<para xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> This article provides an introduction to the Special Section on Darwinian Perspectives on Electronic Communication. It starts with a discussion of the motivation for the Special Section, followed by several sections written by the Guest Editor (Ned Kock) and the Guest Associate Editors (Donald Hantula, Stephen Hayne, Gad Saad, Peter Todd, and Richard Watson). In those sections, the Guest Editor and Associate Editors put forth several provocative ideas that hopefully will provide a roadmap for future inquiry in areas related to the main topic of the Special Section. Toward its end, this article provides a discussion on how biological theories of electronic communication can bridge the current gap between technological and social theories. The article concludes with an answer to an intriguing question: Are we as a species currently evolving to become better at using electronic communication technologies? </para>

This study on computer-mediated deception features an experiment involving an interactive interview of deceitful applicants for a fictitious scholarship, using one of three different computer-based communication media. Results showed that people were successful at deceiving others no matter what medium was used, but interviewers who used interactive, as opposed to non-interactive, media probed interviewees more during the interviews. Probing led to better lie detection. Also, interviewers who had received simple warnings about the possible presence of deception were better at detecting deception than were interviewers who had received no warnings. However, warnings alone were not sufficient to increase interviewers' probing.

New forms of computer-mediated, online learning can benefit from new forms of assessment that fit the medium and the pedagogical style of the online environment. This paper investigates students' learning styles and learning strategies in taking online collaborative exams. Applying constructivist and collaborative learning theories, the collaborative examination features students' active participation in various phases of the exam process through small group activities online. Students' learning strategies, including deep learning and collaborative learning, are investigated using a 1 3 field quasi-experiment to compare the team-based collaborative online exam with the traditional in-class exam and with the participatory exam, where students participate in the online exam processes individually. Data analysis using results from 485 students indicates that collaborative examinations significantly reduced surface learning in exam study, enhanced interactions and the sense of an online learning community, and increased perceived learning. The results also suggest learning predispositions were significantly correlated with exam study strategies, and provide indications of their effects on learning strategies.

Hofstede's cultural dimensions model has been widely used as a basic explanatory and predictive model in a variety of business studies, including studies addressing information management and electronic communication issues. This study aimed at assessing Hofstede's model by looking into a key issue for information management and electronic communication-information overload. The study compared information overload-related data from the US and New Zealand. The sample involved 108 MBA students who held professional or management positions. Data analyses employed comparisons of means and partial least squares (PLS)-based structural equation modeling techniques. Information overload perceptions in the two countries appear to differ significantly. This finding seems to be inconsistent with the relatively small differences in cultural dimension scores between the US and New Zealand, and with those two countries being placed in the same country cluster in Hofstede's model. The results call into question the adequacy of Hofstede's model as a basis to explain information management phenomena.

Findings from a previous study indicate that dominance was a key inhibitor of creativity in virtual teams. This study extends understanding of dominance through an in-depth, qualitative analysis of eight virtual teams. Two research questions are addressed: (1) how is dominance manifested in virtual teams? and (2) why does dominance occur in some teams, and not others? Findings indicate that dominance occurred in three different patterns. Although both males and females dominated, a commonality across patterns was that the dominant individual belonged to the majority sex in each team. Furthermore, dominance was driven by a combination of a few team member status traits. When one or more status markers belonged to a single person - the dominant member - and were absent in other team members, dominance was pronounced. In teams that did not experience dominance, these status indicators were spread across multiple members. Additionally, even though all teams communicated strictly via asynchronous computer-mediated communication (CMC), equalization was not evidenced in the majority of teams. Status characteristics theory and proportional representation theory provide a basis to explain the prevalence, as well as the absence, of dominance in these virtual teams.

