Exploring Social Networks and Improving Hypertext Results for Cloud Solutions

Internet technologies are constantly evolving as well as the way people use them. Search engines help users to find higher and better relevant results to their searches. Cloud Computing is an evolution of the Internet services and provides a step further ecosystem that can be used to improve the search of more relevant results. Each search engine is based on different modules in order to retrieve the results expected by users using specific keywords. Social networks appear as a reliable Web technology that can directly support a content search. Several studies have been performed showing the growth of social networks in people lives. Using the cloud computing paradigm it is possible to propose a more scalable and efficient way to explore public information available on online social networks. This paper includes the analyses of several social networks services, available contents, cloud-crawlers, and information extraction. In order to collect relevant data from social networks, a social crawler on cloud is proposed. The new approach provides a cloud-based crawler for low-cost, effective, and personalized search models. Moreover, a new algorithm to rank Web documents is proposed and demonstrated. The proposed system is evaluated in comparison with the top Internet search engine, Google, its behavior is very promising, and it is ready for use.     

Computer-mediated social support, older adults, and coping

One important new context of communication for older adults is computer-mediated communication (CMC). Although the Internet has become an important resource for information, little is known about the ways in which individuals use this technology for social support. Older adults (mean age = 62) using SeniorNet and other related websites completed an on-line questionnaire (N = 136) investigating social support in the computer-mediated environment. Satisfaction with Internet providers of social support was significantly higher for high Internet users than for low Internet users whereas low Internet users were more satisfied with their non-Internet support networks than high Internet users. Internet companionship network size was significantly larger than Internet social support network size. Greater involvement with the on-line community was predictive of lower perceived life stress. Social support and companionship satisfaction were not related to the types of coping strategies used; however, the results indicate that direct action was the most common coping strategy for the sample.     

The future of online social networks (OSN): A measurement analysis using social media tools and application

The explosion of online social networks (OSN) has created an interactive and communicative global phenomenon that has enabled billions of users to connect to other individuals on Facebook and Twitter but also with media sharing platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest. This study examines the current use of social media platforms and explores the factors that help define the long term implications of social media. The study employed a nationwide survey collected from 2012 to 2013 and is available from the PEW Internet research center of more than 2000 American citizens’ behaviour towards OSNs. The results revealed strong predictors of OSN that form the connections among users; and the core significant predictors: age, gender and access to mobile Internet that foster the adoption and usage of OSN in the future. Furthermore, online activities such as posting video content on social networks also highlighted the online usage patterns and trends of using social media to actively engage with other users more willingly than text. This is due to the viral nature of online media sharing on social media and as part of the video viewing and creating experience. An outline of practical implications of the findings and areas for future research is also discussed.     

Understanding the impacts of Internet use on senior Citizens’ social participation in China: Evidence from longitudinal panel data

Scholars have appealed to build a digitally inclusive society to include senior citizens. However, conclusions on the impacts of Internet use on senior citizens’ social participation are divided. In order to address the above issue, this study addresses two questions: 1) how Internet use is related to senior citizens’ social participation; and 2) what the specific impacts of Internet use are on different subgroups’ social participation. We aim to understand the specific impacts of Internet use on senior citizens’ social participation meanwhile explore the reasons causing the abovementioned inconsistence in prior studies. We ran different panel regression models to address these questions based on a dataset drawn from the China Health and Retirement Longitudinal Study. Our empirical results indicate that seniors who are Internet users have higher social participation than those who do not use the Internet even after controlling out other influencing factors; however, frequent Internet use leads to less social participation among senior citizens. For senior citizens with higher cognitive functioning, both using Internet or not and the frequency of Internet use lead to more social participation. Both using Internet or not and the frequency of Internet use cause senior citizens with pensions to engage in fewer social activities. For female senior citizens, frequent Internet use leads to lower social participation. These findings suggest that government and communities should improve digital infrastructures and offer senior citizens more opportunities to access the Internet; meanwhile, local communities, social workers, and family members should direct senior citizens to use the Internet in a reasonable manner.     

