INTRODUCTION Total Quality Management. Six Sigma. Eight Omega. ISO 9000. CMMI. BPMM. SCOR. The number of process improvement frameworks out there is staggering. Where does one begin? What should we believe? Is there a right way and a wrong way? To be sure, we should make a distinction between a framework and a methodology. While a framework provides a foundation typically designed to promote a ...

This paper suggests that in biological organisms, the perceived structure of reality, in particular the notions of body, environment, space, object, and attribute, could be a consequence of an effort on the part of brains to account for the dependency between their inputs and their outputs in terms of a small number of parameters. To validate this idea, a procedure is demonstrated whereby the b...

I, brought up in an authoritative educational and political system in Taiwan, and habituated in being dominated, was truly a positivist. I deeply believed that “there is a reality out there to be studied, captured, and understood.” (Denzin and Lincoln, 2000). Such belief had enhanced my blind worship of idealism as truth building in the pursuit of reality. It also had indirectly fostered the be...

The richness of the career field is astonishing, as this volume testifies. Indeed, many contributors point out that there is much more out there that we could be writing about and researching. Casting one’s mind back a few decades to the first collected volumes of writings on careers, one is struck by the contrast—then the field was dominated by a few quite distinctive approaches yet with a str...

The quality of OpenStreetMap (OSM) and volunteered geographic information (VGI) in general has already been discussed extensively in the literature. Researchers have looked at this issue from different angles such as credibility [2], trust [1], provenance [12, 9], precision [4], and communities [5]. Comparative studies often use commercial datasets or datasets from a national mapping agencies f...

W hich words do children learn earliest, and why? These questions bear on the developmental origin of language and its connection to thought. The striking dominance of nouns in early English vocabularies has led researchers to ask whether there is something special about the link between nouns and concrete objects (e. proposed a conceptual explanation for this early noun dominance: The mapping ...

Online Social Networks (OSNs) have changed the way people use the internet. Over the past few years these platforms have helped societies to organize riots and revolutions such as the Arab Spring or the Occupying Movements. One key fact in particular is how such events and organizations spread through out the world with social interactions, though, not much research has been focused on how to e...

The measurement of the volume of information is fraught with difficulties. However, trends in availability and usage can be very revealing, as is shown by some examples. This paper argues that considerations of the volume of information should not be divorced from those of the value of information. In communications, informative comparisons appear to be possible by classifying technologies in j...