Electronic mail Research Papers - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

El presente artículo da cuenta de la regulación en el ordenamiento jurídico colombiano sobre el funcionamiento de la rama judicial por medios electró- nicos1 como una forma de hacer efectivo el cumplimiento de principios procesales como la gratuidad, garantismo y agilidad en la búsqueda efectiva del funcionamiento del aparato judicial. La necesidad de avance tecnológico informático al servicio de la rama judicial no ha sido soportado desde una política de gobierno generadora de proyectos e inversión que materialicen la inclusión del mundo tecnológico informático en la administración de justicia, más aún, no existe desarrollo legal que permita adelantar un proceso legal por medios electrónicos, salvo la modificación a los artículos 315 y 3202 de la ley 794 de 2003, con la inclusión de la notificación electrónica, avance normativo que a la fecha no se tiene en funcionamiento, volviendo la disposición letra muerta, en contraste con el acelerado desarrollo del comercio y el creciente surgimiento de empresas virtuales del tipo de establecimientos de comercio y sociedades comerciales, las cuales tienen su domicilio de operación comercial, no en una dirección física sino electrónica.
The present article realizes of the regulation in the juridical Colombian classification on the functioning of the judicial branch for electronic means (ways) as a way of making effective the fulfillment of procedural beginning(principles) as the gratuitousness, garantismo and agility, in the effective search of the functioning of the judicial device. The need of technological computer advance to the service of the Judicial Branch has not been supported from a generating politics(policy) of project government and investment that they materialize the incorporation of the technological computer world in the administration of justice, mass still(yet), there does not exist legal development that allows to advance a legal process for electronic means, except the modification to the articles 315 and 320 of the law 794 of 2003, with the incorporation of the electronic notification, normative advance that to the date is not had in functioning, turning the disposition(regulation) dead letter, in contrast with the intensive development of the trade and the increasing emergence of virtual companies of the type of establishments of trade and commercial societies, which have his(her, your) domicile of commercial operation, not in a physical but electronic direction (address).

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- Digital Signature, Computer technology, Constitutional Conflicts, Electronic mail

Abstract—The current proliferation of mobile devices has resulted in a large diversity of hardware specifications, each designed for different services and applications (e.g. cell phones, smart phones, PDAs). At the same time, e-mail message delivery has become a vital part of everyday communications. This article provides a cost-aware study of an RSA-based e-mail protocol executed upon the widely used Apple iPhone1,2 with ARM1176JZF-S, operating in an High Speed Downlink Packet Access (HSDPA) mobile environment. The proposed study employs formal analysis techniques, such as probabilistic model checking, and proceeds to a quantitative analysis of the e-mail protocol, taking into account computational parameters derived by the devices ’ specifications. The value of this study is to form a computer-aided framework which balances the tradeoff between gaining in security, using high-length RSA keys, and conserving CPU resources, due to hardware limitations of mobile devices. To the best...

- by Sophia Petridou
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- Model Checking, Protocol Design, Mobile Computing, Formal Analysis
- by Philip Ritter
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- Endocrinology, Nutrition, Diabetes, Randomization

Performance evaluation of multi-target tracking algorithms is of great practical importance in the design, parameter optimisation and comparison of tracking systems. The goal of performance evaluation is to measure the distance between two sets of tracks: the ground truth tracks and the set of estimated tracks. This paper proposes a mathematically rigorous metric for this purpose. The basis of the proposed distance measure is the recently formulated consistent metric for performance evaluation of multi-target filters, referred to as the OSPA metric. Multitarget filters sequentially estimate the number of targets and their position in the state-space. The OSPA metric is therefore defined on the space of finite sets of vectors. The distinction between filtering and tracking is that tracking algorithms output tracks, and a track represents a labeled temporal sequence of state estimates, associated with the same target. The metric proposed in this paper is therefore defined on the space of finite sets of tracks. Numerical examples demonstrate that the proposed metric behaves in a manner consistent with our expectations.

