The business and Information Technology (IT) alignment issue has become one of the Top-10 IT management issues since 1980. IT has continually strived to achieve alignment with business goals and objectives. These IT efforts include ERP implementation to benefit from the best practices; data center consolidation and server virtualization to keep…

"End-to-End (E2E)" voting systems provide cryptographic proof that the voter's intention is captured, cast, and tallied correctly. While E2E systems guarantee integrity independent of software, most E2E systems rely on software to provide confidentiality, availability, authentication, and access control; thus, end-to-end integrity is not…

In 2003, Nicholas Carr published in "Harvard Business Review" his article "IT Doesn't Matter," which rekindled the debate on the strategic importance of information technology (IT). Chief Information Officers (CIOs) of community colleges are now faced with the challenge of seeking the best technology for their institutions. The…

With the downturn in growth of the U.S. economy and significant layoffs in the IT industry in 2009, retaining information technology (IT) workers is increasingly important to businesses as IT workers carry broad responsibilities for the analysis, design, implementation, and maintenance of critical business systems. Turnover of IT workers causes a…

Clustering is one of the most common data mining tasks, used frequently for data organization and analysis in various application domains. Traditional machine learning approaches to clustering are fully automated and unsupervised where class labels are unknown a priori. In real application domains, however, some "weak" form of side…

Finns are proud of their uniformly high-quality schools. Unlike in the United States, where parents fret about getting their children into "good" and often private schools with restrictive enrollment, virtually all schools are public, and most Finnish parents send their children to the school closest to their home. Teaching is a…

This paper outlines and reviews three forms and associated discourses of the "knowledge economy": the "learning economy", based on the work of Bengt-Ake Lundvall; the "creative economy" based on the work of Charles Landry, John Howkins and Richard Florida; and the "open knowledge economy" based on the work of Yochai Benkler and others. Arguably,…

Making connections between subjects to enhance learning and demonstrate relevance and application is not new, especially in primary education. Teaching through topics or themes has swung in and out of fashion and the use of literacy, numeracy and ICT skills across the curriculum is embedded in many schemes of work. However, the proposed New…

Systems Architects and Information Technology administrators working in higher education help faculty, staff, and student computer users. Yet, who helps them? What resources do these professionals value? A case study was conducted using purposeful sampling and data collection through electronic interview to gather the preferred information-seeking…

The role of the chief information officer (CIO) in higher education has expanded over time as technology has worked its way into people's daily lives, altering forever the way they work and learn, and becoming ubiquitous on campuses. IT is now critical to the business of education, and the CIO has stretched his or her influence to span key…

Back in the 1990s, enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems may not have been user-friendly, but what they tried to do was totally reasonable: replace stand-alone systems in various departments--such as finance, logistics, and human resources--with a single integrated software program. The idea was that although each department would still have…

It's becoming common for schools and community colleges to join with leaders of the business and industry community to create public-private partnerships to create new and enhanced opportunities for both parties. By creating a public-private partnership between schools, the local business community, and organizations like Cisco, Florida State…

One of the most difficult and most important engineering tasks is the integration of a robot-manipulator into material handling, assembly, and production processes, offering the possibility of supervision and control. The knowledge and skills required for these kinds of tasks are purely mechatronic and, thus, multidisciplinary. This paper…

This article critically assesses the potential of information and communication technologies (ICTs) as agricultural extension tools. Specifically, the purpose of the current piece of work is to identify the extent of the use of ICTs on farms, look into farmers' characteristics as related to ICTs' adoption and explore farmers' preferred extension…

This paper focuses on the ethical position of the ethnographer when encountering unethical activities. Ethnography affords a rich insight into cultures, often behind previously secure doors but it is also a demanding science. Our gatekeepers control our access and our relationships with them can determine our destiny. This paper offers an exchange…