How we browse: Measurement and analysis of digital behavior

Accurately analyzing and modeling online browsing behavior play a key role in understanding users and technology interactions. In this work, we design and conduct a user study to collect browsing data from 31 participants continuously for 14 days and self-reported browsing patterns. We combine self-reports and observational data to provide an up-to-date measurement study of online browsing behavior. We use these data to empirically address the following questions: (1) Do structural patterns of browsing differ across demographic groups and types of web use?, (2) Do people have correct perceptions of their behavior online?, and (3) Do people change their browsing behavior if they are aware of being observed? In response to these questions, we find significant differences in level of activity based on user age, but not based on race or gender. We also find that users have significantly different behavior on Security Concerns websites, which may enable new behavioral methods for automatic detection of security concerns online. We find that users significantly overestimate the time they spend online, but have relatively accurate perceptions of how they spend their time online. We find no significant changes in behavior over the course of the study, which may indicate that observation had no effect on behavior, or that users were consciously aware of being observed throughout the stud

Why Do Developers Get Password Storage Wrong? A Qualitative Usability Study

Passwords are still a mainstay of various security systems, as well as the cause of many usability issues. For end-users, many of these issues have been studied extensively, highlighting problems and informing design decisions for better policies and motivating research into alternatives. However, end-users are not the only ones who have usability problems with passwords! Developers who are tasked with writing the code by which passwords are stored must do so securely. Yet history has shown that this complex task often fails due to human error with catastrophic results. While an end-user who selects a bad password can have dire consequences, the consequences of a developer who forgets to hash and salt a password database can lead to far larger problems. In this paper we present a first qualitative usability study with 20 computer science students to discover how developers deal with password storage and to inform research into aiding developers in the creation of secure password systems

Family stress and satisfaction in college students: does parental divorce matter?

[Resumen] Esta investigación explora si el divorcio de los padres se relaciona con el estrés y la satisfacción familiares de sus hijos universitarios, así como con la calidad y la frecuencia de las relaciones padres-hijos. Participaron 147 alumnos de primer curso de las titulaciones de Educación Primaria, Educación Social, Filología, Sociología y Logopedia de la Universidade da Coruña. Los resultados indicaron que los estudiantes universitarios pertenecientes a familias en las que los padres están divorciados tienen un estrés significativamente mayor, una satisfacción familiar menor y una calidad y frecuencia de las relaciones familiares menor que los estudiantes universitarios pertenecientes a familias de padres no divorciados. Estos resultados podrían estar relacionados con los efectos a largo plazo del divorcio y ponen de manifiesto diferencias en las condiciones familiares de los alumnos cuyos padres están divorciados comparados con aquellos cuyos padres continúan casados

Participant Perceptions of Twitter Research Ethics

Social computing systems such as Twitter present new research sites that have provided billions of data points to researchers. However, the availability of public social media data has also presented ethical challenges. As the research community works to create ethical norms, we should be considering users’ concerns as well. With this in mind, we report on an exploratory survey of Twitter users’ perceptions of the use of tweets in research. Within our survey sample, few users were previously aware that their public tweets could be used by researchers, and the majority felt that researchers should not be able to use tweets without consent. However, we find that these attitudes are highly contextual, depending on factors such as how the research is conducted or disseminated, who is conducting it, and what the study is about. The findings of this study point to potential best practices for researchers conducting observation and analysis of public data

Software architecture critics in argo

Software architectures are high-level design representations of software systems that focus on composition of software components and how those components interact. Software architectures abstract the details of implementation and allow the designer to focus on essential design decisions. Regardless of notation, designers are faced with the task of making good design decisions, which demands a wide range of knowledge of the problem and solution domains. Argo is a software architecture design environment that supports designers by addressing several cognitive challenges of design. In this paper we describe how Argo supports decision making by automatically supplying knowledge that is timely and relevant to decisions at hand

Using Critics to Analyze Evolving Architectures

Software architectures evolve as the result of numerous, interrelated design decisions. At any point in an architecture’s evolution, current decisions can critically affect alternatives at later stages, and each decision has the potential of requiring previous decisions to be reconsidered. Analysis techniques that provide feedback only after “complete ” sequences of design decisions have been made do not directly support the evolutionary nature of the architecture design process. In this paper we present an approach to architectural analysis that more closely supports evolution by providing feedback a