bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025_split huggingface dataset:
Content‐based indexing and teaching focus mining for lecture videos
Authors: Lin Yu‐Tzu , Yen Bai‐Jang , Chang Chia‐Hu , Lee Greg C. , Lin Yu‐Chih 
Published: September 2010

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to propose an indexing and teaching focus mining system for lecture videos recorded in an unconstrained environment.Design/methodology/approachBy applying the proposed algorithms in this paper, the slide structure can be reconstructed by extracting slide images from the video. Instead of applying traditional shot‐change detection methods for general videos, a new edge‐based shot‐change detection algorithm is designed specifically for lecture videos. Besides, light influence and occlusions in the lecture video can be removed to obtain more accurate results. Moreover, the teaching focus can be extracted according to instructors' behavior based on the analyses of visual and audio information extracted from the lecture video.FindingsExperiment results show the feasibility of the proposed method, that is, the slide shots can be correctly detected even if the illumination conditions are variant or the slides are obstructed by the instructor or students, and the teaching focus can be extracted to provide learners with an efficient way to study.Research limitations/implicationsThis paper provides only technical experiments, but lacks complete educational study. In the future, more subjective tests will be designed to examine the educational effects on students.Practical implicationsThis paper proposes a practical indexing and teaching focus mining system for lecture videos which can help students learn.Originality/valueThe proposed algorithms for indexing and teaching focus mining are derived and applied in lecture videos in this paper.
iTest: online assessment and self‐assessment in mathematics
Authors: Joglar Nuria , Martín Diego , Manuel Colmenar J. , Martínez Iván , Hidalgo J. Ignacio 
Published: September 2010

PurposeThis paper aims to describe the activities designed and conducted with primary school, secondary school and university students to study the integration of alternative assessment and self‐assessment online tools in mathematics courses using iTest. iTest is an educational software tool born to support the continuous evaluation system promoted by the European Space for Higher Education (ESHE).Design/methodology/approachTo cyclically design, implement and analyze the results of the activities a design‐based research methodology was followed which also facilitates the collaboration between researchers and teachers.FindingsStudents and Professors involved in the activities had positive attitudes towards the practical use of the tool. It was detected that iTest offers a good testing tool for units that focus on skills and procedural development as well as for units that are problem‐based and require visualization and manipulation of the geometric representation.Originality/valueiTest is found to be an appropriate complementary software for evaluation in the ESHE. After all the experiences described in this paper, it is now possible to begin the design of a virtual learning environment for mathematics implementing iTest as the assessment and self‐assessment tool.
Opencast Matterhorn
Authors: Ketterl Markus , Schulte Olaf A. , Hochman Adam 
Published: September 2010

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to introduce the Opencast Community, a global community of individuals, institutions, and commercial stakeholders exchanging knowledge about all matters relevant in the context of academic video and promoting projects in this context. It also gives an overview of the most prominent of these projects, Opencast Matterhorn – a community‐driven open source solution for producing, managing, and distributing academic video.Design/methodology/approachThe paper will demonstrate that Opencast Matterhorn is satisfying institutional needs to manage audiovisual content more efficiently as video is becoming a significant resource in research and education. Furthermore, the paper highlights that Opencast Matterhorn as a product and as a project is open for contributions from the research community and provides an excellent environment for the integration of research results from media analysis, multimedia authoring, search technologies, and other related fields.FindingsOpencast Matterhorn provides a scalable open source solution for universities to manage academic video. Its service‐oriented architecture makes it customizable to institutional needs and open for contributions from users as well as media research.Originality/valueThe paper provides an insight to the idea of Opencast, the Opencast Community, and Opencast Matterhorn – and how they will help academic institutions to better manage and exploit the full richness of educational video.
Adaptive pervasive advertisement: scenarios and strategies
Authors: Rosi Alberto , Codeluppi Alessandro , Zambonelli Franco 
Published: September 2010

