Is electronic money a disruptive technology?

Good companies can fail, even when management makes apparently logical and competent decisions. The reason for their downfall can be the impact of new technology that disrupts established markets. Consultant Richard Emsley examines electronic money to see if it is a disruptive technology.     

Is information systems a discipline? Foucauldian and Toulminian insights

Following the Kleinian spirit, this study takes a critical view of the existing orthodoxy within information systems (IS) and reframes the ongoing discussion concerning the intellectual core, identity and disciplinary status of IS using the disciplinary analysis of Michel Foucault and Stephen Toulmin. Instead of limiting the discussion to specific paradigms, topics, subjects or content, it focuses on the characteristics, rules and goals of IS as an academic field. A disciplinary lens is used to frame what it means to be a field, discipline and science, and in the process the study uncovers four doxas that have shaped the development of the IS field: (1) the IS research community sees no difference between fields, disciplines or sciences; (2) IT changes so rapidly, and thus the IS field needs to change to remain relevant; (3) disciplines are by definition rigid, inflexible and uni-theoretical and (4) because IS is pluralistic, IS should not become a discipline. This study's analyses of the IS field's discursive formation and intellectual ideals offer novel perspectives that allow for the integration of the IS field's plurality and diversity. To transform the IS field from its multimodal existence into a vibrant, diverse, academically and socially relevant and influential discipline, the study proposes actionable strategies that include (1) agreeing on the intellectual ideals for IS, (2) focusing on conceptual formation, (3) focusing on theory construction, (4) erecting genealogical boundaries and (5) fostering the development of professional bodies.     

Is technology meeting the privacy challenge?

Privacy is one of consumers' most important concerns about using the Internet for e-commerce and other purposes. With this in mind, a number of privacy-related technologies are emerging, including improved software that anonymizes user identities, tools that audit a company's privacy policy adherence, and standards. Technology's effect on privacy has caused concern since commercial computing emerged in the 1960s. However, the Internet has caused people to look at this issue again in a new way, and we have seen a lot more technologies that are invasive, as well as technologies that enhance privacy     

Is digital divide an issue for students with learning disabilities?

The purpose of this study was to examine if digital divide exists between elementary school aged children with learning disabilities (LD) and their nondisabled peers in Taiwan. A self-reported questionnaire regarding information and communication technology (ICT) access and ICT competency, Scale of Digital Participation of Elementary School Students, designed by the authors, was used to collect data. Totally, 117 students with LD and 117 peers without disabilities were recruited in this investigation and were conducted with the questionnaire. The results indicated that there was no significant difference in the opportunities to access computers and the Internet at home and at school between children with and without LD. However, there was a significant difference found in ICT competencies between children with and without LD. Moreover, students without LD enhanced their computer competency gradually year by year, but students with LD eventually did not. The findings of this study supported the notion that mere provision of ICT access is not sufficient for children with LD to master ICT skills. A specific designed ICT instruction programs should be provided to children with LD. Finally, suggestions for future studies were also discussed.     

Is a GigaLIP Fast Enough?

The capability of large, data-intensive expert systems is determined not only by the cleverness and expertise of their knowledge manipulation algorithms and methods but also by the fundamental speeds of the computer systems upon which they are implemented. To date, logical inferences per second (LIPS) is used as the power metric of the knowledge processing capacity of an expert system implementation. We show why this simplistic metric is misleading. We relate the power metrics for conventional computer systems to LIPS and demonstrate wide discrepancies. We review the power of today's largest conventional mainframes, such as the IBM 3090/400 and the Cray Research Cray-2 and forecast the expected power of mainframes and specialized processors in the coming decade.     

Is Cybersecurity a Public Good?

Minds and Machines -     

Does a government web presence reduce perceptions of corruption?

Researchers have found that corruption severely affects a country's development because it takes resources away from the economy, leads to uncertainty and impairs investment. The purpose of this study is, thus, to determine if a government's web presence can help to reduce perceptions of corruption. There is some empirical evidence that it helps, but there is also skepticism from some scholars who argue that technology is simply another tool that can be exploited for purposes of corruption. The statistical model we use in this article looks at governance factors, specifically government effectiveness and accountability, as well as the focus variable of government web portals. Using data from a six-year panel (2002–2005 and 2008) for 208 countries, our analysis finds that governments' web presence has reduced perceptions of corruption around the world. We also provide case evidence from governments that have used Internet portals that have reduced perceptions of corruption. The author recommends that international agencies support and promote the use of the Internet by governments to supplement other anti-corruption measures that rely on improvements in governance alone.     

Is the subjective feel of “presence” an uninteresting goal?

An ideal goal of virtual reality technology is to deliver a complete visual and sensorimotor duplicate of an object: a fully integrated haptic and visual set of stimuli that would make us feel as if we are in the “presence” of the real object in an ordinary situation. The goal is very ambitious, but what is a measure of success? An analysis of presence is much needed, and one of the main tenets of our paper is that an empirical study of the psychological aspects of the feel of presence would constitute the pivotal element of such an analysis; we shall argue that some interesting lessons can be learned about the ideal goal. To sustain our argument, we consider two case studies in turn. The tunnel effect case teaches us that actual stimulation is neither necessary nor sufficient to convey presence. The picture case teaches us that it is possible to learn how to interact to a high degree of success with very impoverished stimuli and successfully compensate for poor stimulation. Research should thus be oriented not towards potentially useless and costly “duplication” of reality, but towards the unexplored potentialities offered by new and complex interfaces.     

