Security? Who’s Got Time For Security?: I’m Trying to Get my Job Done

What would you do if you were stuck in one place, and everyday was exactly the same, and nothing you did mattered?”Phil Connor, Ground Hog Day

“That about sums it up for me,” answered Ralph, and I’m sure most system administrators, information system security officers (ISSOs), physical security, operations security, and other security professionals would agree. Everybody takes them for granted — until the network goes down or applications can’t be used. And that’s the problem: a totally wrong perception of what’s required for the serious business of properly doing full spectrum security. Security is not something extra. Security is a normal part of doing business.     

Critical Times for Organizations: What Should Be Done to Curb Workers’ Noncompliance With IS Security Policy Guidelines?

This study was designed to examine the impacts of employees’ cost–benefit analysis, deterrence considerations, and top management support and beliefs on information systems security policy compliance. Surveys of Canadian professionals’ perceptions were carried out. A research model was proposed and tested. The results confirmed that top management support and beliefs, sanction severity, and cost–benefit analysis significantly influenced employees’ information systems security policy compliance. The implications of the study findings are discussed, and conclusions are drawn.     

Identification and the Information Matrix: How to Get Just Sufficiently Rich?

In prediction error identification, the information matrix plays a central role. Specifically, when the system is in the model set, the covariance matrix of the parameter estimates converges asymptotically, up to a scaling factor, to the inverse of the information matrix. The existence of a finite covariance matrix thus depends on the positive definiteness of the information matrix, and the rate of convergence of the parameter estimate depends on its “size”. The information matrix is also the key tool in the solution of optimal experiment design procedures, which have become a focus of recent attention. Introducing a geometric framework, we provide a complete analysis, for arbitrary model structures, of the minimum degree of richness required to guarantee the nonsingularity of the information matrix. We then particularize these results to all commonly used model structures, both in open loop and in closed loop. In a closed-loop setup, our results provide an unexpected and precisely quantifiable trade-off between controller degree and required degree of external excitation.      

How to Get 3-D for the Price of 2-D—Topology and Consistency of 3-D Urban GIS

This article deals with topological concepts and models which are necessary to represent three-dimensional urban objects in a geographical information system (GIS). Depending on the shape and the representation of features, several classes with increasing topological complexity are identified and described. This complexity has strong impacts on the models and tools which are required to represent, manage and edit the data. One specific model we call 2.8-D map is identified, which covers many 3-D applications in GIS. It is a slight extension of a 2-D or 2.5-D model and preserves the algorithmic and conceptual simplicity of the 2-D case as much as possible. The model is described in a formal way. Integrity axioms are given, which detect errors in corresponding data sets safely and guarantee the consistency of 2.8-D maps in a mathematically sound and provable way. These axioms are effectively and efficiently checkable by automatic procedures. The model extends digital terrain models (2.5-D) by allowing for vertical walls and projections like balconies or ledges. The conceptual simplicity is due to the two-dimensional topology of the model. Thus bridges and tunnels are special cases; it is shown how to detect and handle these cases efficiently. Based on this model, thematic objects and their aggregation structures are defined in a consistent way.     

To M-Pay or not to M-Pay—Realising the potential of smart phones: conceptual modeling and empirical validation

The variety of products and services available through Smart Phones is predicted to increase significantly over the coming years as the commercial potential of Smart Phones for M-Commerce is widely acknowledged. In fact, it is predicted that M-Commerce will achieve in the next three to four years, what E-Commerce has achieved in the last fifteen years. However, while Smart Phones present significant opportunities for organisations, the M-Commerce channel is entirely contingent on consumers?? willingness to not only use these devices to engage in transactional tasks such as bookings, ticketing, and accessing information on products and services, but rather to actually make an M-Payment using the Smart Phone, and as such complete the M-Commerce transactional loop. Hence, M-Payments are a critical enabler of the true commercial value of the Smart Phone. Thus, gaining an understanding of consumers?? perceptions of using Smart Phones to make M-Payments is essential for theoretical explorations of the M-Payment phenomena, and in the practical implementation of M-Commerce services. This paper makes a number of contributions which are relevant to both academics and practitioners. The paper develops and empirically validates a conceptual model for exploring the impact of Vendor and Mechanism Trust on consumers?? willingness to use Smart Phones to make M-Payments for both Push and Pull based products. The empirical findings of the developed Partial Least Squares model illustrate that a pull-based model (where consumers have high levels of control over the transaction process) is the model consumers are most likely to adopt, and most likely to use to make M-Payments. To realise the M-Payments vision, vendors need to clearly communicate to consumers how their data is secured and privacy protected. Furthermore, the findings illustrate the critical importance of ensuring that adequate legislation is in place pertaining to the protection of consumers, and that such legislation is communicated to consumers to maximise their willingness to make M-Payments.     

Volunteer community service providers during the COVID-19 crisis response in China: What are their personal needs and how to respond?

The needs of volunteer community service providers (VCSPs), who are the main responders to community crises, have received significantly less attention for the contributions they have been making during the COVID-19 crisis. A mixed-method research framework was used in this study, which involved semi-structured interviews with 13 NGOs and questionnaire responses from 430 VCSPs in Hubei, China to assess the VCSPs' personal needs based on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It was found that the VCSPs had safety, love, belonging, self-esteem, and self-actualization personal needs, all of which were closely related to family, partners, organizations, society and the government. The discussions revealed that the more experienced VCSPs needed special attention and family support was extremely significant for VCSPs in crisis. Several recommendations to meet VCSPs' personal needs are proposed that could have valuable reference value for emergency managers when organizing and supporting VCSPs in contingencies.     

