Understanding Effects and Determinants of Mobile Support Tools: A Usability-Centered Field Study on IT Service Technicians

The integration of mobile workplaces is a major challenge for companies. First-wave mobile solutions mostly support existing business processes through adding value in terms of increased efficiency. Second-wave mobile solutions comprise a re-engineering of the mobile business processes, add value through increased effectiveness and may even enable new forms of mobility. In order to achieve a systematic approach to mobile integrated business processes it is important to analyze existing processes, focusing on the effects and determinants of mobile solutions that might be used to support those processes. For this purpose we examined a typical example, the field technician support process of an IT service providing company. Our research approach combines usability and process performance issues. The results show which tasks are suitable for mobile application support, which personnel is most likely to benefit from mobile technology and what improvements on business metrics such as labor time, back office capacity, and invoice cycle are to be expected.

"Out of the loop": autonomous weapon systems and the law of armed conflict

The introduction of autonomous weapon systems into the “battlespace” will profoundly influence the nature of future warfare. This reality has begun to draw the attention of the international legal community, with increasing calls for an outright ban on the use of autonomous weapons systems in armed conflict. This Article is intended to help infuse granularity and precision into the legal debates surrounding such weapon systems and their future uses. It suggests that whereas some conceivable autonomous weapon systems might be prohibited as a matter of law, the use of others will be unlawful only when employed in a manner that runs contrary to the law of armed conflict’s prescriptive norms governing the “conduct of hostilities.” This Article concludes that an outright ban of autonomous weapon systems is insupportable as a matter of law, policy, and operational good sense. Indeed, proponents of a ban underestimate the extent to which the law of armed conflict, including its customary law aspect, will control autonomous weapon system operations. Some autonomous weapon systems that might be developed would already be unlawful per se under existing customary law, irrespective of any treaty ban. The use of certain others would be severely limited by that law. Furthermore, an outright ban is premature since no such weapons have even left the drawing board. Critics typically either fail to take account of likely developments in autonomous weapon systems technology or base their analysis on unfounded assumptions about the nature of the systems. From a national security perspective, passing on the opportunity to develop these systems before they are fully understood would be irresponsible. Perhaps even more troubling is the prospect that banning autonomous weapon systems altogether based on speculation as to their future form could forfeit their potential use in a manner that would minimize harm to civilians and civilian objects when compared to non-autonomous weapon systems

Adoption and Impact of Mobile-Integrated Business Processes - Comparison of Existing Frameworks and Analysis of their Generalization Potential

The integration of mobile workplaces in the (electronically mapped) intra-enterprise value chain is a major and still increasing corporate IT issue. Although the usage of mobile technologies for this purpose is far behind expectations and numerous failures can be observed,still little work has been done on theory building in this area. In this contribution we identify and compare existing frameworks for adoption and impact of mobile technology to support mobile business processes. The hypotheses underlying these frameworks are challenged with experiences from three long-term case studies which are diverse in industry, company size and other factors in order to scrutinize their potential for generalization. The outcome is a set of hypotheses that show robustness against variation of major parameters and thus may be suitable to serve as a basis for a generalized and unified framework on mobile-integrated business processes.

Adoption and Impact of Mobile-Integrated Business Processes - Comparison of Existing Frameworks and Analysis of their Generalization Potential

The integration of mobile workplaces in the (electronically mapped) intra-enterprise value chain is a major and still increasing corporate IT issue. Although the usage of mobile technologies for this purpose is far behind expectations and numerous failures can be observed,still little work has been done on theory building in this area. In this contribution we identify and compare existing frameworks for adoption and impact of mobile technology to support mobile business processes. The hypotheses underlying these frameworks are challenged with experiences from three long-term case studies which are diverse in industry, company size and other factors in order to scrutinize their potential for generalization. The outcome is a set of hypotheses that show robustness against variation of major parameters and thus may be suitable to serve as a basis for a generalized and unified framework on mobile-integrated business processes

Usage of mobile technolgies to support business processes

Recently, companies start realizing the necessity to equip their mobile workforce with a mobile solution. But this is not enough to integrate the mobile workforce into the business process. Therefore it is necessary to find for each mobile employee a mobile solution that supports his/her whole range of activities of work. To use the new potential efficiently, a Business Process Reengineering (BPR) is essential. This can be supported by use of the “Mobility-M” that was developed exclusively for analysis and concept of mobile business processes.

