In this article, we investigate why merchants accept credit cards for payment despite the relatively high cost of processing these types of transactions. A two-period model is constructed to determine under what conditions a credit card equilibrium would exist. The results of the model indicate that when the cost of funds is not too high and when the merchant’s profit margin is sufficiently hig...

The card sort is a key scale development tool that is frequently used in IS survey instrument development. Cohen's Kappa is a recommended measure of inter-rater agreement in this process, however one of its underlying statistical assumptions is violated when it is used in open card sorts. To address this issue, Matrix Kappa is proposed as a complement to other card sort analysis techniques, ref...

The Java dialect Java Card for programming smartcards contains some features which do not exist in Java. Java Card distinguishes persistent and transient data (data stored in EEPROM and RAM, respectively). Because power to a smartcard can suddenly be interrupted by a so-called card tear, by someone removing the smartcard from the reader, Java Card provides a notion of transaction to ensure that...

Apoptosis requires recruitment of caspases by receptor-associated adaptors through homophilic interactions between the CARDs (caspase recruitment domains) of adaptor proteins and prodomains of caspases. We have solved the CARD structure of the RAIDD adaptor protein that recruits ICH-1/caspase-2. It consists of six tightly packed helices arranged in a topology homologous to the Fas death domain....

Java is the ideal development platform for mobile code systems. It ensures application portability and mobility for a variety of platforms, while providing strong security features. The intermediate code (byte code) allows us to verify statically (i.e. during loading phase) that the program is trustworthy. This is done by a software security module called the byte code verifier. Given the compl...

We prove the following two variants of the defect theorem. Let X be a nite set of words over a nite alphabet. Then if a nonperiodic bi-in nite word w has two X-factorizations, then the combinatorial rank of X is at most card(X) 1, i.e. there exists a set F such that X F+ with card(F ) < card(X). Further, if card(X) = 2 and a bi-in nite word possesses two X-factorizations which are not shift-equ...

One of the main obstacles to the unification of smartcard usage is the specialization of applications and protocols used between the card and the terminals. Even with Java cards, this will not change, since there is no standardized way of exhibiting a smartcard’s interface to the outside world. Smartcards communicate by exchanging byte sequences, APDUs, which are only weakly structured. For the...

This paper presents an operational semantics for a subset of Java Card bytecode, focussing on aspects of the Java Card firewall, method invocation, field access, variable access, shareable objects and contexts. The goal is to provide a precise description of the Java Card firewall using standard tools from operational semantics. Such a description is necessary for formally arguing the correctne...

The advent of the Java Card standard has been a major turning point in smart card technology. With the growing acceptance of this standard, understanding the performance behavior of these platforms is becoming crucial. To meet this need, we present in this paper a novel benchmarking framework to test and evaluate the performance of Java Card platforms. MESURE tool is the first framework which a...

We describe the CARD (Cluster Administration using Relational Databases) system for monitoring large clusters of cooperating computers. CARD scales both in capacity and in visualization to at least 150 machines, and can in principle scale far beyond that. The architecture is easily extensible to monitor new cluster software and hardware. CARD detects and automatically recovers from common fault...