February 2009 - Vol. 52 No. 2

February 2009 issue cover image

Features

Research and Advances Research highlights

Building Secure Web Applications With Automatic Partitioning

Swift is a new, principled approach to building Web applications that are secure by construction. Swift automatically partitions application code while providing assurance that the resulting placement is secure and efficient.
Opinion Last byte

Puzzled: Will My Algorithm Terminate?

Welcome to three new challenging mathematical puzzles. Solutions to the first two will be published next month; the third is as yet unsolved. In them all, I concentrate on algorithm termination, outlining some simple procedures and asking whether they always terminate or might possibly run forever.
Research and Advances Virtual extension

Networks of Contextualized Data: a Framework For Cyberinfrastructure Data Management

Data, and those who manage it, have received heightened attention in recent years. Data is widely viewed as a valuable organizational resource,5 and those charged with its management have been elevated to executive levels of the organization.9 However, as organizations respond to the ever-increasing demands for information, data management activities have become much more complex.1 […]
Research and Advances Virtual extension

For Sale By Owner Online: Who Gets the Saved Commission?

The evolution of the internet in commerce has dramatically reshaped many industries such as security trading, retail banking, and travel agency industry. It had been widely predicted that the Internet would also present a serious threat to real estate agent as a market intermediary. Recent studies show, however, that in spite of growing use of […]
Research and Advances Virtual extension

Oracle, Where Shall I Submit My Papers?

In April 2005, a group of MIT students pulled prank1 on the conference – World Multi-Conference on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics [WMSCI]10-known for sending unsolicited invitation emails to people in academia. The MIT students used software to generate bogus research papers, complete with context-free grammar, and submitted two of them to the conference. To their […]
Research and Advances Virtual extension

Automatically Profiling the Author of an Anonymous Text

Imagine that you have been given an important text of unknown authorship, and wish to know as much as possible about the unknown author (demographics, personality, cultural background, among others), just by analyzing the given text. This authorship profiling problem is of growing importance in the current global information environment– applications abound in forensics, security, […]
Research and Advances Virtual extension

Shadow Systems: the Good, the Bad and the Ugly

We know them as shadow systems, workaround systems, and even feral systems. Operating at the fringes of an organization, they covertly replicate the data and functionality of formally sanctioned systems. Because of their duplicative acts, they are often said to have negative consequences for their hosts: undermining official systems,12 sapping valuable resources and corrupting organizational […]
Research and Advances Virtual extension

Why Is Management Is In Trouble and How to Save It: Lessons Learned in the Automotive Industry

CIOS often face difficulties justifying their requests for investment in information systems (IS). Clear, simple, definitive evidence that investment in IS will benefit the total organization is hard to come by, and the evidence that is available requires the kind of knowledge and training that the CIO (and perhaps his or her staff) possess but […]
Research and Advances Virtual extension

Why File Sharing Networks Are Dangerous?

Peer-to-peer (P2P) software clients have become part of the standard suite of PC applications for many users. With millions of users worldwide sharing music, video, software, and pictures,15 file movement on these networks represent a significant percentage of internet traffic. Beyond the much discussed copyright infringement issues, P2P networks threaten both corporate and individual security. […]
Research and Advances Virtual extension

Technical Opinion: Multitasking With Laptops During Meetings

For what purposes do people use their laptops during meetings? Recent press articles and academic studies describe a pervasive tendency to use computers for multiple purposes during lectures and workplace meetings.2,3,4 Participants may use their laptops to take notes in electronic format, follow presentation slides at their own pace, or look up related information on […]

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