Contemporary Information Technology Research Articles

Information Revolution and Growing Power of Communication: A Foundation of New Diplomacy

Information and communication technology strategy can be said to have emerged as a road map for capitalizing on the use of information and technology as a key enabler of the government’s transformation in the realms of new diplomacy. The recent information and communication technological development, in both developed and developing countries, has increased the high-speed interactive digital network for multilingual voice, video, print, data communication worldwide, revolutionizing how nation states communicate with one another in the international system. There is no doubt that in the contemporary international system information technology (IT) is fundamentally transforming the way we live, work, govern and communicate. The global digital network and the growing power of communication have created a new foundation of diplomacy in the international arena. Therefore, this article examines the sweeping changes in the global system, high-speed interactive network with adequate bandwidth for multilingual voice, video, print and data communication vis-à-vis the conduct of diplomacy in the twenty-first century. Furthermore, it should be emphasized that IT is as important as politics, economics and military power, information, communication skills and foreign policy are high national priorities in international relations. The introductory part of this article focuses on the concept of diplomacy and we further analyze the sweeping changes in IT and growing power of communication in the new millennium and the contribution of IT toward the development of diplomacy in the international system.

Social Mission of Students in the Educational Process: The Past and the Present

Abstract The article considers the interconnection between students’ social mission in the conditions of information society and improvement of higher educational process. The aim and tasks of the article are to examine the dynamics of students’ social mission, to study out the characteristic features of improving educational process in relation to contemporary tasks of training a competent professional, empiric verification of proposed scientific positions. To investigate the connection between students’ social mission and optimization of educational process a set of methods was used: theoretical – historical analysis to define students’ social mission; comparison, generalization of scientific facts to uncover contemporary interaction tendencies of students’ social role and the flow of educational process; synthesis for clarification of the “students’ social mission” concept; empiric – experimental research of students’ satisfaction with the educational process, survey through online questionnaire, mathematic processing and generalization of acquired data. Analysis of open-type responses regarding the proposed remarks and recommendations enabled the formation of action directions to improve the conditions of educational process, such as support and facilitation of students’ academic mobility, usage of new forms and means in educational process (distance learning, training, contemporary information technologies and others), correspondence of the contents of educative qualification study programs with contemporary demands of a job market and others. Results of this study will be useful for scholars of social pedagogy, teachers, methodologists and heads of higher educational institutions, social pedagogues, social workers, students, etc.

Perspective: service-based business models to incentivize the efficient use of pesticides in crop protection.

Several problems limit the productivity and acceptance of crop protection, including pesticide overuse, pesticide resistance, poor adoption of integrated pest management (IPM), declining funding for research and extension, and inefficiencies of scale. We discuss the proposition that alternative business models for crop protection can address these problems by incentivizing and benefiting from efficiency of pesticide use. Currently, business models are not linked to the adoption of IPM and are sometimes at odds with IPM practices. We explore a business model based on the provision of pest management adequacy through services rather than the sale of pesticide products. Specifically, we advocate for establishment of crop protection adequacy standards that would allow a market system to maximize efficiency. Changing some of the relationships between agricultural companies and producers from one based on products to one based on services is an idea worthy of debate and evaluation for improving the efficiency of pest management. Contemporary information technology enhancing monitoring and coordination warrants attention in this debate. © 2019 Society of Chemical Industry.

Prawnokarne i prawnomiędzynarodowe regulacje związane z ochroną przed pedofilią w cyberprzestrzeni

<p>Artykuł skupia się na rozwiązaniach jurydycznych dotyczących ochrony przed pedofilią w cyberprzestrzeni, stosowanych w Polsce, jak również na arenie międzynarodowej. W szeroki sposób przedstawiono działanie pedofilów w internecie wykorzystujących sieć do kontaktu i spotkań z osobami małoletnimi oraz do obiegu zdjęć i filmów o charakterze pedofilskim. Jednocześnie przedstawiono próby zwalczania tego procederu podejmowane przez organy państwowe, a polegające w głównej mierze na dostosowywaniu przepisów do zmieniających się realiów oraz uświadamianiu osób małoletnich o zagrożeniach, jakie niesie ze sobą korzystanie z sieci.</p>

Re-fashioning African Studies in an Information Technology Driven World for Africa's Transformation

The African Studies programme, launched in the University of Ghana by Ghana's first president, was for “students to know and understand their roots, inherited past traditions, norms and lore (and to) re-define the African personality” and the “inculcation of time honoured African values of truthfulness, humanness, rectitude and honour …and ultimately ensure a more just and orderly African society” Sackey (2014:225). These and other principles constitute some of the cardinal goals of the programme in both public and private universities in Ghana. Considering tertiary education as both a public and private enterprise, this paper seeks to enrich the discourse on African Studies by taking a retrospection of the subject and investigated university students' perceptions of the discipline among public and privately funded spheres. Adopting a qualitative approach, the paper interviewed students on the relevance of the discipline in a contemporary information technology driven world. The outcome of such interrogation was that African Studies is even more relevant in the era of globalization than it might have been in immediate post independent Africa. It concludes by unraveling how the discipline can be re-fashioned for Africa's transformation.

