Information Competencies: Bridging the North-South Knowledge Gap (Mortenson Distinguished Lecture)

Knowledge is readily available in middle-income developing countries through international information repositories on the Internet. However, most citizens from the Southern Hemisphere do not possess the information skills or information competencies to access, use and understand such knowledge wealth. Most economically evolving developing countries have made progress in education in recent decades, but they still lag behind in information use/generation, such as book and serials production. Their educational systems seem to inhibit the development of information skills, i.e., competencies that are crucial to citizens to benefit from increasing knowledge growth or to cope with ever-present technological innovations and the changing complexities of the world economy. The development of information competencies in Southern countries is critical to reduce North-South gaps, where knowledge inequality is probably the most important among them. In this paper, information development indicators are utilized to illustrate the current knowledge status of countries and the significant role that constructivist educational systems play in the development of information competencies

The Knowledge Gap in Workplace Retirement Investing and the Role of Professional Advisors

The dramatic shift from traditional pension plans to participant-directed 401(k) plans has increased the obligation of individual investors to take responsibility for their own retirement planning. With this shift comes increasing evidence that investors are making poor investment decisions. This Article seeks to uncover the reasons for poor investment decisions. We use a simulated retirement investing task and a new financial literacy index to evaluate the role of financial literacy in retirement investment decisionmaking in a group of nonexpert participants. Our results suggest that individual employees often lack the skills necessary to support the current model of participant-directed investing. We show that less knowledgeable participants allocate too little money to equity, engage in naive diversification, fail to identify dominated funds, and are inattentive to fees. Over the duration of a retirement account, these mistakes can cost investors hundreds of thousands of dollars. We then explore the capacity of professional advisors to mitigate this problem. Using the same study with a group of professional advisors, we document a predictable but nonetheless dramatic knowledge gap between professionals and ordinary investors. The professional advisors were far more financially literate and made better choices among investment alternatives. Our results highlight the potential value of professional advice in mitigating the effects of financial illiteracy in retirement planning. Our findings suggest that, in weighing the costs of heightened regulation against the value of reducing possible conflicts of interest, regulators need to be sensitive to the knowledge gap

Closing the knowledge gap in Irish manufacturing - a north-south comparison

Knowledge, however defined, is perceived as firms "key" source of competitive advantage and a central determinant of productivity and wealth creation. The value of knowledge as a competitive asset is not intrinsic, but depends instead on its application, i.e. innovation or the transformation of knowledge into new technologies, products and, or services. Therefore, the extent of innovation within an economy depends crucially on the rapid diffusion of new technology and best practice, which it is argued depends in turn on building strong regional networks. So, knowledge, its distribution and diffusion - particularly through the supply chain - form the central focus of this paper. For some economies (e.g. Finland, Israel) with high levels of domestic R&D spending much of the ''new'' knowledge driving local business competitiveness is created domestically. For Ireland, both North and South, however, historically low levels of domestic R&D spending mean that inward technology transfer - primarily associated with inward investment - has been crucial to recent economic development. This suggests two main questions. First, how does the knowledge transferred to Ireland, North and South, through international inward investment compare to international best practice? And, second, to what extent does this knowledge then diffuse to other manufacturing businesses located in Ireland? A third, and related, question concerns the contrasting experiences of Ireland, North and South, particularly given the very different history of inward investment in the two areas. The analysis in the paper is based on data collected through face-to-face interviews with 94 Multi-national enterprise (MNE) plants in the South and North of Ireland. The relatively high response rates achieved and the fact that the final sample coverage resembles relatively closely that of the underlying population suggests that the sample is likely to provide results which are representative of the whole population of large MNE plants in both the South and North of Ireland. The research findings demonstrate that the potential to transfer knowledge from MNE plants to local firms through the supply chain is higher in the South of Ireland than in the North. Yet, Northern suppliers' adoption of a range of best practice techniques lags further behind their MNE plants than in the South. Therefore, larger average knowledge gaps suggest a greater potential benefit from knowledge transfers in the North of Ireland. Yet, while general contact as part of normal trading relations between MNE plants and their suppliers is more common in the North, contact in the South of Ireland is characterised by developmental interactions such as collaboration on product developments and quality assurance systems. Furthermore, southern MNE plants report having had a significantly greater impact on both the performance and the competitiveness of local suppliers than their Northern counterparts.