PurposeStarting from the premise that digital screens are pervading our everyday urban and social environments to serve a variety of purposes, the purpose of this paper is to show how screens can be made aware of what is happening around them and – based on specific strategies – adapt accordingly the advertisement flow to supply to users more engaging contents.Design/methodology/approachThe paper presents an overview of future pervasive advertisement scenarios, and sketches the architecture and implementation of a system for adaptive context‐aware pervasive advertisement. Subsequently, with the help of a simulation environment, the paper evaluates the performances of several adaptive context‐aware advertisement strategies, and compares them against non‐adaptive ones.FindingsThe paper demonstrates that, in a wide range of conditions, an advertisement system based on adaptive context‐aware strategies leads to a gain in terms of commercial value with respect to traditional non‐adaptive strategies for advertisement broadcasting.Practical implicationsA system for pervasive advertisement could be easily brought to life, leading advertisement companies to a much more targeted exploitation of the screen resource and, eventually, to higher revenues.Originality/valueAdaptive advertisement systems can offer notable commercial advantages over traditional advertisement systems even when visitors demonstrate poor collaboration towards the system.
Attitudes and leadership competences for project success
Authors: Müller Ralf , Rodney Turner J. 
Published: September 2010

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate the relative importance of project managers' attitudes towards their project and their leadership competences for achieving project success. Leadership competences were assessed as emotional, managerial, and intellectual competences (EQ, MQ, IQ, respectively) using the leadership dimensions questionnaire. Attitudes were assessed through the importance project managers assign to the project success criteria.Design/methodology/approachBuilding on the competency school of leadership theories, this study used 400 responses to a global web‐based questionnaire to identify the variances in attitudes and leadership competences of project managers and its relation to project success. ANOVA and regression analyses were used to identify how attitudes and leadership competences related to project results.FindingsThe paper identifies two types of results variances, these are, variances in project results and variances in business results. The former is caused by the attitudes of project managers, the latter is caused by a mixture of their attitude and emotional competences.Research limitations/implicationsThe results show the relative importance of specific attitudes and leadership competences for different types of project success.Practical implicationsThe results indicate key areas for project manager development in order to move from mediocre to superior project results.Originality/valueThe paper builds on prior work in EQ, MQ, and IQ for project management and is the first study to identify a migration theory for the combination of attitudes and leadership competences for project success.
Business perceptions of regulative institutions in Central and Eastern Europe
Authors: Kshetri Nir 
Published: September 2010

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to investigate, theoretically and empirically, how entrepreneurial firms' perceptions of formal institutions differ across Central and Eastern European (CEE) economies.Design/methodology/approachThe paper uses data from the World Bank Group's World Business Environment Survey (WBES) compare entrepreneurial firms' perceptions of changes in different components of regulative institutions in Latin and orthodox CEE economies. The data used in this paper capture a decade's progress in the development of regulative institutions in these economies.FindingsIt was found that the state's regulatory, participatory, and supportive roles are more favorable to businesses in the Latin countries than in the orthodox countries. The findings provide support for the notion that informal institutions influence the degree of generalizeability and replicability of Western political and economic institutions' success in driving firms' entrepreneurial behavior in emerging economies.Research limitations/implicationsThe first limitation is that the data used were collected about a decade ago. Another limitation relates to a lack of coverage of many former Soviet republics and some other CEE countries in the WBES.Practical implicationsThe findings point to the need of strategic planning and various degrees of adaptation of business strategies across the CEE economies. Second, businesses may differ in terms of the relative importance of regulatory, participatory, and supportive roles of the government in their operations. Finally, some CEE economies can be influenced more than others by international pressures.Originality/valueThis paper's greatest value stems from the fact that it uses internationally comparable firm‐level data to empirically examine entrepreneurial firms' perceptions of regulative institutions in CEE economies.
Entrepreneurial Need for Achievement in China, Latvia, and the USA
Authors: Carraher Shawn M. , Buchanan Jason K. , Puia George 
Published: September 2010

