Content blaster : the online show generator

Tese de mestrado integrado. Engenharia Informática e Computação. Faculdade de Engenharia. Universidade do Porto. 200

Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement

This open access book marks the first historical overview of the autism rights branch of the neurodiversity movement, describing the activities and rationales of key leaders in their own words since it organized into a unique community in 1992. Sandwiched by editorial chapters that include critical analysis, the book contains 19 chapters by 21 authors about the forming of the autistic community and neurodiversity movement, progress in their influence on the broader autism community and field, and their possible threshold of the advocacy establishment. The actions covered are legendary in the autistic community, including manifestos such as “Don’t Mourn for Us”, mailing lists, websites or webpages, conferences, issue campaigns, academic project and journal, a book, and advisory roles. These actions have shifted the landscape toward viewing autism in social terms of human rights and identity to accept, rather than as a medical collection of deficits and symptoms to cure

The Nourishing Revolution: Exploring the Praxis of the Weston A. Price Foundation

As consumers of food, we are faced with many choices every day. We are encouraged to make healthy choices, but ‘healthy’ in today’s supermarket can mean many things: heart healthy, light, lite, cholesterol reducing, gluten or dairy free, organic, locally made or biodynamic. The discourses around food are now expansive, confusing and contradictory. Using a lens of Freirean praxis, this thesis explores the dispraxia of modern food and the praxis of the Weston A. Price foundation (WAPF) and wider Nourishing Food Movement, (NFM), which offers an alternative. The movement calls for a return to more traditional ways of selecting, preparing and eating food. For example, it emphasises soaking grains, preparing meals from scratch, and using less processed saturated fat and non-pasteurised milk. The thesis also challenges and debunks the discourse of modern food by exploring the controversy around the consumption of animal fat and raw milk. The praxis of the WAPF and NFM is explored more deeply through qualitative case studies investigating internet blogs. The blogs serve as a dynamic and interactive example of libratory education, in comparison with messages and recipes provided by the dominant, corporate, food industry. The interplay of multiple discourses and subject positions around gender and class in food blogging are examined in a reflexive blog-based discussion, highlighting the layered complexity which must be navigated and reconciled by individuals when making food choices. Overall, this thesis argues that the praxis of the WAPF acts to help empower consumers to make more genuine choices by providing techniques and information with which they can navigate the modern food context

Community, Conversation, and Conflict: a Study of Deliberation and Moderation in a Collaborative Political Weblog

Concerns about the feasibility of the Internet as an appropriate venue for deliberation have emerged based on the adverse effects of depersonalization, anonymity, and lack of accountability on the part of online discussants. As in face-to-face communication, participants in online conversations are best situated to determine for themselves what type of communication is appropriate. Earlier research on Usenet groups was not optimistic, but community-administered moderation may provide a valuable tool for online political discussion groups who wish to support and enforce deliberative communication among a diverse or disagreeing membership. This research examines individual comments and their rating and moderation within a week-long Pie Fight discussion about community ownership and values in the Daily Kos political blog. Specific components of deliberation were identified and a content analysis was conducted for each. Salient issues included community reputation, agreement and disagreement, meta-communication, and appropriate expression of emotion, humor, and profanity. Data subsets were analyzed in conjunction with the comment ratings given by community members to determine what types of interaction received the most attention, and how the community used the comment ratings system to promote or demote specific comment types. The use of middle versus high or low ratings, the value of varied ratings format, and the use of moderation as a low-impact means of expressing dissent were also explored. The Daily Kos community members effectively used both comments and ratings to mediate conflict, assert their desired kind of community, demonstrate a deliberative self-concept, and support specific conditions of deliberation. The moderation system was used to sanction uncivil or unproductive communication, as intended, and was also shown to facilitate deliberation of disagreement rather than creating an echo chamber of opinion

