Earticle

This study investigates whether different SNS with different characteristics have different impacts on participatory social capital in Korea. At least in Korea, SNS are categorized into five types (community, blog, micro-blog, profile-based service and instant message service), and participatory social capital is specified by three types (off-line political participation, on-line political participation, on-line civic engagement). Using Nielsen KoreanClick’s web-based survey data, our regression analysis shows that SNS which are more open and focused on information sharing contribute more to participatory social capital.

Recently, as the price per bit is decreasing at a fast rate, flash memory is considered to be used as primary storage of large-scale database systems. Although flash memory shows off its high speeds of page reads, however, it has a problem of noticeable performance degradation in the presence of increasing update workloads. When updates are requested for pages with random page IDs, in particular, the shortcoming of flash tends to impair significantly the overall performance of a flash-based database system. Therefore, it is important to have a way to efficiently update the B+-tree, when it is stored in flash storage. This is because most of updates in the B+-tree arise at leaf nodes, whose page IDs are in random. In this light, we propose a new flash B+-tree that stores up-to-date versions of leaf nodes in sibling-leaf blocks (SLBs), while updating them. The use of SLBs improves the update performance of B-trees and provides the mechanism for fast key range searches. To verify the performance advantages of the proposed flash B+-tree, we developed a mathematical performance evaluation model that is suited for assessing B-tree operations. The performance comparisons from it show that the proposed flash B+-tree provides faster range searches and reduces more than 50% of update costs.

User-generated content (UGC) satirizing the presidential candidates was widespread during the 2016 election in Taiwan. Using an experimental design, this study explored the predictors of viewer agreement to satirical UGC, and its influence on viewer attitudes towards candidates after watching the satirical videos from YouTube. Results showed that participants’ agreement with the satirical UGC was predicted by their political cynicism and political information efficacy, but not by candidate favorability. Watching the UGC satirizing the presidential candidates effected the favorability toward the male candidates but not the female candidate. In addition, the evidence suggested that the frequency of exposure to satirical UGC is related to political information efficacy, but not with political cynicism or candidate favorability.

In this paper, we propose a new anti-forensic method for hiding data in the timestamp of a file in the Windows NTFS filesystem. The main idea of the proposed method is to utilize the 16 least significant bits of the 64 bits in the timestamps. The 64-bit timestamp format represents a number of 100- nanosecond intervals, which are small enough to appear in less than a second, and are not commonly displayed with full precision in the Windows Explorer window or the file browsers of forensic tools. This allows them to be manipulated for other purposes. Every file has $STANDARD_INFORMATION and $FILE_NAME attributes, and each attribute has four timestamps respectively, so we can use 16 bytes to hide data. Without any changes in an original timestamp of “year-month-day hour:min:sec” format, we intentionally put manipulated data into the 16 least significant bits, making the existence of the hidden data in the timestamps difficult to uncover or detect. We demonstrated the applicability and feasibility of the proposed method with a test case.

Recently, many biometrics-based user authentication schemes for telecare medicine information systems (TMIS) have been proposed to improve the security problems in user authentication system. In 2014, Mishra et al. proposed an improvement of Awasthi-Srivastava’s biometric based authentication for TMIS which is secure against the various attacks and provide mutual authentication, efficient password change. In this paper, we discuss the security of Mishra et al.’s authentication scheme, and we have shown that Mishra et al.’s authentication scheme is still insecure against the various attacks. Also, we proposed the improved scheme to remove these security problems of Mishra et al.’s authentication scheme, even if the secret information stored in the smart card is revealed. As a result, we can see that the improved biometric based authentication scheme is secure against the insider attack, the password guessing attack, the user impersonation attack, the server masquerading attack and provides mutual authentication between the user and the telecare system.

In 2013, Li et al. proposed an improved smart card-based remote user password authentication scheme, and claimed that their scheme not only overcomes security weaknesses of the Chen et al.’s scheme but also is a more user friendly scheme compared with other schemes. In this paper, we analyze the security of Li et al.’s authentication scheme and we show that Li et al.’s authentication scheme is still insecure against the various attacks, such as the off-line password guessing attack, the forgery attack, and the session key generation attack etc. Also, we propose an improved scheme that can resist these security drawbacks of Li et al.’s authentication, even if the secret information stored in the smart card is revealed. As a result of security analysis, the improved scheme is relatively more secure against several attacks than other related schemes in terms of the security.

Due to the rapidly changing global business environment and global management environment, companies must actively act for competitiveness. By examining the development process of Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), there is a chance to optimize the organization and find measures to improve the company competitiveness. It seems examining task process, and studying the influence of ERP introduction to management performance by considering whether the excessive maintenance cost or repetitive investment toward ERP is quiet significant. The companies which instituted ERP uses “business process model” provided by “Best Practice” compare own task to choose much efficient method. This allows simultaneous realization of ERP institution and Business Reengineering (BR).

This thesis proposed an objective and accurate fundamental numeric data for the economics and business analysis of applicable CCS technology to plant using existing fossil fuel by analyzing the influence of process improvement for commercialization of Carbon Capture and Storage(CCS) technology, which enables storing CO2 generated by fossil fuel by extracting before emitting to air and press until it becomes liquid, and development and performance improvement of new solvent on Total Life Cycle Cost(TLC) of CCS.

Maximum utilization of unused license spectrum is one of key factor in cognitive radio network which can handle the large number of systems and devices connected on smart grid AMI network. The central intelligence control system has responsibility to accept new technologies and users for automation. To ensure a reliable communication in smart grid system through cognitive network, a minimum mean square error (MSE) signal using unused licensed spectrum (or frequency) is necessary to be detected with small decision error. In this paper, we introduce a user control wireless smart grid system with minimum MSE using LMS algorithm.

Various studies have proven that human is the biggest challenge in the process of transitioning to agile. Culture and mindset are two critical elements of human factors causing issues in agile environment. This study involved thirty-two (32) agile practitioners from nineteen (19) country to validate the issues from human factors. The purpose of the study is to discover human factors that required more attention and factors that give a low impact on the agile environment. Furthermore, this paper presents research analysis on some of popular human factors such as collaboration, hierarchy, communication and other critical factors which company may face. The results of this analysis can be used as a guide for IT organization to consider the critical challenges they may encounter.