Artificial Intelligence Lab, Department of MIS, University of Arizona / Competitive Intelligence (CI) aims to monitor a firm’s external environment for information relevant to its decision-making process. As an excellent information source, the Internet provides significant opportunities for CI professionals as well as the problem of information overload. Internet search engines have been widely used to facilitate information search on the Internet. However, many problems hinder their effective use in CI research. In this paper, we introduce the Competitive Intelligence Spider, or CI Spider, designed to address some of the problems associated with using Internet search engines in the context of competitive intelligence. CI Spider performs real-time collection of Web pages from sites specified by the user and applies indexing and categorization analysis on the documents collected, thus providing the user with an up-to-date, comprehensive view of the Web sites of user interest. In this paper, we report on the design of the CI Spider system and on a user study of CI Spider, which compares CI Spider with two other alternative focused information gathering methods: Lycos search constrained by Internet domain, and manual within-site browsing and searching. Our study indicates that CI Spider has better precision and recall rate than Lycos. CI Spider also outperforms both Lycos and within-site browsing and searching with respect to ease of use. We conclude that there exists strong evidence in support of the potentially significant value of applying the CI Spider approach in CI applications.

Papers from the 17th ASIST&T Special Interest Group for Classification Research Workshop. The workshop ran November 4, 2006 in Austin, Texas.

Published by the U.S. National Institute on Aging and the National Library of Medicine / This fifteen-page pamphlet includes recommendations regarding designing readable text, presenting information to older adults, improving Web site navigation, and incorporating media into Web sites. A list of references and additional readings is included.

This article discusses Web search engines; mainly the challenges in indexing the World Wide Web, the user behaviour, and the ranking factors used by these engines. Ranking factors are divided into query-dependent and query-independent factors, the latter of which have become more and more important within recent years. The possibilities of these factors are limited, mainly of those that are based on the widely used link popularity measures. The article concludes with an overview of factors that should be considered to determine the quality of Web search engines.

5 pp. / Realizing that the Arizona citrus industry might someday have to deal with widespread ACP control, the Arizona Citrus Research Council approved a trip to Florida and Texas to investigate how ACP control was accomplished in those two states. The trips were to McAllen, Texas on 9-12 Nov 2011 and to Immokalee Florida on 17-18 Nov. 2011. In McAllen, I interviewed Dr. Mamoudou Setamou, extension entomologist for Texas A&M – Kingsville and his staff, and Mr. Ray Prewitt, president of Texas Citrus Mutual. In Florida, I interviewed Mr. Ron Hamel, manager of the Gulf Citrus Growers, and Dr. Mongi Zekri, southwest Florida Multi-County Citrus Agent, housed at the Hendry County Extension Office in LaBelle., FL. The author hopes that some of this information can be used in the development of an Area Wide Spray Plan in Arizona.

This study investigated the effect of repeated reading on the reading achievement of middle school students with visual impairments. Using a matched subject research design, two pairs of students were matched on the following variables: reading level, reading medium and the presence or absence of additional disabilities. One student from each matched pair was randomly selected for the repeated reading intervention. The corresponding student in the pair was assigned to the control group. The repeated reading method used in this study required the student to reread a passage three times. The nonrepetitive method required the student to read a wide variety of young adult literature without any rereading of the text. The amount of time engaged in reading remained equivalent for the students in the matched pairs. The students were administered a preand posttest and the repeated reading intervention was conducted over a five week period. The mean differences in reading rate, correctly read words and comprehension were compared to determine if repeated reading was more effective than wide reading in improving reading fluency and comprehension. In addition, the study investigated if the gains in fluency using repeated reading generalized to new text. The results of the study indicated that there was not a significant difference between repeated reading and wide reading on reading rate, correctly read words or comprehension. In addition, the students who participated in the repeated reading showed a gain in fluency when rereading the same passage; however the gains in fluency were not transferred to new text. Repeated reading was not more effective than an equivalent amount of wide reading for improving fluency.

This thesis has mainly focused on investigating the effect of communication network on the power system operation. The main objective of this research has been to develop a set of communication network simulation tools and verify their suitability for realistic cosimulation of a power system and an associated data-communication network within a power system simulation environment. Based on a background study, a set of communication components have been developed for the PSCAD/EMTDC power system simulation software, which can simulate communication delay and packet losses. Furthermore, an analytical method based on queuing theory has also been developed to evaluate the communication delay and packet loss probability of a typical PMU-PDC communication network. Finally, the communication components developed in this thesis have been integrated into the simulation of a wide area power system application to investigate the effect of communication network parameters on the power system operation.

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