Georgia State University

About: Georgia State University is a education organization based out in Atlanta, Georgia, United States. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & Poison control. The organization has 13988 authors who have published 35895 publications receiving 1164332 citations. The organization is also known as: GSU & Georgia State.

The Mythology of Privatization in Contracting for Social Services

Abstract: States and municipalities have privatized services in an effort to improve their cost-effectiveness and quality. Competition provides the logical foundation for an expectation of cost savings and quality improvements, but competition does not exist in many local marketplaces—especially in the social services, where governments contract primarily with nonprofit organizations. As government increases its use of contracting, it simultaneously reduces its own public-management capacity, imperiling its ability to be a smart buyer of contracted goods and services. This article examines two questions about the privatization of social services based on interviews conducted with public and nonprofit managers in New York state: Does social services contracting exist in a competitive environment? And do county governments have enough public-management capacity to contract effectively for social services? The findings suggest an absence of competition and public-management capacity, raising the question of why governments contract when these conditions are not met.

Growing systems in emergent organizations

Abstract: requirements Complete and unambiguous specifications New system projects as achievements Tools/Techniques for emergent ISD goals: Reliable back channels for ISD professionals, emergent IT organizations, prototyping, proper rewards system, and existing tools such as open systems, end-user development and object-oriented designs and implementation tools. third goal is an implied response to the revocation of third and fourth items in the old goal set. Always analysis. Under emergent assumptions, the analysis of IS applications must be continuous. Since the organization is emerging, the fundamental IS must continuously change and adapt. In order to implement this adaptation, requirements and specifications are constantly renegotiated. Analysis activities are no longer captured within the early stages of a system’s life cycle. Instead, these activities are an ongoing service of the organizational ISD group. It is important to realize that this ongoing service must not be cyclical (periods of analysis followed by periods of implementation), but is generally a constant ISD activity in parallel with systems operation and maintenance. The results of this ongoing analysis are continuously fed into the maintenance activities. Because of organizational emergence, the underlying ISD service continuously monitors and reappraises the IS support for every business process and organizational activity. Under this goal, analysis is not a component of an ISD project, but an ongoing ISD organizational maintenance activity. Dynamic requirements negotiations. Because the organization is emerging around the users, IS requirements can never be fully specified because users are always in conflict with them. Thus user satisfaction is improbable. Indeed, under this assumption, a setting where users are fully satisfied would be an alarming anomaly. Requirements are no longer determined as part of a project, but become a negotiated outcome of the changing characteristics of an emergent organization and the resources for enhancing or altering the existing IS. An emergent ISD goal is not user satisfaction, but a “healthy” degree of conflict between users and their IS. As requirements conflicts rise, increased negotiation and IS enhancement activities are prescribed. As requirements conflicts fall, ISD activities are decreased. The conflict, negotiation and enhancement are continuous service activities provided to support ongoing business processes. These activities are not necessarily associated with any ISD project. Incomplete and usefully ambiguous specifications. If abstract requirements are largely imaginary, and unambiguous specifications are ineffectual, analysts must come to terms with ambiguity. Because the requirements are in motion, specifications must be kept in a state in which these can be easily adapted for enhancing or modifying the existing system. The goal is a set of specifications wherein each specification is open-ended and easily modified. Complete and unambiguous specifications are only possible for organizations that are totally stable, and waste valuable resources in an emergent setting. System enhancement and modification activities begin to be undertaken even though the specifications are incomplete and ambiguous. These activities “succeed” because they are themselves never completed (the organization is likely to emerge from under the planned enhancements or modifications). Traditionally, the IS is a consequence of the specification. Under the emergent view, the specification is just as equally a consequence of the IS emergence. This parallel emergence leads to both an IS and an ISD process that are incomplete and usefully ambiguous. These last two characteristics represent an excellent foundation for further organizational emergence. Continuous redevelopment. Under emergent assumptions, this goal supplants the current ISD project mentality under which all systems terminate at their obsolescence point. The goal of ISD is to preserve all existing IS applications by continuously enhancing and modifying these to match organizational requirements. The goal of ISD is to prevent system obsolescence and thereby eliminate system termination (and the