Podcasting in education: Are students as ready and eager as we think they are?

Instructors in higher education are disseminating instructional content via podcasting, as many rally behind the technology’s potential benefits. Others have expressed concern about the risks of deleterious effects that might accompany the adoption of podcasting, such as lower class attendance. Yet, relatively few studies have investigated students’ perceptions of podcasting for educational purposes, especially in relation to different podcasting forms: repetitive and supplemental. The present study explored students’ readiness and attitudes towards these two forms of podcasting to provide fundamental information for future researchers and educators. The results indicated that students may not be as ready or eager to use podcasting for repetitive or supplemental educational purposes as much as we think they are, but they could be persuaded.     

What are X-Machines?

X-machines were introduced by S. Eilenberg in 1974 ([Eil74]) as a mathematical framework for examining the relationships between languages and automata. The X-machine definition provided a very general concept that captured in a simple and elegant way a wide variety of existing models and their computational behaviour. Thus finite state machines, pushdown automata and Turing machines all provided different examples of X-machines obtained by varying some of the components of the X-machine's definition.     

What are the trend and core knowledge of information security? A citation and co-citation analysis

Information technology brings business success opportunities, but also causes potential safety hazards to organizations. In response to the increasing academia and industry concerns regarding information security (ISec), this study systematically explored extant ISec research and identified eight core knowledge groups, including (1) intrusion detection, (2) privacy protection, (3) secure machine learning, (4) cryptosystem, (5) data service security, (6) malware analysis, (7) security decision-making, and (8) security management. The detection of research hotspots shows that data service security and risk management garner the most current research attention. Furthermore, we establish a comprehensive ISec framework to help systematically understand and achieve ISec.     

What are the actual needs of visually impaired people?

In this editorial, the leading guest editor of the Special Issue on “Visually Assistive Systems for the Visually Impaired” invited two visually impaired persons to talk about the actual needs of the visually impaired.     

What are features? An ontology-based review of the literature

Feature-based product modeling is the leading approach for the integrated representation of engineering product data. On the one side, this approach has stimulated the development of formal models and vocabularies, data standards and computational ontologies. On the other side, the current ways to model features are considered problematic since it lacks a principled and uniform methodology for feature representation.This paper reviews the state of art of feature-based modeling approaches by concentrating on how features are conceptualized. It points out the drawbacks of current approaches and proposes a high-level ontology-based perspective to harmonize the definition of feature.     

What are suspicious VoIP delays?

Voice over IP (VoIP) is unquestionably the most popular real-time service in IP networks today. Recent studies have shown that it is also a suitable carrier for information hiding. Hidden communication may pose security concerns as it can lead to confidential information leakage. In VoIP, RTP (Real-time Transport Protocol) in particular, which provides the means for the successful transport of voice packets through IP networks, is suitable for steganographic purposes. It is characterised by a high packet rate compared to other protocols used in IP telephony, resulting in a potentially high steganographic bandwidth. The modification of an RTP packet stream provides many opportunities for hidden communication as the packets may be delayed, reordered or intentionally lost. In this paper, to enable the detection of steganographic exchanges in VoIP, we examined real RTP traffic traces to answer the questions, what do the “normal” delays in RTP packet streams look like? and, is it possible to detect the use of known RTP steganographic methods based on this knowledge?     

Flight decks and free flight: where are the system boundaries?

The change from managed to free flight is expected to have large effects, over and above the intended efficiency gains. Human factor concerns have understandably focused on how free flight may affect the pilots in the cockpit. Yet it is necessary to see the change from managed to free flight as more than just an increment to the pilots' work. Despite the best intentions the transition will not be a case of a smooth, carefully planned and therefore uneventful introduction of a new technology. It is more likely to be a substantial change to an already challenging working environment, in the air as well as on the ground. The significant effects will therefore not just happen within the existing structure or distribution of work and responsibilities, but affect the structure of work itself. This paper takes a look at free flight from a cognitive systems engineering perspective and identifies two major concerns: first what effects free flight has on the boundaries of the joint cognitive systems, and second how this affects demands to control. The conclusion is that both will change considerably and that we need to understand the nature of these changes before focusing on the possible effects of free flight on pilots' performance.     