"Hispano-Lusophone" community media : identity, cultural politics and difference

In recent years, the issue of identity has been the subject of an intensive analysis across different fields and disciplines. Indeed, in an era of accelerated social and technological changes under the phenomenon of globalization, with the rapid internationalization and expansion of urban centres across the world, this is of little surprise. According to Lyotard (2006), these sweeping changes have set a crucial moment in a much longer process of displacement, through which dominant narratives, traditions and structures have progressively lost their historic power. As a part of this social reconfiguration, institutions have dematerialized, while beliefs, traditions and cultural practices have gained flexibility through rapid and frequent changes. In such a context, we witness the advent of a new subject, whose identity is no longer fixed, as well as the development of new forms of inequality, as it all converges to modify the contemporary social and political landscape. In these terms, Arjun Appadurai (1996) uses the expression "global cultural economy" to describe the myriad of cultural meeting points and flows underpinning this new modern, globalized world. As the author explains, "the new global cultural economy has to be seen as a complex, overlapping, disjunctive order that cannot any longer be understood in terms of existing centre-periphery models" (Appadurai, 1996:32). Indeed, the ongoing renegotiation and traversal of traditional borders point towards a multiplicity of new, non-monolithic membership forms: collectivities in which the local and the global, as experiential entities, are intimately intertwined (Featherstone & Lash, 2002). With this in mind, we have operationalized the concept of 'multi-territoriality' as a guide for this book. Such an expression, initially proposed by Haesbaert (1994) but further developed by Augé (1995), Albagli and Maciel (2010), refers to the intensification of multiple territorial re-imaginings and repossessions. In this context, displacement does not mean the abandonment of already established territorial references, but rather the addition of new references, which come together to form a complex matrix of feelings of belonging and ownership, towards a multiplicity of places and spaces. The intense flow of people and information appears pivotal to this panorama. Hence, the proliferation of 'differences' establishes a strategic space for intervention, which goes beyond and onto a broader, non-universalizing understanding of culture. In this process, the differences and experiences are taken into consideration, creating the basic conditions for societies to be transformed and improved. One of the most notable consequences of these shifts is the current social reconfiguration, with the consequent surfacing of groups that were previously marginalized. Indeed, these groups find themselves now able to capitalize on new flows of information, communication and expertise. Consequently, novel social categories and relations of belonging are forged, extending both within and across national boundaries (Santos & Rodríguez, 2003). Inspired by the idea of 'territory' as a cultural construct, created, contested and transformed in various ways by media technologies (Canclini, 2001; Appadurai, 2001; Haesbaert, 1994), the works collected in this edition span and explore several of the community media projects, parts of a 'space'1 named the 'Hispano-Lusophone' sphere. By mapping and exploring the creative and intellectual production in the context of the Hispano-Lusophone imaginary, this project consciously endeavours to disarm and overturn certain cultural and raced hierarchies within the global knowledge production. Its authors come from a large array of professional backgrounds: they have worked intensively to overcome the significant linguistic and geographical barriers to intellectual collaboration. In this respect, the authors draw into critical examination the established frontiers of knowledge production, as well as the main agents and processes that create and legitimate those borders

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Untangling the Web: A Guide To Internet Research

[Excerpt] Untangling the Web for 2007 is the twelfth edition of a book that started as a small handout. After more than a decade of researching, reading about, using, and trying to understand the Internet, I have come to accept that it is indeed a Sisyphean task. Sometimes I feel that all I can do is to push the rock up to the top of that virtual hill, then stand back and watch as it rolls down again. The Internet—in all its glory of information and misinformation—is for all practical purposes limitless, which of course means we can never know it all, see it all, understand it all, or even imagine all it is and will be. The more we know about the Internet, the more acute is our awareness of what we do not know. The Internet emphasizes the depth of our ignorance because our knowledge can only be finite, while our ignorance must necessarily be infinite. My hope is that Untangling the Web will add to our knowledge of the Internet and the world while recognizing that the rock will always roll back down the hill at the end of the day

Living with HIV: Views through the Blog

The purpose of this qualitative descriptive study was to develop a greater clarity of how HIV infected individuals live and work within the sphere of HIV infection as represented through unsolicited, personal narratives posted on blogs. Existing, single author, personal blogs were identified via a search engine. Blogs were defined as the blog author\u27s postings and all responses, whether written by the blog author or a reader respondent. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were developed to respect indicators of bloggers\u27 intentions for privacy, e.g., blogs which required a password were excluded. A total of 14 blogs met inclusion criteria. Actions to promote validity focused on the areas of credibility, authenticity, criticality, and integrity. Throughout the blogs, online social connectedness formed the context for expression of the four themes identified to describe the experiences of the bloggers and their readers living with HIV infection. Suffering was the human experience of stigma related to living with HIV infection. This was primarily manifested in either self-imposed isolation or isolation resulting from rejection by others. Relationships addressed both the online and offline/in-person interactions experienced by the blog authors and their readers. These stories were predominantly about receiving support from persons via online interactions. Daily living with HIV dialogue addressed the common experiences shared by various bloggers and their readers such as longing for normalcy. A call to action addressed a self-embraced sense of mission or purpose which was a contributing impetus to blog. Blog readers affirmed these missions in their responses. While these themes have been documented in prior qualitative research on living with HIV infection, the opportunities for online social connectedness altered the expression of these themes. Further research using unsolicited narrative blogs is warranted