The measurement of meaning

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Qualitative Research in Information Systems

Do you need to read published papers? Or are you a scientific paper non-reader or recluse? This book (very thoughtfully) starts off by asking whether you need to read this book—how many textbooks actually ask you whether you need to use/read/buy it? The need for such a book is certainly there, as this excellent little book is intended to help existing readers read, and actually interpret, medical papers better. Current non-readers and scientific recluses may even be encouraged to open medical journals for once! The book provides an excellent practical and pragmatic approach to critical analysis of much of the uninspiring and unread published literature (which often makes you wonder how it got into print in the first place!). There is a systematic discussion on evidence-based medicine and a thoughtful practical section on how to search the medical literature. Despite the age of the Internet and computerised databases, even the most experienced Medline surfer often only manages to find approximately a third of the published material on a particular subject—handy tips are provided to improve searches, to increase one’s gain and to reduce eye strain or repetitive strain injury from a long, tiring session at the Medline computer terminal. The book describes the various sections of a published paper, including appraisal of the nature of the study and statistics for the non-statistician. It then discusses what you would hope to gain from reading a particular paper, including papers that report drug trials, diagnostic screening tests, systematic reviews and guidelines. It also has information on economic analyses and qualitative research. Finally, it gives some examples of how to implement evidence-based findings. Since much of clinical medicine is still not evidence-based, perhaps this goes some way to rectify this appalling state of affairs. I also found the Appendix with a checklist for finding, appraising and implementing evidence fairly helpful. Readers of this excellent book who are like me — struggling to understand much of the published literature and also to produce an intelligible published paper every so often—this book not only helps you read a paper but tries to make you a better paper writer as well. Perhaps my understanding of evidence-based medicine will improve after reading this book, and make me a better teacher and researcher. Perhaps it will make me reject more of the papers submitted to the journal I help edit! At the cost of £14.95, this book is an absolute bargain and it fulfils its advertised aim of being a compressed introduction to the usefulness and potential applications of evidence-based medicine in the clinical setting. I recommend it wholeheartedly as an obligatory read.

How the Read a Paper: The Basics of Evidence Based Medicine

The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature

Information systems development and data modeling: Conceptual and philosophical foundations

The aim of this paper is to introduce and validate a logic-based framework that serves as the underlying model for a recently introduced formalism for capturing enterprise architecture design decisions by Plataniotis et al. Our working hypothesis is that capturing of design knowledge in terms of a logic-based framework will enable consistency checks of the underlying rationales and advanced impact/what-if analysis when confronted with changes. We formalize a set of integrity constraints, which allow guidance of decision capturing during model creation and provide means to perform consistency checks. We apply our formal framework to a practical case study from the insurance sector.

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Formalizing Enterprise Architecture Decision Models Using Integrity Constraints

Enterprise Architecture (EA) languages describe the design of an enterprise holistically, typically linking products and services to supporting business processes and, in turn, business processes to their supporting IT systems. In earlier work, we introduced EA Anamnesis, which provides an approach and corresponding meta-model for rationalizing architectural designs. EA Anamnesis captures the motivations of design decisions in enterprise architecture, alternative designs, design criteria, observed impacts of a design decision, and more. We argued that EA Anamnesis nicely complements current architectural languages by providing the capability to learn from past decision making.In this paper, we provide a first empirical grounding for the practical usefulness of EA Anamnesis. Using a survey amongst 35 enterprise architecture practitioners, we test the perceived usefulness of EA Anamnesis concepts, and compare this to their current uptake in practice. Results indicate that while many EA Anamnesis concepts are perceived as useful, the current uptake in practice is limited to a few concepts - prominently ‘rationale’ and ‘layer’. Our results go on and show that architects currently rationalize architectural decisions in an ad hoc manner, forgoing structured templates such as provided by EA Anamnesis. Finally, we interpret the survey results discussing for example possible reasons for the gap between perceived usefulness and uptake of architectural rationalization.

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An Empirical Evaluation of Design Decision Concepts in Enterprise Architecture

Behavioural studies revealed that the dog–human relationship resembles the human mother–child bond, but the underlying mechanisms remain unclear. Here, we report the results of a multi-method approach combining fMRI (N = 17), eye-tracking (N = 15), and behavioural preference tests (N = 24) to explore the engagement of an attachment-like system in dogs seeing human faces. We presented morph videos of the caregiver, a familiar person, and a stranger showing either happy or angry facial expressions. Regardless of emotion, viewing the caregiver activated brain regions associated with emotion and attachment processing in humans. In contrast, the stranger elicited activation mainly in brain regions related to visual and motor processing, and the familiar person relatively weak activations overall. While the majority of happy stimuli led to increased activation of the caudate nucleus associated with reward processing, angry stimuli led to activations in limbic regions. Both the eye-tracking and preference test data supported the superior role of the caregiver’s face and were in line with the findings from the fMRI experiment. While preliminary, these findings indicate that cutting across different levels, from brain to behaviour, can provide novel and converging insights into the engagement of the putative attachment system when dogs interact with humans.

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Exploring the dog-human relationship by combining fMRI, eye-tracking and behavioural measures.

Business processes, goals, and tasks of individuals in an Enterprise must constantly be aligned with several regulations, standards, policies and EA principles imposed internally by organizations or externally by governments. Due to the complexity of these documents and their constant changes, it is not possible for organizations and individuals to ensure compliance with the descriptive and textual version of these documents. To overcome this, we propose a principle-based GRL framework which help to formally model these interactions with an extension of GRL and analyze the impact of the principles, regulations, standards and policies on the overall goals of the organization. In this paper, we discuss our proposed framework and then focus mainly on providing a GRL profile for Enterprise Architecture principles.

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A principle-based goal-oriented requirements language (GRL) for Enterprise Architecture

As an increasingly prevalent class of consumer device, pet wearables hold more privacy implications than might be initially apparent. Through analysis of privacy policies, we show that more data are captured about owners than pets-and which data are captured remains vague.

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Dirk van der Linden

Papers

Formalizing Enterprise Architecture Decision Models Using Integrity Constraints

An Empirical Evaluation of Design Decision Concepts in Enterprise Architecture

Exploring the dog-human relationship by combining fMRI, eye-tracking and behavioural measures.

A principle-based goal-oriented requirements language (GRL) for Enterprise Architecture

Buddy's Wearable Is Not Your Buddy: Privacy Implications of Pet Wearables