The role of social networks in students’ learning experiences

The aim of this research is to investigate the role of social networks in computer science education. The Internet shows great potential for enhancing collaboration between people and the role of social software has become increasingly relevant in recent years. This research focuses on analyzing the role that social networks play in students’ learning experiences. The construction of students’ social networks, the evolution of these networks, and their effects on the students’ learning experience in a university environment are examined

Assessing the Feasibility of Self Organizing Maps for Data Mining Financial Information

Analyzing financial performance in today’s information-rich society can be a daunting task. With the evolution of the Internet, access to massive amounts of financial data, typically in the form of financial statements, is widespread. Managers and stakeholders are in need of a data-mining tool allowing them to quickly and accurately analyze this data. An emerging technique that may be suited for this application is the self-organizing map. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the performance of self-organizing maps for analyzing financial performance of international pulp and paper companies. For the study, financial data, in the form of seven financial ratios, was collected, using the Internet as the primary source of information. A total of 77 companies, and six regional averages, were included in the study. The time frame of the study was the period 1995-00. An example analysis was performed, and the results analyzed based on information contained in the annual reports. The results of the study indicate that self-organizing maps can be feasible tools for the financial analysis of large amounts of financial data

The Communications Decency Act: Immunity for Internet-Facilitated Commercial Sexual Exploitation

This paper reviews the original intent and historical application of the Communications Decency Act (CDA), most notably Section 230, with special regard to cases of Internet-facilitated commercial sexual exploitation. Although the CDA was originally created to protect children online, Section 230 of the CDA has been interpreted by the courts to grant broad immunities to websites facilitating the sexual exploitation of children and adults alike. Through analyzing the genesis and evolution of the CDA, it becomes clear that court interpretations of Section 230 are starkly inconsistent with original Congressional intent, and that the primary way to avoid de facto decriminalization of Internet-facilitated commercial sexual exploitation is to amend the Communications Decency Act

TrustShadow: Secure Execution of Unmodified Applications with ARM TrustZone

The rapid evolution of Internet-of-Things (IoT) technologies has led to an emerging need to make it smarter. A variety of applications now run simultaneously on an ARM-based processor. For example, devices on the edge of the Internet are provided with higher horsepower to be entrusted with storing, processing and analyzing data collected from IoT devices. This significantly improves efficiency and reduces the amount of data that needs to be transported to the cloud for data processing, analysis and storage. However, commodity OSes are prone to compromise. Once they are exploited, attackers can access the data on these devices. Since the data stored and processed on the devices can be sensitive, left untackled, this is particularly disconcerting. In this paper, we propose a new system, TrustShadow that shields legacy applications from untrusted OSes. TrustShadow takes advantage of ARM TrustZone technology and partitions resources into the secure and normal worlds. In the secure world, TrustShadow constructs a trusted execution environment for security-critical applications. This trusted environment is maintained by a lightweight runtime system that coordinates the communication between applications and the ordinary OS running in the normal world. The runtime system does not provide system services itself. Rather, it forwards requests for system services to the ordinary OS, and verifies the correctness of the responses. To demonstrate the efficiency of this design, we prototyped TrustShadow on a real chip board with ARM TrustZone support, and evaluated its performance using both microbenchmarks and real-world applications. We showed TrustShadow introduces only negligible overhead to real-world applications.Comment: MobiSys 201

I can has thesis? a linguistic analysis of lolspeak

Lolspeak, which I characterize as an internet dialect of English that is used in conjunction with images of cats, exhibits distinctive variations and patterns which differ from those of standard English. Lolspeak has influenced other language use and may have a significant impact on the English language, due in part to the internet’s role in the evolution of English (Crystal “Language and the Internet,” 2006:26-27). To approach this data, I created a multi-modal discourse transcription technique for analyzing Lolspeak utterances within the context of their images based on Grounded Theory (Glaser and Strauss “The Discovery of Grounded Theory” 2007:9). I implemented this technique with randomly collected Lolspeak data that I collected from the website www.icanhascheezburger.com. My work has dual future implications in that it could be used to further studies of Lolspeak or other internet dialects/ languages, and the transcription method I have invented could be beneficial to those looking at other forms of multi-modal discourse

Risk of internet addiction in adolescents: A confrontation between traditional teaching and online teaching

Background: The technological evolution has given the opportunities to develop new models of education, like online teaching. However, Internet Problematic Use and Internet Addiction are becoming frequently represented among adolescents with a prevalence that varies worldwide from 2% to 20% of the high school population. Objective: The aim of this study was to analyse the risk of Internet Addiction in a High Schools student sample comparing two different types of schools (online and traditional teaching) and analyzing the associations between pathological use of Internet and socio-demographic factors connected to the different educational orientations and to the daily usage of Internet. Methods: Students were enrolled from four different orientation school programs (different high school, technical and economical Institute, vocational schools). Each student completed a self-reported test to collect socio-demographic data and th Internet Addiction Test (IAT) from K. Young to assess the risk of Internet Addiction. The Mann-Whitney test for quantitative variables was used for statistical analysis. Results: 522 students were enrolled, 243 students from online teaching and 279 from traditional teaching schools. Internet Addiction was observed in 1,16% of the total sample, while 53.83% of subjects was at risk of development Internet Addiction. No significant difference was found between the two different types of teaching, nor considering gender. Considering the amount of time spent on the web in portion of the sample at risk of developing Internet Addiction, the Traditional Teaching group spent between 4 and 7 hours a day on the Web, while the Online Teaching group between 1 to 3 hours/daily. However, no statistically significant difference was found. Conclusion: Although our data demonstrate that there is no clear association between online education and problematic use of Internet, the excessive use of Internet is linked to a massive waste of personal energy in terms of time and social life