- by Ba-Ngu Vo and +1
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- Signal Processing, Multidisciplinary, Target Tracking, Performance Evaluation

The current study investigated forms of technology (phone calls, texts, email and Facebook) for maintaining contact with homeless youth over baseline, 1-week, 6-week, and 3-month follow-up interviews. The study combined quantitative tracking of youths’ response patterns and open-ended interviews regarding youths’ preferred methods of communication. Results indicate that maintaining communication with homeless youth requires persistence, including frequent contact attempts over several days. Cell phone contacts (calls or texts) were most successful in communicating with youth, with e-mail and Facebook messaging useful when phones were lost or stolen. Youth who maintained contact were strikingly similar to youth who discontinued contact.

- by Badiah Haffejee
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- Social Work, Social Networking, Telecommunications, Cell Phones

The authors report on a patient who used electronic mail to report satisfactory recovery from ambulatory surgery and anesthesia. The potential benefits and pitfalls of using electronic mail for patient follow-up and communication, as well as research purposes, are reviewed. Potential benefits include cost savings, ease in collecting quality improvement data, and the potential for increased reporting of unpleasant events. Potential pitfalls include lack of universal access (with racial and socioeconomic differentials), privacy and security concerns, and potential slow responses to messages that might require emergent responses or actions.

- by Allan Klock
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- Quality Improvement, Emergency Response, Follow-up studies, Electronic mail

Background: Internet-delivered cognitive behaviour therapy (iCBT) has been found to be an effective way to disseminate psychological treatment, and support given by a therapist seems to be important in order to achieve good outcomes. Little is known about what the therapists actually do when they provide support in iCBT and whether their behaviour influences treatment outcome. Aims: This study addressed the content of therapist e-mails in guided iCBT for generalized anxiety disorder. Method: We examined 490 e-mails from three therapists providing support to 44 patients who participated in a controlled trial on iCBT for generalized anxiety disorder. Results: Through content analysis of the written correspondence, eight distinguishable therapist behaviours were derived: deadline flexibility, task reinforcement, alliance bolstering, task prompting, psychoeducation, self-disclosure, self-efficacy shaping, and empathetic utterances. We found that task Therapist behaviours in Internet therapy 281 reinforcement, task prompting, self-efficacy shaping and empathetic utterances correlated with module completion. Deadline flexibility was negatively associated with outcome and task reinforcement positively correlated with changes on the Penn State Worry Questionnaire. Conclusions: Different types of therapist behaviours can be identified in iCBT, and though many of these behaviours are correlated to each other, different behaviours have an impact on change in symptoms and module completion.

- by Pim Cuijpers
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Anxiety Disorders, Social Support

Abstract Programmable Logic Controllers (PLC) have been used in industrial environment to control several different tasks. Such devices can be programmed using one of the languages specified in the IEC 61131–3 standard, such as Ladder or... more

- by Leandro Batista Da Silva
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- Computer Science, Petri Nets, Formal Models, Control Systems

Because of the variety of types of collaboration services used in enterprises today, there is difficulty in integrating related work threads from different collaboration environments. Each collaboration tool differs in storage model, APIs, content organization, content addressing, content formats, user authentication, and user interface. Nevertheless users prefer to be able to choose which collaboration tool they use for a given interaction, and over the course of long-term collaboration, will typically use a variety of tools, including email, instant messages, wikis, blogs, web conferences, and shared documents. The solution presented here is to provide a federated integration of these different collaboration tools to make content access and transfer straight forward between different systems. Additionally, we enable the user to achieve this federation by working directly in the client application of their choice; we illustrate this with plug-ins for MS Outlook, Internet Explorer and Skype. Our architecture integrates both desktop and servercentric tools.

- by Venkatesh Krishnaswamy
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- Electronic publishing, User Interface, Instant Messaging, Information Flow

Phishing is an attempt by an individual or a group to thieve personal confidential information such as passwords, credit card information etc from unsuspecting victims for identity theft, financial gain and other fraudulent activities. In this paper we have proposed a new approach named as "A Novel Antiphishing framework based on visual cryptography" to solve the problem of phishing. Here an image based authentication using Visual Cryptography (vc) is used. The use of visual cryptography is explored to preserve the privacy of image captcha by decomposing the original image captcha into two shares that are stored in separate database servers such that the original image captcha can be revealed only when both are simultaneously available; the individual sheet images do not reveal the identity of the original image captcha. Once the original image captcha is revealed to the user it can be used as the password.

