ACUTA Journal of Telecommunications in Higher Education

In This Issue President\u27s Message From the ACUTA GEO Privacy Matters Crisis on Campus Appropriate and Reasonable Protections Securing the Cloud: Key Contract Provisions for lnstitutions Changing Behavior...Changing Mindsets Holes in University BYOD Policies The impact of the Smartphone Ecosystem Phishing, the Path of Least Resistance 2014 lnstitutional Excellence Awar

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

First steps in the study of cyber-psycho-cognitive operations

Dissertação (mestrado)—Universidade de Brasília, Instituto de Relações Internacionais, Programa de Pós-Graduação em Relações Internacionais, 2019.O presente trabalho é uma análise dos mecanismos informáticos e tecno-comunicacionais envolvidos na articulação de mundos da vida orientados estrategicamente para estimular, prever ou minar o desenvolvimento das condições psico-cognitivas adequadas para a construção e sustento da legitimidade racional de uma autoridade ou ação política. A aplicação de instrumentos “arqueológicos” Foucauldianos ao estudo das narrativas políticas que engendraram e surgiram de “Russiagate” permitiu situar a teoria num contexto histórico e validar a premissa da convergência e incorporação de tendências de agendamento comuns e de práticas típicas de operações psicológicas tradicionais. Contudo, os efeitos tanto da disponibilidade comercial das TICs com capacidade de “deep learning”, quanto da estruturação baseada em conhecimento permitida pela ubiquidade e centralidade econômica dessas tecnologias, tornam o conjunto de mecanismos analisados num fenômeno que merece uma conceptualização e marco investigativo únicos. A obra é uma contribuição a esse empreendimento.This is an analysis of the ICT-based mechanisms involved in the articulation of lifeworlds that are strategically oriented to foster, prevent or undermine the development of psycho-cognitive conditions adequate for the construction or sustainability of an authority’s or a political action’s rational legitimacy. While grounding theory to a historical context, the application of Foucauldian “archeological” instruments to the study of the political narratives giving birth and springing from “Russiagate” also served to validate the premised convergence and incorporation of common agenda-setting trends and practices typical of traditional psychological operations. However, the effects of both the commercial availability of deep-learning ICTs and the cognition-based structuration afforded by their ubiquity and economic centrality set this “dispositif” apart, thereby deserving a unique conceptualization and research framework. This study is a contribution to such endeavor

Big Data and Organizational Impacts: A Study of Big Data Ventures

New information technology (IT) ventures are at the forefront of developing IT innovations. In spite of their importance in the advancement of IT and the unique risks of survival that distinguishes them from established firms, the organizational literature on IT has mostly overlooked new IT ventures. Specifically, Big Data industry is a context where new IT ventures actively change the landscape of IT innovations. However, less is known about the factors influencing the economic success of Big Data ventures (BDVs), as well as the established firms that invest in them. To shed light on these factors, three essays are designed and executed. The first essay investigates the value proposition of a BDV’s product/service as an important constituent of its business model and seeks to understand how it affects the capital raised by BDVs in their early stages of development. Then, the second essay is concerned with the role that the network embeddedness of a BDV plays in its success. Building on the notion of Socially-constructed innovations, this essay examines the suitable network structures that help BDVs succeed. Finally, the third essay focuses on a BDV’s strategy in management of its communication with the potential investors on Social media platforms. In this essay, we extend the previous literature that had highlighted the importance of the verbal content of communication on Social media platforms for a new venture’s success and in turn focus on the non-verbal aspects of communication in Social media. Building on the notion of symbolic actions to theorize about non-verbal communication, we focus on the sequence of message narrators in Social media and investigate the different tactics BDVs follow to raise capital

Conventions of the Commons: Technical Communication and Crowdsourced Digital Publishing

This project traces the digital publishing history of the audiobook archive LibriVox.org, examining how its volunteers manage, control, and negotiate procedures and policies for their ongoing collaborative work. Examples of public knowledge work like LibriVox illustrate the value of professional and technical communication in accessibly digitizing knowledge and culture for use now and in the future. I investigate and theorize how groups of diverse and transient volunteers create and engage with the tools and documentation they use to manage their crowdsourced audio digitization work. The example of LibriVox can help us better recognize and value the invitational care work embedded in the professional and instructional documents we create, circulate, and consume. As both researcher and participant with LibriVox, I interrogate conventions of crowdsourced digitization and sharing in the public domain, recover some of the technological and social history upon which LibriVox was built (and is still being built), and explore how LibriVox and its volunteers are preserving crucial modes of openness and access with regards to public culture. Crowdsourcing models of production are proliferating in professional, social, and scholarly contexts. Understanding how individuals contribute to such projects can help us understand the implications such models have for the future of collaborative work and distributed workplaces. As social production and digitization efforts become more supported across sectors, these models offer and allow for many unique collaborative learning opportunities. The complex, often transient, extra-institutional communities that emerge around the activities of socially sharing knowledge are valuable for what insights they may offer into the future of information access and the future of distributed work arrangements. I aim to extend what we know about technical communication in public, open, volunteer spaces. How we organize and preserve content—whether old, new, or re-imagined—matters to how we and others access and use that content, both now and in the future. LibriVox is an example of a digitally-based volunteer-run community of practice engaged in public, crowdsourced social production. With this project, I begin to document how the LibriVox’s initially ad hoc and somewhat chaotic processes have (and have not) congealed into a more stable, yet still idiosyncratic, protocol. I find LibriVox volunteers managing their ongoing work using documentation, instruction, and interactions that are marked by a generous, patient invitational rhetoric. For digital knowledge projects like LibriVox, the invitational and instructional roles of documentation become especially important for stewarding a transient, multicultural, digital community of practice. The LibriVox project’s clarity of purpose and open, welcoming processes demonstrate possibilities for pluralism and inclusiveness in terms of work, culture, and knowledge curation. Such a project makes a useful potential model for future collaborative, online media projects. The implications of this successful, sustainable, commons-based, digital publishing model may help prompt important, democratizing shifts in the future of multimodal and open scholarly publishing. Understanding the nuances of LibriVox practices will also help us to better prepare students to intervene effectively in other similarly distributed, ad hoc organizations and to face the shifting and uncertain futures of 21st-century work. Volunteers at LibriVox are digitizing and preserving certain types of available human culture in particular ways that afford near limitless access, re-distribution, and re-use. The ways LibriVox and other archives, digital curation projects, and public collections manage themselves make a difference for how (and perhaps whether) cultural knowledge is preserved, not only into the future, but for access now, across platforms and across user groups with varying abilities. I contend that investigating the example of LibriVox and what it means for how we conceptualize and make use of human culture and knowledge can help us in formulating and answering important questions about the lasting value of LibriVox and of other open knowledge projects

Enabling and Understanding Failure of Engineering Structures Using the Technique of Cohesive Elements

In this paper, we describe a cohesive zone model for the prediction of failure of engineering solids and/or structures. A damage evolution law is incorporated into a three-dimensional, exponential cohesive law to account for material degradation under the influence of cyclic loading. This cohesive zone model is implemented in the finite element software ABAQUS through a user defined subroutine. The irreversibility of the cohesive zone model is first verified and subsequently applied for studying cyclic crack growth in specimens experiencing different modes of fracture and/or failure. The crack growth behavior to include both crack initiation and crack propagation becomes a natural outcome of the numerical simulation. Numerical examples suggest that the irreversible cohesive zone model can serve as an efficient tool to predict fatigue crack growth. Key issues such as crack path deviation, convergence and mesh dependency are also discussed