In this paper we investigate the effects that team size has on geographically distributed team behavior and technology choice. We report results from a survey of distributed team members conducted within a large, multinational technology manufacturing organization. Responses indicate that members of smaller teams participated more actively on their team, were more committed to their team, were more aware of the goals of the team, had greater awareness of other team members, and were in teams with higher levels of rapport. Larger teams are more conscientious than smaller teams in preparing meeting agendas. Team size was also associated with different technology choice: larger teams adopted technology to support the coordination of asynchronous work, while smaller teams adopted technology that primarily supported collaboration. We discuss the implications of distributed team size for team performance and technology adoption.

Researchers have long studied the effects of social presence and media richness on media choice and the effects of media use. This focus on social presence and social psychological theories has led to valuable research on communication. However, little research (either empirical or theoretical) has been done to understand the ways in which media choices influence the cognitive processes that underlie communication. In this paper, we present a cognitive-based view of media choice and media use, based on dual process theories of cognition, which argue that in order for individuals to systematically process messages, they must be motivated to process the message and have the ability to process it. We argue that the use of rich media high in social presence induces increased motivation but decreases the ability to process information, while the use of lean media low in social presence induces decreased motivation but increases the ability to process information. The paradox of richness lies in its duality of impact: from a cognitive perspective, rich media high in social presence simultaneously acts to both improve and impair performance.

This paper presents a cross-case comparison of experiences from organizational adoption and use of e-collaboration technologies in two large, global companies. Challenges in the global implementation process were found to increase with the organizational and geographical scope of the implementation, level of autonomy in the adoption process, cultural diversity, technological heterogeneity, and the level of work process support embedded in the system. Alignment with existing collaborative work practices resulted in faster adoption of the technological solution. Highly competitive conditions restricted the resources available for training and experience transfer between projects. Clients' preferences for co-located project operations served as a potential barrier to the very concept of global e-collaboration. The study increases our understanding of the adoption and use of permanent e-collaboration infrastructures at the organizational level, thus expanding the focus of global e-collaboration research beyond the level of ad hoc, virtual teams.

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.

Recently, the phenomenon of software aging, one in which the state of the software system degrades with time, has been reported. This phenomenon, which may eventually lead to system performance degradation and/or crash/hang failure, is the result of exhaustion of operating system resources, data corruption, and numerical error accumulation. To counteract software aging, a technique called software rejuvenation has been proposed, which essentially involves occasionally terminating an application or a system, cleaning its internal state and/or its environment, and restarting it. Since rejuvenation incurs an overhead, an important research issue is to determine optimal times to initiate this action. In this paper, we first describe how to include faults attributed to software aging in the framework of Gray's software fault classification (deterministic and transient), and study the treatment and recovery strategies for each of the fault classes. We then construct a semi-Markov reward model based on workload and resource usage data collected from the UNIX operating system. We identify different workload states using statistical cluster analysis, estimate transition probabilities, and sojourn time distributions from the data. Corresponding to each resource, a reward function is then defined for the model based on the rate of resource depletion in each state. The model is then solved to obtain estimated times to exhaustion for each resource. The result from the semi-Markov reward model are then fed into a higher-level availability model that accounts for failure followed by reactive recovery, as well as proactive recovery. This comprehensive model is then used to derive optimal rejuvenation schedules that maximize availability or minimize downtime cost.

This paper introduces a new benchmark tool, SPEK (storage performance evaluation kernel module), for evaluating the performance of block-level storage systems in the presence of faults as well as under normal operations. SPEK can work on both direct attached storage (DAS) and block level networked storage systems such as storage area networks (SAN). Each SPEK consists of a controller, several workers, one or more probers, and several fault injection modules. Since it runs at kernel level and eliminates skews and overheads caused by file systems, SPEK is highly accurate and efficient. It allows a storage architect to generate configurable workloads to a system under test and to inject different faults into various system components such as network devices, storage devices, and controllers. Available performance measurements under different workloads and faulty conditions are dynamically collected and recorded in SPEK over a spectrum of time. To demonstrate its functionality, we apply SPEK to evaluate the performance of two direct attached storage systems and two typical SANs under Linux with different fault injections. Our experiments show that SPEK is highly efficient and accurate to measure performance for block-level storage systems.

