Does E-Government Measure Up to E-Business? Comparing End User Perceptions of U.S. Federal Government and E-Business Web Sites (journal article)
By Forrest V. Morgeson III and Sunil Mithas
from Public Administration Review Vol 69 Issue 4, pp. 740 - 752.
"This paper examines the federal government's success in implementing and providing high-quality service through e-government, something that has received very little attention. We define quality from the perspective of the end users of federal agency Web sites, as measured through customer survey data. Using data from the American Customer Satisfaction Index, we compare the performance of federal agency Web sites across a range of relevant variables with a private sector equivalent, e-business Web sites. Our findings suggest that federal e-government Web sites are not yet, in the aggregate, providing the same level of quality as their e-business counterparts. We also find significant variability among federal agencies. We discuss the implications of these findings for e-government performance measurement, performance benchmarking, and the market-centered theories of administrative reform that are driving e-government and similar transformations of government practice."

The Life and Death of Statically Detected Vulnerabilities: An Empirical Study (journal article)
By Massimiliano De Penta, Luigi Cerulo and Lerina Aversano
from Information & Software Technology Vol. 51 Iss 10 Oct 2009, pp. 1469-1484.
"Vulnerable statements constitute a major problem for developers and maintainers of networking systems. Their presence can ease the success of security attacks, aimed at gaining unauthorized access to data and functionality, or at causing system crashes and data loss. Examples of attacks caused by source code vulnerabilities are buffer overflows, command injections, and cross-site scripting. This paper reports on an empirical study, conducted across three networking systems, aimed at observing the evolution and decay of vulnerabilities detected by three freely available static analysis tools. In particular, the study compares the decay of different kinds of vulnerabilities, characterizes the decay likelihood through probability density functions, and reports a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the reasons for vulnerability removals. The study is performed by using a framework that traces the evolution of source code fragments across subsequent commits."
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Empirical evaluation of selected best practices in implementation of software process improvement (journal article)
By Tihana Galinac
from Information & Software Technology Vol. 51 Iss 9 Sep 2009, pp. 1351-1364.
"To be successfully applied in practice, software process improvement (SPI) needs not only identifying what needs to be improved, and which factors will influence its success, but also guidelines on how to implement those improvements and meet the factors. This paper proposes an SPI implementation strategy that has been developed in lines with standard SPI models and frameworks, intended to be suitable for global software development (GSD), and exploiting ideas of incremental deliveries, short iterations with frequent reviews and close collaboration with customers. Quantitative analyses of data from case studies within large GSD show that improvement teams implementing the strategy are more likely to have better progress and achieve better effectiveness in terms of improvement deployment within development teams. The results could be useful to SPI practitioners in making their SPI initiatives more successful."
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The Cloud, the Crowd, and Public Policy (journal article)
By Michael R Nelson
from Issues in Science and Technology Vol. 25 Issue 4 Summer 2009, pp. 71-76
"A new age of more flexible, less expensive, and more secure computing will emerge soon if governments act wisely."

The Sustainability Transition (journal article)
By Pamela Matson
from Issues in Science and Technology Vol. 25 Issue 4 Summer 2009, pp. 39-42
"Meeting basic human needs without degrading the planets vital systems will require an ambitious, interdisciplinary, and solution-oriented research program."

Alternative Energy for Transportation (journal article)
By Koji Omi
from Issues in Science and Technology Vol. 25 Issue 4 Summer 2009, pp. 31-34
"The worlds citizens and governments must accept that Earths resources are finite and commit themselves to the development of new power sources for automobiles."

Built environment procurement practice : impediments to innovation and opportunities for change [online]

Authors: Curtin University of Technology. Commissioned by the Built Environment Industry Innovation Council

"Recent research suggests that there is a need to develop a more holistic approach to project delivery processes that drive sustainable innovation and there is a pent up need to move from traditional procurement delivery models (in their various guises) to new methods that are able to incorporate innovative change processes that are required to address sustainable outcomes." - executive summary.

Global green building trends : market growth and perspectives from around the world [book]

Authors: McGraw-Hill Construction & World Green Building Council

Chapters include: Global green building market summary; Global construction and the market opportunity for green; Regional green market activity in Europe, North and South America, Australia/New Zealand, Asia and Africa; Market intelligence on global green building; Green building practices and renewable energy; Green building product use and identification; and Green building rating systems.

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Letting go of the words : writing web content that works [book]

Author: Janice Redish

"This book helps you write successfully for web users. It offers strategy, process, and tactics for creating or revising content for the web. It helps you plan, organize, write, design and test web content that will make web users come back again and again to your site." - cover.

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Fraser Institute annual survey of mining companies [online]

Authors: Fred McMahon, Miguel Cervantes / Fraser Institute

"Survey responses indicate that the mining sector expects dramatically decreased investment plans along with a large number of bankruptcies in the sector. ... More than 4 out of five miners believe that at least 30 percent of exploration companies will be forced out of business in the current economic downturn." - page 5.

