Many initiatives to improve Business processes are emerging. The essential roles and contributions of Business Analyst (BA) and Business Process Management (BPM) professionals to such initiatives have been recognized in literature and practice. The roles and responsibilities of a BA or BPM practitioner typically require different skill-sets; however these differences are often vague. This vague...

I n the introduction to this Handbook, James A. Holstein and Jaber F. Gubrium suggest that a social constructionist approach deals best with what people construct and how this social construction process unfolds. They argue that the constructionist vocabulary does not as readily address the why questions that characterize more positivistic inquiry. In their earlier methodological treatise, The ...

In this paper some initial work towards a new approach to qualitative reasoning under un­ certainty is presented. This method is not only applicable to qualitative probabilistic reasoning, as is the case with other methods, but also allows the qualitative propagation within networks of values based upon possi­ bility theory and Dempster-Shafer evidence theory. The method is applied to two simpl...

A chicken egg is an already packaged food. An important quality aspect of the packaging material is the mechanical strength of the eggshell. A commonly used technique for the measurement of the shell strength is the quasi-static, non-destructive compression of an egg between two parallel steel plates. The slope of the force-deformation curve is a measure for the stiffness of the shell and for t...

The main goal of Business Process Management (BPM) is conceptualising, operationalizing and controlling workflows in organisations based on process models. In this paper we discuss several limitations of the workflow paradigm and suggest that process models can also play an important role in analysing how organisations think about themselves through storytelling. We contrast the workflow paradi...

A variety of techniques exist for reducing the cogging torque of conventional radial flux PM machines. This paper presents an application of two cogging torque minimization techniques in which the permanent magnets are skewed in a conventional manner and the stator slots are closed with soft magnetic composite material. The comparative analysis of the different motor designs regarding the coggi...

This paper deals with the problem of clustering a data set. In particular, the bisecting divisive partitioning approach is here considered. We focus on two algorithms: the celebrated K-means algorithm, and the recently proposed Principal Direction Divisive Partitioning (PDDP) algorithm. A comparison of the two algorithms is given, under the assumption that the data set is uniformly distributed ...

Chinese Pinyin input method is very important for Chinese language information processing. Users may make errors when they are typing in Chinese words. In this paper, we are concerned with the reasons that cause the errors. Inspired by the observation that pressing backspace is one of the most common user behaviors to modify the errors, we collect 54, 309, 334 error-correction pairs from a real...

China experienced a rapid economic growth since 1979 when it opened up. The fast transformation affected the country in many ways including economic structure. This paper tries to identify the changes of economic structure influenced by economic growth from input-output prospective. The methodology is rooted in key sector analysis and complemented by presentation of the multiplier product matri...

Spectral analysis has been successfully applied at the detection of community structure of networks, respectively being based on the adjacency matrix, the standard Laplacian matrix, the normalized Laplacian matrix, the modularity matrix, the correlation matrix and several other variants of these matrices. However, the comparison between these spectral methods is less reported. More importantly,...