No description available.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Syracuse University, 2008. / "Publication number: AAT 3323071."

The concept of resource sharing has, of late, engaged the increased attention of librarians and information workers, and various conferences and seminars have been devoted to its exposition in one form or the other. The Airlie House Conference of 1970 and the Pittsburgh Conferences of 1973 and 1976 are some of the notable examples of this growing interest. Although these conferences and. seminars have shown predominant concern with resource sharing in the context of the developed countries, the interests of the developing countries have not been entirely neglected as the IFLA/UNESCO Pre- Sesssion Seminar of 1977 shows. The basic motivating factors behind resource sharing in the provision of library and information services are the acknowledged impossibility for any library or information centre to be self-sufficient, and the nedd to co-ordinate activities in order to avoid unnecessary duplication in the provision of the services. Additionally, technological progress has made library co-operation a lot more feasible than it has ever been. These factors are relevant to both the developed and the developing countries and therefore make resource sharing a concept of common interest and relevance, too. However, the developing countries have to adopt strategies that are different from those of the developed countries in the interpretation and application of the concept. This is because in the developed countries, the resources are, by and large, in existence and are available in considerable quantity. In the developing countries, however, the reverse is the norm. The resources are generally scanty, and the supporting services are comparatively weak. So while the main concern of the developed countries may lie in the development of schemes for the sharing of the existing resources, to the developing countries, resource sharing should mean more than that; it should be seen as an essential part of the wider task of resource building. These two aspects (i. e. resource building and sharing) should be considered together to make the concept meaningful to the developing countries. This interpretation of resource sharing forms the basis of this work, and the existing resources in English-speaking West Africa (comprising The Gambia, Ghana, Liberia, Nigeria and Sierra Leone) have been reviewed with these two aspects in view. In addition to individual country assessment, the opportunities for resource sharing at the subregional level have also been examined. For ease of reference, the tables accompanying this text have been prepared separately as Volume Two.

Mobile banking services have changed the design and delivery of financial services and the whole banking sector. Financial service companies employ mobile banking applications as new alternative channels to increase customers' convenience and to reduce costs and maintain profitability. The primary focus of this study was to explore the Saudi bank customers' perceptions about the adoption of mobile banking applications and to test the relationships between the factors that influence mobile banking adoption as independent variables and the action to adopt them as the dependent variable. Saudi customers' perceptions were tested based on the extended versions of IDT, TAM and other diffusion of innovation theories and frameworks to generate a model of constructs that can be used to study the use and the adoption of mobile technology by users. Koenig-Lewis, Palmer, & Moll's (2010) model was used to test its constructs of (1) perceived usefulness, (2) perceived ease of use, (3) perceived compatibility, (4) perceived credibility, (5) perceived trust, (6) perceived risk, and (7) perceived cost, and these were the independent variables in current study. This study revealed a high level of adoption that 82.7% of Saudis had adopted mobile banking applications. Also, the findings of this study identified a statistically significant relationship between all of demographic differences: gender, education level, monthly income, and profession and mobile banking services among adopters and non-adopters. Seven attributes relating to the adoption of mobile banking applications were evaluated in this study to assess which variables affected Saudi banks customers in their adoption of mobile banking services. The findings indicated that the attributes that significantly affected the adoption of mobile banking applications among Saudis were perceived trust, perceived cost, and perceived risk. These three predictors, as a result, explained more than 60% of variance in intention to adopt mobile banking technology in Saudi Arabia. While the perceived trust variable was the strongest influencing factor in the adoption of mobile banking, perceived cost and perceived risk had a negative correlation, equally, with mobile banking adoption. Furthermore, perceived usefulness, perceived ease of use, and perceived compatibility had no significant correlation with mobile banking adoption.

<p>A study of the tree structures developed by Finkel and Bentley (3 & 4) was done and the results are documented in this report. These tree structures, i.e. the quad tree and the k-d tree, were especially developed for associative retrieval. A comparison of the above tree structures and the well known binary search tree is presented for exact match queries.</p> <p>An implementation of the insertion algorithms for each tree structure and a generalization of Aldon Walker's (9) display algorithm are given.</p> / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

<p> Two questions drove this case study. 1) To what extent does playing the online computer game Minecraft at home in a multiplayer environment impact a player's media literacy skills of analysis, evaluation, and access? 2) To what extent does playing the online computer game Minecraft at home in a multiplayer environment impact a player's 21^st century skills of critical thinking, creativity, communication, and collaboration? The study employed quantitative and qualitative research methods (pre and posttest, survey, and interview) using a case study design, enabling an opportunity for in-depth data gathering in a naturalistic environment.</p><p> Using pre and posttest, the researcher assessed whether participants' 21^st century skills changed over the course of a 24 week period. Participants&rsquo; media literacy skills were assessed at the beginning and end of the study, using a pretest/posttest method adapted for use with younger children from the Arke and Primack Media Literacy Measure (2009). In addition, media literacy skills and the Four Cs skills were assessed using a combination of survey, reflective questioning, and interview methods. Analysis of the data shows that participants' media literacy skills did improve at the end of six months of gameplay, and playing Minecraft multiplayer did provide opportunities for participants to practice 21^st century skills.</p>

<p> There has been vast and growing amount of healthcare data especially with the rapid adoption of electronic health records (EHRs) as a result of the HITECH act of 2009. It is estimated that around 80% of the clinical information resides in the unstructured narrative of an EHR. Recently, natural language processing (NLP) techniques have offered opportunities to extract information from unstructured clinical texts needed for various clinical applications. A popular method for enabling secondary uses of EHRs is information or concept extraction, a subtask of NLP that seeks to locate and classify elements within text based on the context. Extraction of clinical concepts without considering the context has many complications, including inaccurate diagnosis of patients and contamination of study cohorts. Identifying the negation status and whether a clinical concept belongs to patients or his family members are two of the challenges faced in context detection. A negation algorithm called Dependency Parser Negation (DEEPEN) has been developed in this research study by taking into account the dependency relationship between negation words and concepts within a sentence using the Stanford Dependency Parser. The study results demonstrate that DEEPEN, can reduce the number of incorrect negation assignment for patients with positive findings, and therefore improve the identification of patients with the target clinical findings in EHRs. Additionally, an NLP system consisting of section segmentation and relation discovery was developed to identify patients&rsquo; family history. To assess the generalizability of the negation and family history algorithm, data from a different clinical institution was used in both algorithm evaluations. The temporal dimension of extracted information from clinical records representing the trajectory of disease progression in patients was also studied in this project. Clinical data of patients who lived in Olmsted County (Rochester, MN) during 1966 to 2010 was analyzed in this work. The patient records were modeled by diagnosis matrices with clinical events as rows and their temporal information as columns. Deep learning algorithm was used to find common temporal patterns within these diagnosis matrices.</p>

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.