Analysis on Linguistic Art of Broadcasting in the New Media Era

As the information and communication technology increasingly grows, it is very vital that the new media featuring the internet has blazed a new path for the reform of communication and even the evolution of the whole society. This new era brings opportunities and challenges to traditional media work while facilitating this industry. Efforts should be made to upgrade the broadcasting major in order to meet the requirements of society and the public. This paper aims to explore some problems and difficulties of linguistic art of broadcasting in the new era by analyzing its characters and development trend, so as to ensure the quality of broadcasting programs, and even make sound progress in this era

Measuring The Evolving Internet Ecosystem With Exchange Points

The Internet ecosystem comprising of thousands of Autonomous Systems (ASes) now include Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) as another critical component in the infrastructure. Peering plays a significant part in driving the economic growth of ASes and is contributing to a variety of structural changes in the Internet. IXPs are a primary component of this peering ecosystem and are playing an increasing role not only in the topology evolution of the Internet but also inter-domain path routing. In this dissertation we study and analyze the overall affects of peering and IXP infrastructure on the Internet. We observe IXP peering is enabling a quicker flattening of the Internet topology and leading to over-utilization of popular inter-AS links. Indiscriminate peering at these locations is leading to higher endto-end path latencies for ASes peering at an exchange point, an effect magnified at the most popular worldwide IXPs. We first study the effects of recently discovered IXP links on the inter-AS routes using graph based approaches and find that it points towards the changing and flattening landscape in the evolution of the Internet’s topology. We then study more IXP effects by using measurements to investigate the networks benefits of peering. We propose and implement a measurement framework which identifies default paths through IXPs and compares them with alternate paths isolating the IXP hop. Our system is running and recording default and alternate path latencies and made publicly available. We model the probability of an alternate path performing better than a default path through an IXP iii by identifying the underlying factors influencing the end-to end path latency. Our firstof-its-kind modeling study, which uses a combination of statistical and machine learning approaches, shows that path latencies depend on the popularity of the particular IXP, the size of the provider ASes of the networks peering at common locations and the relative position of the IXP hop along the path. An in-depth comparison of end-to-end path latencies reveal a significant percentage of alternate paths outperforming the default route through an IXP. This characteristic of higher path latencies is magnified in the popular continental exchanges as measured by us in a case study looking at the largest regional IXPs. We continue by studying another effect of peering which has numerous applications in overlay routing, Triangle Inequality Violations (TIVs). These TIVs in the Internet delay space are created due to peering and we compare their essential characteristics with overlay paths such as detour routes. They are identified and analyzed from existing measurement datasets but on a scale not carried out earlier. This implementation exhibits the effectiveness of GPUs in analyzing big data sets while the TIVs studied show that the a set of common inter-AS links create these TIVs. This result provides a new insight about the development of TIVs by analyzing a very large data set using GPGPUs. Overall our work presents numerous insights into the inner workings of the Internet’s peering ecosystem. Our measurements show the effects of exchange points on the evolving Internet and exhibits their importance to Internet routing

A system for profiling the IXPs in a region and monitoring their growth: spotlight at the internet frontier

This work aims at designing and implementing a system able to profile and help manage the set of Internet eXchange Points (IXPs) in an Internet region. As part of the Internet Society's strategy to help monitor and understand the evolution of IXPs in a particular region, a route-collector data analyzer tool was developed before being deployed and tested in AfriNIC. In fact, traffic localization efforts in the African peering ecosystem would be more sustained, and their efficacy assessed if they were supported by a platform, which evaluates and reports in real time about their impact on the Internet. We, thus, built the “African” Route-collectors Data Analyzer (ARDA), an open source web platform for analyzing publicly available routing information collected since 2005, by local route-collectors. ARDA evaluates predefined metrics that picture the status of the interconnection at local, national, and regional levels. It shows that a small proportion of AfriNIC ASes (roughly 17%) are peering in the region. Through them, 58% of all African networks are visible at one IXP or more. These have been static from April to September 2017, and even February 2018, underlining the need for increased efforts to improve local interconnectivity. We show how ARDA can help detect the impact of policies on the growth of local IXPs or continually provide the community with up-to-date empirical data on the evolution of the IXP substrate. Given its features, this tool will be a helpful compass for stakeholders in the quest for better traffic localization and new interconnection opportunities in the targeted region.This work was partially funded by the Internet Society (ISOC). Support to this work was also provided by IMDEA Networks Institute, the National Science Foundation (NSF) CNS-1414177, and NSF OAC-1724853.We are grateful to Nishal Goburdhan and Dibya Khatiwada for their technical support as well as to The African IXP Association (Af-IX), Packet Clearing House (PCH), and Hisham Ibrahim for their cooperation.Publicad