This study investigated the impact of weblog use on individual learning in the context of university senior-level business education. As an emergent form of personal communication, weblogs enable people to publish their thoughts as webpages, and to share information and knowledge. Recognizing the potential impact of weblogs on knowledge expression and sharing, this research sought to empirically examine whether the continuous use of weblogs as online learning logs would affect student learning performance. The assumption was that effective use of weblogs promoted the constructivist models of learning by supporting both cognitive and social knowledge construction, and by reinforcing individual accountability in learning. Results from an Information Systems undergraduate course with 31 participants indicated that the performance of students' weblogs was a significant predictor of the learning outcome (while traditional coursework was not). Moreover, individuals' cognitive construction effort to build their own mental models and social construction effort to further enrich/expand knowledge resources appeared to be two key aspects of the constructivist learning with weblogs. Our results imply the potential benefit of using weblogs as a knowledge construction tool and a social learning medium

This short paperback book is divided into 14 chapters and 2 exhibits. The book is designed to provide answers to two key questions - First, how do we reduce the number of emails we find in our mailbox each day, and ,second, how do we teach others to present information in the most effective manner? The solution, according to the authors, is simple: bottom line. In simple terms, it means bringing the subject to the front of the e-mail so that the reader finds the answer to the question "Why should I be interested? quickly. The authors develop a number of approaches that are suitable for most e-mail communication. The authors extend the concept to other business writing as well, but they admit there are circumstances that may require different approaches. The takeaway message is a good one for engineers, technical communicators, and managers alike. The book is an excellent addition to one's reading list and the local library's reference shelf.

Unlike experienced collaborators, student teams often attempt to collaborate without effective documentation of meetings. This tendency may be exacerbated by professional writing textbooks, which rarely mention minutes in their chapters on collaboration and provide ineffective examples of meeting minutes that follow a parliamentary style of minutes rather than the action-oriented style that is the norm in most workplace settings. Interviews with three engineering managers are supported by published research in professional communication to show how meeting minutes are essential to projecting a team forward by solidifying consensus and holding individuals accountable for actions. A short exercise designed to teach students how effective minutes function as a management tool is presented along with observational evidence of the exercise's effect on student team practices in both professional writing and computer science team projects

Firms that are trying to stay competitive in the current business environment often require the use of groups. The popularity of group work is tied to the promise of improved productivity via the pooling of information, knowledge, and skills. In recent years, group work has been expanded to virtual or distributed environments. However, there are questions about how aspects of group work-specifically group size and social presence-impact group members' ability to voice opinions. This study examines groups of two sizes in three distinct social presence settings: face-to-face, face-to-face using collaborative software, and virtual using collaborative software. This study finds that both group size and social presence affect individual instrumental voice, value-expressive voice, and the group interaction process. The results show that by increasing social presence through the use of collaborative software, it is possible to lessen the negative impact of increasing group size. These results should be of interest to the increasing number of organizations that are implementing virtual group environments.

In this article, we propose that remote, internet-based studies of real users interacting with real websites on their own computers at a time and place convenient for them will provide a solid empirical base from which researchers can extrapolate reliable and valid web-design guidelines. After a discussion of research methods that have been used to support the principles that underlie web-design guidelines, we review some of the methodological issues associated with internet-based research and tools for supporting such work. Given advances in technology, the multitude of users online, and emerging technologies with new interfaces, the time has come for technical communication researchers to enter the arena of internet-based research and conduct remote experiments to support the web-design guidelines that they espouse.

As virtual teams constitute an important and pervasive organizational structure, research with the aim of improving the effectiveness of these teams is vital. Although critical topics such as conflict, coordination and trust are being addressed, research on creativity in virtual teams has been quite limited. Given that creative solutions to complex problems create and sustain a firm's competitive advantage, an investigation of creativity in virtual teams is warranted. The goal of the current study is to explore the influences on creativity in asynchronous virtual teams. Predicated upon grounded theory, this exploration is accomplished through an in-depth qualitative analysis of the team communication transcripts of ten virtual teams. Teams were composed of graduate students who interacted solely via an asynchronous, computer conferencing system to develop the high-level requirements and design for a new innovative product. Significant inhibitors to the creative performance of virtual teams included dominance, domain knowledge, downward norm setting, lack of shared understanding, time pressure, and technical difficulties. Significant enhancers to creativity included stimulating colleagues, the existence of a variety of social influences, a collaborative team climate, and both the surfacing and reduction of equivocality.