The Black swan : the impact of the highly improbable [book]

Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"The Black Swan is a concept that will change the way you look at the world. Black Swans underlie almost everything, from the rise of religions, to events in our own lives. A Black Swan is a highly improbable event with three principle characteristics: it’s unpredictable; carries a massive impact; and, after the fact, we concoct an explanation that makes it appear less random than it was. The astonishing success of Google was a black swan; so was 9/11. ... Reveals that we are hard-wired not to truly estimate risk, too vulnerable to the impulse to simplify, narrate, and categorize and not open enough to rewarding those who can imagine the ’impossible’. ... Explains everything we know about what we don’t know, and shows us how to face the world." - publisher website.

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The Bioeconomy to 2030 : designing a policy agenda [online]

Source: Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD)

"Evaluates existing evidence and the characteristics of biotechnology innovation in order to estimate where the bioeconomy is today, where it could be in 2015, and more speculatively, what it might look like in 2030. It develops a policy agenda to help guide the use of biotechnology to address current and future challenges." - executive summary.

Are Biofuels to blame for higher food prices?
Source: Michael Knox's Economic Strategy
"Four Fed researchers Scott Baier, Mark Clements, Charles Griffiths and Jane Ihrig have recently published an insightful research piece on the interaction between biofuels, a number of major US food crops and food prices. Their paper examines the effect that biofuels production has had on commodity and global food prices. They estimate that biofuel production over the past two years has had a sizable impact on corn, sugar, barley and soybean prices but a much smaller impact on global food prices."

Click and connect – young Australians' use of online social media
Source: Australian Communications and Media Authority
"Children and young people have a high level of awareness of cybersafety risks and the key messages for staying safe online. This ACMA report found that 75 per cent of children surveyed claim they know not to give out their address or phone number online and remember key safety messages such as ‘people aren’t always who they say they are online’."

Organizing the Innovation Process: Complementarities in Innovation Networking (journal article)
by James H. Love and Stephen Roper
from Industry and Innovation, Vol 16 No 3 June 2009 pp. 273-290
"This paper contributes to the developing literature on complementarities in organizational design. We test for the existence of complementarities in the use of external networking between stages of the innovation process in a sample of UK and German manufacturing plants. Our evidence suggests some differences between the UK and Germany in terms of the optimal combination of innovation activities in which to implement external networking. "

Who killed the eco-town? (journal article)
by Damian Arnold
from Architecture Journal, 25 June 2009
"Eco-towns are dead. Architects, planners and developers alike are asking: who killed them? Gordon Brown wanted to unveil plans for 10 carbon-neutral communities that would deliver up to 200,000 new homes on cheap government-owned land in the greenbelt by 2020. The idea was that the eco-towns would be so enthusiastically received that they could simply be parachuted into existing local authority development plans and fast-tracked through the system so that building could get started as quickly as possible. Developers flocked to get involved in what they saw as a great commercial opportunity – all in the name of being green. For better or for worse, this grand plan is not going to happen."

The Social media bible : tactics, tools, and strategies for business success [book]

Authors: Lon Safko & David Brake

"How to build or transform your business into a social media-enabled enterprise where customers, employees, and prospects connect, collaborate, and champion your products, your services, and your way of doing business. ... [Covers] social media tools like Facebook, MySpace, YouTube, Twitter, blogging, podcasting, and hundreds of others." - cover.

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And Data for All: Why Obama's Geeky New CIO Wants to Put All Gov't Info Online (article)
by Nicholas Thompson
from Wired Magazine, 18 June 2009
"The Obama administration's most radical idea may also be its geekiest: Make nearly every hidden government spreadsheet and buried statistic available online, all in one place. For anyone to see. Are you searching for a Food and Drug Administration report that used to be obtainable only through the Freedom of Information Act? Just a mouseclick away. Need National Institutes of Health studies and school testing scores? Click. Census data, nonclassified Defense Department specs, obscure Securities and Exchange Commission files, prison statistics? Click click. Click. Click."

Water and Wastewater Services in Non-Metropolitan New South Wales: A Critical Analysis of the Report of the Independent Inquiry (journal article)
by Brian Dollery
from Agenda, Vol 16 No 2 2009
"The Commonwealth's assumption of greater control over water policy has been justified on the grounds that a 'national approach' to the problems in the Murray-Darling Basin is required to resolve the ills of the Basin. This paper investigates the validity of this contention in the context of the Federal government's 'Water for the Future' manifesto. The paper argues that the current naive understanding of 'water use efficiency' concepts is likely to stymie any purported basin-wide gains from a 'national approach' to water policy."

The Clean tech revolution : discover the top trends, technologies and companies to watch [book]

Authors: Ron Pernick & Clint Wilder

[Identifies] "the major forces that have pushed clean tech from back-to-the-earth utopian dream to its current revolution among the inner circles of corporate boardrooms, on Wall Street trading floors, and in government offices around the globe. By highlighting eight major clean-tech sectors - solar energy, wind power, biofuels and biomaterials, green buildings, personal transportation, the smart grid, mobile applications, and water filtration - they uncover how investors, entrepreneurs, and individuals can profit from this next wave of technological innovation." - cover.

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