Multivariate Citations Functions and Journal Rankings

Previous citations-based rankings of journals suffer from the lack of a well-specified methodological base. Using an explicit multivariate citations function, the authors produce a single ranking that controls simultaneously for several nonquality related factors that influence citation. As an example of this methodology, they produce a ranking of economics journals that controls for the effects of differences in field size of journals on citations. The authors demonstrate that previous rankings have been biased in favor of journals from larger fields.

Book reviews

Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/45586/1/11199_2004_Article_BF00289303.pd

Towards understanding Android system vulnerabilities: Techniques and insights

National Research Foundation (NRF) Singapor

Antecedents of political trust in adolescence: Cognitive abilities and perceptions of parents

This study examined the predictors of political trust in late adolescence. Three waves of longitudinal data (ages 11, 15, and 17) from 1116 Czech adolescents (346 participated at least in the first and last wave) were analyzed using structural equation modeling. Results showed that high verbal cognitive ability in early adolescence predicted greater political trust in late adolescence. This effect was explained by adolescents' greater cognitive political engagements, but not by their more positive relationships with authorities (e.g., school or parents) during adolescence. Next, early adolescents who perceived more parental warmth demonstrated greater political trust when they reached late adolescence. These results suggest that some young people might enter adulthood more skeptical regarding politics based on their abilities and early nonpolitical experiences

Rethinking Security of Web-Based System Applications

Many modern desktop and mobile platforms, including Ubuntu, Google Chrome, Windows, and Firefox OS, support so called Web-based system applications that run outside the Web browser and enjoy direct access to native objects such as files, camera, and ge-olocation. We show that the access-control models of these plat-forms are (a) incompatible and (b) prone to unintended delega-tion of native-access rights: when applications request native ac-cess for their own code, they unintentionally enable it for untrusted third-party code, too. This enables malicious ads and other third-party content to steal users ’ OAuth authentication credentials, ac-cess camera on their devices, etc. We then design, implement, and evaluate POWERGATE, a new access-control mechanism for Web-based system applications. It solves two key problems plaguing all existing platforms: security and consistency. First, unlike the existing platforms, POWERGATE correctly protects native objects from unauthorized access. Second, POWERGATE provides uniform access-control semantics across all platforms and is 100 % backward compatible. POWERGATE en-ables application developers to write well-defined native-object ac-cess policies with explicit principals such as “application’s own lo-cal code ” and “third-party Web code, ” is easy to configure, and incurs negligible performance overhead