We introduce the area of remote physical device fingerprinting, or fingerprinting a physical device, as opposed to an operating system or class of devices, remotely, and without the fingerprinted device's known cooperation. We accomplish this goal by exploiting small, microscopic deviations in device hardware: clock skews. Our techniques do not require any modification to the fingerprinted devices. Our techniques report consistent measurements when the measurer is thousands of miles, multiple hops, and tens of milliseconds away from the fingerprinted device and when the fingerprinted device is connected to the Internet from different locations and via different access technologies. Further, one can apply our passive and semipassive techniques when the fingerprinted device is behind a NAT or firewall, and. also when the device's system time is maintained via NTP or SNTP. One can use our techniques to obtain information about whether two devices on the Internet, possibly shifted in time or IP addresses, are actually the same physical device. Example applications include: computer forensics; tracking, with some probability, a physical device as it connects to the Internet from different public access points; counting the number of devices behind a NAT even when the devices use constant or random IP IDs; remotely probing a block of addresses to determine if the addresses correspond to virtual hosts, e.g., as part of a virtual honeynet; and unanonymizing anonymized network traces.

SINCE 1980, the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy has been the premier annual forum for the presentation of scientific developments in information security and privacy technology, and for bringing together researchers and practitioners in the field. It is sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society Technical Committee on Security and Privacy, in co-operation with The International Association for Cryptologic Research (IACR). The program committee of the 2005 conference received 192 submissions, and selected 17 papers to be presented, on the basis of excellence of scientific contribution. Out of these 17 high quality papers, the program committee selected three as the most highly rated papers for this special issue. In no particular order, they are: “Hardware-Assisted Circumvention of Self-Hashing Software Tamper Resistance” by P.C. van Oorschot, Anil Somayaji, and Glenn Wurster; “Remote Physical Device Fingerprinting” by Tadayoshi Kohno, Andre Broido, and K.C. Claffy; “Relating Symbolic and Cryptographic Secrecy” by Michael Backes and Birgit Pfitzmann. Like all scientific conferences, the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy lives from the voluntary and hard work of many people. We wish to thank all of them-authors, reviewers, participants and organizers-but in particular the members of the program committee: William Arbaugh, Michael Backes, Josh Benaloh, Marc Dacier, Herve Debar, George Dinolt, Riccardo Focardi, Virgil Gligor, Peter Gutmann, Dogan Kesdogan, Helmut Kurth, Wenke Lee, Roy Maxion, John McHugh, Catherine Meadows, Radia Perlman, Birgit Pfitzmann, Joachim Posegga, Niels Provos, Josyula R. Rao, Michael Reiter Eric Rescorla, Rei SafaviNaini, Pierangela Samarati, Andrei Serjantov, Giovanni Vigna, Dan S. Wallach, Andreas Wespi, and Marianne Winslett. We also thank the anonymous journal reviewers of the three papers published in this special issue for their work. Vern Paxson received the MS and PhD degrees from the University of California, Berkeley, and has been (and continues to be) a staff scientist with the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Network Research Group for many years. He began at the ICIR group of the International Computer Science Institute (ICSI) in 1999. His main active research projects are Bro, worms (including the network telescope project), DETER, and PREDICT. He has been the vice chair of ACM SIGCOMM; program cochair for IEEE Security and Privacy 2005 (Program); and program committee member for SRUTI 2005, RAID 2005, ACSAC 2005, and USENIX/ACM NSDI ’05. He was on the editorial board of IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking from 2000-2004.

Self-hashing has been proposed as a technique for verifying software integrity. Appealing aspects of this approach to software tamper resistance include the promise of being able to verify the integrity of software independent of the external support environment, as well as the ability to integrate code protection mechanisms automatically. In this paper, we show that the rich functionality of most modern general-purpose processors (including UltraSparc, x86, PowerPC, AMD64, Alpha, and ARM) facilitate an automated, generic attack which defeats such self-hashing. We present a general description of the attack strategy and multiple attack implementations that exploit different processor features. Each of these implementations is generic in that it can defeat self-hashing employed by any user-space program on a single platform. Together, these implementations defeat self-hashing on most modern general-purpose processors. The generality and efficiency of our attack suggests that self-hashing is not a viable strategy for high-security tamper resistance on modern computer systems.

