On Contending with Unruly Neighbors in the Global Village: Viewing Information Systems as Both Weapon and Target

While information technologies we employ in business, government, and society have dramatically enhanced our ability to conduct commerce, the vulnerabilities of these systems create potential dangers not often fully apprehended. As an example, criminal and terrorist groups have demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of how to adapt organizational forms and information technologies to advance their agendas, regardless of how contemptible these may be. In this article, we consider how these groups may view information technology and systems both as means by which they may more effectively organize themselves and as potential targets as they subvert the underlying societal assumptions regarding the technology itself. Topics such as these have implications for both IS research and practice because the changing nature of warfare means entities that may have until recently been seen as “non-combatant” are no longer viewed as such; any organization’s online resources may be regarded and serviced as legitimate targets. This fact, coupled with the interconnectedness of the global economy, makes it imperative to understand the potential threat—whether this is acted on by criminals, terrorists, or even by hostile nation states—and place greater emphasis on defending vital systems against such attacks

The Limits of Information: Measuring Differences Between Local and Distance Group Attitudes Toward Distance Learning

Because of the imperative of attaining advanced education in the emerging global service economy, and the difficulties involved in traveling to distant classrooms, universities are investing heavily in interactive video and other types of distance learning. While we admit the necessity to investigate these modes of instructional delivery, we also call for a fair but critical investigation of what these technologies take away from the classroom experience. We performed a quasi-experimental study to investigate just that. Students in a local and distance class taught simultaneously by one instructor were asked for their perceptions about the experience. In the main, the perceptions of students in the Distance setting were generally less favorable than their Local setting counterparts. Implications of our findings are discussed

Robbing Peter to Pay Paul: The OtherSide of Group Support Systems

That Group Support Systems (GSS) can enhance group performance appears to be the case. However, GSS research has drawn heavily from a rational perspective, one that may not be able to comprehend the full range of phenomena at play in group meetings. Although a social perspective may provide greater explanatory power, little has been done to investigate GSS phenomena from this viewpoint. This paper considers more fully the social impacts of GSS by varying levels of GSS restrictiveness and assessing the effect that this may have on group cohesiveness. We find that groups in the more restrictive treatment experienced lower perceived cohesiveness than did those in the non-restrictive treatmen

The AMCIS 2003 Panels on IS Education-I: Let Us Not Throw Out the Baby with the Bath Water: Information, Technology, and Systems All Matter in the Core IS Course

Recent discussion about MIS centers on its role as an academic discipline and the utility of the core IS course in undergraduate business programs. This article presents a summary of a panel discussion at the AMCIS 2003 meeting about these issues. In includes the results of a survey on what elements of the IS 2002.1 Introduction to MIS course are being used that was presented. It also presents the discussions among panel participants and the audience and the panelists emerging perspective on the topic. Some advocate a reduction in the focus on systems and technology in the core IS course. However, we believe that this view is an over-reaction to concerns about the course, and suggest (as did many before us) that systems theory is a central organizing them of the core IS course. We believe that the response by the field should not be to water down our core course, but to identify our contribution and highlight it. To this end, we offer a concise statement of what we believe is the heart of the core IS course

IS Journal Quality Assessment Using the Author Affiliation Index

Research productivity is one means by which academic units attain legitimacy within their institutional milieu and make their case for resources. Journal quality assessment is an important component for assessing faculty research productivity. We introduce the Author Affiliation Index (AAI), a simple method for assessing journal quality, to the IS domain. Essentially, the AAI of a journal is the percentage of academic authors publishing in that journal who are affiliated with a base set of high-quality academic institutions. Besides explaining the AAI, we demonstrate its use with a set of well-known IS journals, discuss its rankings vis-à-vis those resulting from other methods, and provide an example of how the basic AAI approach can be modified by changing the base school set that is used to define journal quality. The AAI has a number of advantages. First, it is a simple, low cost and transparent method for assessing any journal given a base school set. Second, it provides a consistent ranking of journals, particularly of those beyond the top consensus journals where less consistency is achieved with other measures. Third, it enables new journals to be rapidly assessed against more established ones without the lags or costs of other measures. The AAI provides another indicator of journal quality that is different from surveys and citation analyses

Genetic Knock-Down of Hdac3 Does Not Modify Disease-Related Phenotypes in a Mouse Model of Huntington's Disease

Huntington's disease (HD) is an autosomal dominant progressive neurodegenerative disorder caused by an expansion of a CAG/polyglutamine repeat for which there are no disease modifying treatments. In recent years, transcriptional dysregulation has emerged as a pathogenic process that appears early in disease progression and has been recapitulated across multiple HD models. Altered histone acetylation has been proposed to underlie this transcriptional dysregulation and histone deacetylase (HDAC) inhibitors, such as suberoylanilide hydroxamic acid (SAHA), have been shown to improve polyglutamine-dependent phenotypes in numerous HD models. However potent pan-HDAC inhibitors such as SAHA display toxic side-effects. To better understand the mechanism underlying this potential therapeutic benefit and to dissociate the beneficial and toxic effects of SAHA, we set out to identify the specific HDAC(s) involved in this process. For this purpose, we are exploring the effect of the genetic reduction of specific HDACs on HD-related phenotypes in the R6/2 mouse model of HD. The study presented here focuses on HDAC3, which, as a class I HDAC, is one of the preferred targets of SAHA and is directly involved in histone deacetylation. To evaluate a potential benefit of Hdac3 genetic reduction in R6/2, we generated a mouse carrying a critical deletion in the Hdac3 gene. We confirmed that the complete knock-out of Hdac3 is embryonic lethal. To test the effects of HDAC3 inhibition, we used Hdac3+/− heterozygotes to reduce nuclear HDAC3 levels in R6/2 mice. We found that Hdac3 knock-down does not ameliorate physiological or behavioural phenotypes and has no effect on molecular changes including dysregulated transcripts. We conclude that HDAC3 should not be considered as the major mediator of the beneficial effect induced by SAHA and other HDAC inhibitors in HD

To Agree or Not to Agree: Do GSS Help or Hinder Group Consensus?

One intent of Group Support Systems (GSS) is to assist groups in reaching consensus, however, the pattern that emerges from previous GSS research suggests, that, if anything, GSS use inhibits consensus. In this study, we firstreview literature that suggests why this may be. We then present results from an experiment (40 focus groups performing a product pricing/consensus reaching task) that would at first seem counter-intuitive, given our theory and previous GSS research findings-we found higher consensus in GSS groups than in non-GSS groups. Implications for GSS research and practice are offered