What Do We Mean By 'Media' Today?

The article aims at pointing out that the traditional notion of media is no longer functional to the contemporary information and communication technology environment and requires a different approach in order to avoid applying obsolete rules to new means.

The Rationalization of Leisure

Critical analyses of domestic technological culture have emphasized the impact of domestic technologies on intensifying women’s labor and reinforcing its privatization within the home, all the while being marketed as laborsaving devices. Drawing from the ways the marketing of domestic technologies framed the home as a space in need of technological administration, this article offers a Marxist feminist analysis of online surveillance during leisure time, examining how the marketing of technologies for both domestic labor and online leisure helps produce relationships between subjects and technologies that double as vehicles for capital accumulation. The article argues that we should look to the history of domestic technological design to understand the ways online surveillance and data collection are used to produce revenue and impact consumer behavior, given that both domestic technologies and contemporary information technologies work to rationalize non-waged time. The article begins with the Taylorization of the home popularized in 1912, followed by the rise of domestic technologies in the 1950s, in order to demonstrate how the ideological framing of the home as a space in need of rationalization informs the marketing of today’s personalization technologies. The marketing of personalization technologies reproduces the racialized and gendered logic of machine subordination that framed domestic technologies for the home in the 20th century. The article concludes with a discussion of how Marxist feminism is a useful theoretical framework for understanding and developing a political response to online data collection, given that both the domestic sphere and online leisure time are traditionally understood to be outside the workday, and therefore supposedly outside the scope of capitalist workplace relations of surveillance and exploitation.

Contemporary approaches to working with a family educating a child with speech disturbance

The following article presents speech-therapy guidance for the families, who have kids with speech disorders, and outlines directions and means of solving the problem. The authors view speech-therapy guidance as interaction of all the participants in the correction process. Its implementation goes as a simultaneous, coherent system of work, which begins with interaction between the child, the therapist and experts in other specialties (psychologist, doctors, and rehabilitation specialists). Afterwards the work is meant to continue by parents supervised by the speech therapist. The article touches upon both group and individual work done in cooperation with parents. Group work – parents’ meetings, guidance, round tables, exhibitions, seminars, frontal-work lessons, workshops, games and exercises’ libraries, visual libraries, open days and conferences. Individual work – individual discourses, practicing, watching individual lessons, recommendation notices, homework notebooks, conducting surveys and home libraries. The authors claim that the system of a speech-therapy guidance can be introduced as two general aspects in work: 1) Speech-therapy aspect involves acquiring knowledge about phases and peculiarities of the child’s speech development, enhancing speaking communication among children, forming awareness of pre-school children speech disorders, motivation for cooperation with speech therapists, teachers and children, acquiring skills to follow the therapist’s advice and use all the correction exercises. The points mentioned above help to do the speech therapist supervised correction work, to adhere to the same requirements and the sequence of speech influence and conduct systematic correction work in accordance to the speech therapist’s advice. 2) Psychological aspect involves forming the knowledge about age-based psychological peculiarities of children’s development, fostering motivation skills for speaking communication, developing the skill of providing appropriate conditions for effective speech development, promoting ways of successful communication of children and parents. Nowadays there are different ways and forms of speech-therapy guidance for parents. The ones that proved to be the most informative and interactive are contemporary information technologies.

Factors with Impact in the Assessment and Choice of Tourist Destinations

The preference disaggregation approach to the problem of multicriteria choice is to uncover the inherent model of choice that brings a decision unit to a conclusion in terms of an overall preference on the alternatives. In the context, the actual market shares of a class of competing products (alternatives) constitute a concise global variable originated in and reflecting the cumulative preferences of the consumer body, which affects the pattern of the market. This paper presents a systematic method to analyse the preference information cumulated in the actual market shares of competing products in terms of the criteria involved in the process of choice. The aim of this study is to present an entirely new approach to the problem of multicriteria choice and an application to analyse the market of tourist agency destination offer. In the paper outlines the market share analysis methodology for building an additive utility model in situations concerning attributes on which preferences behave monotonically. When contemporary information and communication technologies are included into the processes of choosing then electronic word-of-mouth (e-WOM) communication appears, while specific marketing messages are being created and transferred. The paper ends with some concluding remarks.

