Dedicated to my parents Sabitri Das (late) and Balaram Das For their love and courage iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am deeply grateful for the guidance and support of my advisor Prof. Joshua S. insightful comments and prompt advice made my graduate-student life a fascinating and enriching experience. I thank him for his support, for sharing his endless supply of ideas, and for being my philosopher and ...

Market pressure is forcing New Zealand greenhouse tomato growers to shift from conventional to more environmentally-friendly pest control methods such as IPM (Integrated Pest Management). Growers can access IPM manuals, but these tend to provide generalized advice, which they find difficult to apply to their own situations. Alternatively, growers can use consultants to tailor IPM strategies to ...

Whilst formal organizational knowledge is often stored in archives and accessed through a range of IT tools, informal knowledge from face to face meetings, email exchanges, team meetings is usually not stored and remains implicit. This work aims at finding effective ways of capturing and making use of informal communications, making it available through a knowledge management system to support ...

Finding expertise is an important task required in all organisations and institutions. In looking for expertise, one typically relies on the compilation of information from multiple sources such as organisational directories and social networks. This approach has been applied to enhance the Journal of Universal Computer Science to enable it to become a still more valuable scholarly resource. Th...

The literature of the last 50 years abounds with research papers and reviews of how floral biodiversity might affect the numbers and impact of indigenous natural enemies. However, it is only relatively recently that practical advice is available to any farmer who might wish to exploit such biodiversity in an economically viable fashion. “Practice” in the title of this paper is therefore used in...

Experimental studies on decision making based on advice received from others find that the weight put on the advice is negatively related to the distance between the advice and the decisionmaker’s initial opinion. In this paper, we show that the distance effect can follow from rational signal extraction when the decisionmaker has imperfect knowledge about the advisor’s competence. What drives t...

Both TCP and ICMP are applied in network measurement, while investigating differences between the measured results of them is important but has been less addressed. To compare the differences between TCP and ICMP when they are used in measuring host connectivity, RTT, and packet loss rate, we designed two groups of comparison programs, after careful evaluating of the program parameters, we exec...

Drawing upon James Carey’s ritual model of communication as a framework, we argue that rituals, especially religious rituals, are important resources for technology design. We suggest that a ritual view of ICT interaction represents an alternative and significant model for ICT development and evaluation, and that the observance of religious rituals affords researchers the opportunity to see cul...