Several information systems and computer-mediated communication studies in the literature measure user's perceptions of E-mail. The user's perceptions of E-mail were used to develop and validate the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). While a user's perceptions of E-mail play an important role in the literature, very few studies have focused solely on developing a construct for measuring these perceptions. In this paper, we develop a construct to measure an individual's perceptions of E-mail as a medium for electronic communication in organizations. Using a survey of management and nonmanagement employees in northeastern USA, we empirically test our theoretical construct. The results of our research indicate that an individual's perceptions of E-mail are a multidimensional construct with two dimensions: the individual level dimension and the organizational level. At an individual level, a person's perceptions may be impacted by E-mail's role in improving productivity, supporting team work, and providing global reach. At an organizational level a person's perceptions may be impacted by E-mail's role in making an organization vulnerable to viruses, exposing proprietary information, and/or encouraging unprofessional and illegal behavior.

The article examines the use of electronic cases which is characterized by the use of the Web to improve teaching and learning in professional communication techniques. The approach presented provides a learning environment (the case) in which students draw from and contribute to an interactive resource of artifacts, so as to become actively involved in the day-to-day practices of a group. Furthermore, students must (based on their understanding of the artifacts) identify, communicate, and justify a course of action for the continued development of the organization. In this sense, students move beyond analyzing and responding to a traditionally narrated, historical case and instead become immersed in the process of "making sense" and communicating in an effort to render the organization for a number of audiences. Because it is computer mediated, the case affords the opportunity for students to more readily interact with a greater volume and wider range of information than can be transmitted through traditional hard-copy case studies.

This paper describes a five-year research project aimed at developing a corpus-based language support tool able to respond to the English writing needs of Japanese software engineers who do not speak English natively. Our research was based on recent developments in corpus and text linguistics. Since foreign readers often complain that English text produced by Japanese authors is difficult to understand because it is poorly organized and incoherent, we focused on the possibility of designing a writing tool that would provide discourse-level as well as sentence-level assistance. We collected a total of 539 sample English abstracts from four well-known technical journals and tagged them with linguistic and rhetorical information. Using this tagged corpus, an initial prototype was developed on a Unix-based workstation and a second one on the Web. The Web-based prototype was then evaluated in terms of its usability by engineers in Ricoh's Software Research and Development Group. They evaluated the final product positively. However, they expressed uncertainty about its ability to address their weaknesses in using transition words effectively as cohesive devices. In spite of unexpected difficulties, product improvement continues.

When faced with the tasks of reading and writing a complex technical paper, many nonnative scientists and engineers who have a solid background in English grammar and vocabulary lack an adequate knowledge of commonly used structural patterns at the discourse level. In this paper, we propose a novel computer software tool that can assist these people in the understanding and construction of technical papers, by automatically identifying the structure of writing in different fields and disciplines. The system is tested using research article abstracts and is shown to be a fast, accurate, and useful aid in the reading and writing process.

This tutorial is an outgrowth of a classroom-based simulation project and should act as a general outline for using simulations in English for Science and Technology classrooms. The simulation was created based on an actual court case involving two software companies; however, the case was altered significantly to meet the needs of the students. Twenty-six Japanese students studying computer science at a university in northern Japan participated in the simulation. In phase one of the simulation, teams of students were required to make difficult decisions about the case in their role as company engineers. They subsequently wrote of their positions in teams. In phase two of the simulation, each student was required to preside over the related court case, judge between the two companies, and render a fair verdict in writing. The students' writing exhibited an understanding of the complexity of problems and sound reasoning for addressing such problems; therefore, the simulation-based curriculum was deemed highly successful. Furthermore, students remained engaged throughout the simulation, in part because they could see its long-term value.

Action research has been presented as a promising approach for academic inquiry because of its focus on real world problems and its ability to provide researchers with a rich body of field data for knowledge building. Published examples of action research, however, are hard to find in business communication literature. What are the reasons for this? I try to provide a basis for answering this question as well as helping other business communication researchers-particularly those interested in computer-mediated communication issues-to decide whether and when to employ action research. I offer a first-person, confessional tale-like account of an action research study of computer-mediated communication in groups. In order to focus on the lessons learned, my focus is on the process of conducting action research and not on empirical results. Some of the situations and related lessons discussed are somewhat surprising and illustrate the complex nature of action research. The doctoral research, conducted over four years in Brazil and New Zealand, highlights the challenges associated with action research's dual goal of serving practitioners and the research community.