- by Divya James
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- Image Processing, Security, Cryptography, Image Reconstruction
- by Robert Duran
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- Sociology, Cognitive Science, Student Motivation, Electronic mail

AAgricultural direct marketing implies the selling of agricultural, mainly horticultural products directly to the public either through on-farm markets (farm-shops), community-based farmers’ markets, or post, electronic mail and internet web order. These types of distribution channels can supply customers with fresh, ripen and healthy produce without the physical and social costs of transportation. In our view direct marketing alone is not competitive enough, as it should combine innovation with the complexity of multifunctional agriculture, rural development and countryside management. The synergies from decreasing local unemployment, entertainment and rural education (edutainment) of city dwellers, local craft products, organic production, pick-your-own (PYO) and agritourism can balance out the above mentioned disadvantages. The important barriers are the increasing rural traffic, a certain degree of environmental contamination and the limitation of the role of professional market...

- by Istvan Raduly
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- Rural Development, Direct Marketing, Agricultural Production, Organic production

Research has proliferated in recent years regarding the relationship of oral disease to systemic conditions. Specifically, periodontal disease has been studied as a potential risk factor for multiple conditions such as cardiovascular disease (CVD) and adverse pregnancy outcomes, while other research focuses on exposures or behaviors associated with oral disease. However, few articles have been published reporting how this information is integrated into schools of dentistry, both in the classroom and clinical curriculum. For our study, a thirty-three-item survey and cover letter were electronically mailed to academic deans at sixty-five accredited dental schools in the United States and Canada in the fall of 2007. The response rate was 77 percent. According to the responses to this survey, the primary topics covered in the didactic curriculum regarding periodontal oral-systemic disease are aging, CVD, diabetes, and tobacco use. Eighty-eight percent of the respondents reported that th...

- by Salme Lavigne
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- Dentistry, Communication, Aging, Inflammation
- by Irudaya Raj
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- Marketing, Sociology, Social Networks, Social Capital

Background: Internet education is increasingly provided to health professionals, but little is known about the most effective strategies for delivering the content. The purpose of this study is to compare four strategies for delivering an Internet-based (e-) curriculum on clinicians' knowledge (K), confidence (CONF), and communication (COMM) about herbs and other dietary supplements (HDS).

- by xinxin Liu
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- Communication, Health Care, CONTINUING EDUCATION, Curriculum

This paper analyses the methods of intelligent spam filtering techniques in the SMS (Short Message Service) text paradigm, in the context of mobile text message spam. The unique characteristics of the SMS contents are indicative of the fact that all approaches may not be equally effective or efficient. This paper compares some of the popular spam filtering techniques on a publically available SMS spam corpus, to identify the methods that work best in the SMS text context. This can give hints on optimized spam detection for mobile text messages.

- by Kuruvilla Mathew
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- Text Analysis, Text Messaging, Spam Filtering, Electronic mail
- by Bernadette Glenn-Porter and +1
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- Electronic Health Records, Electronic mail, Clinical Sciences, Retrospective Studies

The association between specific types of peer victimization with depression, suicidal ideation, and suicide attempts among adolescents was examined. A self-report survey was completed by 2,342 high-school students. Regression analyses indicated that frequent exposure to all types of peer victimization was related to high risk of depression, ideation, and attempts compared to students not victimized. Infrequent victimization was also related to increased risk, particularly among females. The more types of victimization the higher the risk for depression and suicidality among both genders. Specific types of peer victimization are a potential risk factor for adolescent depression and suicidality. It is important to assess depression and suicidality among victimized students in order to develop appropriate intervention methods.

- by Irvin Schonfeld
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- Psychology, Suicide, Body Image, Adolescent

Distracted driving due to texting while driving (TWD) has emerged as an important teenage safety issue. Previous studies have shown that the self-reported prevalence of TWD among teenagers varies widely.

