<p> With the rise of global telecommunications networks, and especially with the worldwide spread of the Internet, the world is considered to be becoming an information society: a society in which social relations are patterned by information, transcending time and space through the use of new information and communications technologies. Much of the popular press and academic literature on the information society focuses on the dichotomy between the technologically-enabled virtual space of information, and the physical space of the material world. </p><p> My examination of Internet infrastructure focuses on the system of interconnections amongst the networks which make up the Internet, which is called the inter-domain routing system. For all that the Internet is spoken of as a singular entity, it is in fact a complex distributed system of over 47,000 interconnected networks spanning the world. It is these interconnections which allow the Internet to appear to be a single entity, and provide the means through which the apparent placelessness of virtual space is produced. I approach the problem of understanding the production of virtual space by examining the mechanisms involved in the maintenance of order within the Internet's inter-domain routing system. </p><p> To examine the mechanisms involved in maintaining order in the inter-domain routing system, I study the technology and practices involved in the interconnection of networks. The technology which enables network interconnection is the Border Gateway Protocol (BGP), which allows the establishment of network interconnections without any need for centralized oversight. In the absence of centralized oversight, I found that the practices involved in operating BGP rely on coordination and collaboration amongst the technical personnel responsible for managing the interconnection of networks. Coordination and collaboration are enabled amongst the Internet's technical personnel through social relationships of trust, running across corporate and state boundaries. Even though the inter-domain routing system operates without centralized oversight, it does rely on centralized institutional structures for specialized functions, such as standards-setting activity, and the allocation of unique numbering resources required to identify networks in the inter-domain routing system, and to identify computers within networks. </p><p> I argue that order is maintained within the inter-domain routing system through a distributed system of trust relationships, which are anchored by centralized institutional structures. As an arrangement of mechanisms for maintaining order, I consider this to be a governance arrangement, which I term "distributed governance". </p><p> Distributed governance is an unusual, and possibly unique, model of governance. It has three distinguishing features which mark it off from hierarchical and market-based models of governance. First, in its reliance on a distributed system of trust relationships. These are produced and reproduced in the practice of interconnecting networks, and through professional communities of the technical personnel responsible for managing network interconnections. Second, in its centralized institutional structures, which are uniquely organized amongst global governance institutions. None of these centralized institutional structures are formed by international treaty, and all of them are strongly committed to openness and participation. Third, in its operation over the particular technological form of BGP which emphasizes coordination and collaboration. To change the technology of inter-domain routing would be to change the range of governance possibilities for inter-domain routing, modifying the nature of distributed governance itself. </p><p> These distinguishing features are sites of contestation. Although technical personnel do owe allegiance to their professional communities, and to one another through trust relationships, they are also employees of corporations which invest in Internet infrastructure, and citizens of nation states which regulate Internet infrastructure in their territories. Distributed governance is accordingly complicated by market relationships, the interests of nation states, and international relations amongst nation states, just as markets, nation states and international relations are complicated by distributed governance. </p><p> To make sense of distributed governance as a global system, I study its instantiation in professional communities of the Internet's technical personnel, centralized institutional arrangements, and state and market interests across two different regions: North America, which is relatively central to the global Internet, and South Asia, which is relatively peripheral. This provides the opportunity to perform a comparison between these two cases, to understand at once how distributed governance varies under different conditions, and how different articulations of distributed governance are linked into a single global system of governance. </p><p> The range of social possibilities within a society are shaped by the model of governance which provides it with order. To understand the nature of the information society, it is essential to understand the mechanisms of distributed governance. Indeed, I argue that the social values of "freedom" and "democracy" which are often ascribed to the Internet are only made possible through distributed governance. (Abstract shortened by UMI.) </p>

<p>In the past decade, the amount of scientific data collected and generated by scientists has grown dramatically. This growth has intensified an existing problem: in large archives consisting of datasets stored in many files, formats and locations, how can scientists find data relevant to their research interests? We approach this problem in a new way: by adapting Information Retrieval techniques, developed for searching text documents, into the world of (primarily numeric) scientific data. We propose an approach that uses a blend of automated and curated methods to extract metadata from large repositories of scientific data. We then perform searches over this metadata, returning results ranked by similarity to the search criteria. We present a model of this approach, and describe a specific implementation thereof performed at an ocean-observatory data archive and now running in production. Our prototype implements scanners that extract metadata from datasets that contain different kinds of environmental observations, and a search engine with a candidate similarity measure for comparing a set of search terms to the extracted metadata. We evaluate the utility of the prototype by performing two user studies; these studies show that the approach resonates with users, and that our proposed similarity measure performs well when analyzed using standard Information Retrieval evaluation methods. We performed performance tests to explore how continued archive growth will affect our goal of interactive response, developed and applied techniques that mitigate the effects of that growth, and show that the techniques are effective. Lastly, we describe some of the research needed to extend this initial work into a true &ldquo;Google for data&rdquo;. </p>