implied new ISD project). The U.S. railroad system provides a metaphor to illustrate how this ISD approach operates. Today’s railroad systems no longer resemble the railroads of a century ago. The engines, rolling stock, tracks, stations, and signaling have all been replaced with modern elements. There has not been a nationwide development project to replace the entire railroad system. Instead, the railroad system has emerged to match the needs of the nation and the limits of the technology. This emergence is a consequence of continuous enhancements: new tracks added in some areas and new rolling stock purchased when needed, for example. The net effect is an adaptive railroad system. Continuous redevelopment implies that information systems are continuously enhanced and modified such that they are never totally outdated and irreparable. COMMUNICATIONS OF THE ACM August 1999/Vol. 42, No. 8 121 SYSTEMS SHOULD BE UNDER CONSTANT DEVELOPMENT, CAN NEVER BE FULLY SPECIFIED AND ARE SUBJECT TO CONSTANT ADJUSTMENT AND ADAPTATION. There are two interesting implications of continuous redevelopment. The first implication arises from the viewpoint of life-cycle termination as an anomaly. When an IS becomes too expensive to maintain and must be replaced, there is an implied failure on the part of ISD management. ISD management failed to keep the IS maintained in a state that permitted its further redevelopment. In other words, the IS was allowed to decay beyond its economic rescue point. In an emergent setting, the decayed IS probably imposed a long period of rising stable systems drag that limited the organizational ability to emerge. Had the system been continuously redeveloped, the drag would have been reduced and the system life span extended indefinitely. In most traditional ISD organizations, the resources that might be used for continuous redevelopment are paradoxically occupied with system replacement projects. The second interesting implication regards legacy systems and the infamous Y2K problem. These two interconnected problems have risen in importance over the last decade. To a degree, both of these result from the preservation of the 1960s and 1970s ISD project mentality into the 1980s and 1990s. The new systems projects consumed the resources that might have otherwise been applied in gradually redeveloping, enhancing, and modifying these old systems. Under continuous redevelopment, these systems, like the national railroad system, could not be legacy systems. Over the 1980s and 1990s, these legacy systems should have evolved, but didn’t. Today’s ISD managers are now confronted with (and blamed for) the failures of their predecessors. Adaptability orientation. The essential impact of the emergent goal set on ISD relates to the adaptability of IS. Recognizing that IS must undergo continuous redevelopment, the ISD approach and the underlying IS architecture must be conducive to redevelopment. Ease of modification must be deeply embedded in every IS. This easy modification implies that every system includes explicit ISD mechanisms by which the system can adapt. An interesting implication of this goal is the merger of IS and ISD. Development of an IS is exactly the same activity as maintenance, and is equally an essential component of IS operation. The distinction between IS and ISD disappears because the emergence of IS is embodied by the goal set of emergent ISD—an emergent IS is ISD. Ways of Supporting the New ISD Goals The existing vehicles for supporting an effort to reach the emergent organization goals include easily maintainable specifications, open systems interconnection architectures, prototyping, and end-user development. Easily maintainable specifications, like object-oriented designs, make it easier and cheaper to respecify IT systems when change is needed. Open systems architectures enable IT components to be easily rearranged and incorporated with newly developed components. Prototypes, particularly operational prototypes, are typically built with tools that enable easy changes. End-user development uses productivity tools to create inexpensive applications that can be thought of as disposable systems. These existing tools have a role in supporting emergent organizations, but these alone do not go far enough. Several IT organizational capabilities can also help. Back channel communications for ISD professionals. Back channels, such as guaranteed privacy for email, chat rooms, and groupware, permit developers to establish versions of the organizational identity or reality that conflict with other versions. This conflict is important for autopoiesis and emergence. These channels should extend beyond the ISD group and into the users with whom they may interact in order to continuously redevelop systems. Emergent IT organizations. The IT organization itself must be highly emergent. One element that can promote this emergence is virtual teams that extend to include users. These teams lack the history that confines their adaptation, and eliminate the boundary between user and developer. Another important element is the elimination of the “project” as the primary means of organizing IT activities. An emergent IT organization replaces projects with “streams” of redevelopment activity that are continuous as long as the particular IT system requirement is present. A new project represents the failure of the IT organization to properly adapt the systems in its charge. Proper rewards system. The IT organization that supports emergent organizations must value system adaptation. Initially developing adaptable systems is important. However, most of the organization’s important development activities are merged with its maintenance activities. Maintenance needs to become innovative