- by Danice Eaton
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- Pediatrics, Risk Taking, Adolescent, Schools
- by Kathy Hosig
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- Health Promotion, Health Education, Social Support, Social Cognitive Theory

In previous work, we presented the first spam filtering method based on anomaly detection that reduces the necessity of labelling spam messages and only employs the representation of legitimate e-mails. This method achieved high accuracy rates detecting spam while maintaining a low false positive rate and reducing the effort produced by labelling spam. In this paper, we study the performance of our previous method when using spam messages to represent normality.

- by Carlos Laorden
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- Anomaly Detection, Spam Filtering, Electronic mail, Mathematical Model
- by Robert Kraut
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- Human Computer Interaction, Laboratory experiment, Electronic mail, Economic Model

XML Internet a b s t r a c t Background: With the introduction of the electronic health record, physiotherapists too are encouraged to store their patient records in a structured digital format. The typical nature of a physiotherapy treatment requires a specific record structure to be implemented, with special attention to user-friendliness and communication with other healthcare providers.

- by Ronald Buyl
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- Engineering, Medical Informatics, XML, Physical Therapy

¡ª Electronic mail service is one of the most essential and well-known Internet/Intranet application services. Users expect their electronic mail service to be reliable and efficient, while administrators demand reliable and efficient tools to satisfy users' expectations. Mail server management system is a good solution for such requirements from different user groups. We have designed and implemented an SNMP manager and SNMP agent system that can manage Internet/Intranet mail server systems. The system has been integrated with WWW technology such as Java and CGI. The Java-based GUI system enables human users to manage mail server systems from anywhere with friendly, easy-to-use Web browser interfaces. The system architecture is also general enough so that it can be easily extended to manage any other Internet/Intranet application services.

Electronic learning (e-learning) is gaining an educational foothold all over the world. The availability of electronic and Web-enabling technologies has tremendous influence on the success of e-learning (Kramer, 2000). The Internet and network-centric computing give a strong foundation for experimentation with e-learning and extend traditional learning methods through electronic and Web technologies into new dynamic learning models (Eckert et al., 1997; Colette, 2001). The importance of advanced electronic technologies, such as the Internet, to education has increased significantly during the past few years. For electronic learning systems to make use of these technologies so as to be successful, effective and of a quality comparable with some of the traditional educational learning systems, the electronic learning systems must be designed and constructed with care, using a scientific approach which embraces well-designed procedures and techniques (Colette, 2001). The e-learning market covers the academic, corporate and consumer fields, and has a variety of segments, including content providers, technology vendors, and service providers. Morgan, Keegan & Co. estimate that expenditures on all forms of education now exceed 750billionintheUSAand750 billion in the USA and 750billionintheUSAand2 trillion worldwide , with revenue growth for e-learning expected to outstrip that in all other sectors of the education industry (Cisco Systems, 2000; Fry, 2001). The US Department of Labor estimates that corporate e-learning revenues are expected to increase from US$550 million to US$11.4 billion, a projected 83 percent compound annual growth rate between 1998-2003 (Cisco Systems, 2000). A venture capital provider estimated the US market capitalization of the listed corporations involved in e-learning as US$50 billion, a figure which should reach $US200 billion in three years (Lance, 2000). Corporate and campus agendas have started to recognize e-learning as having the power to really transform the performance, knowledge and skills landscape, so much so that the International Data Corporation estimates that the corporate spend on

- by suraj guha
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- Higher Education, Industrial, World Wide Web, Electronic mail

Mechanical ventilation can initiate ventilator-associated lung injury and postoperative pulmonary complications. The aim of this study was to evaluate (1) how mechanical ventilation was comprehended by anaesthetists (physician and nurses) and (2) the need for educational programs. A computing questionnary was sent by electronic-mail to the entire anaesthetist from Alsace region in France (297 physicians), and to a pool of 99 nurse anaesthetists. Mechanical ventilation during anaesthesia was considered as optimized when low tidal volume (6-8mL) of ideal body weight was associated with positive end expiratory pressure, FiO2 less than 50%, I/E adjustment and recruitment maneuvers. The participation rate was 50.5% (172 professionals). Only 2.3% of professionals used the five parameters for optimized ventilation. Majority of professionals considered that mechanical ventilation adjustment influenced the patients&amp;amp;amp;#39; postoperative outcome. Majority of the professionals asked for a specific educational program in the field of mechanical ventilation. Only 2.3% of professionals optimized mechanical ventilation during anaesthesia. Guidelines and specific educational programs in the field of mechanical ventilation are widely expected.

