<p> This study examines the environmental and economic effects of green information technology (IT). Green IT describes two sets of IT innovations: one set includes innovations that are implemented to reduce the environmental impact of IT services in organizations; and the other IT to reduce the environmental impact of other organizational processes. The two sets respond to the call for more environmentally friendly or &ldquo;greener&rdquo; organizational processes. </p><p> I developed and tested a preliminary model. The model applied the resource based view (RBV) of the firm (Wernerfelt 1984) the stakeholder theory (Freeman 1984) and included four constructs: (1) <i>BAS implementation; environmental value</i> conceived in a novel way as the conservation of electric energy in buildings; <i>economic value</i> -- from energy cost savings; and <i>BAS complements.</i> These four constructs formed three propositions: (1) <i>BAS implementation</i> is positively associated with <i> environmental value;</i> (2) <i>environmental value</i> is positively associated with <i>economic value;</i> and <i>BAS complements</i> moderate the relationship <i>BAS implementation </i> and <i>environmental value.</i></p><p> The model was used to guide the investigation of three research questions: 1. What are the environmental and economic values of green IT? 2. How do green IT create the above values? 3. Are other dimensions of value created? If so, what are they?</p><p> The focal IT investigated was the building automation system &ndash; a system designed to conserve electric energy and decrease operational costs. The unit of analysis of the study was the facilities management team &ndash; the implementers of the system.</p><p> I collected data on a sample of six diverse cases of BAS implementations. The cases were diverse in terms of the BAS types, the building purposes, the building locations and the building occupancy and management. Two types of BAS were involved in the study, each with a different level of artificial intelligence: the more intelligent BAS self-reconfigured when changes in setpoints, for example, were necessary; the less intelligent BAS must be reconfigured by an engineer in similar circumstances.</p><p> There was also diversity in terms of the buildings in which the systems were implemented and the occupancy and management of the buildings. The buildings include: the corporate headquarters of a global telecommunications firm; university classrooms; a residence hall in a university; and three multi-tenanted office complexes. The building occupancy and management differ in that some buildings are owner-occupied and are managed in-house, while the others are leased and their management outsourced.</p><p> Data collection involved recorded semi-structured interviews of three sets of users in the organizations: building engineers; chief engineers; and property/facilities managers. The interviews were prearranged and were conducted onsite using an interview protocol. Each interview lasted approximately one hour and was conducted in one session. The data were transcribed and analyzed in Nvivo 10.</p><p> The findings showed support for the presence of the four constructs within the preliminary model as well as for the three propositions in the preliminary model. The data also revealed contextual details of the <i>BAS implementation </i> and <i>BAS complements</i> constructs. There were also new dimensions value including: unanticipated types of economic value (including savings from reduced labor demand; social value (comfort and safety for building occupants); and <i>strategic value</i> (knowledge used to position the organizations for greater efficiency and effectiveness). Overall, the value outcomes of the implementations can be summarized as short term social, environmental and economic value as well as strategic value &ndash; consistent with the concept of <i>sustainable value</i> defined by Hart et al. (1995).</p><p> Also, consistent with Zuboff&rsquo;s (1985) description of the duality of intelligent IT systems -- the ability to <i>informate</i> and <i> automate,</i> the BAS implementation construct was found to include two distinct sources of value: <i>equipment automation;</i> and <i> equipment</i> information. The unanticipated value dimensions and types, as well as the sources of value were used to refine the research model.</p><p> The study therefore a preliminary theoretical model &ndash; the <i> resource based view of the sustainable organization</i> (RBV-SO) -- as well as contextual implementation details that can be used to guide future investigations of the value created by intelligent green IT systems such as the BAS, as well as measurement items that can be used to inform quantitative studies of these systems. The study also adds to the practical body of knowledge concerning green IT implementations in general and implementations of the BAS in particular, concerning: details of the information value &ndash; for example, for measuring the environmental impact of the system and for substantiating claims in the application for green funds available to organizations; and details of some key complementary resources that enhance value creation within the context.</p><p> Two major limitations of this study are: (1) a single coder was used in the analysis process and therefore no inter-coder reliability was established for the results; and (2) user perceptions rather than actual quantities were used to validate the findings.</p><p> Some future research prospects include: use of these findings to conduct a quantitative study of an intelligent system extended with, for example, investigation of the impact of external forces such as government regulations, environmental issue salience, and market forces on the value created by green IT (such as the BAS); and investigation of the impact over time of the development of the strategic capabilities enabled by the BAS on creation of value.</p>

