Cyber Crime: How Technology Makes it Easy and What to do About it

Preventing, detecting, investigating, and prosecuting economic crimes must become a priority in order to lessen their impact on the economy and the public's confidence. Law enforcement, as it stands now, is in danger of slipping further behind the highly sophisticated criminals. These needs and challenges can only be accomplished with the cooperation of the private, public, and international sectors. All stakeholders must be more willing to exchange information on the effect economic and cyber crime has on them and on the methods they are using to detect and prevent it.     

Software Quality and Management: How the World's Most Powerful Software Makers do it

Controlling software quality is a major challenge in modern software development projects. This article looks at software development practices at the two largest producers of software, IBM and Microsoft, and compares them against the Software Engineering Institute's (SEI) Capability Maturity Model (CMM). It concludes that rigorous quality controls and the CMM's basic premise for reaching higher maturity are still the best ways to produce quality software.     

Toward a Model Theory of Actions: How Agents do it in Branching Time

A clear understanding and formalization of actions is essential to computing, and especially so to reasoning about and constructing intelligent agents. Several approaches have been proposed over the years. However, most approaches concentrate on the causes and effects of actions, but do not give general characterizations of actions themselves. A useful formalization of actions would be based on a general, possibly nondiscrete, model of time that allows branching (to capture agents' choices). A desirable formalization would also allow actions to be of arbitrary duration and would permit multiple agents to act concurrently. We develop a branching-time framework that allows great flexibility in how time and action are modeled. We motivate and formalize several coherence constraints on our models, which capture some nice intuitions and validate some useful inferences relating actions with time.     

Software Quality and Management: How the World's Most Powerful Software Makers do it

Abstract

Controlling software quality is a major challenge in modern software development projects. This article looks at software development practices at the two largest producers of software, IBM and Microsoft, and compares them against the Software Engineering Institute's (SEI) Capability Maturity Model (CMM). It concludes that rigorous quality controls and the CMM's basic premise for reaching higher maturity are still the best ways to produce quality software.     

How do children do mathematics with LOGO?

Abstract  This paper considers some results of a study designed to investigate the kinds of mathematical activity undertaken by children (aged between 8 and 11) as they learned to program in LOGO. A model of learning modes is proposed, which attempts to describe the ways in which children used and acquired understanding of the programming/mathematical concepts involved. The remainder of the paper is concerned with discussing the validity and limitations of the model, and its implications for further research and curriculum development.     

Beyond intelligent machines: just do it

The author argues that users want a sense of direct and immediate control over computers that differs from how they interact with people. He presents several examples of these predictable and controllable interfaces developed in the lab. The examples include tree maps and dynamic queries