This study explored strengths and limitations of table formatting choices by engaging twenty-eight participants in information searches in online tables, presented on a small-screen interface (Palm IIIc). Table length across conditions was held constant at three screens long (24 rows total) but varied from one to three screens wide (approximately 35, 70, and 105 characters per line). Target information was positioned in either the upper left, lower left, upper right, or lower right quadrants. Data collected were time on task, error rate, and level of participants' confidence in their answers. Experimenters found that increased horizontal scrolling imposed the heaviest burden on information search. This study supports restricting table widths to one screen on handheld computers. If necessary, however, tables can go to two screens wide without critical detriment to usability. While ruled line formatting is slightly better than interface character in providing visual support for the burden of horizontal scrolling, neither formatting option adequately compensates for the added burden.

Innovation in a company's design process is increasingly a matter of cooperation between the company and its customers. New information and communication technology (ICT) possibilities such as electronic communication (EC) media generate even more opportunities for companies to collaborate with customers during the early stages of research and development. This exploratory study examined the design process of five Dutch firms and the cultural and communicative implications of cooperation in the design process between the supplier and the customer using EC media. We found that the selected use of EC media for communication between R&D and customers has a positive effect on the design process. We also discovered that the characteristics of the most suitable EC media depend on the design activity and that the corporate and professional cultures of both the company and its customers involved in the cooperation seem to affect the communication media used. Finally, the future use of new ICT in the design area is discussed.

With the development of new technologies, and particularly information and communication technologies (ICTs), teams have evolved to encompass new forms of interaction and collaboration. By focusing on the communicative dimensions of global virtual teams, this paper demonstrates that e-collaboration is more than a technological substitution for traditional face-to face collaboration. It places special emphasis on the importance of structuring activities for balancing electronic communication during e-collaboration (i.e., videoconference, email, chat session, distributed use of group support system) to bridge cultural and stereotypical gaps, to increase profitable role repartition between the participants, and to prevent and solve conflicts. During the past four years, the authors have developed a project involving hundreds of participants from different national cultures working together for six weeks on a specific project. In this paper, we present our experiences and draw conclusions, giving special attention to the structure of the electronic communication required to support efficient virtual teaming in education and industry.

Web-based training has been both acclaimed as a self-paced, consistent, stand-alone alternative to traditional instructor-led training and disparaged for its high development costs and dearth of qualified trainers. Critics especially question its effectiveness. This case study tests the effectiveness of a stand-alone Web-based training program and compares the results to that of an identical instructor-led course. The course provides highly task-oriented instruction for a computer software package and was developed using a proven instructional design methodology. The data from this study show that Web-based training is as effective as instructor-led training for stand-alone software application training in a corporation.

Thought, in the modern technical sense, is rather like travel. To travel without the aid of tools (cars, buses, and planes), that is, to walk, barely means travel at all in the modern sense. Likewise, to think in the modern sense means thought with tools. It is not enough to speak, or write with pen and paper, or even a typewriter. We have little choice, to be competitive, but to word-process, to send email, and to build hypertext. The thoughts we think we are having in the relative comfort of our own heads mean little, until they are written out, published to others, and subjected to natural-selection tests for validity. Beyond this, we must be keenly aware of the texts produced by others and the physical circumstances that produced them. These are simultaneously the best representation of a whole community's thought, and also the best tools that we can use to further advance our own thought.

Web-based training has been both acclaimed as a self-paced, consistent, stand-alone alternative to traditional instructor-led training and disparaged for its high development costs and dearth of qualified trainers. Critics especially question its effectiveness. This case study tests the effectiveness of a stand-alone Web-based training program and compares the results to that of an identical instructor-led course. The course provides highly task-oriented instruction for a computer software package and was developed using a proven instructional design methodology. The data from this study show that Web-based training is as effective as instructor-led training for stand-alone software application training in a corporation.

This paper compares the Finnish and English Web sites of a Finnish company to find out what culturally geared strategies emerge and what constitutes the genre of company information on the Internet. Drawing on genre theory and cultural studies, the paper further explores the relationship between linear texts and nonlinear hypertext genre. The paper shows how the Web sites aimed at the English-speaking readers are different from the sites targeted to the Finnish readers. It further illustrates the company strategies employed to establish the Web site in Finnish and English. These are endorsed by a company representative who was interviewed for the paper. The Finnish Web site meant for local Finnish readers contained detailed and itemized information and portrayed a retail-oriented strategy. The Internet presence targeted toward English-speaking readers portrayed an investor-oriented strategy. The characteristics of hypertext that distinguish it from linear texts are high rate of repetition and low macrolevel cohesion.