Can cognitive inferences be made from aggregate traffic flow data?

Space syntax analysis or the topological analysis of street networks has illustrated that human traffic flow is highly correlated with some topological centrality measures, implying that human movement at an aggregate level is primarily shaped by the underlying topological structure of street networks. However, this high correlation does not imply that any individual's movement can be predicted by any street network centrality measure. In other words, traffic flow at the aggregate level cannot be used to make inferences about an individual's spatial cognition or conceptualization of space. Based on a set of agent-based simulations using three types of moving agents – topological, angular, and metric – we show that topological–angular centrality measures correlate better than does the metric centrality measure with the aggregate flows of agents who choose the shortest angular, topological or metric routes. We relate the superiority of the topological–angular network effects to the structural relations holding between street network to-movement and through-movement potentials. The study findings indicate that correlations between aggregate flow and street network centrality measures cannot be used to infer knowledge about individuals' spatial cognition during urban movement.     

Mobile recommendations based on interest prediction from consumer's installed apps–insights from a large-scale field study

Recommender systems are essential in mobile commerce to benefit both companies and individuals by offering highly personalized products and services. One key pre-requirement of applying such systems is to gain decent knowledge about each individual consumer through user profiling. However, most existing profiling approaches on mobile suffer problems such as non-real-time, intrusive, cold-start, and non-scalable, which prevents them from being adopted in reality. To tackle the problems, this work developed real-time machine-learning models to predict user profiles of smartphone users from openly accessible data, i.e. app installation logs. Results from a study with 904 participants showed that the models are able to predict interests on average 48.81% better than a random guess in terms of precision and 13.80% better in terms of recall. Since the effectiveness of such predictive models is unknown in practice, the predictive models were evaluated in a large-scale field experiment with 73,244 participants. Results showed that by leveraging our models, personalized mobile recommendations can be enabled and the corresponding click-through-rate can be improved by up to 228.30%. Supplementary information, study data, and software can be found at https://www.autoidlabs.ch/mobile-analytics.     

Is a Semantic Web Agent a Knowledge-Savvy Agent?

The issue of knowledge sharing has permeated the field of distributed AI and, in particular, its successor, multiagent systems. Through the years, many research and engineering efforts have tackled the problem of encoding and sharing knowledge without the need for a single, centralized knowledge base. The proposed solutions to this problem are based, more or less, on stringent assumptions, such as static, shared ontological models, or the existence of a common blackboard (or "Linda Space") environment where entities can share knowledge. However, the uptake of the World Wide Web and the emergence of modern computing paradigms, such as distributed, open systems, have highlighted the importance of sharing distributed and heterogeneous knowledge on a larger scale-possibly on the scale of the Internet.     

Is Echo a complex adaptive system?

We evaluate whether John Holland's Echo model exemplifies his theory of complex adaptive systems. After reviewing Holland's theory of complex adaptive systems and describing his Escho model, we describe and explain the characteristic evolutionary behavior observed in a series of Echo model runs. We conclude that Echo lacks the diversity of hierarchically organized aggregates that typify complex adaptive systems, and we explore possible explanations for this failure.     

Is the use of information and communication technology related to performance in working memory tasks? Evidence from seventh-grade students

The main purpose of this study was to assess whether seventh-grade students use of information and communication technology (ICT) was related to performance on working memory tasks. In addition, the study tested whether the relationship between ICT use and performance on working memory tasks interacted with seventh-grade students’ socioeconomic level and gender. 275 students recruited from 30 Chilean schools were grouped according to their self-reported use of PC, the Internet, Chat and Video games. To assess students’ working memory performance, they were tested with a digit span test and a visuo-spatial measure. Only one of our two dependent variables reflected a relationship between specific profiles of ICT use and working memory. Higher scores on the digits span test were related to those user profiles combining PC use and video game play, that is, those identified as Full users and as PC and Console Gamers. We did not find an interaction effect of gender and ICT use or an interaction effect of socioeconomic level and ICT use. There are three possible explanations for these results: first, a proclivity of students with higher working memory capacity to engage in technology use; second, an impact on working memory of potential differences in multitasking; and, third, an impact on working memory of video game play. However, these results must be interpreted cautiously since scores on the GEFT, our visuo-spatial working memory measure, were not related to any profile of technology use. As serious educational games become more regularly used at school, previous differences in video game experience become growingly important. Future research must study whether the intended benefits of serious educational games are being mediated by individual differences in previous exposure to video games and other information and computer technologies, with independence of the directionality of the relationship between video game play and working memory.     

Statistical significance testing––a panacea for software technology experiments?

Empirical software engineering has a long history of utilizing statistical significance testing, and in many ways, it has become the backbone of the topic. What is less obvious is how much consideration has been given to its adoption. Statistical significance testing was initially designed for testing hypotheses in a very different area, and hence the question must be asked: does it transfer into empirical software engineering research? This paper attempts to address this question. The paper finds that this transference is far from straightforward, resulting in several problems in its deployment within the area. Principally problems exist in: formulating hypotheses, the calculation of the probability values and its associated cut-off value, and the construction of the sample and its distribution. Hence, the paper concludes that the topic should explore other avenues of analysis, in an attempt to establish which analysis approaches are preferable under which conditions, when conducting empirical software engineering studies.