Solutions for More Sustainable Distribution in the Short Food Supply Chains

The largest part of food sales is managed by large food supply chains. However, an alternative system of food distribution focuses on locally produced and sold food that has gotten great attention in the last two decades. The challenges of those new systems, called short food supply chains (SFSC), represent tough market competitions, high distribution and logistics costs, small shipment sizes and so forth. Hence, the SFSC requires corresponding solutions in food distribution that are aligned with the contemporary logistics trends, sustainability and aspects of the new digital era. Using specially developed methodology, based on two different conceptual models, we showed how the SFSC could be designed from the aspects of innovative logistics modes and contemporary information and communication technologies, with the final aim to outline and evaluate different food distribution scenarios towards greater sustainability. The first conceptual model was aimed at the creation of innovative forms of SFSC, in which business process modelling was used in order to design and explore the given situation more thoroughly. For the purposes of conducting a comparative assessment of the distribution models developed in the previous part, the second conceptual model is developed. By using a qualitative approach, this is how the major advantages and challenges of practical implementations in creating sustainable distribution solutions are stated for each scenario.

Анализ готовности преподавателей к работе в электронной образовательной среде вуза

Informatization of education requires the modern teachers to possess and use contemporary information technologies in teaching activities. The paper deals with the role and place of professional development of teachers in the field of e-learning. The assessment tools have been created and tested to identify the level of university teachers’ readiness to use the means of e-learning environment. By means of an online survey, the author reveals the main problems faced by teachers during their indirect interaction with the persons involved in the academic process (e-learning activities are time-consuming; there is a lack of skills and motivation to develop e-learning courses). Based on the results obtained, a refresher course for teachers can be developed in this regard.

Science and Technology and the President's Crime Commission

AbstractThe U.S. President's Commission on Law Enforcement and Administration of Justice added a Task Force on Science and Technology as somewhat of an afterthought because there had then been very little interaction between science and technology and the criminal justice system (CJS). The task force focused on the CJS as a whole and interactions among its parts, with an important emphasis on analysis of the operating systems and on the important potential role of information systems as the technology advanced. The potential applications of contemporary information and electronic technologies is considerable, especially for assessing risk and needs of identified offenders and for providing relevant information wherever needed. There is urgent need for scientific evaluation of many of the positive and negative aspects of the operation of the CJS and of the potential for new technologies.

Home inspection: Mina Rees and national computing infrastructure

This essay seeks to undermine the primacy of Vannevar Bush as an architect of digital culture by reimagining the story of national computing infrastructure through the framework of feminized care work. It argues that early forms of networked computational media were situated in collaborative spaces in which labor oriented around utilization, maintenance, and other forms of labor associated with domesticity were understood to be essential duties. This essay also tries not to focus exclusively on programmers, engineers, or designers as potential “mothers of invention.” Using theoretical frameworks from global feminists working on contemporary information and communication technologies, this essay argues that those who engage with the messiness of networks of relationships that constitute infrastructure should be acknowledged as critical in the history of computing, particularly to question myths of disintermediation that are so dominant in technological discourses. In considering recovered histories of women in computing, this essay examines the career of Mina Rees, who headed the mathematics department of the U. S. Office of Naval Research, as a way to rethink the origin stories of computer history.

Ensemble Classifiers with Drift Detection (ECDD) in Traffic Flow Streams to Detect DDOS Attacks

Malfunction of internet networking systems might directly and the adverse effect in one way or the other, wherein aspects of contemporary information and communication technologies. In such conditions, DDoS attacks are prevalent threat, wherein flooding of requests related to computation and communication resources for ordering the service that is unavailable for legitimate users. DDOS attacks to be defend to guard the Critical resources. The contribution of this manuscript is an ensemble classifier model to defend the DDOS attacks. The Proposed model is based on ensemble classifier with drift detection ability at the service request stream level. The proposed model incorporates the process of defining service request streaming characteristics, enables the drift detection ability that uses the defined service request stream characteristics. The experimental study carried out from the setup established using synthesized service request stream, and the result obtained are explored using statistical metrics such as true negative rate, positive predictive value, accuracy. Moreover, the significance of the model elevated by comparing the obtained results with results obtained from other benchmark models depicted in contemporary literature.

Bridging the digital divide with off-line e-learning

This paper explores a proposal for an off-line e-learning platform that will provide a bridge for digitally unconnected students and educators to join the contemporary information and communications technology (ICT) intensive world. Individual remote and unconnected learners face a chicken and egg problem for engagement with contemporary e-learning offerings. Without connectivity, remote learners have no way of engaging with now common ICT intensified learning materials that are intended to teach them how to engage in an ICT intensive world! The paper takes systems approach to developing a solution that will fit into the world we have, and not one we wish we had in terms of infrastructure, economics and skills available in remote and developing regions. Digital learning courses are placed onto a portable e-learning environment that is not reliant on a constant network connection to function but retains interactivity, analytics and the ability to synchronise data with an educational institution when a connection is found.

