Investing in Broadband Evaluation: Guiding Policy & Innovation for the Future

How we address the broadband challenge has been called the most important infrastructure challenge of the new century by the National Broadband Plan. High-speed Internet can connect remote communities, help coordinate and streamline health care services, enable our children with unparalleled access to learning opportunities, and spark and support innovation in numerous fields. The challenge, however, is understanding what works and why across all of these important uses of broadband technology. Program evaluation can answer this need, especially if it is built into new programs and policies from the start

Abstractions, accounts and grid usability

The vision of the Grid is one of seamless, virtual and constantly changing resources where users need not concern themselves about details, such as exactly where an application is running or where their data is being stored. However, seamless and virtual often imply a lack of control that users may be wary of, or even opposed to. Drawing upon our studies of HCI and of collaborative work, this paper examines whether the Grid development community should be taking this vision literally and argues for the need for accountability of systems ‘in interaction’. We give examples of an alternative approach that seeks to provide ways in which administrators, technical support and user communities can make sense of the behaviour of the complex socio-technical ensembles that are the reality of Grids

Academic Integrity Resources - links and guides

an online tutorial, a pdf version, a powerpoint presentation, links to regulations

Print Media vs. Digital Manifest Destiny

Every communications medium reflects and reinforces intellectual habits and content patterns unique to the medium. A digital/internet hegemony is a paradoxical foreclosure on breadth of mind since digital formats do not reflect or reinforce the intellectual habits and content patterns unique to other media, especially books. A credible educational process w ill take appropriate advantage of digital media without allowing its influence to repress breadth of mind

New technologies for e-commerce

Today electronic commerce (e-commerce) has changed the way of doing business, and contributes significantly to economic activity. In any case, e-commerce is not a static field but it is always evolving in order to support new and more complex real world processes. The agriculture sector is expected to undergo significant transformation as a result of new business models being adopted through ecommerce. Examples of the adoption of new technologies in agriculture are provided with a view to demonstrating the benefits that can be achieved. The first part I expound the basics of e-commerce and e-markets. After I describe potential benefits to agriculture from adoption of e-commerce. The last part I describe the ecommerce 2.0, what is a prospect evolution of e-commerce

Plagiarism in philosophy: prevention better than cure

[Introduction] Plagiarism more common than thought in student essays’ would make a good headline. Recent research suggests that students admit to much more plagiarism and other forms of cheating than teachers generally suspect, and it is widely believed that the problem is increasing as a result of the internet. The solution is to use a range of techniques to get the thought back into student essay writing, and to take more active steps to spot when this has not happened

Web API Fragility: How Robust is Your Web API Client

Web APIs provide a systematic and extensible approach for application-to-application interaction. A large number of mobile applications makes use of web APIs to integrate services into apps. Each Web API's evolution pace is determined by their respective developer and mobile application developers are forced to accompany the API providers in their software evolution tasks. In this paper we investigate whether mobile application developers understand and how they deal with the added distress of web APIs evolving. In particular, we studied how robust 48 high profile mobile applications are when dealing with mutated web API responses. Additionally, we interviewed three mobile application developers to better understand their choices and trade-offs regarding web API integration.Comment: Technical repor

The Internet of Things Connectivity Binge: What are the Implications?

Despite wide concern about cyberattacks, outages and privacy violations, most experts believe the Internet of Things will continue to expand successfully the next few years, tying machines to machines and linking people to valuable resources, services and opportunities