Pursuing the Peak of Excellence: Wiki as a Knowledge Base

The pursuit of excellent communication is a path not easily navigated. Challenges arise at every turn, and the greatest obstacle of all is ensuring availability and accuracy of information. Help Desk representatives are the first point of contact for customers placing technology requests and they must have a broad range of knowledge about services provided by the department. A large amount of time is spent in training staff members to achieve the desired level of expertise. At Valparaiso University these staff members are students, adding to the complexity of information sharing as these staff members are only employed for a few years before graduating and entering “the real world.” Having a knowledge base is one way to reduce the amount of time needed to train staff members, as information is easily accessible. The Valparaiso University IT Help Desk has been on an ongoing journey to find a knowledge base and after investigating different solutions we have settled on a wiki. At SIGUCCS’07 we described the process of selecting our solution and our anticipated use of the wiki. By October 2008 we will have had over one year of using the wiki, including populating data, keeping it up-to-date, and training staff on its use. Come and look at the journey we have traveled thus far and explore with us the growing potential of this tool as the map of the terrain grows larger with each passing week

Reduce Response Time: Get Hooked on a Wiki

Managing the flow of information both within the IT department and to our customers is one of our greatest challenges in the Office of Technology Information at Valparaiso University. To be successful, IT staff first need to acquire the right information from colleagues to provide excellent service. Then, the staff must determine the most effective way to communicate that information to internal and external customers to encourage the flow of information. To advance the IT department’s goals, how best can we utilize “information” and “communication” vehicles to exchange information, improve workflow, and ultimately communicate essential information to our internal and external customers? We’ve asked ourselves this question and have resolved that “information” and “communication” need to work cooperatively! How better than with a wiki? Recent changes in departmental structure gave us the opportunity to examine our communication vehicles—specifically the software tools we use to facilitate the flow of information. Our previous knowledge base, First Level Support, a module of the HEAT support software produced by FrontRange Solutions, once met our needs as an internal knowledge base solution. We realized we had outgrown FLS and needed a more robust alternative. Our student employees asked for a newer, more interactive method of sharing information. With the assistance of our UNIX systems administrator, we investigated various options and decided to implement the MediaWikiTM system. As we had anticipated, use of this wiki system reduced the response time a customer must wait for an answer to their inquiry. What we didn’t realize was that utilization of the wiki would meet many more needs than we had anticipated. It has also helped us meet other departmental needs, such as increased collaboration, an online knowledge base, and a training tool for staff. Come see how a sprinkle of pixie dust improved communication through adoption of the wiki, and brought information to the forefront of our operations

Google Apps for Education: Valparaiso University\u27s Migration Experience

Many campuses are investigating cloud-based or hosted email solutions. This paper will cover Valparaiso University’s decision to move to the Google Apps for Education platform and our campus migration strategy. Google Apps offers significant savings in both cost of service and cost of support / maintenance while simultaneously offering functionality improvements to the campus experience over our previous system. Valparaiso University was using the GroupWise email and calendaring system and began the process of migrating all of campus to the Google Apps for Education platform in early 2011. Our process began with a student led evaluation team to select the new platform and started rolling out to new students beginning summer of 2011 with migration of existing students conducted from July 2011 through October 2011. Faculty / Staff migration began in December 2011 and were rolled out on a department by department basis throughout the spring 2012 Semester. Heavy promotion and utilization of multiple “Meet Google Apps” presentations greatly enhanced communication about the process and reduced migration anxiety. Apps were limited during migration process to those that reproduced existing system functionality to avoid over-taxing IT support resources. Valparaiso University’s migration process has been refined several times and overall feedback from students, faculty, and staff has been very positive throughout the process

Political Participation and Quality of Life

Theoretical literatures on procedural utility and the psychological benefits of political participation suggest that people who participate in political activities will be more satisfied with their lives because of the resulting feelings of autonomy, competence and relatedness. Individual-level data from Latin America show—in one dataset under study but not in another—a positive and statistically significant relationship between voting and life satisfaction. Variation in desire to vote as measured in Costa Rica, however, suggests that the causal arrow may run from happiness to voting. The use of multilevel models further reveals a consistent—but untheorized—cross-country negative relationship between enforced compulsory voting and happiness. Only preliminary results are found regarding the relationship between some other forms of political participation and life satisfaction.