<p> Compliance with regulations may not automatically produce a secure infrastructure. In the United States energy critical infrastructure sector, compliance with regulatory cyber security standards may not necessarily mean that an entity would be able to withstand a cyber attack on critical assets potentially supporting the reliability of the Bulk Electric System (BES). This qualitative exploratory inquiry study researched technical opinions of cyber security professionals in the energy critical infrastructure industry regarding the effect of the North American Electric Reliability Corporation (NERC) Critical Infrastructure Protection (CIP) standards on the reliability of the BES. NERC entities had been required to be compliant with the standards for several years at the time this study was undertaken. There has been speculation regarding the efficacy of the standards to impact the reliability of the BES. However, there was a lack of scholarly or professional literature confirming assumptions concerning BES reliability. In this study, data was gathered through interviews with individuals who were CIP implementation experts. The purpose of this study was to identify a theme or themes regarding changes in the reliability of the BES as a result of the NERC CIP standards implementation. Interview data from the study generated 9 themes including a theme for the research question indicating that reliability of the BES had improved as a result of the implementation and enforcement of the CIP standards. Some of the more prominent themes included NERC fines having influenced entities in the implementation of the standards; entities have been more concerned about CIP compliance than securing their equipment; and entities have removed equipment from their facilities in order to avoid the requirements, and the associated expense, the standards would demand.</p>

<p> This study focuses on modeling people's perceptions of places and how those perceptions are affected by cultural differences. Cultural background affects the way people feel and recall information. However, it is unclear how cultural background influences individual's perception of geospatial areas such as a town or a city. One way an individual's cultural background varies is with regard to the patterns of one's routine communication. This concept is described by Hall's high- and low-context cultural model (1976). The ways people perceive geospatial places can be characterized in terms of their tendency to rely on specific landmarks or symbolic addresses. In this study, we use an online survey and an online place recognition game to test the hypothesis that high-context individuals will perceive urban places in terms of landmarks rather than symbolic addresses. The results suggest that high- and low-context is not a unified construct. Instead it is a multi-dimensional construct with sub-dimensions where one of those, i.e. one's attitude towards other's communication style, may affect an individual's perception of places.</p>

The popularity of mother blogs is increasingly attracting sponsors looking to market their products to mother blog audiences. This combination of commercial and informational content calls on readers and writers to distinguish between informational content and commercial activity. This thesis examines how mother bloggers integrate sponsored content into their blogs and how both writers and readers interpret the credibility of these posts. The study takes place within a conceptual framework of source and message credibility. Using a qualitative and interpretive approach, semi-structured interviews were conducted with readers and writers. Although the results are not generalizable, they suggest determining the credibility of these posts is a social process, informed by participants’ existing knowledge and framed within the community of mother bloggers. The results add to our understanding of credibility perceptions when commercial and informational content comingle and have implications for other online communities that require ongoing information evaluation.

<p> The security of digital information is paramount to the success of private organizations. Violating that security is a multi-billion-dollar criminal business and exploiting these vulnerabilities creates a single point of failure for operations. Thus, understanding the detection, identification, and response to information security incidents is critical to protecting all levels of infrastructure. The lived experiences of current professionals indicate 10 unique themes in regards to how information security incidents are addressed in private organizations. These unique themes led the researcher to offer several conclusions related to the importance of planning, communication, offensive capabilities, and integration with third-party organizations. Information security incident management is accomplished as an escalation process with multiple decision points leading to a restoration of services or security. The source of the incident is not often sought beyond the first external IP address but their purpose and intent are essential to information security incident management. The key lessons learned from professionals include the importance of having a plan, training the plan, and incorporating the human elements of security into information security incident response. Penetration testing as well a knowledge about threat and attack patterns are important to information security incident management for detection, containment, and remediation. External organizations play a major role in the management of information security incidents as fear, incompetence, and jurisdictional issues keep the private sector from working with government, military, and law enforcement organizations. These themes have wide reaching implications for practical application and future research projects.</p>