The generalized temporal role-based access control (GTRBAC) model provides a comprehensive set of temporal constraint expressions which can facilitate the specification of fine-grained time-based access control policies. However, the issue of the expressiveness and usability of this model has not been previously investigated. In this paper, we present an analysis of the expressiveness of the constructs provided by this model and illustrate that its constraints-set is not minimal. We show that there is a subset of GTRBAC constraints that is sufficient to express all the access constraints that can be expressed using the full set. We also illustrate that a nonminimal GTRBAC constraint set can provide better flexibility and lower complexity of constraint representation. Based on our analysis, a set of design guidelines for the development of GTRBAC-based security administration is presented.

We investigate the relation between symbolic and cryptographic secrecy properties for cryptographic protocols. Symbolic secrecy of payload messages or exchanged keys is arguably the most important notion of secrecy shown with automated proof tools. It means that an adversary restricted to symbolic operations on terms can never get the entire considered object into its knowledge set. Cryptographic secrecy essentially means computational indistinguishability between the real object and a random one, given the view of a much more general adversary. In spite of recent advances in linking symbolic and computational models of cryptography, no relation for secrecy under active attacks is known yet. For exchanged keys, we show that a certain strict symbolic secrecy definition over a specific Dolev-Yao-style cryptographic library implies cryptographic key secrecy for a real implementation of this cryptographic library. For payload messages, we present the first general cryptographic secrecy definition for a reactive scenario. The main challenge is to separate secrecy violations by the protocol under consideration from secrecy violations by the protocol users in a general way. For this definition, we show a general secrecy preservation theorem under reactive simulatability, the cryptographic notion of secure implementation. This theorem is of independent cryptographic interest. We then show that symbolic secrecy implies cryptographic payload secrecy for the same cryptographic library as used in key secrecy. Our results thus enable formal proof techniques to establish cryptographically sound proofs of secrecy for payload messages and exchanged keys.

Built-in self-test (BIST) techniques constitute an attractive and practical solution to the difficult problem of testing VLSI circuits and systems. Input vector monitoring concurrent BIST schemes can circumvent problems appearing separately in online and in offline BIST schemes. An important measure of the quality of an input vector monitoring concurrent BIST scheme is the time required to complete the concurrent test, termed concurrent test latency. In this paper, a new input vector monitoring concurrent BIST technique for combinational circuits is presented which is shown to be significantly more efficient than the input vector monitoring techniques proposed to date with respect to concurrent test latency and hardware overhead trade-off, for low values of the hardware overhead.

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.

There has been a proliferation of competing explanations regarding the inconsistent results reported by the e-collaboration literature since its inception. This study advances another possible explanation by investigating the range of multilevel issues that can be encountered in research on the use of synchronous or asynchronous group support systems. We introduce concepts of levels of analysis from the management literature and then examine all empirical studies of e-collaboration from seven information systems journals for the period 1999-2003. We identified a total of 54 studies of e-collaboration in these journals, and after excluding 18 nonconforming studies - those that were primarily conceptual, qualitative, or exploratory only-we analyzed the levels of analysis issues in the remaining 36 empirical studies. Based on our analysis and classification of these studies into six different clusters according to their levels of analysis, we found that a majority of these studies contain one or more problems of levels incongruence that cast doubts on the validity of their results. It is indeed possible that these methodological problems are in part responsible for the inconsistent results reported in this literature, especially since researchers' frequent decisions to analyze data at the individual level - even when the theory was formulated at the group level and when the research setting featured individuals working in groups -may very well have artificially inflated the authors' chances of finding statistically significant results. Based on our discussion of levels of analysis concepts, we hope to provide guidance to empirical researchers who study e-ollaboration.

This special issue of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION focuses on developing new case studies for use in technical and professional communication courses. The term “case study” used here refers to descriptions of real world events that illustrate particular communication problems through collections of primary documents and secondary materials. While case study pedagogy provides students with many benefits, such as concrete applications of technical communication theory, there are distinct challenges that may prevent instructors from developing case studies, such as collecting primary documents as they become available in the media. The case studies treated in the special issue focus on the following events: the crash of Air Midwest Flight 5481; the accounting scandals of the Enron corporation; the communication crisis at Brookhaven National Laboratory; the leaking of nuclear material at the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Plant; the Texas A&M bonfire collapse; and airline press releases in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center.

