Nationality Brazilian-American Role Writer Name Ned Kock | Occupation Professor
Writer Alma mater University of Waikato Education University of Waikato | |
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Born 1964 Brazil Employer Texas A&M International University Books Systems Analysis & Design Fundamentals | ||
WarpPLS, an interview with Ned Kock
Nereu Florencio "Ned" Kock (born 1964) is a Brazilian-American philosopher. He is best known for employing biological evolution ideas to the understanding of human behavior toward technologies, particularly information technologies. He developed media naturalness theory, an evolutionary communication media theory. Kock is the writer of a popular blog on the intersection of evolution, statistics, and health.
He developed WarpPLS, a nonlinear variance-based structural equation modeling software tool. The underlying mathematics employed in WarpPLS builds on the method of path analysis, developed by the evolutionary biologist Sewall Wright. WarpPLS has been used to study a variety of topics, including nursing education, password security risks, software testing, customer satisfaction, accounting education, and web-based homework.
He has conducted research and written on the topic of academic plagiarism. His research and writings in this area have been discussed in The Chronicle of Higher Education, and contributed to considerable debate on the topic within the Association for Computing Machinery, and to the establishment of an ethics committee within the Association for Information Systems.
Kock has also been a proponent of the use of action research in the study of human behavior toward technologies, arguing that it can be used in investigations aimed at testing hypotheses in a postpositivist fashion. As a result of his action research investigations, he developed a method for systems analysis and business process redesign that places emphasis on the optimization of communication interactions in business processes.
He is a Killam Distinguished Professor of Information Systems at Texas A&M International University, and Founding Editor-in-Chief of the International Journal of e-Collaboration. He holds a B.E.E. in Electrical Engineering from the Federal Technological University of Parana at Curitiba, Brazil, a M.Sc. in computer science from the Institute of Aeronautical Technology, Brazil, and a PhD in management with a concentration in information systems from the School of Management Studies, University of Waikato, New Zealand.