- by F. Fischer and +2
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- France, Physicians, Anesthesia, Nurses
- by Brent W. Roberts
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- Marketing, Psychology, Cognitive Science, Health Behavior

Electronic mail has become an indispensable tool in business and academia, and personal use is increasing every day. However, there is also evidence that Email, unlike more traditional communication media, can exert a powerful hold over its users and that many computer users experience stress as a direct result of email-related pressure. This paper develops a three-fold typology of orientations to email: 'relaxed', 'driven' and 'stressed'. It further investigates whether the personality traits of self-esteem and locus of control are associated with email-related stress. It finds that low selfesteem is associated with the 'driven' orientation. It further suggests that the 'stressed' orientation may be related to how distractive email is perceived to be, compared with other forms of communication.

- by Reid Bates
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- Information Systems, Psychology, Cognitive Science, Personality

Virtual communities have become increasingly popular for the general public, using electronic mailing lists, newsgroups, WWeb-based forums, chat rooms, etc. However, it appears that online forums are not well integrated into the sphere of... more

- by Jonathan Bowen
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- Communication, Web 2.0, Informatics, Blogs

Social media adoption within organisations enables wider employee participation in corporate communication and rhetoric. We study the impact of social media on rhetorical practices inside organisations, namely how social media reshapes senior management communication. We study the online communication environments of eight organisations and identify two contrasting approaches in dealing with social media adoption: the closed and open model. In the closed model, organisations maintain central control and their communication platforms remain mainly one-way. In the open model, organisations develop and foster two-way interaction. The study finds that in the "open model", governance and culture of the organisation changes in order to address the shift in control and tension between top-down and bottom-up communication. Our key contribution is in rethinking rhetorical practices in the context of modern open and fluid online communication environments in organisations -rhetorical diffusion -and characterising the changes in governance and culture that enable this transition -internal ambidexterity. 1

- by Robert Galliers
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- Organisational Change, Social Media, Business Communication, Information Service
- by Kevin Kelloway and +1
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- Leadership, Transformational Leadership, Problem Solving, Business and Management
- by Jorge Montoya
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- Social Media, Bullying, Risk Taking, Adolescent

Cyberbullying has recently emerged as a new form of bullying and harassment. 360 adolescents (12-20 years), were surveyed to examine the nature and extent of cyberbullying in Swedish schools. Four categories of cyberbullying (by text message, email, phone call and picture/video clip) were examined in relation to age and gender, perceived impact, telling others, and perception of adults becoming aware of such bullying. There was a significant incidence of cyberbullying in lower secondary schools, less in sixth-form colleges. Gender differences were few. The impact of cyberbullying was perceived as highly negative for picture/video clip bullying. Cybervictims most often chose to either tell their friends or no one at all about the cyberbullying, so adults may not be aware of cyberbullying, and (apart from picture/video clip bullying) this is how it was perceived by pupils. Findings are discussed in relation to similarities and differences between cyberbullying and the more traditional forms of bullying.

- by Margaret Takaki
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Perception, Cell Phones
- by Liuba Belkin
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- Marketing, Psychology, Applied Psychology, Decision Making

As more and more people use computers for communicating, the behavioral and societal effects of computer-mediated communication are becoming critical research topics. This article describes some of the issues raised by electronic communication, illustrates one empirical approach for investigating its social psychological effects, and discusses why social psychological research might contribute to a deeper understanding of computer-mediated communication specifically and of computers and technological change in society more generally. One objective of our research is to explore how people participate in computer-mediated communication and how computerization affects group efforts to reach consensus. In experiments, we have shown differences in participation, decisions, and interaction among groups meeting face to face and in simultaneous computer-linked discourse and communication by electronic mail. We discuss these results and the design of subsequent research to highlight the many researchable social psychological issues raised by computing and technological change.