PurposeThe decision one makes to engage in entrepreneurial activity is affected by many different motivators. The paper aims to focus on one specific motivator for entrepreneurial activity which is the Need for Achievement. The prevailing methods of studying achievement motivation will also be discussed as shall constructs related to Need for Achievement. The paper also examines the dynamics of achievement motivation. The dynamic ability of individual traits is important, if it were not one's traits would be constant and not capable of being changed or developed. Some of the main factors that can influence achievement motivation are also examined in the paper.Design/methodology/approachSpecifically, data from 249 entrepreneurs from the USA, 220 from China, and 173 from Latvia were used in order to examine the relationships between variables related to Need for Achievement.FindingsGoal orientation, conscientiousness, cognitive complexity, age, and gender were found to be able to account for 29.4 percent of the variance in Need for Achievement among American entrepreneurs, 45.3 percent among Chinese entrepreneurs, and 33.5 percent among Latvian entrepreneurs. Differences are found between the countries with cognitive complexity being statistically significant in the USA and China, but not in Latvia. Gender was significant in the USA and China but not in Latvia. Age was not significantly related to Need for Achievement in any of the three countries, while goal orientation and conscientiousness were significantly related to Need for Achievement in all three countries. Finally, the implications of this research as well as areas that need to be considered for future research are discussed.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper is limited to entrepreneurs of small to medium‐sized enterprises in North America, Asia, and the Baltics. The implications of the research include that Need for Achievement is important for entrepreneurs across these three very diverse cultures and that variables related to Need for Achievement vary between the countries. As Need for Achievement is related to economic development, it is important to understand the factors which might be able to influence the Need for Achievement of entrepreneurs from around the world.Originality/valueThe development of entrepreneurs is important if economies desire to have sustainable growth. Little empirical research has examined these issues with data‐sets from three continents. Even less research has examined these issues among entrepreneurs. The paper addresses these areas.
The business of business incubators
Authors: Gstraunthaler Thomas 
Published: September 2010

PurposeNew business ideas, especially those which address markets that do not yet exist, face huge difficulties in securing vital resources. Hence, governments support the creation of a protected environment, business incubators, in which these early ventures can develop. Business incubators perform two different processes: servicing the companies they host and fulfilling their main stakeholders' demands. Hence, this paper is critical of whether business incubators in Lithuania have been installed due to real economic demand to help all the promising startups to develop or if they serve primarily political goals. Business incubators are exposed to pressure from shareholders, both public and private, and adopt certain strategies to deal with their expectations. The paper aims to explore how the management of business incubators understand their own position, tasks and challenges and how they see their business incubators performing now and in the future.Design/methodology/approachThis paper adds viewpoints from the sociology‐based institutional theory, adopting a more critical view on how institutions emerge, how they are influenced by their environment and how they shape the environment in which they operate. In‐depth interviews were conducted with the management of the business incubators. The paper included all seven business incubators of Lithuania: five business incubators in Vilnius and two business incubators in Kaunas.FindingsThe studied Lithuanian business incubators have a strong focus on property, together with the offering of training and consulting, although at a very superficial level. There are strong arguments in favor of a mimicking process and institutional behavior. What made these property developments so attractive was the available public money, particularly from the European Union. As long as the money keeps flowing, there is a strong incentive to grow. The managers say that their public shareholders provide only weak support after the business incubator was set up. Their private investors, on the other hand, are interested in high rents. In addition, teams operating the business incubators are small, most consisting of not more than three people; a much lower number than the European average of 12.Originality/valueThe empirical results offer interesting insights into the self‐understanding of the management of Lithuanian business incubators, their setup and the environment in which they operate.
Software development maturity evaluation: six cases from Estonian SMEs
Authors: Puus Uuno , Mets Tõnis 
Published: September 2010

PurposeThe software industry, especially software development (SD), in Estonia is at the present moment in the phase of expansion: first level of life cycle of the industry. Initial maturity level of the industry is among other factors characterized by lower maturity level of development process in companies/development teams. The goal of this paper is to analyze the maturity level of SD process in Estonian companies. Usually, poorly managed processes and low‐development performance are the major reasons for overrun deadlines and insufficient competitive advantages. Therefore, improved performance is the key factor of SD industry competitiveness.Design/methodology/approachThe methodology used in the paper is semi‐structured interviews with experienced software developers/project managers in Estonian SD enterprises. On the basis of the interviews, authors were analyzing the usability of capability maturity model integration (CMMI) in Estonian SD companies to perform/apply the software process improvement (SPI).FindingsResults based on self‐evaluation are describing the current level of SD process maturity in sense of CMMI in Estonian SD enterprises. Also, the difficulties of collecting process performance data were discovered. SD companies did not find it necessary to collect and save development process performance data, such as number of (corrected) errors, number of lines of code, etc.Originality/valueThe paper describes structured performance as SD process maturity in sense of CMMI together with development process performance as project characteristics: product quality, cycle‐time, development effort, product maintainability, etc.
Efficiency evolution of coal‐fired electricity generation in China, 1999‐2007
Authors: Tai Wu Han , Pineau Pierre‐Olivier , Caporossi Gilles 
Published: September 2010