Research in computer-mediated communication has usually emphasized the cognitive over the social aspects of communication, the medium over the message, and the product of communication over the process. In contrast, this paper emphasizes three constructs of the communication process: goal-based communication strategies, message form and medium. We seek to balance cognitive and social communication strategies and to combine new and old measures of the message form (organization, formality and size). A field study in an academic institution examined the content of text-based communication delivered by letter, memo, fax and e-mail. As expected, people preferred certain message and medium attributes for certain strategies. These findings are further investigated using open-ended interviews. We conclude with examples of practical implications on designing and implementing computer-mediated communication.

Previous researchers have given conflicting views as to what makes a "good" research article (RA) title. In this paper, characteristic features of research article titles, including length, punctuation usage, word frequency, and preposition usage are investigated using a corpus of 600 research articles from the six journals of the IEEE Computer Society. Results show, while some of the intuitive observations made in the literature about title writing are accurate for computer science journals, other observations have ignored the effects of discipline and field variation. Subsequently, these observations are either unjustified or misleading.

The spread of online communication technologies has brought with it new perspectives on international communication. Now, with the Internet, email, and application service providers, interacting with coworkers an entire hemisphere away can be almost as easy as interacting with coworkers in the same building. As a result of the "leveling of distance" created by online communication technologies, new kinds of international business models have been proposed; models that attempt to reduce production costs while maintaining product quality. However, some of these models fail to account for cultural differences that could cause communication problems in international online exchanges. The article examines how one particular international online production model, production facilities that never close, could encounter cultural communication problems if participants involved were not aware of certain cultural communication expectations, specifically those related to the cultural concept of "face".

Previous empirical findings from the computer-mediated communication research literature are consistent with media richness theory because they suggest that the use of electronic communication media is likely to have a negative impact on the success and outcome quality of process improvement groups. These findings lead to the expectation that electronic communication media will not be as appropriate as the face-to face medium to support the type of complex and knowledge-rich communication that takes place in process improvement groups. The paper analyzes 12 process improvement groups interacting through an electronic communication medium and finds this expectation unfounded. In fact, the use of an electronic communication medium can actually have the opposite effect, that is, a "positive" effect, on process improvement group success and outcome quality. Two other theoretical models, namely the compensatory adaptation and social influence models, are used to explain these counter intuitive findings.

In virtual teams, members are physically distributed and often have not met each other in person. They work together and share information via electronic communication. To address business problems in a timely way, virtual teams must quickly become effective upon formation. However, prior studies have found that virtual teams are ineffective initially because electronic communication does not facilitate building of shared understanding among team members. This study proposes a dialogue technique that facilitates building of shared understanding in virtual teams. Results from an experiment showed that virtual teams which used this technique had better relational development and decision outcome than those which did not. Moreover these differences remained over time. Therefore, the dialogue technique appears to be useful for helping virtual teams become effective quickly so as to address business problems without unnecessary delays.

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) has enabled relaxation of temporal and geographical boundaries surrounding group tasks. A question is whether this opening is appropriate mainly for information exchange or whether it is also conducive to the interactive moves necessary for group knowledge production. This study examines knowledge production via email in a technology standardization working group. It notes the occurrence of interactive moves and discusses how they are and can be affected for producing group knowledge.

This study examines how students enrolled in two Web-based sections of a technical writing class performed compared to students enrolled in a conventional version of the class. Although no significant difference in student performance was found between the two learning conditions, our data reveal intriguing relationships between students' prior knowledge, attitudes, and learning styles and our Web-based writing environment. One finding that we focus on is that reflective, global learners performed significantly better online than active, sequential learners, whereas there was no difference between them in the conventional class. Our study highlights the complexity of effective teaching and the difficulty of making comparisons between the online and the classroom environments. In particular, we maintain that the transfer of active learning strategies to the Web is not straightforward and that interactivity as a goal of instructional Web site design requires significant elaboration.

Focuses on communication channels (or media) that technical writers uses to obtain and verify information and their reasons for selecting them. The author analyzes data from a survey of 30 technical communicators who responded to an e-mail questionnaire.

