This paper presents an in-depth analysis of the technical and business implications of adopting Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) in organizational settings. The year 2004 marked a significant shift toward adopting RFID because of mandates by large retailers and government organizations. The use of RFID technology is expected to increase rapidly in the next few years. At present, however, initial barriers against widespread adoption include standards, interoperability, costs, forward compatibility, and lack of familiarity. This paper describes basic components of an RFID system including tags, readers, and antennas and how they work together using an integrated supply chain model. Our analysis suggests that business needs to overcome human resource scarcity, security, legal and financial challenges and make informed decision regarding standards and process reengineering. The technology is not fully mature and suffers from issues of attenuation and interference. A laboratory experiment conducted by the authors shows that the middleware is not yet at a "plug-and-play" stage, which means that initial adopters need to spend considerable effort to integrate RFID into their existing business processes. Appendices contain a glossary of common RFID terms, a list of RFID vendors and detailed findings of the laboratory experiment.

Zaheeruddin AsifInstitute of Business Administration Karachi zuasif@gmail.com Web 2.0 has great potential to serve as a public sphere (Habermas, 1974;Habermas, 1989) -a distributed arena of voices where all who want to do so can participate. A well-functioning public sphere is important for pluralistic decision-making at many levels, ranging from small organizations to society at large. In this paper, we analyze the capability of the blogosphere in its current form to support such a role. This analysis leads to the identification of the principal issues that prevent the blogosphere from realizing its full potential as a public sphere. Most significantly, we propose that the sheer volume of content overwhelms blog readers, forcing them to restrict themselves to only a small subset of valuable content. This ultimately reduces their level of informedness. Based on past research on managing discourse, we propose four design artifacts that would alleviate these issues: a communal repository, textual clustering, visual cues, and a participation facility for blog users. We present a prototype system, called FeedWiz, which implements several of these design artifacts. Based on this initial design, we formulate a research agenda for the creation of new tools that effectively harness the potential of the growing body of user-generated content in the blogosphere and beyond. WEB 2.0 AND THE PERILS OF SELF-PUBLISHINGWeb-based collaborative applications commonly known as "Web 2.0" (O'Reilly, 2005) have been changing the way individuals interact with each other and the public at large. These applications have changed the communication paradigm from a one-to-many to a many-to-many format. Web 2.0 , at its core, is a mechanism for self-publishing user-generated content (Cayzer, 2004), which can be in various forms ranging from online video (e.g., YouTube, Google Video, MetaCafe) to text-based content (e.g., Blogger.com, WordPress, Wikipedia). The intended audience of information shared in Web 2.0 also varies greatly, from narrowly focused content to information intended for a much broader audience. For example, social networking sites such as Facebook and MySpace provide mechanisms for users to share information about themselves with unique and limited networks of individuals. In addition to this kind of "narrowcasting," using Web 2.0 to broadcast to a broader audience is also common. Users of Twitter can publish brief, public "microblog" entries regarding what they are doing at any point in time. Another example is user-created posts sharing reactions to news stories on CNN.com.Within its many applications, one of the most visible and established components of Web 2.0 is the weblog (or "blog"). The term "blog" is commonly used to describe a web site where an individual (typically the owner or the "main author" of the site) or a group of individuals write about a variety of topics such as the details of their daily lives or their reactions to ongoing world events. New technologies have made it very easy for users of all skill l...

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Online learning is becoming more popular with the maturity of social and educational technologies. In the COVID-19 era, it has become one of the most utilized ways to continue academic pursuits. Despite the ease and benefits offered by online classes, their completion rates are surprisingly low. Although several past studies focused on online dropout rates, institutions and course providers are still searching for a solution to this alarming problem. It is mainly because the previous studies have used divergent frameworks and approaches. Based on empirical research since 2001, this study presents a comprehensive review of factors by synthesizing them into a logically cohesive and integrative framework. Using different combinations of terms related to persistence and dropout, the authors explored various databases to form a pool of past research on the subject. This collection was also enhanced using the snowball approach. The authors only selected empirical, peer-reviewed, and contextually relevant studies, shortlisting them by reading through the abstracts. The Constant Comparative Method (CCM) seems ideal for this research. The authors employed axial coding to explore the relationships among factors, and selective coding helped identify the core categories. The categorical arrangement of factors will give researchers valuable insights into the combined effects of factors that impact persistence and dropout decisions. It will also direct future research to critically examine the relationships among factors and suggest improvements by validating them empirically. We anticipate that this research will enable future researchers to apply the results in different scenarios and contexts related to online learning.