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New measures of test information, termed global information, quantify test information relative to the entire range of the trait being assessed. Estimating global information relative to a non-informative prior distribution results in a measure of how much information could be gained by administering the test to an unspecified examinee. Currently, such measures have been developed only for unidimensional tests. This study introduces measures of multidimensional global test information and validates them in simulated data. Then, the utility of global test information is tested in neuropsychological data collected as part of Rush University’s Memory and Aging Project. These measures allow for direct comparison of complex tests calibrated in different samples, facilitating test development and selection.

This paper addresses the consensus protocol design problem for linear multi-agent systems with input saturation. Existing consensus protocols usually contain certain global information, such as network size or the spectrum of the Laplacian matrix, and this global knowledge is often unavailable to all agents. In this paper, based on only the agent dynamics and the relative states of neighbouring agents, a novel adaptive consensus protocol is designed by assigning a time-varying coupling weight to each node. This protocol has two advantages: it is independent of any global information, and hence is fully distributed; and it is implemented by actuators with input saturation constraints. By combining the low-gain feedback method and appropriate Lyapunov techniques, it is shown that our protocol can achieve the semi-global consensus tracking in a fully distributed fashion, under the mild assumptions on agent dynamics and the topology graph. The results are illustrated by numerical simulations

Communities in social networks are groups of individuals who are connected with specific goals. Discovering information on the structure, members and types of changes of communities have always been of great interest. Despite the extensive global researches conducted on these, discovery has not been confirmed yet and researchers try to find methods and improve estimated techniques by using Data Mining tools, Graph Mining tools and artificial intelligence techniques. This paper proposes a novel two-phase approach based on global and local information to detect communities in social network. It explores the global information in the first phase and then exploits the local information in the second phase to discover communities more accurately. It also proposes a novel algorithm which exploits the local information and mines deeply for the second phase. Experimental results show that the proposed method has better performance and achieves more accurate results compared with the previous ones.

The World Society for Pediatric and Congenital Heart Surgery was founded with the mission to “promote the highest quality comprehensive cardiac care to all patients with congenital heart disease, from the fetus to the adult, regardless of the patient’s economic means, with an emphasis on excellence in teaching, research, and community service.” Early on, the Society’s members realized that a crucial step in meeting this goal was to establish a global database that would collect vital information, allowing cardiac surgical centers worldwide to benchmark their outcomes and improve the quality of congenital heart disease care. With tireless efforts from all corners of the globe and utilizing the vast experience and invaluable input of multiple international experts, such a platform of global information exchange was created: The World Database for Pediatric and Congenital Heart Disease went live on January 1, 2017. This database has been thoughtfully designed to produce meaningful performance and quality analyses of surgical outcomes extending beyond immediate hospital survival, allowing capture of important morbidities and mortalities for up to 1 year postoperatively. In order to advance the societal mission, this quality improvement program is available free of charge to WSPCHS members. In establishing the World Database, the Society has taken an essential step to further the process of global improvement in care for children with congenital heart disease.

Global information is required to facilitate trade, international business expansion, research and for international comparisons. The amount of data available varies in what exists, its age and its accuracy. Information from one area may not be comparable with that from another. The global searcher needs to consider these points and why information may be findable, prior to searching. Anticipating such issues can aid the search approach – whether via a local search engine or by going directly to a range of websites holding relevant data. Global and national information can come from supranational bodies, governments, public and private sector organizations as well as specialist sites. Some information sources will require payment or a subscription to gain access.

This article shares the experiences of Novo Nordisk Global Information & Analysis’ efforts within virtual training. Virtual training is live training in a virtual classroom and focuses on engaging participants through exercises and peer-to-peer learning. Virtual training can be an efficient tool for information professionals to reach their end users globally and cut costs at the same time. However, it also poses some challenges, which demand that information professionals consider competency development, understanding of the virtual classroom and virtual etiquette.

