Although the Internet has been touted as a means to improve democratic governance, there has been little systematic analysis of its use. The authors analyze the diffusion of municipal Web sites that include information concerning a specific locality. The analysis is based on demographic and fiscal data from 454 California cities and two surveys of Web site adoption. The authors’ theoretical framework draws from the political economy and technology diffusion literatures. City size, government resources, concentration of social-economic elites, and voter registration levels are the most significant predictors of adoption. In contrast to previous adoption studies, the authors find that liberal political ideology and experience with advanced communication technologies do not appreciably increase the probability of adoption.

Hundreds of empirical studies indicate that the media can tell us not only what to think about but what to think. It is therefore likely that media coverage of nonprofits may have profound effects on the public's perception of the voluntary sector. Unfortunately, there is little empirical research about media coverage of nonprofits and almost none that is framed by communication theories. This article uses two such theories, agenda setting and media framing, to explore how nonprofits are portrayed in the media. A content analysis of 1,034 randomly sampled newspaper stories reveals that although nonprofit coverage is generally quite favorable, it is often episodic and not thematically framed. In addition, the results indicate that on the comparatively rare occasions when newspaper stories focus on the nonprofit sector as a whole instead of individual nonprofit organizations, the proportion of stories favorable toward nonprofits declines.

Abstract-By choosing to use cloud services, organizations seek to reduce costs and maximize efficiency. For mission critical systems that must satisfy security constraints, this push to the cloud introduces risks associated with cloud service providers not implementing organizationally selected security controls or policies. As internal system details are abstracted away as part of the cloud architecture, the organization must rely on contractual obligations embedded in service level agreements (SLAs) to assess service offerings. Current SLAs focus on quality of service metrics and lack the semantics needed to express security constraints that could be used to measure risk. We create a framework, called SecAgreement (SecAg), that extends the current SLA negotiation standard, WS-Agreement, to allow security metrics to be expressed on service description terms and service level objectives. The framework enables cloud service providers to include security in their SLA offerings, increasing the likelihood that their services will be used. We define and exemplify a cloud service matchmaking algorithm to assess and rank SecAg enhanced WS-Agreements by their risk, allowing organizations to quantify risk, identify any policy compliance gaps that might exist, and as a result select the cloud services that best meet their security needs.

Background Gene Ontology enrichment analysis provides an effective way to extract meaningful information from complex biological datasets. By identifying terms that are significantly overrepresented in a gene set, researchers can uncover biological features shared by genes. In addition to extracting enriched terms, it is also important to visualize the results in a way that is conducive to biological interpretation. Results Here we present FunSet, a new web server to perform and visualize enrichment analysis. The web server identifies Gene Ontology terms that are statistically overrepresented in a target set with respect to a background set. The enriched terms are displayed in a 2D plot that captures the semantic similarity between terms, with the option to cluster terms via spectral clustering and identify a representative term for each cluster. FunSet can be used interactively or programmatically, and allows users to download the enrichment results both in tabular form and in graphical form as SVG files or in data format as JSON or csv. To enhance reproducibility of the analyses, users have access to historical data for the ontology and the annotations. The source code for the standalone program and the web server are made available with an open-source license.