Best Selling Books by Paul Benjamin

Model checking offers a methodology for determining whether a model satisfies a list of correctness requirements. We propose a theory of dependability auditing with model checking based on four principles: (1) The modeling process should be partitioned into computational components and behavioral components as an aid to system understanding; (2) Abstracting from the detail of the actual system design; (3) A language must be available that can represent and evaluate states and processes that evolve over time; (4) Given an adequate model and temporal specifications, a model checker can verify whether or not the input model is a model of that specification: the specification will not fail in the model. We demonstrate this theoretical framework with Web Services and electronic contracting.

Contributors' withdrawal from online communities is threatening the sustainability of those communities, especially those that have entered mature and saturated stages. Drawing upon organizational withdrawal research, this article re-conceptualizes contributor withdrawal in the context of online communities. To explain the underlying mechanisms by which contributors withdraw from online communities, we introduce a theory of contributor withdrawal that emphasizes within-individual variances on the changes of cognition, emotions, and behaviors, rather than across-individual variances on the final (or average) states. In light of affective events theory, contributors' cognitive dissonances between the community they experience and the community they expected are identified as distal causes of contributor withdrawal through the mediation of emotional changes. We also propose a typology of cognitive dissonances towards online communities and the structure of emotional change. We then discuss the moderating impacts of affective dispositions and sense-making on the cognitive dissonance-emotional change relationship, and the mediating impacts of changes in attitude and expectation on emotional change-withdrawal behavior relationships.

Social networking applications such as blogs, instant messaging, podcasts, social networking websites (e.g., Renren in China, Vkontakte in Russia, Facebook), professional networking websites (e.g., LinkedIn), Twitter, and virtual worlds (e.g., Second Life) have become increasingly popular in the last few years. Because these applications have substantial implications for users, organizations, and society, online social networks (OSN) have gained attention from information systems (IS) researchers and grown steadily as a research area since 2004. However, to organize the accumulated research and encourage researchers to examine new and pressing issues in social networks, available knowledge needs to be synthesized and research gaps need to be addressed [Bandara et al., 2011]. Therefore, we conducted a systematic review of publications about OSN published in major IS journals between January 2004 and August 2013 and provide an overview of the state of IS research regarding OSN. The objective of this study is to show the evolution of the existing IS research on OSN, to build a common nomenclature and taxonomy for this area of research, to identify theories used, and to provide a useful roadmap for future research in this area.

Information systems (IS) journal rankings and ratings help scholars focus their publishing efforts and are widely used surrogates for judging the quality of research. Over the years, numerous approaches have been used to rank IS journals, approaches such as citation metrics, school lists, acceptance rates, and expert assessments. However, the results of these approaches often conflict due to a host of validity concerns. In the current scientometric study, we make significant strides toward correcting for these limitations in the ranking of mainstream IS journals. We compare expert rankings to bibliometric measures such as the ISI Impact FactorTM, the h-index, and social network analysis metrics. Among other findings, we conclude that bibliometric measures provide very similar results to expert-based methods in determining a tiered structure of IS journals, thereby suggesting that bibliometrics can be a complete, a less expensive, and a more efficient substitute for expert assessment. We also find strong support for seven of the eight journals in the Association for Information Systems (AIS) Senior Scholars' “basket” of journals. A cluster analysis of our results indicates a two-tiered separation in the quality of the highest quality IS journals -- with MISQ, ISR, and JMIS belonging, in that order, to the highest A tier. Journal quality metrics fit nicely into the sociology of science literature and can be useful in models that attempt to explain how knowledge disseminates through scientific communities.

A gory, bizarre collection of Australian true crime stories of marriages that ended in murder over the past 100 years.

How Jews have adapted to socialist and post-socialist Yugoslavia, affirming their Jewishness in a much more secular fashion than in the past.

Information systems (IS) research frequently uses survey data to measure the interplay between technological systems and human beings. Researchers have developed sophisticated procedures to build and validate multi-item scales that measure latent constructs. The vast majority of IS studies uses classical test theory (CTT), but this approach suffers from three major theoretical shortcomings: (1) it assumes a linear relationship between the latent variable and observed scores, which rarely represents the empirical reality of behavioral constructs; (2) the true score can either not be estimated directly or only by making assumptions that are difficult to be met; and (3) parameters such as reliability, discrimination, location, or factor loadings depend on the sample being used. To address these issues, we present item response theory (IRT) as a collection of viable alternatives for measuring continuous latent variables by means of categorical indicators (i.e., measurement variables). IRT offers several advantages: (1) it assumes nonlinear relationships; (2) it allows more appropriate estimation of the true score; (3) it can estimate item parameters independently of the sample being used; (4) it allows the researcher to select items that are in accordance with a desired model; and (5) it applies and generalizes concepts such as reliability and internal consistency, and thus allows researchers to derive more information about the measurement process. We use a CTT approach as well as Rasch models (a special class of IRT models) to demonstrate how a scale for measuring hedonic aspects of websites is developed under both approaches. The results illustrate how IRT can be successfully applied in IS research and provide better scale results than CTT. We conclude by explaining the most appropriate circumstances for applying IRT, as well as the limitations of IRT.

Although trust and distrust are both crucial in online truster-trustee relationships, researchers disagree as to whether trust and distrust are distinct from each other. Given this debate, it is important to consider how distrust could be distinguished from trust. Accordingly, this paper extends the nomological network of distrust and introduces two novel antecedents never introduced in e-commerce literature: situational abnormalities and suspicion. We also propose that trust and distrust coexist in an online e-commerce relationship and can result in ambivalence when they both have high attitudinal values (represented in emotions, beliefs, or behaviours). Using a study of online consumer behaviour with 521 consumers, we largely validated our newly proposed model. We find that situational abnormalities and suspicion are separate, important novel antecedents to distrust. We also examine the effect of ambivalence on the truster's intentions towards the website and find a small positive effect that increases the user's intentions towards the website. Finally, we demonstrate the coexistence of trust and distrust as separate constructs, and highlight that distrust has a much larger impact on the truster's intentions than trust. We conclude with implications to theory and practice, along with a discussion of the limitations and future opportunities.