In the usability testing of Web sites, thinking aloud is a frequently-used method. A fundamental discussion, however, about the relation between the use of different variants of thinking aloud and the evaluation goals for this specific medium is still lacking. To lay a foundation for this discussion, I analyzed the results of three usability studies in which different thinking-aloud tasks were used: a simple searching task, an application task and a prediction task. In the task setting, the profile of the Web surfer, the communication goal of the Web site and other quality aspects are taken into account. The qualitative analysis of these studies shows that the task variation has some influence on the results of usability testing and that, consequently, tasks should be matched with the evaluation goals put forward.

Normand Croteau is a technical writer for Purkinje, Inc., in Montreal, Canada. He has been with Purkinje for approximately two years. Before Purkinje, Norm spent time working for Sapience, a small software company; Bell Sygma, a computer department of Bell Canada; and Bell Canada, a telecommunication company, for “a total of 13 years of experiences in the field.”

From the Publisher: An unforgettable journey into the dark heart of the Information Age, Escape Velocity explores the high-tech subcultures that both celebrate and critique our wired world: cyberpunks, cyberhippies, technopagans, and rogue technologists, to name a few. The computer revolution has given rise to a digital underground - an Information Age counterculture whose members are utilizing cutting-edge technology in ways never intended by its manufacturers. Poised, at the end of the century, between technological rapture and social rupture, between Tomorrowland and Blade Runner, fringe computer culture poses the fundamental question of our time: Will technology liberate or enslave us in the coming millennium? Mark Dery takes us on an electrifying tour of the high-tech underground. Exploring the shadowy byways of cyberculture, we meet would-be cyborgs who believe the body is obsolete and dream of downloading their minds into computers, cyberhippies who boost their brainpower with smart drugs and mind machines, on-line swingers seeking cybersex on electronic bulletin boards, techno-primitives who sport biomechanical tattoos of computer circuitry, and cyberpunk roboticists whose Mad Max contraptions duel to the death before howling crowds. Most cyber- titles are a breathless mix of New Age futurism and gadget-happy cyberhype. Escape Velocity stands alone as the first truly critical inquiry into cyberculture. Shifting the focus of our conversation about technology from the corridors of power to disparate voices on the cultural fringes, Dery wires it into the power politics and social issues of the moment. Timely, trenchant, and provocative, Escape Velocity is essential reading for everyone interested in computer culture and the shape of things to come.

How well do you understand copyright law? How about the doctrine of fair use? If a recent study reported in the Business Communication Quarterly is any indication, IEEE members may not have a very solid understanding of either. J.V. Arn, R. Gatlin, and W. Kordsmeier reported the results of a questionnaire survey of the membership of the Association for Business Communication (ABC) (see Bus. Commun. Quart., vol.61, no.4, p.32-9, 1998). The survey was designed to test the understanding of ABC members of various parts of copyright law including the sections cited in the fair use guidelines for educational multimedia. In their brief description of fair use, the authors explain: "fair use is a possible defense to copyright infringement in an educational or nonprofit environment but not in a commercial application" (p. 36). This difference has long been recognized in differing fees for use. Nonprofit institutions who publish newsletters, monographs, and books routinely pay nominal fees to use copyrighted materials, but what about more limited uses such as in the classroom or in a presentation at a professional meeting? Defining multimedia as "a single, computer-controlled product that integrates text, audio, graphic, still image, and moving pictures", J.V. Arn et al., note that such a "variety of sources requires the producer to understand a wide variety of legal constraints" (p. 33). Their study showed that ABC members often underestimated their rights to use copyrighted material.

From the Publisher: The essays collected in this volume address the full range of pedagogical and programmatic issues specifically facing technical communication teachers and program directors in the computer age. The authors locate computers and computing activities within the richly textured cultural contexts of a technological society, focusing on the technical communication instructional issues that remain most important as old versions of hardware and software are endlessly replaced by new ones.

From the Publisher: The great divide between the approaches of systems developers and those of social scientists to computer supported cooperative work has been vigorously debated in the systems development literature. In spite of their differences in style, the two groups have been cooperating more and more in the last decade, as the people problems associated with computing become increasingly evident to everyone. This book is the first to address directly the problem of how to bridge the divide. It offers an exciting overview of the cutting edge of research and theory, and will constitute a solid foundation for the rapidly coalescing field of social informatics.