Classifying documents to a large-scale web taxonomy is a challenging research problem because of a large number of categories and associated documents in the taxonomy. The state-of-the-art solution known as the narrow-down approach utilizes a search engine to reduce an entire category hierarchy to most relevant categories and selects the best one among them using a classifier. In a recent language modelling approach, top-level category information (or global information) was used in judging the appropriateness of a local category, which led to performance improvements. However, we observe that using global information has a limited influence on the final category selection under some conditions. First, global information may be inaccurate even though it is generated by a top-level category classifier using an entire hierarchy. Second, it has little influence when two competing categories share the same top-level category or when the local category information has too strong an influence on the final category selection. To resolve the limitations, in this paper, we propose two external methods: (1) a meta-classifier with novel dependency features among top-level categories based on an ensemble learning framework; and (2) a query modification model based on a statistical feedback method to improve the query document representation instead of just juggling with information in the hierarchy. Our methods were evaluated using the Open Directory Project test collection.

Adaptive guaranteed-performance formation analysis and design problems for second-order multi-agent systems are studied, where the global information is not required, which means the main results of this article are fully distributed. First, an adaptive guaranteed-performance formation control protocol is presented for second-order multi-agent systems, where the control input is constructed using neighboring state errors and adaptively adjustable interaction weights. Then, an adaptive guaranteed-performance formation control is proposed based on Riccati inequalities. Furthermore, the guaranteed-performance cost is determined and the adjusting approach of the formation control gain is presented in terms of linear matrix inequalities. Finally, a numerical simulation is provided to demonstrate the effectiveness of the theoretical results.

Bridging the gap of the digital divide can play an important role in education, employment and economic growth of any country. The present study attempts to examine and analyze the digital divide status of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) countries compared with countries of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) and other Arab countries. It uses 19 indicators of four factors adapted from The Global Information Technology Report 2009–2010 to measure the digital divide. Findings of the study indicated that GCC countries have a better ICT infrastructure than the ASEAN and other Arab countries. Similarly, the results of the study revealed that GCC nations have more ICT users than the ASEAN and other Arab countries. However, the study found no significant differences among these groups of countries in regard to government support and usage of ICT. Findings of the Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) show that, across the three groups of countries, the influence of ICT infrastructure is consistently significant in narrowing the digital divide. The regression results also prove a significant relationship between government support for ICT and government usage of ICT.

Local, as opposed to global, perceptual bias has been linked to a lesser ability to attend globally. We examined this proposed link in Himba observers, members of a remote Namibian population who have demonstrated a strong local bias compared with British observers. If local perceptual bias is related to a lesser ability to attend globally, Himba observers, relative to British observers, should be less distracted by global information when performing a local-selection task but more distracted by local information when performing a global-selection task. However, Himba observers performed better than British observers did on both a local-selection task and a global-selection task (both of which used local/global hierarchical figures as stimuli), which suggests that they possessed greater control over attentional selection in response to task demands. We conclude that local and global perceptual biases must be distinguished from local and global selective attention.

The perception of visual illusions is a powerful diagnostic of implicit integration of global information. Many illusions occur when length, size, orientation, or luminance are misjudged because neighboring visuospatial information cannot be ignored. We asked if people with Williams syndrome (WS), a rare genetic disorder that results in severely impaired global visuospatial construction abilities, are also susceptible to the context of visual illusions. Remarkably, we found that illusions influenced WS individuals to the same degree as normal adults, although size discrimination was somewhat impaired in WS. Our results are evidence that illusions are a consequence of the brain's bias to implicitly integrate visual information, even in a population known to have difficulty in explicitly representing spatial relationships among objects. Moreover, these results suggest that implicit and non-implicit integration of spatial information have different vulnerabilities in abnormal development.

This article gives a detailed encyclopedic overview of the many areas and concepts that fall within the domain of information ethics. Thus, it offers brief synoptic remarks on, for example, privacy and peer review, rather than in-depth discussions of these topics, many of which have generated thousands of studies, articles, and monographic treatments.

This essay is an account of the artist's practice-based research into geometry, optics and drafting techniques, with particular interest in how these systems are being challenged by global information and positioning systems.

This article explores Donald McGavran's writings for resources that enable mission engagement today in the culture of late modernity. There is, indeed, much of value in McGavran's 1955 classic, The Bridges of God, among other writings. With these resources in hand, the author situates McGavran within the socio-cultural changes of the twentieth century. Adding deterritorialization to people movement theory enables the formulation of a theory that maintains the dynamics of mission within spaces where people are no longer associated with particular places or cultures. If mission stations represent mission engagement in modernity, and people movements in postmodernity, the author proposes practice movements as a viable way forward for mission in global information culture.

