This study aimed at exploring how the organizational culture can contribute in adopting Total Quality Management (TQM) in the organization. A case study was conducted at the Salt complex in El Outaya, Biskra State and the questionnaire was used to collect data. The study found that the organizational culture (organizational values, organizational behavior and the artifacts) contributes in adopt...

This paper considers novelty-seeking multi-agent systems as a step towards more efficient generation of creative artifacts. We describe a simple multi-agent architecture where agents have limited resources and exercise self-criticism, veto power and voting to collectively regulate which artifacts are selected to the domain i.e., the cultural storage of the system. To overcome their individual r...

The results of 505 magnetic resonance (MR) imaging examinations of the head disclosed several different types of artifact. Various artifacts observed with two-dimensional Fourier transformation are described and illustrated. All images were obtained with a 0.5 Tesla superconducting MR imager. About 70% of all images contained artifacts. Phase encoding artifacts due to motion or flow were most f...

“In watching people thinking in the wild, we learn about their environment for thinking not what is inside them. But the environments of human thinking are not ‘natural’ environments. They are artificial. Humans create their cognitive power by creating the environments in which they exercise those powers.” Hutchins, 1995: 169 This paper deals with cognitive artifacts and their relevance for con...

This article presents a model for projects that have to adhere to Enterprise Architecture (EA) in order for their results to be aligned with the broader organization. The model features project artifacts (i.e. deliverables such as Software Architecture Documents), their mutual relationships, their relationship with EA, and the processes in which they are created and tested on conformance. We st...

In Technical Functions – On the Use and Design of Artifacts, Wybo Houkes and Pieter Vermaas have developed a theory of technical functions that focuses on the attribution of technical functions to artifacts. They aim at a non-essentialist account of technical functions by reference to use-plans. ‘Use plan’ means, a more or less standardized way of manipulating objects in order to realize a prac...

Objective(s): Alternative normalization methods were proposed to solve the biased information of SPM in the study of neurodegenerative disease. The objective of this study was to determine the most suitable count normalization method for SPM analysis of a neurodegenerative disease based on the results of different count normalization methods applied on a prepared digital phantom similar to one ...

Reusing software artifacts for system development has become a promising way for transferring existing knowledge into new projects. Yet, the benefits that can be achieved by reusing such artifacts strongly depend on their quality. Thus, the artifacts always have to represent the latest state of the art. This paper introduces an approach for systematically detecting and capturing the improvement...