DESIGN OF DIGITAL DEMOCRACIES: Performances of citizenship, gender and IT

The point of departure for this article is several Swedish IT policies that articulate goals for further development of the welfare state, which demand and enable active citizenship as well as enrolment of IT in the performance of this active citizenship. This article also examines the performance of active citizenship in a variety of sociotechnical arenas where people and technology coexist. Does the notion of active citizenship turn out a number of performances when translated into materialized technologies, such as Internet portals and web-based services? The authors juxtapose the policies with a construction of agencies in the story of citizens' design. In the last section, the discussions taking place in the parliament of things are summarized and related to the problematizations of citizenship, gender and IT.     

Health Information Seals of Approval: What do they Signify?

Much of the health information available to consumers on the Internet is incomplete, out of date and even inaccurate. Seals of approval or trustmarks have been suggested as a strategy to assist consumers in identifying high-quality information. Little is known, however, about how consumers interpret such seals. This study addresses this issue by examining assumptions about the quality criteria that are reflected by a seal of approval. This question is of particular importance because a wide variety of quality criteria have been suggested for online health information, including: core aspects of quality such as accuracy, currency and completeness; proxy indicators of quality such as the disclosure of commercial interests; and indicators that reflect the quality of the site or the interaction it affords, such as the availability of a search mechanism. The results of this study suggest that seals of approval are assumed to certify information quality primarily with respect to core quality indicators, aspects that subjects both consider to be important and feel relatively less able to evaluate for themselves (compared with their ability to rate proxy indicators of information or indicators of site or interaction quality). This assumption is largely inconsistent with practice: most seals of approval involve assessment of proxy indicators of information quality, rather than direct assessment of content. These results identify a problem that certification or accreditation bodies must address since, unless and until consumer expectations are congruent with evaluation practice, seals of approval will seem to promise more than they deliver.     

Pre-decisional information acquisition: Why do we pay too much for information? Brief report

People tend to acquire more information while making their decisions than a rational and risk-neutral benchmark would predict. We conduct a carefully designed experiment to derive five plausible reasons for pre-decision information overpurchasing. The results show that overpurchasing of information can be almost entirely explained by systematic information processing errors (misestimation or incorrect Bayesian updating), possibly caused by biased intuitive decision processes. Other factors, such as overoptimism about the validity of the new information, risk aversion, ambiguity aversion, and curiosity about (irrelevant) information, play at most a minor role. Our results imply that information overacquisitions are mainly driven by the overestimation of the usefulness of additional information.     

宁夏新农村信息化建设的基本经验与存在的问题

2007年9月,国家信息化工作办公室将宁夏正式列为全国第一个国家级社会主义新农村信息化工作省域试点,宁夏的农村信息化建设也被列为自治区的”民生工程”;2008年9月,宁夏又被列为全国第一个社会主义新农村信息化省域示范点。但是,宁夏的农村信息化同时也存在着一些问题。本文从研究宁夏新农村信息化的经验入手,深入系统地分析农村信息化发展中存在的问题,对于不断完善宁夏农村信息化工作、推进宁夏新农村建设具有重要现实意义。     

信息时代图书馆服务机制的创新

信息时代给图书馆带来了机遇和挑战。本文借用创新理论,从服务观念、服务手段、服务内容、服务模式和服务职能等方面阐述了在信息时代转变图书馆服务机制应采取的措施。     

利用信息技术 推进高校党建工作

随着高校党建工作出现的新情况、新问题,传统的工作方式已不能适应高校快速发展的需要,高校应充分发挥信息技术的作用,创新工作途径,改进工作方式,不断推进党建工作.文章通过分析高校党建管理信息化的可行性,提出高校党建数字化管理的具体建议.     

新会计准则下会计监督体系的改革与创新

实践证明,新会计准则的实施在总体上是顺利的.但与旧准则体系相比,新会计准则尤其是涉及公允价值引入的多项会计准则的内容变化很大,且操作性较差,给企业和会计人员提供了更多的"机会".这种变化对目前会计监督体系提出了严峻挑战.为此,本文提出了更新监督理念、优化会计监督模式、转变监督重点、创新监督方式、整合人力资源等建议.     

试谈分类阅读中的信息提取

阅读理解过程是作者、语言信息和读者等几方面相互作用的结果.如果从作者写作的思维模式入手,进行分类阅读,就能较快地提取有关信息,从而提高阅读理解水平.     

Origins of the epithet ‘government by public relations’: Revisiting Bruce Catton's War Lords of Washington, 1948

While it might make public relations professionals and faculty cringe, the term ‘government by public relations’ is a negative one, implying that governmental decision-making is guided by appearances rather than on the merits. This tag line is a relatively common American put-down of politicians and senior civil servants. This article examines the origins of the term, locating its usage in the WWII memoirs of Bruce Catton, then a government public information officer and later a renowned popular historian of the American Civil War. Catton's use of the term, his 1948 book War Lords of Washington, and his philosophy of government public information are examined in more detail to give context to the phrase ‘government by public relations.’     

The exponentiated reduced Kies distribution: Properties and applications

Here we consider an exponentiated version of the reduced Kies distribution and discuss some of its properties. The parameters of the distribution are estimated by the method of maximum likelihood and illustrated with the help of certain real-life data sets. Asymptotic behavior of the maximum likelihood estimators of the parameters of the distribution is also studied by using certain simulated data sets.