Domain decomposition based coupling between the lattice Boltzmann method and traditional CFD methods—Part I: Formulation and application to the 2-D Burgers’ equation

The lattice Boltzmann method is being increasingly employed in the field of computational fluid dynamics due to its computational efficiency. Floating-point operations in the lattice Boltzmann method involve local data and therefore allow easy cache optimization and parallelization. Due to this, the cache-optimized lattice Boltzmann method has superior computational performance over traditional finite difference methods for solving unsteady flow problems. When solving steady flow problems, the explicit nature of the lattice Boltzmann discretization limits the time step size and therefore the efficiency of the lattice Boltzmann method for steady flows. To quantify the computational performance of the lattice Boltzmann method for steady flows, a comparison study between the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) and the alternating direction implicit (ADI) method was performed using the 2-D steady Burgers’ equation. The comparison study showed that the LBM performs comparatively poor on high-resolution meshes due to smaller time step sizes, while on coarser meshes where the time step size is similar for both methods, the cache-optimized LBM performance is superior. Because flow domains can be discretized with multiblock grids consisting of coarse and fine grid blocks, the cache-optimized LBM can be applied on the coarse grid block while the traditional implicit methods are applied on the fine grid blocks. This paper finds the coupled cache-optimized lattice Boltzmann-ADI method to be faster by a factor of 4.5 over the traditional methods while maintaining similar accuracy.     

A two-stage Ant Colony optimization algorithm to minimize the makespan on unrelated parallel machines—part II: enhancements and experimentations

In a previous paper (Arnaout et al in J Intell Manuf 21:693–701, 2010), an Ant Colony optimization (ACO I) algorithm was introduced for minimizing the schedule’s makespan on unrelated parallel machines with sequence-dependent setup times. Optimal solutions for small instances of this problem were obtained by solving a mixed integer program. However, for larger instances (up to 10 machines and 120 jobs), heuristic and approximate algorithms were necessary to reach solutions in reasonable computational times. ACO I’s performance was evaluated by comparing its solutions to solutions obtained using Tabu Search and MetaRaPS (metaheuristic for Randomized Priority Search). While the results indicated that ACO I outperformed the other heuristics, it also showed that MetaRaPS had a better performance when all ratios of N/M (jobs to machines ratio) were considered. In this paper, we introduce an enhanced ACO which will be referred to as ACO II and compare its performance to other existing and new algorithms including ACO I, MetaRaPS, and SA. The extensive and expanded experiments conducted prove the superiority of the enhanced ACO II.     

SOA$$^mathrm{}$$: a new way to design the decision in SOA—based on the new standard Decision Model and Notation (DMN)

In recent years, Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) technologies are emerging as a powerful vehicle for organizations that need to integrate their applications within and across organizational boundaries. In addition, organizations need to make better decisions more quickly. Moreover, they need to change those decisions immediately to adapt to this increasingly dynamic business environment. It is primarily a question in ensuring the decisional aspect by adopting the SOA as a support architecture. In this paper, we describe a new approach called SOA(^mathrm{+d}) based on a certain number of standards. It is going to be studied on three dimensions: The first is related to the definition of the information system implied in the SOA based on the use case model. The second develops the business dimension which is based on the BPMN (Business Process Modeling Notation). The last dimension addresses the need of decision; we use the new standard decision model and notation (DMN) which is recently approved by Object Management Group (OMG) and considered as a simple notation to specify the decision. Finally, Service Oriented Architecture Modeling Language (SoaML) will be used for design of several services. We also present our meta-model Decisional Model of Service (DMS) to define a new set of concepts necessary for modeling the three levels. Some of them are already known, whereas others are new and are proposed as an element of this work. we illustrate our proposal with a real case study in the Pharmacy Inventory Management.     

Wordnet as a resource for NLP: Yorick Wilks’ reflections on the ontological debate—and how to cope with ambiguity and vagueness of natural language

The paper argues that Guarino is right that ontologies are different from thesauri and similar objects, but not in the ways he believes: they are distinguished from essentially linguistic objects like thesauri and hierarchies of conceptual relations because they unpack, ultimately, in terms of sets of objects and individuals. However this is a lonely status, and without much application outside strict scientific and engineering disciplines, and of no direct relevance to language processing (NLP). More interesting structures, of NLP relevance, that encode conceptual knowledge, cannot be subjected to the “cleaning up” techniques that Guarino advocates, because his conditions are too strict to be applicable, and because the terms used in such structures retain their language-like features of ambiguity and vagueness, and in a way that cannot be eliminated by reference to sets of objects, as it can be in ontologies in the narrow sense. Wordnet is a structure that remains useful to NLP, and has within it features of both types (ontologies and conceptual hierarchies) and its function and usefulness will remain, properly, resistant to Guarino’s techniques, because those rest on a misunderstanding about concepts. The ultimate way out of such disputes can only come from automatic construction and evaluation procedures for conceptual and ontological structures from data, which is to say, corpora.     

Stop the Presses for a Late Breaking Story… Countries and Companies Spy on Each Other!: “I’m shocked — Shocked — to hear that gambling goes on here” Captain Louis Renault,Casablanca

The terms “sharks,” “wolves,” and “predators” are used to describe those who are dangerous in the marketplace. How about “spies”? External and internal spies are the most insidious threat of all. Foreign nations, hostile intelligence services, corporations, disgruntled employees, and crackers want to steal, alter and destroy your information. Virtual theft, of course, is the preferred means because it’s easy to do, usually goes unnoticed, and when it is noticed there’s little recourse for the harmed party.