Requirements on Next Generation Social Networking—A User’s Perspective

When it comes to discussing the future of the Internet, social networking is one of the central buzzwords. The Internet has become a platform where new social networks emerge and the Internet in itself support the more traditional computer supported communication. The way users build and verifies different online networks for communities of people who share interests or individuals who present themselves through user produced content is what makes up the social networking of today. This article discusses general perceived user requirements to the next generation social networks. Particularly, the article presents results of an empirical survey of perceived user requirements to social networks from a group of ICT experts. The survey shows that this group of users has specific requirements to the next generation social networks, and that these can be categorized into high level user requirement dimensions.     

Flexible Network Support for Mobile Hosts

Fueled by the large number of powerful light-weight portable computers, the expanding availability of wireless networks, and the popularity of the Internet, there is an increasing demand to connect portable computers to the Internet at any time and in any place. However, the dynamic nature of a mobile host's connectivity and its use of multiple network interfaces require more flexible network support than has typically been available for stationary workstations.This paper introduces two flow-oriented mechanisms, in the context of Mobile IP , to ensure a mobile host's robust and efficient communication with other hosts in a changing environment. One mechanism supports multiple packet delivery methods (such as regular IP or Mobile IP) and adaptively selects the most appropriate one to use according to the characteristics of each traffic flow. The other mechanism enables a mobile host to make use of multiple network interfaces simultaneously and to control the selection of the most desirable network interfaces for both outgoing and incoming packets for different traffic flows. We demonstrate the usefulness of these two network layer mechanisms and describe their implementation and performance.     

The use of Facebook for political commentary in South Africa

The use of the Internet, and especially social media networks, is becoming increasingly relevant for 21st century politics, not only for political campaigning purposes, but also as a platform to encourage the public to engage in political discourse. This study considers comments posted on two South African political party Facebook sites: the African National Congress’ (ANC); and the Democratic Alliance’s (DA). It examines how both the South African public and the political parties are using the site for discussion, debate and opinion formation. The study also investigates the perceived benefits and challenges that are offered to members of the Facebook groups. According to the findings, the public are using the Facebook site(s) to engage in discussion of a political nature as well as using the platform to connect with each other and share political information in new ways. However, it is this article’s contention that the two political parties are not fully capitalising on the potential offered by Facebook.     

A protocol for partitionable group membership service in mobile Internet

The explosive growth of mobile and wireless communications has attracted interests in the integration of mobile and wireless networks with wired ones and the wired Internet in particular. Such an integrated mobile Internet environment has brought up many new applications and there is an increasing demand for enhanced services to help users do mobile collaborations, which requires the support for mobile group communications. In this paper, based on a multitier proxy‐based mobile Internet architecture, we propose a novel scalable, reliable, and partitionable membership protocol for mobile group communications. The proxies manage local groups of mobile users and are dynamically organized into a ring‐based hierarchy for global membership management. We describe algorithms and mechanisms for membership propagation and topology maintenance in the presence of dynamic membership, dynamic locations of mobile hosts, and dynamic networks. The proposed protocol can tolerate proxy failures, and network failures including network partitions and network merges. Theoretical analysis and simulation studies show that, comparing with existing tree‐based protocols, the proposed protocol has comparable scalability and higher reliability. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Multiple determinants of life quality: the roles of Internet activities,use of new media,social support,and leisure activities

The quest for quality of life (QoL) is a growing concern for individuals and communities seeking to find sustainable life satisfaction in a technologically changing world. Industry, consumer groups, academics, and policy makers have sought to better understand how the Internet contributes to or detracts from society. This study examined the effects of Internet activities, new media use, social support, and leisure activities on perceived quality of life. Correlational results showed that Internet activities, such as using the Internet for sociability, fun seeking and information seeking, and new media use, correlate positively with various dimensions of social support. However, use of the Internet, especially for sociability, and computer use were inversely linked to QoL. Furthermore, hierarchical regression analysis revealed that affectionate, positive social interaction, and emotional and informational social support, received from either online or offline sources, are the strongest determinants of quality of life. More important, QoL can also be enhanced if suitable amounts of time are spent on media-related activities, namely, less time on using the Internet for intimate self-disclosure and in playing computer games, and more time on listening to music on CD/MD/MP3. Finally, participating in community or religious activities for leisure was also a significant predictor of QoL. Implications regarding policy formulation to improve life quality are discussed.     

