Home, School, Borrowed, Public or Mobile: Variations in Young Singaporeans' Internet Access and Their Implications

This paper studied uneven Internet access amongst young people in Singapore. The study finds that young Singaporeans access the Internet mainly through home, school, borrowed, public, and mobile sources, with different implications for each type of Internet access. For those with home or mobile access, Internet use was routinised and often intense, even burdensome and distracting on occasions. For those who relied on borrowed, school, or public access, intermittent use appeared adequate but hampered their ability to hone online skills to the levels of their peers. The study also finds that although systematic incorporation of IT into the national curriculum can encourage parity in basic exposure to online skills, developing greater Internet proficiency is more likely with home Internet access.     

基于IXP425的家庭数字媒体中心的设计与实现

设计并实现了一种高性价比的的家庭媒体娱乐中心。该系统基于IXP425和sigma 8622芯片，无缝地连接多种家庭内消费类电子产品，通过有线/无线网络连接Internet对各种多媒体格式进行管理、存储以及分配，并提供自动化控制和远程管理功能。该方案充分满足了数字家庭媒体内部和外部Internet的数据流和媒体流共享的需求。     

基于RFID技术的智能家校通门禁管理系统设计与实现

针对现代大学生自我约束能力不足、晚归及旷寝等事件频繁发生、安全防范能力缺乏等现象,结合高校学生管理的需求,提出基于射频识别(RFID)技术的智能家校通门禁管理系统的设计方案.该系统运用C#开发平台,由门禁子系统(计算机端)、查询子系统(Web端)组成.系统具备实时采集数据、存储数据功能.用户可以在Web端访问数据,能在...     

Exploring Relationships Between Traditional and New Media Literacies: British Preteen Texters at School

This article focuses on preteen British children's use of text messaging, particularly the abbreviations and characteristic language used within text messages. We look not only at the language style used by the children, but at the ways in which it relates to their traditional literacy skills, as measured through standardized tests and assessments. We have found repeated positive relationships between use of text register language and traditional literacy skills, and we give here a preview of our latest, longitudinal work, which allows those relationships to be studied directionally, enabling us to draw causal conclusions.     

A Computationally Efficient and Scalable Key Management Scheme for Access Control of Media Delivery in Digital Pay-TV Systems

Multimedia Tools and Applications - In today’s Internet era, group communications in multimedia applications are becoming more and more popular. The issues of controlling illegal access to...     

一种利用XML和XSLT生成数据库访问层代码的方法

设计了一种生成数据库访问层程序代码的方法。该方法先从现有数据库或PowerDesigner模型文件中解析出数据库架构信息,并将这些信息用XML格式描述,然后利用XSLT将该XML格式文件转换为用高级程序语言表示的程序代码．     

Hyper-Encryption: Eternal Secrecy Using the Bounded Storage and Limited Access Models

ABSTRACT

The efficacy of a cryptosystem rests on the assumptions that are implemented in its security proofs. Computational cryptosystems assume an upper bound on the computational capability of an adversary. A shortcoming of this assumption is that as computing technology advances over time it obviates the processing limitations that are observed or projected when the upper bound was determined. An information theoretic cryptosystem does not make assumptions about the computational capabilities of an adversary and thus it provides the blueprint for cryptosystems that can guarantee the unconditional security of a ciphertext. However, an assumption that both information-theoretic and computational cryptosystems make is that a secret key always remains a secret. Hence, they are both vulnerable to the threat from an adversary who is able to obtain the secret key. Upon obtaining the key the adversary can not only decrypt ciphertexts that are encrypted using the key in the future but also retroactively decrypt those that were encrypted using it in the past. This paper discusses the bounded storage and limited access models and their implementation in hyper-encryption, which is a cryptosystem that assures not only the infinite robustness of a ciphertext but also guarantees its eternal secrecy in the event of key compromise.     

Movie Making at Pixar: A Collaboration of Art and Technology

This talk takes you behind the scenes at Pixar Animation Studios for an in‐depth look at how its 3d computer graphics films are made. Making a computer animated film involves people with artistic talent and people with technical skills working together in close collaboration. The process starts with the development of the story and continues with modeling the geometry, adding articulation controls, using those controls to animate the characters, simulating things like water and cloth and hair, defining the look of the surfaces, putting lights in the scene, adding special effects, rendering, and post‐production. Special emphasis is given to the roles of technology and computer graphics research in supporting the filmmaker.     