<p> This dissertation addresses the problem of the automatic discovery of structure in music from audio signals by introducing novel approaches and proposing perceptually enhanced evaluations. First, the problem of music structure analysis is reviewed from the perspectives of music information retrieval (MIR) and music perception and cognition (MPC), including a discussion of the limitations and current challenges in both disciplines. When discussing the existing methods of evaluating the outputs of algorithms that discover musical structure, a transparent open source software called mir eval, which contains implementations to these evaluations, is introduced. Then, four MIR algorithms are presented: one to compress music recordings into audible summaries, another to discover musical patterns from an audio signal, and two for the identification of the large-scale, non-overlapping segments of a musical piece. After discussing these techniques, and given the differences when perceiving the structure of music, the idea of applying more MPC-oriented approaches is considered to obtain perceptually relevant evaluations for music segmentation. A methodology to automatically obtain the most difficult tracks for machines to annotate is presented in order to include them in a design of a human study to collect multiple human annotations. To select these tracks, a novel open source framework called music structural analysis framework (MSAF) is introduced. This framework contains the most relevant music segmentation algorithms and it uses mir eval to transparently evaluate them. Moreover, MSAF makes use of the JSON annotated music specification (JAMS), a new format to contain multiple annotations for several tasks in a single file, which simplifies the dataset design and the analysis of agreement across different human references. The human study to collect additional annotations (which are stored in JAMS files) is described, where five new annotations for fifty tracks are stored. Finally, these additional annotations are analyzed, confirming the problem of having ground-truth datasets with a single annotator per track due to the high degree of disagreement among annotators for the challenging tracks. To alleviate this, these annotations are merged to produce a more robust human reference annotation. Lastly, the standard F-measure of the hit rate measure to evaluate music segmentation is analyzed when access to additional annotations is not possible, and it is shown, via multiple human studies, that precision seems more perceptually relevant than recall.</p>

This thesis deals with the representation of emblem literature in digital media in the modern age. A discussion of issues related to new media such as the advantages and disadvantages of digital media as well as copyright issues is presented. There follows a discussion of different technologies related to modern means of publishing, notably Acrobat technology, HTML, XHTML, and XML, and how they could be best used to serve the goal of dealing with emblems by means of digital media. A discussion of digitizing and indexing emblems as well as CD-ROM technology is also presented. This leads to an evaluation of some Internet web sites and a CD-ROM edition. The thesis concludes with a summary evaluating the success of modern attempts of presenting emblem literature in modern digital media.

Despite the amount of literature on the antecedents and outcomes of IT outsourcing, the vast majority of this research has focused on factors at the firm level. Environmental factors such as industry and country characteristics have received little attention. Environmental factors should be taken into account in IT outsourcing research because firms are open systems and their behaviors are significantly influenced by material-resource and institutional environments. Moreover, previous research at the firm level has not evaluated the effectiveness of IT outsourcing and insourcing in terms of how they create value for firms. To address the paucity of macro-level research in IT outsourcing as well as to augment our knowledge at the firm level, this thesis investigates IT outsourcing issues at three levels, namely, at the firm, industry, and country level. More specifically, I expand firm-level research by jointly examining the impacts of IT outsourcing and insourcing on IT-enabled organizational capabilities and firm performance (Essay #1). I also investigate the roles of industry-level factors such as munificence, dynamism, concentration, and capital intensity (Essay #2) and country-level variables such as the maturity of the IT-related legal system, generalized trust, uncertainty avoidance, Internet penetration, and the maturity of the IT outsourcing market of a country (Essay #3) in the diffusion of IT outsourcing practice.

