles ( $$40^{\circ }$$ > 40 ∘ ) led to increased incidence of pathologically high shear rates. Optimizations predicted that an intermediate  ( $$\sim 30^\circ$$ ∼ 30 ∘ ) graft-to-anastomosis angle was optimal. Our study demonstrates that graft-to-vein anastomosis angles can significantly impact pathological flow fields, and can be optimized to substantially improve arteriovenous graft patency rates

A Longitudinal Study of Local E-Government Development: The Policy Maker Perspective

Developments in information and communication technologies have been an enabler of enhanced, citizen focused services by governments around the world. Electronic Government, or E-Government, is widely regarded as a disruptor of traditional e-government service provision through greater citizen access, enhanced democracy, improved information quality, and a range of governmental efficiencies. Local government has been a key e-government focus for many nations due to the wide and varied interactions these governmental agencies have with citizens. A gap in the literature exists that monitors the development of local e-government, especially from the policy maker perspective, of This study presents the findings of a longitudinal study exploring the development of local e-government in New Zealand – from the policy makers’ perspective. All local and regional authorities in New Zealand were surveyed in 2000, 2004, and 2012 with the goal of understanding the key considerations associated with the development of e-government strategies and subsequent implementation of associated infrastructure. While local e-government development has been more incremental than transformational, there has been a trend towards greater consideration of citizen-focused issues including the likes of Consumer Confidence, Trust, Accessibility, The Digital Divide, Indigenous Peoples, Security, and Privacy. This offers a degree of reassurance that local authorities remain, and are indeed increasingly, focused on the provision of enhanced services to the communities they serve

PARA++ : C++ Bindings for Message Passing Libraries : User Guide

The aim of Para++ is to provide a user-level C++ interface to message passing libraries, by encapsulating the notions of processes and inter-processes communications into specific C++ objects and streams. Actually, this abstraction level allows to implement Para++ with any kind of message passing library. Para++'s main idea is to add new C++ io-streams to allows inter-tasks communications. These streams support all generic scalar datatype ({\tt int}, {\tt float}, {\tt double},...), plus some mathematical datatypes ({\tt Vectors}, {\tt Matrix},...) in order to exchange data between co-operating tasks. Para++ has been implemented on top of PVM and MPI

Para++: C++ bindings for Message Passing

This paper describes a high level C++ library for message passing applications. Our interface is build on top of \PVM and \MPI. The goal of this interface is to allow a quicker design of parallel applications without any important drop of performances. We introduce two levels of tasks and use C++ streams for communications. We also present a performance study over both \PVM and \MPI to show the overhead of our implementation. Finally, we detail two applications based on the heat equation to explain how our library can be used for SPMD and MPMD applications