Mobile phone and e-government in Turkey: practices and technological choices at the cross-road

Enhanced data services through mobile phones are expected to be soon fully transactional and embedded within future mobile consumption practices. While private services will surely continue to take the lead, others such as government and NGOs will become more prominent m-players. It is not yet sure which form of technological standards will take the lead including enhance SMS based operations or Internet based specifically developed mobile phone applications. With the introduction of interactive transactions via mobile phones, currently untapped segment of the populations (without computers) have the potential to be accessed. Our research, as a reflection of the current market situation in an emerging country context, in the case of mobile phones analyzes the current needs or emergence of dependencies regarding the use of m/e-government services from the perspective of municipality officers. We contend that more research is needed to understand current preparatory bottlenecks and front loading activities to be able to encourage future intention to use e-government services through mobile phone technologies. This study highlights and interprets the current emerging practices and praxis for consuming m-government services within government

An actor-network theory (ANT) approach to Turkish e-government gateway initiative

There are various models proposed in the literature to analyze trajectories of e-Government projects in terms of success and failure. Yet, only the Actor-Network Theory (ANT) perspective (Heeks and Stanforth, 2007) considers the interaction factors among network actors and actants. This paper proposes the ANT for approaching to the Turkish e-Government Gateway initiative as a case study. In doing so, it provides valuable insight in terms of both local and global actor-networks which surround the initiative

AN EVALUATION OF AUDIO FEATURE EXTRACTION TOOLBOXES

Audio feature extraction underpins a massive proportion of audio processing, music information retrieval, audio effect design and audio synthesis. Design, analysis, synthesis and evaluation often rely on audio features, but there are a large and diverse range of feature extraction tools presented to the community. An evaluation of existing audio feature extraction libraries was undertaken. Ten libraries and toolboxes were evaluated with the Cranfield Model for evaluation of information retrieval systems, reviewing the cov-erage, effort, presentation and time lag of a system. Comparisons are undertaken of these tools and example use cases are presented as to when toolboxes are most suitable. This paper allows a soft-ware engineer or researcher to quickly and easily select a suitable audio feature extraction toolbox. 1

AUTOMATIC SUBGROUPING OF MULTITRACK AUDIO

Subgrouping is a mixing technique where the outputs of a subset of audio tracks in a multitrack are summed to a single audio bus. This is done so that the mix engineer can apply signal processing to an entire subgroup, speed up the mix work flow and manipu-late a number of audio tracks at once. In this work, we investigate which audio features from a set of 159 can be used to automati-cally subgroup multitrack audio. We determine a subset of audio features from the original 159 audio features to use for automatic subgrouping, by performing feature selection using a Random For-est classifier on a dataset of 54 individual multitracks. We show that by using agglomerative clustering on 5 test multitracks, the entire set of audio features incorrectly clusters 35.08 % of the audio tracks, while the subset of audio features incorrectly clusters only 7.89 % of the audio tracks. Furthermore, we also show that using the entire set of audio features, ten incorrect subgroups are created. However, when using the subset of audio features, only five incor-rect subgroups are created. This indicates that our reduced set of audio features provides a significant increase in classification ac-curacy for the creation of subgroups automatically. 1

Electrical standing waves in the HIFI HEB mixer amplifier chain

The Heterodyne Instrument for the Far-Infrared (HIFI) is one of three instruments to be launched aboard the Herschel Space Observatory (HSO) in 2009. HIFI will provide unprecedented spectral sensitivity and resolution between 490–1250 GHz and 1410–1910 GHz. In this paper, we report on the analysis of electrical standing waves that are present between the hot electron bolometer (HEB) heterodyne mixing element and the first low noise amplifier in the HIFI instrument. We show that the standing wave shape is not a standard sinusoid and difficult to remove from the resulting spectrum using standard fitting methods. We present a method to remove the standing waves based on data taken during the HIFI instrument level test, and anticipate the use of a similar calibration procedure in actual flight. Using the standing wave profile we obtain direct evidence of the complex IF output impedance of the HEB mixer