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.