On the Driving Forces of Diffusion of Podcasting in Organizational Settings: A Case Study and Propositions

More and more organizations are integrating Web 2.0 technologies to enhance their organizational learning abilities. However, relatively little attention has been paid to the use of Web 2.0 technologies in organizational settings. This research attempts to understand what drives a person’s use of Web 2.0 technology in organizational settings. To achieve this objective, we conducted a case study on a specific Web 2.0 technology, podcasting, in a global company to understand what factors influence employees’ perceived usefulness of podcasting. Four factors were identified as having important influence in shaping their usefulness perceptions: information overload, tenure, information privacy, and information relevance. A set of propositions regarding the relationships was also developed

Breakdown Characteristics of Varistor Ceramics

Breakdown characteristics are of great importance for varistor ceramics, which largely depend on Schottky barriers at grain boundaries. In order to enhance breakdown performance for meeting the requirement of device miniaturization, different doping methods are introduced to not only restrict grain size from additional phase but also manipulate defect structure of Schottky barrier at grain boundaries from substitution. Distribution of barriers is another key point affecting breakdown characteristics in varistor ceramics. Dimensional effect, which is detected in not only ZnO ceramics but also CaCu3Ti4O12 ceramics, is practically and theoretically found to be closely correlated with uniformity of grains. As a result, breakdown characteristics of varistors are dominated by combination effect of single barrier performance and spatial barrier distribution. In this chapter, enhanced breakdown field in CaxSr1−xCu3Ti4O12 ceramics, in situ synthesized CaCu3Ti4O12-CuAl2O4 ceramics, and CaCu3Ti4O12-Y2/3Cu3Ti4O12 composite ceramics are investigated from the aspect of Schottky barriers at grain boundaries. In addition, dimensional effect is found in both ZnO and CaCu3Ti4O12 ceramics, which are investigated from grain size distribution through theoretical and experimental analysis

Seismic demand for eccentric wall structures subjected to velocity pulse-like ground motions

The elastic and inelastic seismic demand of shear wall structures, with stiffness, strength and combined-stiffness-and-strength eccentricity, subjected to velocity pulse-like ground motions are investigated. Based on the axial load-bending moment interaction model and eight pulse-like ground motions, nonlinear dynamic time history analyses are conducted to single-story RC eccentric wall structures. The seismic demand is discussed in terms of the displacement, floor rotation and ductility, and the influence mechanism of different eccentricity types is revealed. The results show that the eccentric systems for pulse-like cases experience much higher elastic and inelastic seismic demand comparing to those for non-pulse-like cases. The axial compression ratio has certain effect on the inelastic seismic demand. The stiffness eccentricity is the key factor to the elastic seismic demand, while the strength eccentricity influences the inelastic seismic demand most. It is suggested that the strength eccentricity be added as a parameter in the inelastic analysis of eccentric structures, and the influence of axial load as well as velocity pulse-like effect of ground motions also be accounted in

Object Detection in 3D Point Clouds via Local Correlation-Aware Point Embedding

We present an improved approach for 3D object detection in point clouds data based on the Frustum PointNet (F-PointNet). Compared to the original F-PointNet, our newly proposed method considers the point neighborhood when computing point features. The newly introduced local neighborhood embedding operation mimics the convolutional operations in 2D neural networks. Thus features of each point are not only computed with the features of its own or of the whole point cloud, but also computed especially with respect to the features of its neighbors. Experiments show that our proposed method achieves better performance than the F-Pointnet baseline on 3D object detection tasks

Emergent Decision-Making Practices In Technology-Supported Self-Organizing Distributed Teams

We seek to identify work practices that make technology-supported, self-organizing, distributed (or virtual) teams (TSSODT for short) effective in producing outputs satisfactory to their sponsors, meeting the needs of their members, and continuing to function. A particularly important practice for team effectiveness is decision making: are the right decisions made at the right time to get the work done in a way that satisfies team sponsors, keeps contributors happy and engaged, and enables continued team success? In this research-in-progress paper, we report on an inductive qualitative analysis of 120 decision episodes taken by two Free/Libre Open Source Software development teams. Our analysis revealed differences in decision-making practices that seem to be related to differences in overall team effectiveness