Life without value? Voices of embryo donors for hESC research in China

Technoscientifi c projects feature high on the Chinese government’s agenda. The decoding of the rice, chicken and most recently panda genomes have caught the attention of the media and the masses. A no less ambitious plan is the drive to establish China as a key force in human embryonic stem cell (hESC) research. While in the West hESC research has been slowed by ethical and legal debates, a highly permissive regulatory environment has been fostered in China. Achim Rosemann investigates how this corresponds to the perceptions of potential embryo donors

Stem cell clinical trials

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Linking Theory and Practice: Performing a Reality Check on a Model of IS Success

The issue of ‘rigour vs. relevance’ in IS research has generated an intense, heated debate for over a decade. It is possible to identify, however, only a limited number of contributions on how to increase the relevance of IS research without compromising its rigour. Based on a lifecycle view of IS research, we propose the notion of ‘reality checks’ in order to review IS research outcomes in the light of actual industry demands. We assume that five barriers impact the efficient transfer of IS research outcomes; they are lack of awareness, lack of understandability, lack of relevance, lack of timeliness, and lack of applicability. In seeking to understand the effect of these barriers on the transfer of mature IS research into practice, we used focus groups. We chose DeLone and McLean’s IS success model as our stimulus because it is one of the more widely researched areas of IS

SAP-Related Education - Status-Quo and Experience

Integrating Enterprise Systems solutions in the curriculum of not only universities but all types of institutes of higher learning has been a major challenge for nearly ten years. Enterprise Systems education is surprisingly well documented in a number of papers on Information Systems education. However, most publications in this area report on the individual experiences of an institution or an academic. This paper focuses on the most popular Enterprise System - SAP - and summarizes the outcomes of a global survey on the status quo of SAP-related education. Based on feedback of 305 lecturers and more than 700 students, it reports on the main factors of Enterprise Systems education including, critical success factors, alternative hosting models, and students’ perceptions. The results show among others an overall increasing interest in advanced SAP solutions and international collaboration, and a high satisfaction with the concept of using Application Hosting Centers

Estimation of the Probit Model from Anonymized Micro Data

The demand of scientists for confidential micro data from official sources has created discussion of how to anonymize these data in such a way that they can be given to the scientific community. We report results from a German project which exploits various options of anonymization for producing such ”scientific-use- files”. The main concern in the project however is whether estimation of stochastic models from these perturbed data is possible and – more importantly – leads to reliable results. In this paper we concentrate on estimation of the probit model under the assumption that only anonymized data are available. In particular we assume that the binary dependent variable has undergone post-randomization (PRAM) and that the set of explanatory variables has been perturbed by addition of noise. We employ a maximum likelihood estimator which is consistent if only the dependent variable has been anonymized by PRAM. The errors-in-variables structure of the regressors then is handled by the simulation extrapolation (SIMEX) estimation procedure where we compare performance of quadratic and nonlinear (rational) extrapolation.anonymization, misclassification, noise addition, post-randomization, SIMEX procedure, statistical disclosure.

Root Cause Analysis in Business Processes

Conceptual modeling is an important tool for understanding and revealing weaknesses of business processes. Yet, the current practice in reengineering projects often considers simply the as-is control flow and uses the respective model barely as a reference for brain-storming about improvement opportunities. This approach heavily relies on the intuition of the participants and misses a clear description of steps to identify root causes of problems. In contrast to that, this paper introduces a systematic methodology to detect and document the quality dimension of a business process. It builds on the definition of softgoals for each process activity, of correlations between softgoals, and metrics to measure the occurrence of quality issues. In this regard our contribution is a foundation of root-cause analysis in business process modeling, and a conceptual integration of goal-based and activity-based approaches to capturing processes