<p> Noise is a fundamental hurdle that impedes the processing of information-bearing signals, specifically the extraction of salient information. Processing that is both optimal and efficient is desired; optimality ensures the extracted information has the highest fidelity allowed by the noise, while efficiency ensures limited resource usage. Optimal detectors and estimators have long been known, e.g., for maximum likelihood or minimum mean-squared error criteria, but might not admit an efficient implementation. A tradeoff often exists between the two goals. This thesis explores the tradeoff between optimality and efficiency in a passive radar system and an analog-to-digital converter. A passive radar system opportunistically uses illuminating signals from the environment to detect and track targets of interest, e.g., airplanes or vehicles. As an opportunistic user of signals, the system does not have control over the transmitted waveform. The available waveforms are not designed for radar and often have undesirable properties for radar systems, so the burden is on the receiver processing to overcome these obstacles. A novel technique is proposed for the processing of digital television signals as passive radar illuminators that eases the need for complex detection and tracking schemes while incurring only a small penalty in detection performance. An analog-to-digital converter samples analog signals for digital processing. The Shannon-Nyquist theorem describes a sufficient sampling and recovery scheme for bandlimited signals from uniformly spaced samples taken at a rate twice the bandwidth of the signal. Frequency-sparse signals are composed of relatively few frequency components and have fewer degrees of freedom than a frequency-dense bandlimited signal. Recent results in compressed sensing describe sufficient sampling and recovery schemes for frequency-sparse signals that require a sampling rate proportional to the spectral density and the logarithm of the bandwidth, while providing high fidelity and requiring many fewer samples, which saves resources. A proposed sampling and simple recovery scheme is shown to efficiently recover the locations of tones in a large bandwidth nearly-optimally using relatively few samples. The proposed sampling scheme is further optimized for full recovery of the input signal by matching the statistics of the scheme to the statistics of the input signal.</p>

<p> The purpose of this study was to explore family caregivers' perceptions of the use of assistive technology to manage care, through secondary analysis of data from the Healthy@home 2.0 survey. An online survey conducted by Knowledge Panel (KP) was distributed via email invitation to those who met the qualifications for the sample. The data was collected between November 22 and November 29,2010. The sample (<i>N</i> = 1, 152) consisted of caregivers between the ages of 45 to 75 years. This study examined a total of 31 questions assessing caregivers' actual use, awareness, willingness, enablers, and barriers to assistive technology. Assistive technologies have become crucial when caring for patients at home. Assistive technologies can help cut healthcare cost by shorter hospital stay and assist the elderly to continue to live independently at home and caring for themselves or with the help of family members. The findings highlighted that most participants are willing to use the assistive technologies despite a high reporting of barriers. Despite some limitations in this study, these highlighted findings will present some understanding into the perception of assistive technologies in the caregivers.</p>

Principals believe that Intech applications are suitable for most administration tasks. They appear to be content with the amount of user documentation provided by the vendor and supplemented by the school board. The principals hold the opinion that while Intech does not threaten school administration jobs, it does not create many new jobs. Support from the governing bodies (in this case, the Quebec Ministry of Education) is limited and budgeting for Intech almost always presents a problem. / There appear to be at least two types of principals insofar as Intech use and application are concerned. The "enabling" principal provides a supportive environment to school staff for the proper use of Intech for administration purposes. The "nonenabling" principal is indifferent to Intech use in schools and actively attempts to avoid any and all contact. The study revealed the former are in a significant majority.

