Is Geo-Indistinguishability What You Are Looking for?

Since its proposal in 2013, geo-indistinguishability has been consolidated as a formal notion of location privacy, generating a rich body of literature building on this idea. A problem with most of these follow-up works is that they blindly rely on geo-indistinguishability to provide location privacy, ignoring the numerical interpretation of this privacy guarantee. In this paper, we provide an alternative formulation of geo-indistinguishability as an adversary error, and use it to show that the privacy vs.~utility trade-off that can be obtained is not as appealing as implied by the literature. We also show that although geo-indistinguishability guarantees a lower bound on the adversary's error, this comes at the cost of achieving poorer performance than other noise generation mechanisms in terms of average error, and enabling the possibility of exposing obfuscated locations that are useless from the quality of service point of view

Qualitative methods: are you enchanted or are you alienated?

Copyright © 2007 SAGE Publications. Author's draft version; post-print. Final version published by Sage available on Sage Journals Online http://online.sagepub.com/Since the last report on qualitative methods (Crang, 2005), many of the practical procedures of doing qualitative research remain the same. Human geographers continue to study texts, to conduct interviews, to convene focus groups and to engage in ethnography. Indeed, it is hard, though perhaps not impossible, to imagine what a radically new form of qualitative research practice might look like. So, for the time being, this suite of methods remains the backbone of qualitative research in human geography. Yet we would like to contend that, while these activities continue as before, there are changes in the way they are being conceived and carried out, and related to this there are transformations in the way these methods are being used to make claims to understanding and intervening in the world. In the first of our three reports, it is this link between qualitative methodologies and interpretative strategies we would like to reflect on

Metrics : you are what you measure!

Title from cover. "January, 1998."Includes bibliographical references (p. 26-27).John R. Hauser, Gerald M. Katz

What you know can influence what you are going to know (especially for older adults)

Stimuli related to an individual's knowledge/experience are often more memorable than abstract stimuli, particularly for older adults. This has been found when material that is congruent with knowledge is contrasted with material that is incongruent with knowledge, but there is little research on a possible graded effect of congruency. The present study manipulated the degree of congruency of study material with participants’ knowledge. Young and older participants associated two famous names to nonfamous faces, where the similarity between the nonfamous faces and the real famous individuals varied. These associations were incrementally easier to remember as the name-face combinations became more congruent with prior knowledge, demonstrating a graded congruency effect, as opposed to an effect based simply on the presence or absence of associations to prior knowledge. Older adults tended to show greater susceptibility to the effect than young adults, with a significant age difference for extreme stimuli, in line with previous literature showing that schematic support in memory tasks particularly benefits older adults

Communicating You Are Worth It in a Noisy Marketplace

This paper provides guidance and specific examples of common elements needed for communicating the value proposition of liberal arts colleges to prospective students and families. In an environment where the worth of a college degree is questioned daily by the public and the mainstream media, this paper demonstrates how strategies that are distinctive, rooted in research and complementary to the institutional brand are imperative for communicating the worth of an institution. The paper suggests tactics to develop the key partnerships needed and provides metrics for how leaders can assess their value proposition initiatives

Commentary: Art Education and New Technology: Are You Ready?

As an Art education major, I was somewhat daunted by a recent job offer requiring me to teach in the Career and Technology Studies department. As a recovering technophobe and lover of scissors and paste, I was cautious of this ‘Brave New World’ of computers. I perceived post-millennial teens to be cyber savvy know-it-alls, largely due to the way in which they were portrayed in the media. As well, if the ads were true, teens weren’t the only ones riding the new technological wave; Cisco Systems 1999 television campaign presented a global Utopia of citizens united through surfing the net. Shot in a series of exotic locales, the Cisco ads featured various cultural ambassadors garbed in ethnic dress asking the western TV audience “Are you ready?” Ready for what, you ask? Well, the Internet, of course! Cisco shows us a (fake?) Greek grandma tending her flock of sheep and she’s asking you if you’re ready for the new information age! Get with it, dude! If Mongolian nomads were hip to on-line education and instant messaging, I could only imagine the dizzying cyber heights being reached by upper middle class teens in Canada