Proxy caching for media streaming over the Internet

Streaming media has contributed to a significant amount of today's Internet traffic. Like conventional Web objects (e.g., HTML pages and images), media objects can benefit from proxy caching; but their unique features such as huge size and high bandwidth demand imply that conventional proxy caching strategies have to be substantially revised. This article discusses the critical issues and challenges of cache management for proxy-assisted media streaming. We survey, classify, and compare the state-of-the-art solutions. We also investigate advanced issues of combining multicast with caching, cooperating among proxies, and leveraging proxy caching in overlay networks.     

信息空间的形成和发展

随着Internet的迅速发展,人类正在被带到一个新的世界环境之中,即信息空间。发展信息空间的主要技术是通信、感知和计算。文章介绍了信息空间的形成与发展,及通信、感知和计算技术发展对信息空间发展的作用,指出未来全球网络的融合将改变单个网络的特性,将创造出一个全球的网络环境,人们可以在这样的空间环境下从事各种活动。     

Analysis of users and non-users of smartphone applications

Purpose

Smartphones facilitate the potential adoption of new mobile applications. The purpose of this research is to study users and non-users of three selected mobile applications, and find out what really drives the intention to use these applications across users and non-users.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors measured actual usage of mobile applications in a panel study of 579 Finnish smartphone users, using in-device measurements as an objective way to identify users and non-users. A web-based survey was used in collecting data to test an extended TAM model in explaining intention to use.

Findings

Perceived technological barriers negatively affect behavioural control, reflecting people’s assessment of themselves being capable of using the services without trouble. Behavioural control is directly linked to perceived usefulness (except for games) and perceived enjoyment, as hypothesized. Perceived enjoyment and usefulness were generically found to explain intention to use applications for both users and for non-users.

Research limitations/implications

With regards to the impact of social norms, the study finds that further research needs to be done in exploring its impact more thoroughly. The dataset of the research, consisting purely of male-dominated, young smartphone users, make the generalization of results difficult.

Practical implications

There are differences regarding what drives the usage of different kinds of mobile applications. In this study, map applications and mobile Internet, are driven by more utilitarian motivations, whereas games are more hedonic. It is also clear that not everybody are using applications facilitated by smartphones, and therefore the presented approach of studying users and non-users separately provides a new approach to analyze adoption on a practical level.

Originality/value

This research proves that models like TAM should not treat mobile services as a generic concept, but instead to specifically address individual mobile services. The research also demonstrates the unique value of combining objective usage measurements (reflecting actual behaviour) with traditional survey data in more comprehensively modelling service adoption.     

A Simple Remedy for Idle Mode via Proxy MIP

While recent wireless networks begin to support mobile Internet protocol (MIP), even the latest wireless network technologies such as IEEE 802.16 wireless metropolitan area networks (WMANs), IEEE 802.11 wireless local area networks (WLANs), and high-speed downlink packet access (HSDPA) are limited in exploiting idle mode under mobile environments in which MIP is employed since they are designed without considering MIP combined with idle mode. In other words, an idle mobile station (MS) should perform MIP handoffs despite that it cannot receive anything while staying in idle mode, and hence, it incurs inexpedient operations. We propose a simple protocol, which makes idle mode integrated with MIP seamlessly by utilizing proxy MIP (PMIP). It processes MIP handoffs on behalf of idle MS, thus allowing idle MS to stay in idle mode consistently.     

On the Performance Benefits of Multihoming Route Control

Multihoming is increasingly being employed by large enterprises and data centers to extract good performance and reliability from their ISP connections. Multihomed end networks today can employ a variety of route control products to optimize their Internet access performance and reliability. However, little is known about the tangible benefits that such products can offer, the mechanisms they employ and their trade-offs. This paper makes two important contributions. First, we present a study of the potential improvements in Internet round-trip times (RTTs) and transfer speeds from employing multihoming route control. Our analysis shows that multihoming to three or more ISPs and cleverly scheduling traffic across the ISPs can improve Internet RTTs and throughputs by up to 25% and 20%, respectively. However, a careful selection of ISPs is important to realize the performance improvements. Second, focusing on large enterprises, we propose and evaluate a wide-range of route control mechanisms and evaluate their design trade-offs. We implement the proposed schemes on a Linux-based Web proxy and perform a trace-based evaluation of their performance. We show that both passive and active measurement-based techniques are equally effective and could improve the Web response times of enterprise networks by up to 25% on average, compared to using a single ISP. We also outline several "best common practices" for the design of route control products.     