This article presents a case for the revaluation of vitalism in sociological theory. It argues for the relevance of such a Lebenssoziologie in the global information age. The body of the article addresses what a vitalist sociology might be through a consideration of Georg Simmel. The analysis works from the juxtapositon of vitalist monadology with postivist atomism. It shows how Simmel drew on the Kantian cognition to develop an idea of the social. Here Kant’s Newtonian atomism was transformed into Simmel’s Darwinian atomism. ‘Form’, for Kant, is the a priori of the cognitive categories. For Simmel form is the functions that constitute the social a priori. The other of form is substance. Simmelian ‘substance’, we see, is understood as ‘life’. We view this in the context of Leibniz’s monadology. In this the monad is simple substance as difference. The monad is self-organizing, conceived on the lines of not the extensivity of res extensa, but the intensivity of res cogitans; the monad is possessed with memory as trace; it is comprised of relations of perception; it is reflexive. In each case monadology is systematically contrasted with atomism. We consider the Bergsonian and Nietzschean impetus in Simmel’s shift from Darwinian atomistic evolution to monadological creative evolution. We compare Marx’s labour theory of value with Simmel’s ‘life theory of value’. For Marx it is labour that makes up value-substance: for Simmel life is value-substance. We examine Simmel’s core notion of life as social substance: as a primordial inter-subjectivity of flux. We conclude with a contrast of such ‘flux’ and flow: of such a flux of ‘becoming’ and invention in contrast to the flows of domination of today’s global capitalism.

Floriculture as a sunrise industry has still not been the fancy of business researchers but as a sector which often marks an entrepreneurial shift directly from the primary sector to high end export, shift in market networking from human interface to global information technology networking and from localized sale and purchase to dependence on complex international logistics, it offers potential for studies in strategic change in a host of economic and management areas. Based on in-depth interviews with floriculturists, bankers, scientists, officials of the Government of Uttar Pradesh, wholesalers and retailers of the flower markets, the paper examines some key elements that mark the transformation from traditional agriculture to export oriented floriculture in and around Lucknow. The paper discusses the basic supply chain models in different kinds of floriculture and the bottlenecks in the rise to the level of exports.

In the globally networked world, strange, unexpected, and sometimes amusing events occur. This article analyzes one such happening with the purpose of understanding how the global communication system affects national cultures. It is the author's hypothesis that the current state of globalization, of which the internet is a major component, imposes a new and heightened level of interaction between cultures. This interactivity changes each culture in many ways, one of which the article highlights: the degree of autonomy of each culture is significantly reduced as a consequence of the global information network.

The following article provides an overview of the moves to reform Japanese education and stake a place in the global information technology revolution and of the current state of information and communications technology (ICT) in Japanese higher education. It discusses recently introduced educational policies regarding the regulation and promotion of multimedia and ICT in Japanese universities, some of the activities in progress, and the factors encouraging and inhibiting new forms of technology-based teaching and learning and the sharing of knowledge and wisdom worldwide.

The effects of five item selection rules—Fisher information (FI), Fisher interval information (FII), Fisher information with a posterior distribution (FIP), Kullback-Leibler information (KL), and Kullback-Leibler information with a posterior distribution (KLP)—were compared with respect to the efficiency and precision of trait (Θ) estimation at the early stages of computerized adaptive testing (CAT). FII, FIP, KL, and KLP performed marginally better than FI at the early stages of CAT for Θ= -3 and -2. For tests longer than 10 items,there appeared to be no precision advantage for any of the selection rules.

This essay primarily focuses on the possible implications of the final sale of Telstra into the private sector. It discusses the effects of the fierce competitiveness of privatisation on fringe communities such as the disabled and the geographically isolated. What happens in the communications sector has a resounding effect on society as we now exist within a global information economy.