The aim of the study was to map the influence of reading task and text format on reading results with an online text. To this purpose, an experiment performed by S. Gordon et al. (1988) was replicated and enhanced. In four conditions, subjects were given a reading task (summarize or answer specific questions) and an online text (linear or hypertext format). In all conditions, both text and task were administered through the World Wide Web, After the subjects had completed their reading, all were given the same assignment: make a summary and answer specific questions. No significant main effects of the independent variables (format and task) were found on the performance of the subjects. There proved to be a significant interaction effect, however, on the completeness of the summaries. The most thorough summaries were written by subjects who were told before the experiment that they would have to summarize the text, and who were presented with the text in a linear version. As far as reading time was concerned, there was a significant difference between the format conditions: reading the text in linear format took more time than reading the text in hypertext format.

Technical writers, for the most part, write user documentation of some kind. However, they also have skills that might enable them to also serve as user-advocates on product development teams and testers of prototype systems. In the computer hardware and software industry, they have the additional skills needed to develop online help tools, to design user interfaces, and to write system and error messages (J. Fisher, 1998). Fisher's recent survey of (Australian) technical communicators showed that some are employed in such tasks, but not widely so. She reports, for instance, that only 38% were consulted by developers about error messages, only 32% actually wrote error messages, and only 13% reported that they had some role in system testing (J. Fisher, 1998). A question emerges out of such results: is there really any necessary and supportive connection between the process of explaining a product to a user and the original process of developing that product? As technical writers looking to expand our roles [and salaries], we would like to say yes. But, in fairness, we have to admit our bias. We need to check such biases against other, independent evidence. The article interfaces this question with a parallel question in the philosophy of science: is there any connection between experimental test results used to "sell" a theory to a scientific audience and the original process of developing that theory?.

Beginning Electrical and Computer Engineering (ECE) students often have difficulty learning the genre of lab report writing. This difficulty can be alleviated through genre theory strategies and research, which writing center consultants, for example, can use to focus on the specific form and content of engineering writing, which then can be taught to students in a writing center environment. Genre theory provides a means (1) for humanities writing center consultants to learn specific characteristics about engineering writing, (2) for interdisciplinary collaboration between writing professionals and engineers to take place, and (3) for students to have increased opportunities to learn the discourse of their field. All of these benefits are enhanced by discipline-specific writing programs that support and facilitate them. In addition, the collaboration provides a stimulating, fluid, creative environment in which to discuss engineering writing, an environment which reflects the changing needs of engineering education as a result of technological advancements. As technology continues to influence engineering education, prompting evolutions in both technical and communication skills and knowledge, genre theory and interdisciplinary collaboration will continue to gain importance as strategies for initiating students into the communication demands of their field. The discussion focuses on the integration of genre theory with writing instruction in the ECE Department at the University of South Carolina. This integration stimulated interaction among ECE faculty, composition and rhetoric faculty and students, and ECE students.

Based on a study of nearly 200 international faculty in the field of computer science and computer engineering, roughly 90 written genres in the computing discipline are identified and organized according to five central aims in the profession: generation, procuration, dissemination, evaluation, and regulation. The importance of writing in the field is discussed, and recommendations for further research follow to encourage greater breadth and depth in the identification and study of generic corpora characteristic of specific professional communities. Benefits of such research assist students preparing to enter a profession, working professionals wishing to improve their writing in a profession, and writing specialists who offer training or editorial services for a profession.

Some years before electronic mail and Web-based hypertext became important features of professional communication, Robert Pirsig observed that information has always had higher value if it was organized in small chunks that could be accessed and sequenced at random. The paper discusses dynamic and static communication in electronic media.

The range of roles performed by technical communicators during the systems development process was identified and published from a 1997 survey of Australian technical communicators. Follow-up case study research investigated the development of 20 information systems. The research sought to quantify the technical communicator's contribution from the external viewpoint of developers and users. The paper describes the major findings from this research. The results support the 1997 survey findings that technical communicators do contribute positively to information systems development. The results quantitatively demonstrate that users are significantly more satisfied with computer systems where technical communicators are involved in the development process.