This case study describes an incident at Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Plant in Oak Harbor, Ohio, and discusses ways in which the case study can be used to examine ethical communication problems and as a basis for writing analytical reports that compare, justify, and analyze materials and issues in technical writing courses. It relates case elements and assignments to broader course and program objectives, poses sample instructional guidance, and offers examples of student performance. Suggested assessment methods to evaluate student learning are also given.

The Brookhaven story illustrates how a research facility, driven by scientific and technological expediency, fails to negotiate their interests with the interests and values of the neighboring communities. As environmental damage at stake is arguably nonessential, the case allows instructors to concentrate strictly on communication issues. A series of short, related assignments raise students' awareness of communication challenges various public groups face in a contemporary democratic society. The case allows instructors to engage students in solving communication problems, building arguments, analyzing websites, and writing workplace documents-letter, report, or proposal-that respond to the complex context.

What constitutes a cause is a particularly important question for those who teach or study technical writing. This article describes a case that helps students look beyond the technical "causes" of a commuter airplane crash in order to address the complex web of policies, practices, actions and events that contributed to the crash. Using an approach grounded in stakeholder theory and ethical theory, students use real documents ranging from news accounts to FAA policies to NTSB hearing exhibits to identify systemic problems that contributed to the disaster. Working from particular stakeholder perspectives, they work collaboratively to develop and argue for policy changes that will prevent future tragedies. The abundance of real documents that drive this case make it an especially useful tool for engaging students in difficult-to-teach subject matter including the role of writing in the failure of technical systems, deliberative and judicial rhetoric, stakeholder theory, visual rhetoric, and ethics.

This case study describes classroom use of the decision making criteria contained in a recommendation report for corrective action following the 1999 bonfire accident at Texas A&M University, in which 12 students were killed and 27 were injured during a school-sanctioned activity. The instructional framework introduces criteria as a decision making tool, asks undergraduates to apply simple criteria in a hypothetical situation, outlines the TAMU case, and analyzes the TAMU report's criteria item by item. It also provides guidelines for assessing students' integration of criteria into their own recommendation reports. This case study offers an analytical model not often available to readers outside an organization and introduces undergraduates to a more sophisticated evaluative methodology than most have used in previous writing projects.

Writing tutors often have very little or no expertise in conventions of engineering writing. In this study, I examine the topics and politeness strategies of tutors' comments, investigating how non-expertise in engineering writing decreases the effectiveness of tutors' interactions with engineering students. I show how the three non-expert tutors gave inappropriate advice and often stated their advice with certainty. I also show how a tutor with expertise in engineering writing gave specific and useful guidance to her tutee and built rapport with him as well. I outline how writing tutors could be trained to help engineering students better.

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The events of September 11, 2001, provide enough case material for hundreds of cases that are applicable in Technical and Professional Communication courses. I developed the case described in this article to give students a real-world look at how corporations communicate in a crisis-in this case, a crisis of extraordinary proportions. The foundation for the case is the public communication via press releases from American Airlines and United Airlines via their press releases within the 24 hours following the first plane's crash into the World Trade Center. The activities provided allow students to produce appropriate corporate communication, in this case, press releases, using the details of the situation. They also provide a variety of ways to use crisis-response strategies, such as Coombs', to analyze, critique, compare and contrast how each airline constructed the messages it conveyed on this fateful day. This case study demonstrates how crucial each word of a message can be and allows students to reach concrete decisions about why a crisis-response plan, along with the accompanying crisis-response strategies and the resulting communication products are essential for any corporation.

Sherron Watkins has been labeled a corporate whistleblower based on the letter she sent in August 2001 to Kenneth Lay, Chairman of the Board of the Enron Corporation. In her letter she identified Enron's unethical and illegal financial management practices, but her letter was never made public until the company's stock was all but worthless. This case is based on the Watkins letter, as well as other articles published in the New York Times and Time magazine. First, we identify the context of the Enron scandal, reviewing the accounting practices that Watkins revealed in her letter. Second, we analyze the Watkins letter, focusing on the rhetorical moves that Watkins makes in the letter and discussing how these moves constitute a persona for Watkins as author. Finally, we present a developed case for use in the classroom; the case continues the analysis of Watkins' persona as it evolves through articles in other publications. We argue that the persona Watkins creates for herself in her letter undergoes a transformation so that by the time she appears as Time magazine's Person of the Year 2002, she is corporate whistleblower. The case includes a two-day course plan with specified student learning outcomes, teaching resources, a group activity, and a selection of student responses to the case.

