How has Japan become a major economic power, a world leader in the automotive and electronics industries? What is the secret of their success? The consensus has been that, though the Japanese are not particularly innovative, they are exceptionally skilful at imitation, at improving products that already exist. But now two leading Japanese business experts, Ikujiro Nonaka and Hiro Takeuchi, turn this conventional wisdom on its head: Japanese firms are successful, they contend, precisely because they are innovative, because they create new knowledge and use it to produce successful products and technologies. Examining case studies drawn from such firms as Honda, Canon, Matsushita, NEC, 3M, GE, and the U.S. Marines, this book reveals how Japanese companies translate tacit to explicit knowledge and use it to produce new processes, products, and services.

The knowledge-creating company : how Japanese companies create the dynamics of innovation

The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

Erik Eriksen is a remarkable individual. He has no college degrees yet is Professor of Human Development at Harvard University. He came to psychology via art, which explains why the reader will find him painting contexts and backgrounds rather than stating dull facts and concepts. He has been a training psychoanalyst for many years as well as a perceptive observer of cultural and social settings and their effect on growing up. This is not just a book on childhood. It is a panorama of our society. Anxiety in young children, apathy in American Indians, confusion in veterans of war, and arrogance in young Nazis are scrutinized under the psychoanalytic magnifying glass. The material is well written and devoid of technical jargon. The theme of the volume is that it is human to have a long childhood which will leave a lifelong residue of emotional immaturity in man. Primitive groups and

Childhood and Society.

Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy

Evidence exists that service quality delivery through Web sites is an essential strategy to success, possibly more important than low price and Web presence. To deliver superior service quality, managers of companies with Web presences must first understand how customers perceive and evaluate online customer service. Information on this topic is beginning to emerge from both academic and practitioner sources, but this information has not yet been examined as a whole. The goals of this article are to review and synthesize the literature about service quality delivery through Web sites, describe what is known about the topic, and develop an agenda for needed research.

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Service Quality Delivery Through Web Sites: A Critical Review of Extant Knowledge

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Personalization on the Net using Web mining: introduction

This article describes a novel way of combining data mining techniques on Internet data in order to discover actionable marketing intelligence in electronic commerce scenarios. The data that is considered not only covers various types of server and web meta information, but also marketing data and knowledge. Furthermore, heterogeneity resolution thereof and Internet- and electronic commerce-specific pre-processing activities are embedded. A generic web log data hypercube is formally defined and schematic designs for analytical and predictive activities are given. From these materialised views, various online analytical web usage data mining techniques are shown, which include marketing expertise as domain knowledge and are specifically designed for electronic commerce purposes.

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Discovering Internet marketing intelligence through online analytical web usage mining

https://pure.ulster.ac.uk/ws/files/11226001/MULVENNA-Review_of_ICT-Based_Services_for_Identified_Unmet_Needs_in_People_with_Dementia.pdf

Review of ICT-Based Services for Identified Unmet Needs in People with Dementia

For future network scenarios to exhibit autonomic behaviour, both networks and application components and services need to be aware of their computational and environmental context, and must tune their activities accordingly. In this position paper, we propose an abstract architecture for knowledge networks that addresses the key issues of how both physical contextual knowledge and social knowledge from the users of communication networks can be used to form a knowledge space in support of autonomic agents dealing with network elements and applications. We discuss that the availability of raw contextual data is not enough to achieve meaningful autonomic behaviours. Rather, contextual information should be properly organised into ‘networks of knowledge', to be exploited by both network and application components as the basic ‘nervous system' in which situational stimuli reify into digital knowledge, and by means of which components can properly orchestrate their activities in a globally meaningful way. Here we firstly discuss the fundamental role of knowledge networks, and try to sketch what actual form and position such knowledge networks could assume. Then, we analyse some simple scenarios of use, showing how it is possible for the components of an autonomic communication system to build such knowledge networks autonomously; and, at the same time, to exploit them for orchestrating their activities in a type of stigmergy-based knowledge-rich system. Eventually, we sketch a rough research agenda and discuss the relations with other research areas.

Maurice Mulvenna

Papers

Personalization on the Net using Web mining: introduction

Discovering Internet marketing intelligence through online analytical web usage mining

Review of ICT-Based Services for Identified Unmet Needs in People with Dementia

Knowledge networks

Evidential fusion of sensor data for activity recognition in smart homes