The Challenges of Big Data Analytics in the Mobile Communications Sector

The activities of the MNO (Mobile Network Operator) feature rapid development and business model innovations; one of their principal results is the communications infrastructure that is vital for economic growth. This dynamic and changing mode of operation (modus operandi) introduces high requirements for business decisions and overall informing to maintain competitiveness. One of the principal success factors in MNO activities is the application of contemporary information technologies, in particular technologies of business intelligence and analytics.The activities of MNO create large data volumes, leading to a significant potential discovery of insights from data. As a result, MNOs have been using analytical technologies to mine large data volumes for several decades, and experience accumulation started long before the term “big data” emerged in academia and business. The growing dynamics of activities drive the efficient use of analytical experience to boost competitive advantage. The goal of this paper is to define the most important features of the use of big data analytics in MNO business and any possible related challenges.

Spatial Spillovers Revisited: Innovation, Human Capital and Local Dynamics

AbstractThis symposium focuses on understanding key territorial‐level innovation trends and processes by country, region and technology. It questions various widely accepted assumptions, offers fresh perspectives, both conceptually and methodologically, and challenges a paradigm shift in the field of innovation and spatial dynamics. It consists of three articles analysing at different scales (urban, regional and national) the territorial dynamics of innovation and their determinants. The innovation process, with local symbiosis and spatial spillovers at its core, is analysed within the conceptual framework of national and regional innovation systems and regional economic development. Based on a discussion of spatial spillovers and the way they shape the evolutionary and symbiotic relationships between local agents and actors, including university, industry and local development agencies, the symposium highlights the relevance of this framework for a better understanding of the transformation of local economic development processes. It investigates the differences in the geography of innovation regarding different institutional settings, different systems of innovation, and different national innovation strategies. While addressing mainly the EU, the US, and emerging countries such as China and India, the contributions also highlight the critical role of current innovation policies from a general perspective. In so doing, the symposium recognizes a contrarian perspective that argues that contemporary information and communication technologies (ICTs) provide a way to leapfrog the dominant role of proximity in innovation processes, creating a complimentary rather than a substitution effect for more remote and peripheral places. That said, this symposium focuses primarily on an urban network view of the innovation process and proximal effects in this context.

Analysis of Computer Information Processing Technology Under the Background of the Times of "Big Data"

The rapid development and application of computer information processing technology under the background of the times of "big data", the constant increasing amount of data and the increasing speed of data transmission, both put forward higher requirements and challenges to the processing level of modern computer information technology. This paper mainly discusses the concept, characteristics and influence of "big data", and analyzes the opportunities and challenges brought about by the era of "big data" to the development of computer information processing technology, and the problems in computer information processing technology, finally, analyzes the development direction of the contemporary computer information technology in the background of the times of "big data", in the hope of providing referential significance to a certain extent for the study and research of the relevant personnel.

Smart cities in the United States and worldwide: A rich arena for MIS studies

ABSTRACTSmart cities provide growing intelligence and interactivity for their citizenry through contemporary information and communication technologies (ICTs). The citizen has enhanced knowledge and interactivity with the city and gains open access to previously sequestered information. This article surveys the expanding prevalence and a wide variety of smart city features, such as dashboards of analytics on progress toward city goals; interactive, real-time provision of vehicle routing, safety, and parking information for citizens; sharing economy efficiencies; and spatial understanding of the urban geography of renewable energy. Smart solutions are discussed for the exemplary cities of Seattle, Los Angeles, and Amsterdam, and benefits pointed out. This emerging area offers a rich panoply for MIS researchers to conduct myriad types of studies utilizing the field’s quantitative and qualitative toolkits, its theories and paradigms of management, organizations, behavior, and strategies, as well as by applying knowledge of decision-making, contemporary sharing economy, and location-based platforms.

Our journey to digital curation of the Jeghers Medical Index.

BackgroundHarold Jeghers, a well-known medical educator of the twentieth century, maintained a print collection of about one million medical articles from the late 1800s to the 1990s. This case study discusses how a print collection of these articles was transformed to a digital database.Case PresentationStaff in the Jeghers Medical Index, St. Elizabeth Youngstown Hospital, converted paper articles to Adobe portable document format (PDF)/A-1a files. Optical character recognition was used to obtain searchable text. The data were then incorporated into a specialized database. Lastly, articles were matched to PubMed bibliographic metadata through automation and human review. An online database of the collection was ultimately created. The collection was made part of a discovery search service, and semantic technologies have been explored as a method of creating access points.ConclusionsThis case study shows how a small medical library made medical writings of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries available in electronic format for historic or semantic research, highlighting the efficiencies of contemporary information technology.