The author proposes a postmodern framework for understanding the contemporary global economic and social/cultural order. Because the origins of postmodernism are so diverse and disparate, the challenge for macromarketers is to capture the key concepts that are relevant to macromarketing theory and practice. Toward this goal, the author specifies five postmodern conditions that constitute the postmodern framework: the sign system, hyperreality, particularism, fragmentation, and the symbolic nature of consumption. The article proceeds to identify and analyze three contemporary macromarketing topics using the postmodern framework: the global sign economy, flexible regimes of production and consumption, and the information economy and informational capitalism. The article concludes with implications for future research and practice.

This article discusses the effects of cultural globalization on urban identities, and concentrates on a case study of Amsterdam. The theoretical part of the paper defines cultural globalization and outlines its effects on localities, including the ways in which the images of localities are transformed in the process of global information exchange. It emphasizes the importance of rapidly growing flows of people, in particular in the form of mass tourism, in the deliberate and spontaneous re-identification and changing meaning of places. The empirical part of the paper juxtaposes the historically grown urban identity of Amsterdam since the sixteenth century with the city’s re-created identity of recent decades. It is argued that Amsterdam’s present-day image as a city with very liberal attitudes towards sex and drugs emerged under the influence of global mass tourism, and that it is not as authentic as is often suggested or believed. The discussion concentrates on past and present cultural traits of Amsterdam in the form of Calvinism, commercialism, morality and tolerance.

Our experience indicates coordination in concurrent engineering (CE) requires support for two types of relationships among decision makers supervisor/subordinate and peer-to-peer Supervisor/subordinate relationships are created by the standard hierarchical decomposition process that is required to solve any large design problem Peer-to-peer relationships arise when teams of decision makers must interact, without direct guidance, to achieve individual and common goals In this paper, we describe a general decision-making methodology, which we call hierarchical CE The emphasis of hierarchical CE is to provide support for both supervisor/subordinate and peer-to-peer relationships In addition to the concept of hierarchical CE, we present a supporting agent-based framework in which the preferences and constraints of a design supervi sor are distributed to design subordinates, who are expected to exploit their local expertise within the context provided by this global information A distinct separation between feasibility and value facilitates optimal decision-making by design agents, since the bounds on feasibility do not include arbitrary statements about value This distinction may prove useful for other problem domains as well

The purpose of this article is twofold: to introduce a new generation of the FUGI global model and, using this model, to make projections and policy simulations of the world economy to the year 2000. Global modeling has been aided not only by the development of high- technology computer systems but also it has benefited from recent developments in the life sciences. The FUGI model classifies the world into 140 countries and regions and provides global information about the world economy under alternative policy scenarios. This FUGI model is currently being used by the United Nations for the purpose of long-term projections and policy simulations of the world economy, and it is likely to play a significant role in envisaging the future of global interdependence and corroborating the need for global cooperation.

Although millions of people die each year throughout the world, and a large proportion of these would benefit from palliative care services to provide care for dying people are underdeveloped, particularly in resource-poor regions. This article describes the development of an information resource on the World Wide Web, the International Observatory on End of Life Care (IOELC), to provide information on palliative care services in Eastern Europe and Central Asia. The article describes the development of the IOELC, the structure of the resource, and how data were collected. It concludes with a discussion of plans to evaluate the website and to expand it to include other world regions, with the aim of developing it into a global information resource for the development of palliative care services.

The proposals in the Australian Government's cultural policy statement 'Creative Nation' to provide funding to capture the growing multimedia market are considered ineffective. It is suggested that Australia should participate actively in the global information economy, but the current notion of investment in technology as a means of economic and social growth seems to be representative only of Cargo Cultism and Technofetishism.

The experiments reported in this paper were designed to test how global and local information are processed by the memory system. When subjects are required to match a given letter with either a previously presented large capital letter or the small capital letters comprising it, (1) responses to the global level (i.e. the big letter) are faster than responses to the local level (i.e. the small letters), and (2) responses to the latter level only are affected by the consistency between the large and the small letters (Experiment 2), a pattern similar to that obtained in perception (Experiment 1). Such results obtain when subjects are required to attend to only one level with a short ISI between the first and second stimulus, but not when a longer ISI is used (Experiment 5) or when subjects are required to attend to both levels at the same time (Experiments 3 and 4). The results are discussed in the light of a model that postulates a temporal precedence of the global information over the local one at the perceptual level.