PurposeThe paper seeks to evaluate the changes in efficiency and productivity of coal‐fired electricity generation of 30 Chinese administrative regions from 1999 to 2007.Design/methodology/approachThe paper incorporates data envelopment analysis with the Malmquist index to study the progress made in this sector. The model considers both economic and environmental factors by including the variables fuel consumption, labor, capital, sulfur dioxide emissions and electricity generated. A second model is constructed without the variable sulfur dioxide emissions to evaluate economic performances without taking environmental measures into consideration.FindingsBy comparing the two models, the paper identified provinces that favored economic performance over environmental performance, or vice versa. Also, it showed that the more efficient provinces tend to manage both economic and environmental efficiencies equally well, while the reverse is true for the least efficient provinces. The average total factor productivity growth in coal‐fired electricity generation of all provinces was 3.96 per cent for 1999‐2007, and this growth is mainly attributed to technological change. In addition, it found that the Eastern provinces are the most efficient and productive of the group.Research limitations/implicationsIn the absence of provincial coal quality data, a key efficiency factor is missing from the analysis.Practical implicationsEfficiency improvement efforts in the Chinese generation sector should target the least efficient provinces identified in this paper. Practices in the most efficient provinces should be further investigated to be replicated when possible.Originality/valueThe paper provides a contemporary overview of Chinese provincial efficiency and productivity measures for policy makers and investors to improve China's coal‐fired electricity generation sector.
Assessing power stations performance using a DEA‐bootstrap approach
Authors: Tsolas Ioannis E. 
Published: September 2010

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to assess the performance of Greek fossil fuel‐fired power stations employing a data envelopment analysis (DEA) model combined with bootstrapping.Design/methodology/approachDEA is used to derive aggregate performance indicators using data on inputs and desirable and undesirable outputs for a sample of fossil fuel‐fired power stations. The statistical significance of the derived aggregate performance indicators is assessed via the bootstrapping approach.FindingsThe results suggest that the power stations in the sample are considerably more inefficient than revealed by the initial point estimates of inefficiency. Moreover, the non‐lignite‐fired stations of the sample are on an average more efficient than the lignite‐fired stations.Research limitations/implicationsDEA represents a useful framework for exploring the current state to derive aggregate performance indicators of power stations, and moreover, the statistical properties of these metrics can be assessed via the bootstrapping approach.Practical implicationsThe bootstrapping approach in DEA shows its superiority over DEA models that do not address the uncertainty surrounding point estimates. The DEA bootstrapping model used in this study to model environmental performance in the power station electricity production setting provides bias correction and confidence intervals for the point estimates and it is therefore more preferable.Originality/valueThe derivation of aggregate performance indicators of Greek fossil fuel‐fired power stations is an important addition to the existing literature on energy economics. The paper is also innovated in providing the statistical properties of the derived performance metrics.
Estimating the efficiency of American petroleum refineries under varying assumptions of the disposability of bad outputs
Authors: Mekaroonreung Maethee , Johnson Andrew L. 
Published: September 2010

PurposeThe paper aims to describe and compare multiple methods for estimating the technical efficiency of 113 US oil refineries in operation in 2006 and 2007, considering undesirable output in a production process.Design/methodology/approachA technology that satisfies weak disposability between desirable and undesirable outputs is constructed by allowing different abatement factors across all refineries. Several measures based on data envelopment analysis approaches are implemented and compared to study the impact of disposability assumptions and to investigate the effects of using non‐uniform abatement factors. A hyperbolic efficiency measure is used to analyze the potential output loss of each refinery due to environmental regulations.FindingsThe results indicate that domestic refineries can improve efficiencies regardless of the disposability assumptions and that environmental regulations reduce the amount of potentially desirable outputs produced by some facilities. However, refineries in the western USA appear to be the most affected by regulations. In general, efficient refineries are less likely to be affected.Research limitations/implicationsUndesirable outputs are limited to toxic release. Undesirable outputs generated from refining crude oil, such as greenhouse gases, can be used when data are available. The desirable outputs in this paper do not include premium products, such as lubricants, which could raise the efficiency estimates of complex refineries.Originality/valueTo the authors' knowledge, this paper is the first implementation of the weakly disposable technology constructed by different uniform abatement factors. Further, the paper investigates the effects of various disposability assumptions on efficiency estimation. The result clearly identifies refineries that use their resources efficiently. The paper suggests that the data may be used to augment managerial decision‐making regarding benchmarking and best practices.