15847291
Preliminary insights into the in-group/out-group effect in partially distributed teams: an analysis of participant reflections
This paper explores issues related to the effectiveness of partially-distributed teams. In each of 12 student teams within a major university, the majority of team members were collocated at the main campus, while the remaining members were located at either one or two branch campuses. Teams worked on a semester long project for a leading Internet Entertainment subsidiary of a Fortune 100 company. One of the unique challenges of partially distributed teams is the in-group/out-group effect that is associated with geographical distance. A preliminary qualitative analysis of team member weekly reflections reveals that two other faultlines, namely the power faultline and information flow faultline, existed in parallel with the geographic faultline, and served to widen the "us vs. them" split. However, the degree of in-group/out-group varied across teams. Three factors -- work ethic, work quality, and media mix -- moderated the team interaction process to alter the level of conflict and trust and the resulting degree of in-group/out-group effect experienced by partially distributed teams. We discuss these findings and our plans for continued research in this area.
17310261
Cross-cultural influences on women in the IT workforce
A review of 862 papers published in SIGMIS/CPR proceedings over the past 44 years revealed only 29 articles that focused on gender and the IT workforce or gender and IT education, the majority of which were presented at the 2003 conference whose theme was diversity in the IT workforce. Therefore, in response to the call for papers to extend our understanding of topics central to computer personnel research, we present data from our field study of gender and IT that is directed at understanding differing cross-cultural influences on female experiences in the IT workforce. Four themes emerged from analysis of data from four separate studies of women in the IT workforces in Australia, Ireland, New Zealand and the United States: motherhood and careers, career choice, family dynamics and gender stereotypes. Analysis of interviews with 167 women reveals a wide range of influences on women's choice of an IT career. These results lend empirical support to the individual differences theory of gender and IT as an alternative to essentialist or social construction theories.
11189498
On the spanning connectivity of graphs
Abstract A k-container C ( u , v ) of G between u and v is a set of k internally disjoint paths between u and v . A k -container C ( u , v ) of G is a k * - container if it contains all vertices of G . A graph G is k * - connected if there exists a k * -container between any two distinct vertices. The spanning connectivity of G , κ * ( G ) , is defined to be the largest integer k such that G is w * -connected for all 1 ⩽ w ⩽ k if G is a 1 * -connected graph. In this paper, we prove that κ * ( G ) ⩾ 2 δ ( G ) - n ( G ) + 2 if ( n ( G ) / 2 ) + 1 ⩽ δ ( G ) ⩽ n ( G ) - 2 . Furthermore, we prove that κ * ( G - T ) ⩾ 2 δ ( G ) - n ( G ) + 2 - | T | if T is a vertex subset with | T | ⩽ 2 δ ( G ) - n ( G ) - 1 .
10305231
The Protein Information Resource: an integrated public resource of functional annotation of proteins
The Protein Information Resource (PIR) serves as an integrated public resource of functional annotation of protein data to support genomic/proteomic research and scientific discovery. The PIR, in collaboration with the Munich Information Center for Protein Sequences (MIPS) and the Japan International Protein Information Database (JIPID), produces the PIR-International Protein Sequence Database (PSD), the major annotated protein sequence database in the public domain, containing about 250 000 proteins. To improve protein annotation and the coverage of experimentally validated data, a bibliography submission system is developed for scientists to submit, categorize and retrieve literature information. Comprehensive protein information is available from iProClass, which includes family classification at the superfamily, domain and motif levels, structural and functional features of proteins, as well as cross-references to over 40 biological databases. To provide timely and comprehensive protein data with source attribution, we have introduced a non-redundant reference protein database, PIR-NREF. The database consists of about 800 000 proteins collected from PIR-PSD, SWISS-PROT, TrEMBL, GenPept, RefSeq and PDB, with composite protein names and literature data. To promote database interoperability, we provide XML data distribution and open database schema, and adopt common ontologies. The PIR web site (http://pir.georgetown.edu/) features data mining and sequence analysis tools for information retrieval and functional identification of proteins based on both sequence and annotation information. The PIR databases and other files are also available by FTP (ftp://nbrfa.georgetown.edu/pir_databases).
9069029
Detection of discriminative sequence motifs in proteins obtained from prokaryotes grown at various temperatures
Recent investigations on the stability of proteins have demonstrated various structural factors, but few have considered sequence factors such as protein motifs. These motifs represent highly conserved regions and describe critical regions that may only exist on proteins that remain functional at high temperatures. This investigation presents a method for identifying and comparing corresponding mesophilic and thermophilic sequence motifs between protein families. Discriminative motifs that are conserved only in the mesophilic or thermophilic subfamily are identified. Analysis of the results shows that, although the subfamilies of most protein families share similar motifs, some discriminative motifs are present in particular thermophilic/mesophilic subfamilies. The thermophilic discriminative motifs are conserved only in thermophilic organisms, revealing that physiochemical principles support thermostability.
5664354
Association analysis with one scan of databases
Mining frequent patterns with an FP-tree avoids costly candidate generation and repeatedly occurrence frequency checking against the support threshold. It therefore achieves better performance and efficiency than Apriori-like algorithms. However the database still needs to be scanned twice to get the FP-tree. This can be very time-consuming when new data are added to an existing database because two scans may be needed for not only the new data but also the existing data. This paper presents a new data structure P-tree, Pattern Tree, and a new technique, which can get the P-tree through only one scan of the database and can obtain the corresponding FP-tree with a specified support threshold. Updating a P-tree with new data needs one scan of the new data only, and the existing data do not need to be re-scanned.
35235754
Gene Family Identification Network Design for Protein Sequence Analysis
With the exponential accumulation of sequence data, continued progress in the Human Genome Project will depend increasingly on advanced computational tools to manage and analyze the data. Utilizing information embedded within families of homologous sequences, a gene family identification approach may facilitate the understanding of gene functions. We have developed a GeneFIND (Gene Family Identification Network Design) system for database searching against gene families. It provides rapid and accurate protein family identification by combining global and motif sequence similarities and incorporating ProClass family information. Multi-level filters are used, starting with the MOTIFIND neural networks and BLAST search, followed by SSEARCH alignment, motif pattern match, hidden Markov modeling of motifs and ClustalW motif alignment. GeneFIND has been implemented as a full-scale system for the classification of more than 1200 ProSite and 6000 PIR families. It has been used to identify thousands of new family members and is well suited for genomic sequence analysis. The system is available for on-line family identification from our WWW server ().