Internet Predictions

More than a dozen leading experts give their opinions on where the Internet is headed and where it will be in the next decade in terms of technology, policy, and applications. They cover topics ranging from the Internet of Things to climate change to the digital storage of the future. A summary of the articles is available in the Web extras section

Audit and AI: Can Artificial Intelligence Restore Public Trust?

Due to the fallout from a series of corporate fraud scandals in the late 2000s, the auditing world has lost much of the public trust that is very important to the profession. Much of the value of an audit opinion is determined by the trust the public places in the auditors behind the opinion. Without trust in the auditors, the audit opinion has very little value. The recent increase in the usage of artificial intelligence (AI) in many industries presents a solution to the problem of auditors. Increased usage of AI in the audit process has the potential to better meet public demand for an audit as well as restore public trust

Binding time: Harold Innis and the balance of new media

Much has been made of the impacts of digital media on the experience of space: new modes of perception and action at a distance: accelerating globalisation; shifting boundaries between work and home life; and so on. It is less common to read about the impacts of digital media on the experience of time. Yet, the digitisation of cultural practices and artefacts has significant implications for structuring our relationships with both the future and the past. In the theoretical traditions concerned with technology and time, the work of Harold Innis, a Canadian economist and communications theorist, offers an approach to understanding the social significance of all kinds of media. He analysed how different media relate to space and time: space-binding media extend influence and meanings over distances, helping to build empires and develop cohesion across space; while time-binding media influence cultural patterns in duration. For Innis, civilisations can be measured by their balance between managing time and controlling space. If this remains the case today, how has the computer changed this balance in our own culture? This paper examines the extent to which Innis’s concepts about media still apply today

The Internet of Things Connectivity Binge: What are the Implications?

Despite wide concern about cyberattacks, outages and privacy violations, most experts believe the Internet of Things will continue to expand successfully the next few years, tying machines to machines and linking people to valuable resources, services and opportunities

Security Evaluation of Cyber-Physical Systems in Society- Critical Internet of Things

In this paper, we present evaluation of security awareness of developers and users of cyber-physical systems. Our study includes interviews, workshops, surveys and one practical evaluation. We conducted 15 interviews and conducted survey with 55 respondents coming primarily from industry. Furthermore, we performed practical evaluation of current state of practice for a society-critical application, a commercial vehicle, and reconfirmed our findings discussing an attack vector for an off-line societycritical facility. More work is necessary to increase usage of security strategies, available methods, processes and standards. The security information, currently often insufficient, should be provided in the user manuals of products and services to protect system users. We confirmed it lately when we conducted an additional survey of users, with users feeling as left out in their quest for own security and privacy. Finally, hardware-related security questions begin to come up on the agenda, with a general increase of interest and awareness of hardware contribution to the overall cyber-physical security. At the end of this paper we discuss possible countermeasures for dealing with threats in infrastructures, highlighting the role of authorities in this quest

Computer game development education at university

This paper articulates some of the challenges for computer game development courses at university level. A typical course development of this type is described. The need to include creative methods alongside more formal software development methodologies as core elements of computer game education is proposed and placed within the context of an industry specific framework. The evolutionary nature of the computer game industry requires that computer game development programmes at university should be equally evolutionary and adaptable to change

Unit standards : an 'easy' pathway for foundation learners : a thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Education (Adult) at Massey University, Massey Campus

Foundation learners come into the tertiary environment at levels one, two and three. They can select from courses of study that include unit standard assessment. These unit standards are credits toward a vast array of national certificates. In recent years, learners have been faced with an ever increasing variety of ways in which they can complete these qualifications from classroom based to online modes of delivery. Many of the programmes and courses on offer are zero fee and promise a self-paced and individualised learning environment. Further investigation reveals that even at this foundation level these programmes play an important role in the political and social agenda to upskill all New Zealanders to better prepare them for the 21st century. The sweeping reforms of the 1990s have turned educational courses at all levels into industry focused curricular (Peters & Marshall, 1996; Olssen & Mathews, 1997; O'Neill et al., 2004) and unit standards are increasingly the chosen pathway of those changes. Over the last 15 years, polytechnics and private training establishments have incorporated New Zealand Qualifications Authority unit standards into many of their programmes. The intention was that these units would be assessments only and would be able to be 'massaged' into existing courses. This proved to be challenging for educators (Goodwill, 1999) and unit standards now dominate the curriculum (Codd, 1997). This research focused on how foundation learners were experiencing unit standards. Nineteen foundation learners, studying at an ITP and two PTEs, were invited to talk about their feelings about assessment, what they thought unit standards were, and how they were finding them. These learners took part in an individual interview and a focused group conversation. The results identified that foundation learners are having an 'easy ride' with unit standards. They can learn the material and then pass the unit. If they don't meet the requirements of the unit standard, they get another chance and do a resit. They like learning 'unit' by 'unit' and doing the assessment straight after the learning, while it is still 'fresh.' If possible they prefer to do it at their own pace, working through the material and being assessed when they are ready. They are now finding assessment less scary than previous experiences and there is opportunity to feel a sense of achievement and not be compared with others. The transparency of the units appeals and the relationship with the tutor is seen as important. It was also evident that students are studying 'units' and that sometimes they find the language of the assessments difficult to understand. There has been a shift in learning, from curriculum-driven 'education' focused programmes to student-driven 'industry-influenced' credit acquisition. The National Qualifications Framework has succeeded in its goal of offering units as attractive learning packages. These learners accept the new language of learning; they don't have the knowledge or understanding about assessment to question the units that are offered to them. "They have no insights into the reforms, no understanding of their political rationales, nor any methods of critiquing them"(O'Neill et al., 2004, p, 17). The biggest challenge for educators is not to teach the unit standard, rather engage learners and encourage them to explore their curriculum in a broader sense. Foundation learners now understand the value of credits; they also need to be encouraged to understand the value of education. 'Learning for life' should be more intrinsic than getting a box ticked. This research highlights the importance of the learning environment, the relationship between learner and tutor, and the relevance of explaining clearly what unit standards are, and how they fit into the bigger picture of the National Qualifications Framework and education itself as a life changing path

Narrative music: towards an understanding of musical narrative functions in multimedia

As the computer screen is replacing the book as the dominant medium for communication (Kress, 2003), questions about how meaning is constituted by the multimodal interaction of different media (including music) is becoming increasingly important in contemporary research of pedagogy, sociology and media studies. The overall aim with this licentiate thesis is to explore musical narrative functions as they appear in multimedia such as film and computer games. The thesis is based on three publications. Publication 1 proposes a classification of musical narrative functions, with 6 narrative classes(the Emotive, Informative, Descriptive, Guiding, Temporal and Rhetorical classes) and 11 categories. The relational interplay of music with contextual factors is emphasized. Publication 2 describes the design of a software tool, REMUPP (Relations Between Musical Parameters and Perceived Properties), to be used for experimental studies of musical expression. REMUPP is used for real time alteration of musical expression, by the manipulation of musical parameters such as tempo, harmony, rhythm, articulation, etc. Publication 3 describes a quasi-experiment using REMUPP, where a group of young participants (12-13 years old) were given the task of adapting musical expression – by manipulating 7 parameters – to make it fit 3 visual scenes shown on a computer screen. They also answered a questionnaire asking about their musical backgrounds and habits of listening to music, watching movies and playing computer games. Numerical data from the manipulations were analyzed statistically with regards to the preferred values of the musical parameters in relation to the different visual scenes. The results indicated awareness and knowledge about codes and conventions of musical narrative functions, and were to some degree affected by the participants’ gender, musical backgrounds and media habits