On Narrowing the Scientific Knowledge Gap

It is now several years since the scientific knowledge gap was pointed out clearly by C. P. Snow in his Two Cultures

Research alternatives for the knowledge gap

The world may be headed for a perfect storm in the coming years that will stretch human ability to manage the combined pressures of population, climate change and unsustainable economic growth. Despite global progress in WASH significant poverty traps are likely to remain and may worsen in the mega-cities and rural remote areas. Least income Fragile and Conflict Affected States in Africa currently remain the areas of most concern. They exhibit the weakest service delivery pathways but are typically highly complex and challenging operational environments. Lack of hard data inhibits research in this area, which can result in major challenges for WASH programming. This paper presents analysis, reviews probabilistic methods for engineering, and presents a paradigmatic framework for research and knowledge generation, demonstrating that methods and tools exist to underpin judgments and decisions under uncertainty

Fungal infection knowledge gap in Ethiopia

Fungal infections are associated with morbidity and mortality especially in in patients with underlying medical conditions. With the increasing number of immune-compromised patients, the burden of invasive fungal infections became widespread.In any country, data on fungal infection is important to design appropriate programs as well as to plan and implement further studies. A review of literature on fungal infections in Ethiopia shows that there is paucity of evidences on this problem and existing ones focused mainly on superficial and mucosal fungal infections while there is almost none on an invasive or systemic infection [Ethiop. J. Health Dev. 2017;31(2):124-126].Keywords: fungal infections, Ethiopi

Bridging the copyright and licensing knowledge gap

Objectives: The purpose of this project was to examine the copyright and licensing knowledge gap of academic staff to identify their current understanding of, and attitudes towards, copyright, licensing and the open access movement in relation to the content they use, create, and share in their teaching and research practice. The motivation behind this study was to gather information to assist the Library in creating and providing effective information resources and training for academic staff.Methods: An anonymous online survey was distributed to Faculty of Health academic staff at Deakin University. Seventy individuals in the Faculty of Health completed the survey.Results: The results suggested that most of the academics have used content created by others in their teaching materials, but they are not confident about complying with copyright or licensing conditions whilst doing so. Most had not posted any of their own content online, but would generally be willing for it to be used by others, with attribution. Around half had never posted their published articles in an institutional or discipline repository, but again, would be willing for them to be used for educational purposes. Most academics have never shared their research data online, and some were very unwilling to do so - despite current pushes to broaden access to research data sets. Finally, most had never applied a Creative Commons licence to a piece of work, and over half were unaware of what rights they had retained under publishing agreements for their work. It was strongly indicated that an informational website would be very helpful in providing guidance around topics of copyright, licensing and sharing. Conclusions: Results were largely consistent with other similar studies conducted around these topics. There is a clear role for librarians to continue providing such training and resources as the push for Open Access resources, publishing, and data only gains momentum

THE KNOWLEDGE-GAP REDUCTION IN SOFTWARE ENGINEERING

Many papers proposed in the software engineering and information systems literature are dedicated to analysis of software projects missing their schedules, exceeding their budgets, delivering software products with poor quality and in some cases even wrong functionality. The expression “software crisis” has been coined since the late 60’s to illustrate this phenomenon. Various solutions has been proposed by academics and practitioners in order to deal with the software crisis, counter these trends and improve productivity and software quality. Such solutions recommend software process improvement as the best way to build software products needed by modern organizations. Among the well-known solutions, many are based either on software development tools or on software development approaches, methods, processes, and notations. Nevertheless, the scope of these solutions seems to be limited and the improvements they provide are often not significant. We think that since software artifacts are accumulation of knowledge owned by organizational stakeholders, the software crisis is due to a knowledge gap between resulting from the discrepancy between the knowledge integrated in software systems and the knowledge owned by organizational actors. In particular, integrating knowledge management in software development process permits reducing the knowledge gap through building software products which reflect at least partly the organization’s know-how. In this paper, we propose a framework which provides a definition of knowledge based on information systems architecture and describes how to deal with the knowledge gap of a knowledge oriented software development process which may help organizations in reducing the software crisis impacts