A comprehensive framework for evaluation in design science research

Abstract: Evaluation is a central and essential activity in conducting rigorous Design Science Research (DSR), yet there is surprisingly little guidance about designing the DSR evaluation activity beyond suggesting possible methods that could be used for evaluation. This paper extends the notable exception of the existing framework of Pries-Heje et al [11] to address this problem. The paper proposes an extended DSR evaluation framework together with a DSR evaluation design method that can guide DSR researchers in choosing an appropriate strategy for evaluation of the design artifacts and design theories that form the output from DSR. The extended DSR evaluation framework asks the DSR researcher to consider (as input to the choice of the DSR evaluation strategy) contextual factors of goals, conditions, and constraints on the DSR evaluation, e.g. the type and level of desired rigor, the type of artifact, the need to support formative development of the designed artifacts, the properties of the artifact to be evaluated, and the constraints on resources available, such as time, labor, facilities, expertise, and access to research subjects. The framework and method support matching these in the first instance to one or more DSR evaluation strategies, including the choice of ex ante (prior to artifact construction) versus ex post evaluation (after artifact construction) and naturalistic (e.g., field setting) versus artificial evaluation (e.g., laboratory setting). Based on the recommended evaluation strategy(ies), guidance is provided concerning what methodologies might be appropriate within the chosen strategy(ies).

The Psychology of Terrorism

Abstract: Preface to 2nd Edition Introduction 1: Psychological Warfare 2: Understanding Terrorism 3: Terrorist Minds? 4: Involvement 5: Engagement 6: Disengagement 7: Towards a Science of Terrorist Behaviour Select Bibliography

Controlling dielectrics with the electric field of light

Abstract: The ultrafast reversibility of changes to the electronic structure and electric polarizability of a dielectric with the electric field of a laser pulse, demonstrated here, offers the potential for petahertz-bandwidth optical signal manipulation. Two studies published in this issue highlight the potential for ultrafast signal manipulation in dielectrics using optical fields. When it comes to electrical signal processing, semiconductors have become the materials of choice. However, insulators such as dielectrics could be attractive alternatives: they have a fast response in principle, but usually have extremely low conductivity at low electric fields and break down in large fields. The electronic properties of dielectrics can be controlled with few-cycle laser pulses that permit damage-free exposure of dielectrics to high electric fields. Agustin Schiffrin et al. demonstrate that strong optical laser fields with controlled few-cycle waveforms can reversibly transform a dielectric insulator into a conductor within the optical period (within one femtosecond). Martin Schultze et al. address the crucial issue of ultrafast reversibility, demonstrating that the dielectric can be repeatedly switched 'on' and 'off' with light fields, without degradation. The control of the electric and optical properties of semiconductors with microwave fields forms the basis of modern electronics, information processing and optical communications. The extension of such control to optical frequencies calls for wideband materials such as dielectrics, which require strong electric fields to alter their physical properties1,2,3,4,5. Few-cycle laser pulses permit damage-free exposure of dielectrics to electric fields of several volts per angstrom6 and significant modifications in their electronic system6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13. Fields of such strength and temporal confinement can turn a dielectric from an insulating state to a conducting state within the optical period14. However, to extend electric signal control and processing to light frequencies depends on the feasibility of reversing these effects approximately as fast as they can be induced. Here we study the underlying electron processes with sub-femtosecond solid-state spectroscopy, which reveals the feasibility of manipulating the electronic structure and electric polarizability of a dielectric reversibly with the electric field of light. We irradiate a dielectric (fused silica) with a waveform-controlled near-infrared few-cycle light field of several volts per angstrom and probe changes in extreme-ultraviolet absorptivity and near-infrared reflectivity on a timescale of approximately a hundred attoseconds to a few femtoseconds. The field-induced changes follow, in a highly nonlinear fashion, the turn-on and turn-off behaviour of the driving field, in agreement with the predictions of a quantum mechanical model. The ultrafast reversibility of the effects implies that the physical properties of a dielectric can be controlled with the electric field of light, offering the potential for petahertz-bandwidth signal manipulation.