Gendered Space: The Digital Divide between Male and Female Users in Internet Public Access Sites

Community technology centers and libraries have been crucial components of public policy initiatives to reduce the digital divide. Using theories of structuration and the social construction of technology, this paper examines the gender dynamics of the digital divide at public access points in Austin, TX over 10 years. Using extensive participant observations, we found male users outnumber female users in public access Internet usage, even accounting for age and ethnicity. In‐depth interviews revealed that both sexes saw public access as the least desirable place to use the Internet, but discourses around libraries differed. Female interviewees associated libraries with nostalgia for books and family, while male interviewees associated libraries with technology. Older female users also described feelings of technophobia.     

Loose-limbed People: Estimating 3D Human Pose and Motion Using Non-parametric Belief Propagation

We formulate the problem of 3D human pose estimation and tracking as one of inference in a graphical model. Unlike traditional kinematic tree representations, our model of the body is a collection of loosely-connected body-parts. In particular, we model the body using an undirected graphical model in which nodes correspond to parts and edges to kinematic, penetration, and temporal constraints imposed by the joints and the world. These constraints are encoded using pair-wise statistical distributions, that are learned from motion-capture training data. Human pose and motion estimation is formulated as inference in this graphical model and is solved using Particle Message Passing (PaMPas). PaMPas is a form of non-parametric belief propagation that uses a variation of particle filtering that can be applied over a general graphical model with loops. The loose-limbed model and decentralized graph structure allow us to incorporate information from “bottom-up” visual cues, such as limb and head detectors, into the inference process. These detectors enable automatic initialization and aid recovery from transient tracking failures. We illustrate the method by automatically tracking people in multi-view imagery using a set of calibrated cameras and present quantitative evaluation using the HumanEva dataset.     

Social Roles and Consequences in Using Social Media in Disasters: a Structurational Perspective

Disaster management officials, as well as the general public, are increasingly using social media to communicate. Such usage has resulted in new and emergent social consequences for disaster management and has reformed the roles of its relevant stakeholders. However, the existing literature on social media use in disasters is still preliminary and incomplete, and does not capture the change in social roles that stakeholders have taken and the consequences of the actions that people take in using social media. In this paper, by using Structuration theory as a meta-theory and by analysing the posts and comments in three officials’ Facebook fan pages in three different disasters, we theorize the social structures (i.e., social roles and social consequences) and the human actions taken by both the public and the disaster management officials during disasters. Furthermore, we explain how the social structures emerge out of the human actions involved, and how the social structures further shape those actions. Our research provides theoretical and practical insights into how the usage of social media in disasters benefits disaster management and reinforces the roles of the different stakeholders.     

Sleep at Home and in the Sleep Laboratory: Disturbance by Recording Procedures

Abstract

Nineteen healthy men, aged 20 to 55 yr, who did not suffer from insomnia had their sleep recorded by EEG and EOG in the laboratory for 3 to 12 nights each over periods of 1 to 4 weeks. They also gave subjective reports each day which proved to be valid although not always very accurate assessments of their sleep latency, the number of mid-night awakenings and the times of sleeping in the laboratory. There was some ' adaptation ' to the laboratory over the first 2 nights, but awakenings during the night continued for up to 12 nights to be reported more than twice as frequently in the laboratory than at home. They were apparently often caused by intermittent traction of electrodes on the face and scalp as the subjects turned over in bed From the point of view of mid-night awakenings, EEG/EOG recordings are unlikely to give an accurate assessment of the subject's usual sleep, even after several ‘ adaptation ’ nights.     

Integrating Assessment and Instruction: Using Student-Generated Grading Criteria to Evaluate Multimodal Digital Projects

In this article, I explore how we can link assessment to instruction and the multimodal composing process by inviting students to generate the grading criteria for new media assignments, and I show how this approach influenced students’ composing and understanding of multimodal texts. I first detail the scaffolding processes I took to help the class learn to construct the evaluative criteria for a digital video project, describing the course curriculum, instructional approaches, and assignments. Then drawing from extended interviews with three learners, I present their perceptions on how the collaborative construction of grading standards affected their learning and comprehension of new media rhetoric. I close with pedagogical recommendations for instructors who teach multimodal digital writing and who seek to integrate the collaborative construction of grading criteria into their classroom.     