More stories from the biggest-ever collection of Australian true crime. From the annals of our criminal history - and as featured on Paul B. Kidd's top-rating radio segement 'Crime File' - comes another collection of Australian true crime stories, from high-proifile murder cases to crimes of he macabre and bizarre.

Business-to-business electronic marketplaces (EMs) were hyped as the future of efficient supply chains and as essential to the growth of e-commerce, but in spite of this promise, many EMs failed in the first few years after 2000. Although numerous studies have involved EMs, little research has focused on the degree to which an EM's automated supply-chain strategy contributed to its survival or failure. Accordingly, this study examines 400 EMs through an extensive survey of the strategic supply-chain capabilities in conjunction with McKinsey & Company and CAPS Research. These results are interpreted using existing strategy literature. The following factors were found to be positively related to EM survival: capturing detailed spend data, providing sourcing and process change recommendations, allowing international contracts, offering the ability to track supplier product availability, and having more than 100 employees. In contrast, the following factors led to EM failure: providing warranties, employing low to medium transaction functionality, integrating with a buyer's accounting system, allowing buyers to “punch through” to supplier Web sites, permitting the online creation of requisition and purchase orders, transacting a daily volume less than $1,000, and having 25-75 employees. These results highlight the need for EMs to create network effects of economies of scale and scope for buyers, focus on core competencies, and create buyer lock-in through high switching costs. Existing EMs should focus their strategy on developing the factors found to lead to EM survival and eliminating the factors leading to failure.

In this essay, we outline some important concerns in the hope of improving the effectiveness of security and privacy research. We discuss the need to re-examine our understanding of information technology (IT) and information system (IS) artefacts and to expand the range of the latter to include those artificial phenomena that are crucial to information security and privacy research. We then briefly discuss some prevalent limitations in theory, methodology, and contributions that generally weaken security/privacy studies and jeopardise their chances of publication in a top IS journal. More importantly, we suggest remedies for these weaknesses, identifying specific improvements that can be made and offering a couple of illustrations of such improvements. In particular, we address the notion of loose re-contextualisation, using deterrence theory (DT) research as an example. We also provide an illustration of how the focus on intentions may have resulted in an underuse of powerful theories in security and privacy research, because such theories explain more than just intentions. We then outline three promising opportunities for IS research that should be particularly compelling to security and privacy researchers: online platforms, the Internet of things (IoT), and big data. All of these carry innate information security and privacy risks and vulnerabilities that can be addressed only by researching each link of the systems chain, that is, technologies-policies-processes-people-society-economy-legislature. We conclude by suggesting several specific opportunities for new research in these areas.

Criminal organizational insider computer abuse (ICA) research has focused on factors that influence either ICA intentions, or actual behavior during the ICA process. However, we argue that this research has not correctly conceptualized the decision-making processes involved in ICA. Thus, our first aim is to demonstrate this opportunity by leveraging the rational choice perspective (RCP) from criminology. The RCP advances an “event” stage, in which choices are made leading up to and during the criminal act. However, the RCP also acknowledges a preceding “initial involvement” stage, which encompasses those factors that lead an individual to consider participation in crime. RCP explains that if, during the initial involvement stage, an individual becomes motivated and decides that future criminal behavior is the most suitable course of action, then he or she will have reached a state of “readiness.” It is only after an individual has become readied, and at a later time, does the individual make event decisions in the perpetration of a specific crime. Consequently, extant ICA research has overlooked consideration of why--prior to the crime-an individual initially considers engaging in such criminal activity in the first instance. Notably, this consideration should not to be conflated with intentions. We argue that there needs to be a clear distinction between those motivational factors that would lead to the consideration of such engagement at the initial involvement stage, and those factors that would lead an individual at the event stage to perpetrate a crime. We thus propose a revised version of the extended security action cycle (ESAC), which reflects these criminal decision-making stages. Moreover, we provide a means through which to identify and understand the relationship among those factors that may motivate an individual during the initial involvement stage, by drawing on the life course perspective (LCP). With a focus on time, context, and process, the LCP offers a framework in which are inscribed four key principles. Through examples drawn from the LCP and white-collar crime literature, we illustrate how these principles can provide a basis for conceptualizing factors that motivate ICA and open up new avenues for future research/theory development.

Imagine a modern-day world in which multiple deities of all religions actually exist - Norse Gods roam Asgard, Greek Gods rule Mount Olympus, Egyptian Gods orbit around Ra, Japanese Gods bestow luck and wisdom - and their demi-god children all attend the same private high school in Los Angeles! These students are the only ones who can stop the plans of the evil gods of several different pantheons who, after seeing their schemes defeated time and time again, have banded together to plunge the world into darkness!

We present a creative approach to improve the effectiveness of decision-making groups in solving nonroutine problems by introducing increased distrust into the group. Our theory is proposed through an extension and empirical test of Schul et al.'s [1] distrust model in an online group decision-making domain. We find that an increase in distrust among group members led to an increase in group decision accuracy for nonroutine problems. This demonstrates that through a distrust stimulus, members of decision-making groups can better solve nonroutine problems. This paper also demonstrates how simple environmental abnormalities can increase distrust and trust in computer-based decision-making groups. Various trust- and distrust-related measures were also tested and validated to further research in this area.