The business environment is increasingly becoming uncertain and complex. Environmental scanning is a systematic way for organizations to detect changes, and hence formulate adaptive strategies for coping with uncertainties. Information literacy skills are required to conduct effective and efficient environmental scanning activities as it is an information intensive process. Moreover, the develo...

This paper proposes a holistic lexicon-reduction method for ancient and modern handwritten Arabic documents. The word shape is represented by the weighted topological signature vector (W-TSV), which encodes graph data into a low-dimensional vector space. Three directed acyclic graph (DAG) representations are proposed for Arabic word shapes, based on topological and geometrical features. Lexicon...

Most migration literature focuses on large scale movements of people across country borders, while the internal migration trends of countries are commonly neglected, despite the fact that the understanding of internal migration trends is crucial for planning the future for a country. In Iraq a major reason for migration has been security a direct result of its turbulent history since the 1980’s...

This paper looks at examples of recent violence prevention initiatives in Australia and relates these to the situational prevention model. The situational prevention matrix is useful in classifying existing violence prevention approaches, pointing to new ones and providing a framework for understanding the factors relevant to violence and its prevention. Although there have been a range of effo...

In the problematic exploration of the narrative potential of videogames, one of the clearest aspects that bridge stories and games is space. This paper examines the different devices that videogames have used to incorporate stories through spatial design and what is known as environmental storytelling, focusing on the design elements that make the story directly relevant to gameplay beyond worl...

Governance Institutions and Economic Activity By AVINASH DIXIT The concept of “governance” has risen from obscurity to buzzword status in just three decades. EconLit shows only 5 mentions of the word governance in the 1970s; by the end of 2008, it was mentioned 33,177 times. The much more specific phrase “economic governance” has appeared 192 times; its more popular cousin, “corporate governanc...

Traditionally, researchers have employed statistical methods to model crime. However, these approaches are limited by being unable to model individual actions and behaviour. Brantingham and Brantingham (1993) described that in their opinion a useful and productive model for simulating crime would have the ability to model the occurrence of crime and the motivations behind it both temporally and...

Governmental environmental protection is often implemented by specifying a standard value of pollution, measured or actual, not to be exceeded. We consider the standard for ozone in the United States, interpreting it using a hypothesis testing framework, and show (in a simplified setting) how a statistician could implement this standard. This implementation is contrasted to the implementation b...

Consumers voluntarily pay significant price premiums to acquire unobservable environmental attributes in green markets. This paper considers the performance of eco-certification policy under circumstances where consumers cannot discern environmental attributes in goods, but are able to form rational expectations regarding the extent of illicit activities in the green market. The main results ar...

This paper presents gold passivated dense NiW mechanically flexible interconnects (MFIs) for advanced 3D heterogeneous IC integration. The MFIs are fabricated with a pitch as small as 25 μm, a maximum height of 65 μm, and can be engineered to provide a wide range of mechanical stiffness and vertical range of motion within the elastic region. The compliance for the fabricated MFIs is measured to...