Living deep-water Lophelia and Madrepora corals in Maltese waters (Strait of Sicily, Mediterranean Sea)

The occurrence of living deep-water corals, Lophelia pertusa and Madrepora oculata, from stations 21-42 km off the southern and south-western coast of Malta is reported. Fragments of living colonies of both species, as well as some large pieces of Lophelia frameworks were recovered from depths of 390-617 m together with the solitary coral Desmophyllum dianthus (= cristagalli). The accompanying biota included the barnacle Pachylasma giganteum, the gastropod Coralliophila richardi, the bivalves Asperarca nodulosa and Spondylus gussonii, and the polychaete Eunice norvegicus, all of which are frequently associated with deep-water corals. The occurrence of the Lophelia-Madrepora- Desmophyllum triad, the large pieces of coral frameworks consisting predominantly of live, healthy polyps, and the associated biota, suggest that coral patches may be present in at least some of the investigated localities, rather than just fragmented remains or isolated colonies.peer-reviewe

A kinetic model describing the processivity of Myosin-V

The precise details of how myosin-V coordinates the biochemical reactions and mechanical motions of its two head elements to engineer effective processive molecular motion along actin filaments remain unresolved. We compare a quantitative kinetic model of the myosin-V walk, consisting of five basic states augmented by two further states to allow for futile hydrolysis and detachments, with experimental results for run lengths, velocities, and dwell times and their dependence on bulk nucleotide concentrations and external loads in both directions. The model reveals how myosin-V can use the internal strain in the molecule to synchronize the motion of the head elements. Estimates for the rate constants in the reaction cycle and the internal strain energy are obtained by a computational comparison scheme involving an extensive exploration of the large parameter space. This scheme exploits the fact that we have obtained analytic results for our reaction network, e.g., for the velocity but also the run length, diffusion constant, and fraction of backward steps. The agreement with experiment is often reasonable but some open problems are highlighted, in particular the inability of such a general model to reproduce the reported dependence of run length on ADP concentration. The novel way that our approach explores parameter space means that any confirmed discrepancies should give new insights into the reaction network model

The Smallest Particles in Saturn's A and C Rings

Radio occultations of Saturn's main rings by spacecraft suggest a power law particle size-distribution down to sizes of the order of 1 cm (Marouf et al., 1983), (Zebker et al., 1985). The lack of optical depth variations between ultraviolet and near-IR wavelengths indicate a lack of micron-sized particles. Between these two regimes, the particle-size distribution is largely unknown. A cutoff where the particle-size distribution turns over must exist, but the position and shape of it is not clear from existing studies. Using a series of solar occultations performed by the VIMS instrument on-board Cassini in the near-infrared, we are able to measure light forward scattered by particles in the A and C rings. With a model of diffraction by ring particles, and the previous radio work as a constraint on the slope of the particle size distribution, we estimate the minimum particle size using a truncated power-law size distribution. The C Ring shows a minimum particle size of $4.1^{+3.8}_{-1.3}$ mm, with an assumed power law index of q=3.1 and a maximum particle size of 10 m. The A Ring signal shows a similar level of scattered flux, but modeling is complicated by the presence of self-gravity wakes and higher optical depths. If q<3, our A Ring model requires a minimum particle size below one millimeter (< 0.34 mm for an assumed q=2.75, or $0.56^{+0.35}_{-0.16}$ mm for a steeper q=2.9) to be consistent with VIMS observations. These results might seem to contradict previous optical(Dones et al., 1993) and infrared (French and Nicholson, 2000) work, which implied that there were few particles in the A Ring smaller than 1 cm. But, because of the shallow power law, relatively little optical depth (between 0.03 and 0.16 in extinction, or 0.015 - 0.08 in absorption) is provided by these particles.Comment: 47 pages, 16 figures, 3 Table