The Cayun Builder and the Jiu-Jitsu Entrepreneur: A Narrative of the Making of an Entrepreneur in the Digital Age

This narrative describes the making of a German electrical engineer, Kurt Beyer, into a micro-entrepreneur. He set for himself the goal of sailing around the world in his own vessel – without being able to afford to buy such a ship. Many people in Germany have in recent years started to build their own sea-going vessels in order to escape from the creativity-stifling and restrictive patterns of their lives and work. Only a few of them have ever finished building their vessels. Firstly, this report describes the experiences of one of those few who have made it. Secondly, it tells the story of how this engineer himself turned into a micro-entrepreneur during the period of yacht-building and how later he started his own charter enterprise, centred around his yacht. Following the model of entrepreneurship described by Dassen-Housen in this issue of AI & Society, the narrative illustrates what it means to run such an enterprise in view of the international competition. Here follows the narrative of the engineer and ship-builder himself (translated by D. Brandt).     

Reel-to-Reel Tapes,Cassettes, and Digital Audio Media: Reverberations from a Half-Century of Recorded-Audio Response to Student Writing

This article applies Everett M. Rogers’ diffusion of innovations model to analyze how instructors have adopted the method of recording audio responses to students’ writing. The analysis focuses on five attributes of recorded-audio response—its observability, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and relative advantage—that, in Rogers’ model, influence the pace at which an innovation is adopted. I examine these attributes by drawing on a half-century of literature discussing recorded-audio response. The analysis reveals that recorded-audio response has elicited a mixed set of perceptions of the innovation's five attributes even among those who have adopted it, many perceptions that would tend to boost its adoption rate, but some that would tend to suppress it. Such an analysis provides both a systematic perspective on why audio-recording has remained a marginal method for responding to students’ writing, and also a heuristic by which writing instructors can consider adopting this and other pedagogical and technological innovations.     

Detection of Spammers in Twitter marketing: A Hybrid Approach Using Social Media Analytics and Bio Inspired Computing

Customer engagement is drastically improved through Web 2.0 technologies, especially social media platforms like Twitter. These platforms are often used by organizations for marketing, of which creation of numerous spam profiles for content promotion is common. The present paper proposes a hybrid approach for identifying the spam profiles by combining social media analytics and bio inspired computing. It adopts a modified K-Means integrated Levy flight Firefly Algorithm (LFA) with chaotic maps as an extension to Firefly Algorithm (FA) for spam detection in Twitter marketing. A total of 18,44,701 tweets have been analyzed from 14,235 Twitter profiles on 13 statistically significant factors derived from social media analytics. A Fuzzy C-Means Clustering approach is further used to identify the overlapping users in two clusters of spammers and non-spammers. Six variants of K-Means integrated FA including chaotic maps and levy flights are tested. The findings indicate that FA with chaos for tuning attractiveness coefficient using Gauss Map converges to a working solution the fastest. Further, LFA with chaos for tuning the absorption coefficient using sinusoidal map outperforms the rest of the approaches in terms of accuracy.     

Precise Experiments: Relations between Mathematics, Philosophy and Design at Ulm School of Design

The strong relationship between theoretical background in structural thinking and practical realization in composing and designing was one of the characteristics at Hochschule fuer Gestaltung (HfG) Ulm, the Ulm School of Design. This paper examines the special relationship between mathematics, philosophy and design at HfG Ulm, illustrated by examples of the foundation courses. This design approach assumes new relevance today in reference to rule-based or parametric designing with digital tools.     

Dominant Patterns of Expenditure Among Older People in the United Kingdom: Segmenting the Older Consumer Using the Living Costs and Food Survey

Policy-makers and practitioners need a good understanding of older people’s expenditure and consumption to inform the design of policies and services that affect their lives. This paper uses data from the 2010 Living Costs and Food Survey to examine and explain levels and patterns of expenditure among households headed by someone aged 50 and over. Expenditure is defined based on 12 broad categories, which reflect the international standard ‘Classification of Individual Consumption according to Purpose’, and is equivalised to control for household size. We report the results of cluster analysis which segments older households depending on their predominant patterns of expenditure. CHAID (decision tree) analysis and bivariate analysis is then used to understand the profile of each cluster in relation to their demographic, socio-economic and other characteristics. Based on their patterns of expenditure, six distinct clusters of older households emerge from the analysis. The findings raise important questions for government policy in the UK in relation to the extent and nature of expenditure poverty among older consumers.