<p> Social computing networking is fast becoming a part of how project managers interact, communicate, and conduct business with each other. This quantitative, non-experimental, survey research addressed the extent to which social computing networking (SCN) affects workplace engagement and ethical workplace behaviors of project managers within public sector organizations. The Utrecht Work Engagement Scale (UWES-17) and the Workplace Ethics Behavior Survey (WEBS) were used to measure the constructs. Data analysis included descriptive statistics, inferential statistics, and hypothesis testing using correlational and multiple regression analysis. The study combined social identity theory with empirical findings from business ethics and workplace engagement research. The accessible population was 116 project managers from the public sector in the southeastern regional area of the United States. The results indicated that a significant, positive relationship did exist between social computing networking and workplace engagement. Additionally, there was a significant, positive, relationship between social computing networking and ethical workplace behaviors. Each null hypothesis was significant at a .05 level and rejected in consideration of the alternate hypothesis. The findings provided insight and increased understanding of project manager needs for engagement and helped determined how organizations can respond to such needs. Consequently, Project Management policies on social networking and expected ethical conduct should be understood by all users. Corporate policies on social computing networking should balance the employer's and employee's interests relevant to workplace engagement and ethical behaviors for a more positive, productive, and secure workplace.</p>

<p> Information security is a complex issue, which is very critical for success of modern businesses. It can be implemented with the help of well-tested global standards and best practices. However, it has been studied that the human aspects of information security compliance pose significant challenge to its practitioners. There has been significant interest in the recent past on how human compliance to information security policy can be achieved in an organization. Various models have been proposed by these researchers. However, there are very few models that have tried to link human commitment attributes with information security governance of an organization. The research problem of this study was to identify the security controls and mechanisms to govern information security effectively. The proposed model was based on agency theory and comprises a relationship between human commitment variables (ethics, integrity and trust) with security governance variables (structural, relational and process) referred as systemic variables in the research. The resulting correlation is further related with governance objectives (goal congruence and reducing information asymmetry) to hypothesize an effective information security in an organization. The research model proposed was tested employing confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) and structural equation modeling (SEM). There were four models tested in this research. The first model (initial measurement model) comprised human variables linked with relational and the systemic variables linked with goal congruence and information asymmetry. This model could not get through the CFA tests. A modified model comprising human and systemic attributes related with goal congruence and information asymmetry, separately, was taken forward to SEM. This model returned low model fitment scores and hence two alternate models were tested. In the first alternative, the human attributes were related with goal congruence and systemic attributes were linked with information asymmetry. In the second alternative, the relationships of the first alternatives were retained and two alternate relationships were introduced - integrity was linked with information asymmetry and structural was linked with goal congruence. Both models are very close to good model fitment scores. However, the second alternative returned better results and hence, was chosen as the final outcome of the research. The model reflects that human attributes and systemic attributes are fairly independent in an effective information security framework, and drive goal congruence and information asymmetry, respectively. However, integrity is an important human commitment for ensuring information asymmetry and the right organizational structure and roles are important for ensuring goal congruence.</p>

No description available.

Technology surrounds us with many daily Search tasks. However, there is a fundamental difference---one of user familiarity and control---that differentiates between search tasks in impersonal and personal search spaces. The World Wide Web itself is largely unknown, unfamiliar and impersonal to a user. In contrast, users regularly search in more `personal' spaces, such as their own files, their web history, bookmarks, downloads, and so on. These spaces are personal because the user has more knowledge, familiarity and control over their content. A byproduct of these qualities is that search in personal spaces is typically navigational: to navigate through or to recover familiar information. This differs from web search, where very often a user is trying to discover new or unknown information. This important difference in search intent means that there are often few `correct' results for a query in personal spaces, which is something we must keep in mind when implementing search algorithms. This thesis leverages structure and metadata to build novel algorithms for improving search in several important personal search spaces: finding a file in a file hierarchy, website navigation on a mobile phone browser, tag-based search in an online bookmarking system, and sponsoring content on mobiles. The proposed methods are highly practical and applicable to current real-life search problems that affect millions of users.