What are the roles of software product managers? An empirical investigation

Software product management covers both technical and business activities to management of products like roadmaps, strategic, tactical, and release planning. In practice, one product manager is seldom responsible for all these activities but several persons share the responsibilities. Therefore, it is important to understand the boundaries of product managers’ work in managing software products, as well as the impact a product manager has on the company business. The purpose of the study is to clarify what roles of software product managers exist and understand how these roles are interrelated with each other and the whole structure and business of an organization. The study is designed as an interpretative qualitative study using grounded theory as the research method. Based on the gathered data we developed a framework that reveals the role of a product manager in the organization and shows how this role can evolve by extending the level of responsibilities. Using the framework, we identified four stereotypical roles of product managers in the studied organizations: experts, strategists, leaders, and problem solvers. The presented framework shows that product managers’ roles are not limited to the conception of the “mini-CEO.” The results allow product managers and top management to collaborate effectively by assigning responsibilities and managing expectations by having a common tool for understanding the role of product managers in the organization.     

What Do the Sun and the Sky Tell Us About the Camera?

As the main observed illuminant outdoors, the sky is a rich source of information about the scene. However, it is yet to be fully explored in computer vision because its appearance in an image depends on the sun position, weather conditions, photometric and geometric parameters of the camera, and the location of capture. In this paper, we analyze two sources of information available within the visible portion of the sky region: the sun position, and the sky appearance. By fitting a model of the predicted sun position to an image sequence, we show how to extract camera parameters such as the focal length, and the zenith and azimuth angles. Similarly, we show how we can extract the same parameters by fitting a physically-based sky model to the sky appearance. In short, the sun and the sky serve as geometric calibration targets, which can be used to annotate a large database of image sequences. We test our methods on a high-quality image sequence with known camera parameters, and obtain errors of less that 1% for the focal length, 1° for azimuth angle and 3° for zenith angle. We also use our methods to calibrate 22 real, low-quality webcam sequences scattered throughout the continental US, and show deviations below 4% for focal length, and 3° for the zenith and azimuth angles. Finally, we demonstrate that by combining the information available within the sun position and the sky appearance, we can also estimate the camera geolocation, as well as its geometric parameters. Our method achieves a mean localization error of 110 km on real, low-quality Internet webcams. The estimated viewing and illumination geometry of the scene can be useful for a variety of vision and graphics tasks such as relighting, appearance analysis and scene recovery.     

Learning gaze typing: what are the obstacles and what progress to expect?

Gaze interaction is a promising input modality for people who are unable to control their fingers and arms. This paper suggests a number of new metrics that can be applied to the analysis of gaze typing interfaces and to the evaluation of user performance. These metrics are derived from a close examination of eight subjects typing text by gazing on a dwell-time activated onscreen keyboard during a seven-day experiment. One of the metrics, termed “Attended keys per character”, measures the number of keys that are attended for each typed character. This metric turned out to be particularly well correlated to the actual numbers of errors committed (r = 0.915). In addition to introducing metrics specific for gaze typing, the paper discusses how the metrics could make remote progress monitoring possible and provides some general advice on how to introduce gaze typing for novice users.     

User privacy and modern mobile services: are they on the same path?

Perhaps, the most important parameter for any mobile application or service is the way it is delivered and experienced by the end-users, who usually, in due course, decide to keep it on their software portfolio or not. Most would agree that security and privacy have both a crucial role to play toward this goal. In this context, the current paper revolves around a key question: Do modern mobile applications respect the privacy of the end-user? The focus is on the iPhone platform security and especially on user’s data privacy. By the implementation of a DNS poisoning malware and two real attack scenarios on the popular Siri and Tethering services, we demonstrate that the privacy of the end-user is at stake.     

What comes first: the workplan or the special request?

How does your MIS Department handle ad hoc requests for I/S projects? CIH Advisory Board member Fran Turisco tells how her MIS Department at the Lahey Clinic deals with this problem and solicits ideas from CIH readers via our "FAX IT BACK" response form.     

Explicit versus implicit models: What are good languages for modeling?

Software and Systems Modeling -     

XML and PKI — What’s the story?

This article discusses how XML technology relates to public key infrastructure, PKI. The bottom line is that today XML doesn’t replace what PKI does, but will provide a new set of ways of interfacing with existing PKI technology via XKMS. Current PKI will remain the technology of choice for certain types of applications, in particular wireless infrastructure, whereas, in perhaps a year or so, a new type of XML security infrastructure will evolve to cater for XML-oriented applications.