Religious Communication and Epistemic Authority of Leaders in Wired Faith Organizations

The mediation of communication has raised questions of authority shifts in key social institutions. This article examines how traditional sources of epistemic power that govern social relations in religious authority are being amplified or delegitimized by Internet use, drawing from in‐depth interviews with protestant pastors in Singapore. Competition from Internet access is found to delocalize epistemic authority to some extent; however, it also reembeds authority by allowing pastors to acquire new competencies as strategic arbiters of religious expertise and knowledge. Our study indicates that although religious leaders are confronted with proletarianization, deprofessionalization, and potential delegitimization as epistemic threats, there is also an enhancement of epistemic warrant as they adopt mediated communication practices that include the social networks of their congregation.     

Enabling multimedia applications for factory automation

Emerging multimedia communication and processing technologies enable many factory applications. However, these technologies are advancing at a prodigious pace. Therefore, designing, managing, and upgrading these networks within this fast-paced environment represents a formidable challenge. The various enabling technologies and the standards that control their use are the subject of this paper. Special emphasis is given to the use of these technologies to support developments on the factory floor. This strategy involves the use of video, audio, and data communications, as well as the inherent processing involved. The role that local area networks and the Internet play in the development of future factory applications is also discussed     

Fast-Handover Mechanism between 802.11 WLAN and 802.16 WiMax with MIH in PMIPv6

As the wireless Internet services become widely available, users become able to use various Internet services without restriction in location. In particular, the demands on wireless Internet services are becoming greater, because mobile devices that support high mobility are getting smarter. However, if a user uses various wireless networks, much limitation occurs in network setting when they move a network different each other. This is because there are few appropriate handover mechanisms to support a heterogeneous network. We propose a fast-handover for heterogeneous networks that utilizes MIH in PMIPv6 to support heterogeneous networks and to reduce the handover latency time. And the performance evaluation for the proposed method was done separately for low speed and high speed mobility. The result presented shows that the suggested method has reduced latency time by 26 % and packet losses by 90 % (Avg.).     

移动自组网与Internet互连的动态网关策略

移动自组网(MANET)是自治的无基础设施的网络,它通过IP路由支持多跳无线通信。它与Internet 相比存在着许多差异,不仅有网络拓扑结构的不同,还存在通信方式的不同。因此,MANET与Internet组合成混杂网络(hybrid network)是一个具有挑战性的课题。移动自组网(MANET)的结点要进行Internet连接,就必须寻找Internet网关。如何寻找和维持与Internet网关的连接是这个问题的关键,再者,就是如何切换到一个更合适的相邻网关。在这篇文章中,首次提出动态网关的概念,动态网关作为MANET和Internet之间的接口起桥梁作用。通过模型分析,证明动态网关体系结构适合于自组网与Internet互联。仿真结果显示,利用动态网关的网络性能优于单一固定网关的体系结构的网络性能。     

Virus infection control in online social networks based on probabilistic communities

With the rapid progress of the Internet, more and more people socialize and make new friends through online social network sites and applications, such as Facebook, Twitter, and MSN Messenger. The number of users of these online social network sites and applications has increased significantly within a short period. Unfortunately, online social networks are often the platforms that propagate malicious software, such as viruses. The malicious software is spread by infected users who automatically send fake requests to other users. After accepting the fake requests, the users are infected. In a realistic environment, everyone can decide whether to accept or decline a request, and thus, we study how to construct and use community structures to efficiently control virus propagation in online social networks whose users each have a probability, namely, inclination, of accepting a request. In this paper, a community detection algorithm is proposed to detect communities in online social networks. In addition, a number of users are selected from the communities for patching and controlling virus propagation. Simulation results show that our proposed method provides good performance in terms of the number of distributed patches.Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.