Measuring the Value of User Participation in Change Projects - Results from Case Studies in the Mobile IT-Service Sector

Mobile devices offer great potentials for business process change and reengineering. However, realizing these potentials in practice still faces serious problems. While technologies are now widely mature, the problems still lie in the adoption and usage of mobile technology. In this paper, we analyze the contribution of user participation to the successful improvement of business metrics. This paper presents results from five case studies conducted in the IT-Service sector. The paper gives an example of a process calculation before and after mobile tool integration. Major findings include (a) user participation leads to improvements in business metrics and, (b) faster adoption and payback periods

The role of laboratory medicine in healthcare: quality requirements of immunoassays, standardisation and data management in prospective medicine

In the last 10 years, the area of ELISA and protein-chip technology has developed and enthusiastically applied to an enormous variety of biological questions. However, the degree of stringency required in data analysis appears to have been underestimated. As a result, there are numerous published findings that are of questionable quality, requiring further confirmation and/or validation. In the course of feasibility and validation studies a number of key issues in research, development and clinical trial studies must be outlined, including those associated with laboratory design, analytical validation strategies, analytical completeness and data managements. The scope of the following review should provide assistance for defining key parameters in assay evaluation and validation in research and clinical trial projects in prospective medicine

Nonautonomous Spectral Submanifolds for Model Reduction of Nonlinear Mechanical Systems under Parametric Resonance

We use the recent theory of Spectral Submanifolds (SSM) for model reduction of nonlinear mechanical systems subject to parametric excitations. Specifically, we develop expressions for higher-order nonautonomous terms in the parameterization of SSMs and their reduced dynamics. We provide these results both for general first-order as well as second-order mechanical systems under periodic and quasiperiodic excitation using a multi-index based approach, thereby optimizing memory requirements and the computational procedure. We further provide theoretical results that simplify the SSM parametrization for general second-order dynamical systems. More practically, we show how the reduced dynamics on the SSM can be used to extract the resonance tongues and the forced response around the principal resonances in parametrically excited systems. In the case of two-dimensional SSMs, we formulate explicit expressions for computing the steady-state response as the zero-level set of a two-dimensional function for systems that are subject to external as well as parametric excitation. This allows us to parallelize the computation of the forced response over the range of excitation frequencies. We demonstrate our results on several examples of varying complexity, including finite-element type examples of mechanical systems. Furthermore, we provide an open-source implementation of all these results in the software package SSMTool

THE IMPACT OF USER EXPERIENCE ON HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION - RESULTS FROM A USABILITY STUDY

For a large number of applications, mobile devices offer a manifold variety of potentials to improve business processes. However, most projects still fail to be successful with regard to key performance indicators (KPI). There is a growing understanding that human computer interaction is a key factor for the successful use of mobile devices in practice. However, it is still unclear how interfaces can be designed according to the specific needs of a user applying mobile devices in a business context. In this study we show that user experience has a strong impact on efficient human computer interaction. We present the results of a usability study on a mobile tool for IT-Service technicians. The results show that (a) even low experienced users can achieve sufficient task performance with a usable tool and (b) that participants of all experience groups perform better in the field setting compared to the lab

"La 21 Division" - Vodú in der dominikanischen Republik

Schwerpunkt der Arbeit sind die Ergebniss der ethnographischen Forschung in der Dominikanischen Republik. Die Diplomarbeit befasst sich mit den Strukturen des dominikanischen Vodú Pantheons und der rituellen Praxis der Adepten. Ein zentraler Fokus wurde auf die Toten und Ahnenverehrung im afrodominikanischen Kontext gesetzt