Information Communication Technology (ICT) is used by private sector companies to differentiate themselves from their counterparts. Some companies view ICT as a strategy enabler and through its integration have improved their service offerings and increased production.This study assesses the integration of ICT in the South African public sector. It compares two government departments: the Department of Home Affairs (DoHA) and the Department of Social Development (SASSA). It highlights the investment these departments make into ICT, assesses the level of management at which ICT is integrated, the perception of managers towards ICT integration and the alignment of ICT processes to the departments' core businesses (Information Systems - Information Technology alignment). The purpose of the study is to resonate to managers in the public sector the benefits ICT can bring in their environment and to highlight the value it can contribute towards improved service delivery if implemented appropriately. Simple random sampling was used to gather data. Questionnaires were distributed in the two departments. At DoHA 23 questionnaires were collected and used as sample and at SASSA 34 questionnaires were collected and used a sample. The descriptive and inferential statistical analysis were done and data presented in the form of tables and charts. The analysis of data shows different approaches to ICT integration in the two departments. The Department of Social Development (SASSA) placed emphasis on ICT integration at both functional and strategic levels of management. The DoHA had no clearly defined approach and a level of indecision amongst the employees was observed. The age of respondents in the two departments had an influence in the manner ICT integration is viewed by employees. The younger respondents accepted ICT integration more readily in their environment, the older respondents reflected some resistance to ICT integration. The data presented shows that SASSA had younger employees up to the age of 49 years whereas at DoHA there were older employees up to the age of 60 years. / Thesis (MBA)-University of KwaZulu-Natal, 2009.

<p> The purpose of this qualitative phenomenological study which evolved into a collective case study was to gain a deeper understanding of knowledge retention and transfer practices within an information technology (IT) interorganizational community of practice. The study involved analyzing structured interview responses from six trainee, seven leaders and two government leader participants in the Bermuda-based program who had experienced knowledge retention and transfer within the social environment, as well as an analysis of relevant documentation to identify emergent themes. Eight themes identified through the data were learner, role model, relevance, learning environment, communication, opportunity, networking, and modeling. The research revealed many elements in the interorganizational IT community of practice contributed to knowledge retention and transfer, including the environment, differing perspectives of those involved, personal development of participants, the career boost perceived by participants, and the complexity of the IT industry. The findings include suggestions for expanding and strengthening the community of practice through partnerships with educational institutions, IT organizations, and alumni of the program, in addition to program enhancements and the replication of the program in other jurisdictions, which might lead to enhancing the value of participation in the IT interorganizational community of practice to the constituent groups involved.</p>

<p> Hacktivist activity is becoming increasingly prominent within the cyber domain and society. The boundaries between cyber terrorism and hacktivism are becoming more unclear. Hackers are becoming more skilled and involved in socio-political matters, not only in the U.S. but also internationally. Terrorist groups like the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) have found a venue to voice their ideals and recruit via social media. Furthermore, terrorist groups have partnerships with hacktivist groups such as Cyber Caliphates. This practice has pointed particular inclinations that characterize different hacker groups with different events. For this reason, computer security has become a matter of national security in the U.S. and research regarding political and socio-economic trends as stimuli for the increment on hacktivist activity must be conducted. This research explored the issue of profiling hacktivist groups, departing from the analysis of the hacker&rsquo;s motivation as a product of a political and socio-economic environment. As comparative angles of analysis, the literature exposed empirical and factual information that integrated U.S. and international hacktivist events. The final research analysis proposed that U.S. political and socio-economic trends promoted hacktivist activity. Moreover, the research exposed that the existent relationship between extrinsic and intrinsic stimuli with political and socio-economical stressors (i.e., misrepresentation, restriction of freedoms, frustration and aggression) promotes hackers to act as hacktivists. <i>Keywords:</i> Psychological profiling; Professor Riddell, Hackers; Hacktivist; Hacktivism; Political Hacktivism; Socio-economic Hacktivism; Extrinsic stimuli; Intrinsic stimuli; Cyber Diplomacy; Cyber Constitution; Cybercrime Awareness Normalization Unit.</p>