This article presents findings from an empirical study investigating the transfer of rhetorical knowledge, defined as audience awareness, sense of purpose, organization, use of visuals, professional appearance, and style, between the technical communication and the engineering disciplines. Various data collection methods were used to examine the skills and rhetorical knowledge students learned in a technical communication course and determine whether or not students relied on that knowledge as they completed writing assignments in an engineering course. Also examined was the effect of workplace experiences on shaping students' rhetorical knowledge. This study indicated that students did appear to transfer rhetorical strategies between different contexts, and those strategies were learned in the workplace as well as the classroom.

This index covers all technical items - papers, correspondence, reviews, etc. - that appeared in this periodical during the year, and items from previous years that were commented upon or corrected in this year. Departments and other items may also be covered if they have been judged to have archival value. The Author Index contains the primary entry for each item, listed under the first author's name. The primary entry includes the co-authors' names, the title of the paper or other item, and its location, specified by the publication abbreviation, year, month, and inclusive pagination. The Subject Index contains entries describing the item under all appropriate subject headings, plus the first author's name, the publication abbreviation, month, and year, and inclusive pages. Note that the item title is found only under he primary entry in the Author Index.

A primary goal of both distance and traditional courses should be that of distance reduction-a shrinking of the mental and time-dimensional separation between the students, the instructor, and the content to be learned. This sort of reduction brings the learning events of a class together in a holistic way that maintains an ongoing dialog with participants. This article reports the results of a study that evaluated the use and effectiveness of course websites in three undergraduate technical communication courses. Research questions investigated students' site visit frequency, purpose of use, and perceptions of distance reduction during out-of-class times via the constant availability of course companion sites. A survey was conducted to measure student responses to the course website used in their technical communication course. Anecdotal and empirical data indicate that course companion sites do decrease students' perceived distance during out-of-class times; however, they also produce unanticipated results, such as increased student dependency on online information and a low tolerance for out-of-date information. Future research is suggested to further investigate the impact of course websites on both cognitive and affective modes of student participation and learning.

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This article presents communication strategies for technical writers and engineers. These strategies are developed from applying Erving Goffman's social interaction theories to the technical writer/engineer relationship. These strategies should also help dispel some of the criticisms that engineers and technical writers have of each other.

This paper summarizes three field experiments involving distributed collaborative writing in traditional educational settings creating a hybrid form of distributed education. One finding shows that specialized collaborative tools allowed for parallel work, group awareness, and coordination, providing substantial advantages over traditional word processors in distributed collaborative writing. However, it was also found that advanced collaborative writing tools alone did not provide optimal results in distributed collaborative writing groups; such groups also needed high levels of process structure, which can be delivered through carefully constructed scripts. Moreover, it was found that introducing face-to-face meetings in distributed collaborative writing work did not necessarily provide advantages over work that was performed in all-distributed settings. Given these findings, this paper concludes by discussing the contributions, implications, limitations, and future research possibilities for hybrid distributed education are discussed.

The population of older adults is growing rapidly worldwide, but technical communicators have not accounted for the needs of these audiences nor drawn from the wide range of research on aging. This article suggests four challenges practitioners, educators, and researchers must undertake to accommodate older adults' physical, cognitive, and emotional needs: refine the demographic variable of age, operationalize age to enrich current methods of audience analysis, investigate multidisciplinary sources of aging research, and participate in research on aging by offering our expertise in document design and communication strategies.

This paper is an analysis of the challenges of dealing with the human and technical aspects of blended learning. It presents a case study of how one course has evolved over the years, presenting not only the lessons learned and the changes made at each stage, but the rationale for those changes. Looking at learning as the combination of information and interaction, the paper describes how the instructor went from being the Sage on the Stage to being the Sage in the Cage, to being the Guide on the Slide to finally being the Guide on the Side. It also documents how the course went from being technology driven to learner driven, and the evolution of an activity cycle. The paper ends with rationale for design changes and implications for current and future designs.