- by Luda Svyr
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- Psychology, Cognitive Science, Communication, Social Interaction

Web development in becoming a global knowledge has taken numerous steps to improve its information systems, strengthen internally and externally focused knowledge-sharing activities, and foster broader global knowledge-sharing initiatives, all in support of enhancing the web development and its partners' and clients' access to and sharing of ideas. Most of universities have websites; these websites have links which its content of information of a student such as examination results which is not sufficient to show or ...

- by S Raviraja
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- Education, Knowledge sharing, Web Development, Electronic mail
- by Patricia Patrician and +2
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- Nursing, Curriculum, United States, Data Collection

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please... more

- by Barrie Gunter
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- Digital Media, Methodology, Survey Sampling, Computer Mediated Communication

Using a primary sample of medical technologists (MTs) and a second validation sample, the results of this study showed initial support for a three-factor measure of cyberloafing. The three scales were labeled browsing-related, non-work-related e-mail, and interactive cyberloafing. MTs who perceived unfair treatment in their organization (i.e., lower organizational justice) were more likely to exhibit all three types of cyberloafing. MTs who did not care as much about punctuality and attendance (i.e., higher time abuse) were more likely to display browsing-related and non-work-related e-mail cyberloafing. Finally, MTs who perceived an inability to control their work environment (i.e., powerlessness) were more likely to display interactive cyberloafing. Study limitations and suggestions for future research are discussed.

- by Gary Blau
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- Mechanical Engineering, Job Satisfaction, Employment, Allied Health

This paper aims to examine the deliberate versus reactive elements of the strategy process with reference to the strategic information management of the Post O$ce. As the literature on strategic management has evolved, there has been much emphasis on the planning aspect of the strategy process. However, in many cases strategy is imposed due to circumstances and the organisation has to react to circumstances outside its control. At "rst sight, it would appear that the communications revolution would have a severe impact on the Royal Mail and that they would have to "nd new directions for their business. However, what has actually happened is that direct marketing, computer databases and electronic mail have increased the amount of business for the Post O$ce and it has had to implement a strategy to deal with this extra business. It is clear from this case study that the strategies towards information management applied by the Post O$ces were emergent rather than deliberate. There are two factors which have meant that the Post O$ce could not have planned; "rstly, there was government action in the form of a capital spending &freeze' which meant that, even if they had a planned information management strategy, they would not have been able to implement it. Secondly, there was the increase in &junk' mail and mail-shots on the part of businesses using computerised databases. A planned strategy would have had several advantages over the emergent strategies that the Post O$ce has adopted for IT. A planned strategy for the Post O$ce Counters in particular would have incorporated meeting the needs of the customer rather than the Bene"ts Agency. The decision by the Bene"ts Agency to pay bene"ts directly into bank accounts will now have serious repercussions for the Post O$ce. The fact that the Post O$ce was unable to invest in new technology as it became available meant that the task was that much greater once its competitors had overtaken it.

We describe the development and implementation of a randomized controlled trial to investigate the impact of genomic counseling on a cohort of patients with heart failure (HF) or hypertension (HTN), managed at a large academic medical center, the Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center (OSUWMC). Our study is built upon the existing Coriell Personalized Medicine Collaborative (CPMC ®). OSUWMC patient participants with chronic disease (CD) receive eight actionable complex disease and one pharmacogenomic test report through the CPMC ® web portal. Participants are randomized to either the in-person post-test genomic counseling-active arm, versus web-based only return of results-control arm. Study-specific surveys measure: (1) change in risk perception; (2) knowledge retention; (3) perceived personal control; (4) health behavior change; and, for the active arm (5), overall satisfaction with genomic counseling. This ongoing partnership has spurred creation of both infrastructure and procedures necessary for the implementation of genomics and genomic counseling in clinical care and clinical research. This included creation of a comprehensive informed consent document and processes for prospective return of actionable results for multiple complex diseases and pharmacogenomics (PGx) through a web portal, and integration of genomic data files and clinical decision support into an EPIC-based electronic medical record. We present this partnership, the infrastructure, genomic counseling approach, and the challenges that arose in the design and conduct of this ongoing trial to inform subsequent collaborative efforts and best genomic counseling practices.

