Failings in the Treatment of Electronic Signatures

Original article can be found at: http://www.herts.ac.uk/courses/schools-of-study/law/hertfordshire-law-journal/home.cfmPeer reviewe

Knowledge management : critical perspectives on e-business activities

This article is both a review and an agenda-setting piece. It argues that knowledge management suffers from conceptual and definitional ambiguity, oversimplification of its development processes, and methodological limitations. Nevertheless, there is a consensus in business and academia that knowledge is a key component of success and allows firms to achieve and sustains competitive advantages. In a digital era, these advantages arise from the potential of data and information that can be gathered, processed, shared, and used to improve e-business activities. Thus, this research bridges the gap in the assessment of knowledge management and e-business relationship, by applying an SEM to a large database sample of KM activities performed by European firms.N/

Designing a Virtual Center for E-Commerce

In the actual context of developing digital services, the promotion of a system that manages multiple e-commerce sites can be extremely valuable in increasing the economic effects for the companies. This paper presents the current stage of the experimental system design and implementation, an open system website-based (called Single Way for E-Commerce - SWEC) having the goal to collaborate with many database servers of the companies that offer e-commerce sevices and also to interract with electronic payment and e-administration systems. This new approach allows the clients, after them authentication, to navigate on e-commerce websites and search different products, grouping on domains, companies and geographic areas. SWEC System will offer to the customer the opportunity to visualize and compare similar products, to order and receive a single invoice for all the products he wants to buy.E-Commerce, Database-driven site, Open system, Server Side Programming

Designing a Virtual Center for E-Commerce

In the actual context of developing digital services, the promotion of a system that manages multiple e-commerce sites can be extremely valuable in increasing the economic effects for the companies. This paper presents the current stage of the experimental system design and implementation, an open system website-based (called Single Way for E-Commerce - SWEC) having the goal to collaborate with many database servers of the companies that offer e-commerce sevices and also to interract with electronic payment and e-administration systems. This new approach allows the clients, after them authentication, to navigate on e-commerce websites and search different products, grouping on domains, companies and geographic areas. SWEC System will offer to the customer the opportunity to visualize and compare similar products, to order and receive a single invoice for all the products he wants to buy.E-Commerce, Database-driven site, Open system, Server Side Programming

Competition Among Public Schools: A Reply to Rothstein (2004)

Rothstein has produced two comments, Rothstein (2003) and Rothstein (2004), on Hoxby "Does Competition Among Public Schools Benefit Students and Taxpayers," American Economic Review, 2000. In this paper, I discuss every claim of any importance in the comments. I show that every claim is wrong. I also discuss a number of Rothstein's innuendos--that is, claims that are made by implication rather than with the support of explicit arguments or evidence. I show that, when held up against the evidence, each innuendo proves to be false. One of the major points of Rothstein (2003) is that lagged school districts are a valid instrumental variable for today's school districts. This is not credible. Another major claim of Rothstein (2003) is that it is better to use highly non-representative achievement data based on students' self-selecting into test-taking than to use nationally representative achievement data. This claim is wrong for multiple reasons. The most important claim of Rothstein (2004) is that the results of Hoxby (2000) are not robust to including private school students in the sample. This is incorrect. While Rothstein appears merely to be adding private school students to the data, he actually substitutes error-prone data for error-free data on all students, generating substantial attenuation bias. He attributes the change in estimates to the addition of the private school students, but I show that the change in estimates is actually due to his using erroneous data for public school students. Another important claim in Rothstein (2004) that the results in Hoxby (2000) are not robust to associating streams with the metropolitan areas through which they flow rather than the metropolitan areas where they have their source. This is false: the results are virtually unchanged when the association is shifted from source to flow. Since 93.5 percent of streams flow only in the metropolitan area where they have their source, it would be surprising if the results did change much. The comments Rothstein (2003) and Rothstein (2004) are without merit. All of the data and code used in Hoxby (2000) are available to other researchers. An easy-to-use CD provides not only extracts and estimation code, but all of the raw data and the code for constructing the dataset.

Does “Evaluating Journal Quality and the Association for Information Systems Senior Scholars Journal Basket…” Support the Basket with Bibliometric Measures?

We re-examine “Evaluating Journal Quality and the Association for Information Systems Senior Scholars Journal Basket…” by Lowry et al. (2013). They sought to use bibliometric methods to validate the Basket as the eight top quality journals that are “strictly speaking, IS journals” (Lowry et al., 2013, pp. 995, 997). They examined 21 journals out of 140 journals considered as possible IS journals. We also expand the sample to 73 of the 140 journals. Our sample includes a wider range of approaches to IS, although all were suggested by IS scholars in a survey by Lowry and colleagues. We also use the same sample of 21 journals in Lowry et al. with the same methods of analysis so far as possible. With the narrow sample, we replicate Lowry et al. as closely as we can, whereas with the broader sample we employ a conceptual replication. This latter replication also employs alternative methods. For example, we consider citations (a quality measure) and centrality (a relevance measure in this context) as distinct, rather than merging them as in Lowry et al. High centrality scores from the sample of 73 journals do not necessarily indicate close connections with IS. Therefore, we determine which journals are of high quality and closely connected with the Basket and with their sample. These results support the broad purpose of Lowry et al., finding a wider set of high quality and relevant journals than just MISQ and ISR, and find a wider set of relevant, top quality journals

An approach to rollback recovery of collaborating mobile agents

Fault-tolerance is one of the main problems that must be resolved to improve the adoption of the agents' computing paradigm. In this paper, we analyse the execution model of agent platforms and the significance of the faults affecting their constituent components on the reliable execution of agent-based applications, in order to develop a pragmatic framework for agent systems fault-tolerance. The developed framework deploys a communication-pairs independent check pointing strategy to offer a low-cost, application-transparent model for reliable agent- based computing that covers all possible faults that might invalidate reliable agent execution, migration and communication and maintains the exactly-one execution property

The factors driving online shopping in Saudi Arabia: Gender differences and behavior

Purpose—This study proposes a revised technology acceptance model that integrates expectation confirmation theory to measure gender differences with regard to continuance online shopping intentions in Saudi Arabia. Design/Methodology—The 465-respondent sample consists of 68.8% women and 31.4% men. A structural equation model confirms model fit. Findings—Perceived usefulness, enjoyment, and subjective norms are determinants of online shopping continuance in Saudi Arabia. Both male and female groups are equivalent. The structural weights are also largely equivalent, but the regression paths from perceived usefulness to subjective norms and to continuous intention are not invariant between men and women. Originality—This research moves beyond online shopping intentions and includes factors affecting online shopping continuance. The research model explains 65% of the intention to continue shopping online. Research Implications—This research suggests that online strategies cannot ignore either the direct and indirect gender differences on continuance intentions in Saudi Arabia. The model can be generalized across Saudi Arabia