In this thesis we consider how user-generated content that is assembled by different popular Web portals can be exploited for Multilingual Information Retrieval. We define the knowledge that can be derived from such portals as Social Semantics. We present to approaches, Cross-lingual Explicit...

The health industry has acquired a reputation as lagging in the use of information technology (IT). Therefore, this study has been undertaken to assess state health's use of IT and then to assess the causal factors of the differing usage rate, if any. The state health industry was compared to...

Litchi is an important crop in the mountainous part of northern Thailand yet its profitability has declined during the last 15 years. The replacement of litchi fruit orchards for seasonal flowers and vegetables has external costs related to increased levels of soil erosion, pesticides, and...

The promise of the Internet and e-commerce has led to the increasing use of the web for transaction processing. Many organizations have adopted web-enabled transaction processing for applications such as processing payments online, selling products online, making travel reservations to name a...

Surveys continue to highlight that most senior business executives aredissatisfied with the value they believe their organizations are deriving frominvestments in information technology. What is often forgotten is that IT initself has no inherent value. This value must be unlocked, and only...

Based on grounded theory and thematic analysis of 70 in-depth interviews conducted over 32 months (from November 2007 to June 2010) with domain scientists, computational technologists, supercomputer center administrators, program officers at the National Science Foundation, social scientists,...

An international wheat trade model incorporating climate variability is used to simulate different scenarios when wheat producers in the USA, Canada, and Australia adopt El Niño/Southern Oscillation (ENSO)-based climate forecasts for use in production decisions. Adoption timing and rates are...

Cointegration techniques are applied to a model of induced innovation based on the two-stage Constant Elasticity of Substitution (CES) production function. This approach results in direct tests of the inducement hypothesis, which are applied to agricultural data for the United Kingdom from 1953...

Agronomists rely increasingly on computers, and more than half of all producers have access to computers. Increasing farm computer ownership has resulted in intensified efforts to transfer new software technologies to producers; however, little is known about how satisfied producers are with...

Agricultural production responds to social, political, economic, environmental, and technological drivers that influence producers' decisions and shape the individual systems through modification of management practices, crop and livestock mix, and marketing strategy. We use an interview and...