- by Kumarasamy Manickam
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- Health Behavior, Obesity, Cell Phones, Social Media
- by Bradley Crotty
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- Communication, Medical Informatics, Social Media, Electronic Health Records

The purpose of this research was to examine counselor educatorsâ€™ perceptions of the gatekeeping process. To fulfill this purpose, a qualitative methodology using grounded theory procedures was utilized. Eight counselor educators participated in three rounds of individualinterviews. These counselor educators were located in the south-east region of the United States and had five or more years of experience teaching in

- by Jolie Daigle
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- Qualitative methodology, Data Analysis, Grounded Theory, Face to Face

Computer technology has recently been applied to the automation of office tasks and procedures. Much of the technology is aimed not at improving the efficiency of current office procedures, but at altering the nature of office work altogether. The development of automated office systems raises a number of issues for the organization. How will this technology be received by organization members? How will it affect the definition of traditional office work? What will be its impact on individuals, work groups, and the structure of the organization? This paper presents a descriptive model and propositions concerning the potential impacts of office automation on the organization and it stresses the need, when implementing automated office systems, to take a broad perspective of their potential positive and negative effects on the organization. The need for further research examining the potential effects of office automation is emphasized.

- by Maryum Khan
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- Electronic mail, Office Automation

This study compared the effects of using voice mail files sent as electronic mail (e-mail) attachments versus text-based e-mail to provide student feedback. Social Presence Theory (SPT) was used as the theoretical framework for assessing the two modes of delivering feedback. SPT would predict that voice mail would be perceived as higher than e-mail in terms of social presence. In accordance with SPT, the results indicate that voice mail was perceived to have significantly higher social presence than text-based e-mail. Both e-mail and voice mail were perceived as capable of providing a reasonably high quality of feedback. The results of this study indicate that students in the voice mail group appreciated the higher social presence of the medium, whereas students in the e-mail group appreciated receiving the text-based feedback because it could be printed and then later accessed and referenced in a non-sequential manner.

BACKGROUND-Hepatitis B (HBV) induced hepatocellular carcinoma (HCC) is the greatest cancer health disparity affecting Asian Americans, but the prevalence of screening to detect HBV is suboptimal. AIMS-Our aims were to determine the effectiveness of electronic health record (EHR) prompts to increase ordering of HBV tests among primary care providers (PCPs) within an academic health system. METHODS-We conducted a randomized, controlled trial between April and June 2011 among 76 PCPs caring for 175 outpatient adults with Chinese or Vietnamese surnames, with appointments with providers and no history of HBV testing. Providers were randomized to either receive an EHR prompt for HBV testing prior to patients' appointments or usual care. Primary outcomes were the proportion of patients 1) whose physician ordered a HBsAg test and 2) who completed testing. Secondary outcomes were A) test results and B) whether the physicians followed-upon the results. RESULTS-HBsAg tests were ordered for 36/88 (40.9%) of the intervention patients and 1/87 (1.1%) of the control patients [χ 2 (df=1) =41.48, p<0.001]. Thirty intervention patients (34.1%) and no control patients completed the HBsAg test [χ 2 (df=1) =35.80, p<0.001]. Four (13.3%) of the completed tests were HBsAb positive, 14 (46.7%) were immune and 12 (40%) were unprotected from HBV. Two HBsAg positive patients were referred to specialists, and 3 unprotected patients were vaccinated for HBV. CONCLUSIONS-EHR-based provider prompts significantly increased HBV testing in Chinese and Vietnamese patients when compared to "usual care." EHR prompts are a promising intervention that could significantly increase screening for HBV.

- by tram nguyen
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- Electronic Health Records, Adolescent, Medicine, California

Background: Recent projections suggest that by the year 2030 depression will be the primary cause of disease burden among developed countries. Delivery of accessible consumer-focused evidenced-based services may be an important element in reducing this burden. Many consumers report a preference for self-help modes of delivery. The Internet offers a promising modality for delivering such services and there is now evidence that automated professionally developed self-help psychological interventions can be effective. By contrast, despite their popularity, there is little evidence as to the effectiveness of Internet support groups which provide peer-to-peer mutual support.

- by Dimity Crisp
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- Australia, Quality of life, Social Support, Treatment Outcome