in the virtual extension
DOI: 10.1145/1592761.1592765

in the Virtual extension

Communications’ Virtual Extension brings more quality articles to ACM
members. These articles are now available in the ACM Digital Library.

offshoring and the new World order Rudy Hirschheim Outsourcing as a means of meeting organizational information technology (IT) demands is a commonly accepted and growing practice—one that is continually evolving to include a much wider set of business functions: logistics, accounting, human resources, legal, and risk assessment. Firms are rushing overseas to have their IT work performed by offshore vendors. Such change, many argue, is merely the natural progression of first moving blue-collar work overseas followed by white-collar work. I T jobs are most visible to us in the IT field, but the same is happening to other business functions/processes. This article analyzes some of the implications for the IT field from a U.S. perspective.

 

if Your Pearls of Wisdom
fall in a forest…
Ralph Westfall
“Build a better mousetrap and the world
will beat a path to your door.” Will that
really happen? not if the world doesn’t
discover your concept! Few of us work
with mousetrap technologies, but many
of us do have good ideas that we would
like to share with others. For academics,
communicating research findings is very
important for advancement. This article
tells how to help more people find your
good ideas among the hundreds of
billions of Web pages in the maze that is
the Internet.

 

Quantifying the Benefits of investing in information security Lara Khansa and Divakaran Liginlal Quantifying the benefits of investing in information security has been a challenge for researchers due to the lack of credible and available firm-level data. In this article, the authors use the revenue data from information security firms to quantify investment in information security products and services. They demonstrate that higher information security investments, especially identity and access management, are instrumental in reducing the severity of malicious attacks, which could be seriously detrimental to the stock price of breached firms. More importantly, they show that greater investment in

information security is associated with an increase in the stock price of information security firms.

 

icare home Portal: an extended model of Quality aging e-services Wei-Lun Chang, Soe-Tsyer, and Eldon Y. Li As the worldwide elderly population is expanding much faster than that of the younger generation, digital devices and applications that help care for the elderly are increasingly popular. This study proposes an electronic iCare model that utilizes collective decision-making to underscore the desired care quality elements of consumer participation and continuous quality improvement. This model goes beyond environmental, physical, and relationship aspects to envision possible forms of iCare e-services and the ontology required to empower agents to fulfill the collective decision process.

 

computing Journals and
their emerging Roles in
Knowledge exchange
Aakash Taneja, Anil Singh, M.K. Raja
Scholarly articles in journals use citations
to both provide a basis and context
for the current work. These journals
play three unique roles as sources,
storers, and synthesizers of knowledge
communication. While the journals’ role
as sources is recognized, their role as
synthesizers is relatively unnoticed. This
study investigates the interconnectedness
of an expanded list of 50 computing
journals through citation analysis to
explore their roles as sources, storers
and synthesizers in their communication
network. It also draws on visual analysis
along with dependence calculations to
provide an insight about the domains and
positions of computing journals.

 

and What can context Do for Data? C. Bolchini, C. A. Curino, G. Orsi, E. Quintarelli, R. Rossato, F. A. Schrieber, and L. Tanca Within an information system, the knowledge demands of users may depend on two different aspects: the application domain that represents the reality under examination, and the working environment, in other words, the context. This article shows how fitting data, possibly assembled

and integrated from many data sources, to applications needs is tantamount to fitting a dress—context is the tailoring scissors. Using a real-estate company as a backdrop, the authors define a tree-based context model and a context-guided methodology to support the designer in identifying the contexts for a given application scenario and to choose the correspondingly relevant subsets of data.

Why Web sites are Lost (and how
they’re sometimes found)
Frank McCown, Catherine C. Marshall,
and Michael L. Nelson
One day a Web site is up; the next day
it’s all but disappeared. We probably
know someone who has experienced
the loss of a Web site, either through
hard-drive crashes, ISP bankruptcies,
and some such event. The authors
survey individuals who have lost Web
sites and examine what happened
and how these individuals went about
reconstructing their sites, including how
they recovered data from search engine
caches and Web archives. The findings
suggest that digital data loss is likely to
continue since backups are frequently
neglected or performed incorrectly.
Moreover, respondents perceive that
loss is uncommon and that data safety is
the responsibility of others. The authors
suggest this benign neglect be countered
by lazy preservation techniques.

 

technical opinion: steering self-Learning Distance algorithms Frank Nielsen The concept of distance expresses the distortion measure between any pair of entities lying in a common space. Distances are ubiquitous in computational science. We concisely review the role and recent development of distance families in computer science. Today, the most appropriate distance functions of complex high-dimensional data sets can no longer be guessed manually and hard-coded, but rather must be fully automatically learned, or even better, partially user-steered for personalization. We envision a whole new generation of personalized information retrieval systems incorporating self-learning built-in distance modules, and providing user interfaces to better take into consideration the subjective tastes of users/groups.