Computer Ownership Up Sharply in the 1990s

[Excerpt] Graphical user interfaces, multimedia CD-ROMs, and the Internet have increased accessibility and people’s understanding of computers. And greater understanding has brought substantially greater ownership. Between 1990 and 1997, the percentage of households1 owning computers increased from 15 percent to 35 percent. During this time, the amount spent by the average household on computers and associated hardware more than tripled. This report briefly examines the demographics of computer ownership (also see table ) as reported by households participating in the interview component of the Bureau’s Consumer Expenditure survey

Mobile recommender apps with privacy management for accessible and usable technologies

The paper presents the preliminary results of an ongoing survey of the use of computers and mobile devices, interest in recommender apps and knowledge and concerns about privacy issues amongst English and Italian speaking disabled people. Participants were found to be regular users of computers and mobile devices for a range of applications. They were interested in recommender apps for household items, computer software and apps that met their accessibility and other requirements. They showed greater concerns about controlling access to personal data of different types than this data being retained by the computer or mobile device. They were also willing to make tradeoffs to improve device performance

Empirical Study on the Accessibility of Wi-Fi, Computers and Cell Phones in Cuba

This paper reviews the accessibility of technology in Havana, Cuba as it begins to open its borders to the modern world. The technology researched includes cell phones, Wi-Fi, computers, and personal computers. As the embargo on Cuba begins to fade, tourists and new businesses are flocking to this once heavily restricted island. The focus of this paper is to explain the availability of modern technology to the citizens of Cuba. Currently, technology is very limited in Cuba because Wi-Fi is an expensive luxury for the average Cuban. Modern computers are also an expensive purchase, which forces Cubans to put together computers from pieces of outdated computers. Government restrictions, limited accessibility, and lack of funding have left Cuba behind the rest of the world in terms of technological advances

Mobile Learning Applications Audit

While mobile learning (m-learning) applications have proven their value in educational activities, there is a need to measure their reliability, accessibility and further more their trustworthiness. Mobile devices are far more vulnerable then classic computers and present inconvenient interfaces due to their size, hardware limitations and their mobile connectivity. Mobile learning applications should be audited to determine if they should be trusted or not, while multimedia contents like automatic speech recognition (ASR) can improve their accessibility. This article will start with a brief introduction on m-learning applications, then it will present the audit process for m-learning applications, it will iterate their specific security threats, it will define the ASR process, and it will elaborate how ASR can enhance accessibility of these types of applications.IT Audit, Software Testing, Penetration Testing, Mobile Applications, Multimedia, Automatic Speech Recognition

Accessibility of Computers for Students with Mild Mental Retardation

As computers move into America\u27s public schools, their accessibility and use have come under scrutiny. Often individuals with mild mental retardation are considered last in decisions regarding the allocation of technological resources such as computers. The purpose of this research was to determine if children with mild mental retardation have access to computers, and if so, how computers are used by these children. Results indicate that in Virginia\u27s county public school systems students with mild mental retardation have access to computers and use those computers primarily for academic purposes

A decision support system to improve service quality in multimodal rapid rail systems: A bayesian perspective

Copyright @ 2011 International Conference on Computers and Industrial EngineeringIn this study, the accessibility of the rail transit stations in a multimodal network formed by a trunk line and its feeder lines are defined. Connectivity between lines and the accessibility of the nodes identify the overall spatial structure of the network. The factors influencing the access choices of rail transit stations and satisfaction of transit travelers in rapid rail transit systems are investigated in order to gain insights into the factors and their interrelationships. The quantitative indications of the relationships are produced and the complexity of evaluating the performance of transit services is exhibited. As the interrelationships are mainly stochastic, the problem on hand is treated as a Bayesian Belief Network (BBN). A BBN approach that presents a learning mechanism is employed and is used as an alternative decision making tool to analyze the rapid rail transit services and identify policies to improve the traveler’s level of service

Ergodicity probes: using time-fluctuations to measure the Hilbert space dimension

Quantum devices, such as quantum simulators, quantum annealers, and quantum computers, may be exploited to solve problems beyond what is tractable with classical computers. This may be achieved as the Hilbert space available to perform such `calculations' is far larger than that which may be classically simulated. In practice, however, quantum devices have imperfections, which may limit the accessibility to the whole Hilbert space. We thus determine that the dimension of the space of quantum states that are available to a quantum device is a meaningful measure of its functionality, though unfortunately this quantity cannot be directly experimentally determined. Here we outline an experimentally realisable approach to obtaining the required Hilbert space dimension of such a device to compute its time evolution, by exploiting the thermalization dynamics of a probe qubit. This is achieved by obtaining a fluctuation-dissipation theorem for high-temperature chaotic quantum systems, which facilitates the extraction of information on the Hilbert space dimension via measurements of the decay rate, and time-fluctuations

The Impact of Limited Internet and Computer Access within an Urban Community

Loaves, Fishes and Computers (LFC) is a non-profit organization located in Monterey County which focuses on helping low-income individuals obtain computers and other services, such as low-cost internet access and technical support, to help bridge the technology gap in the county. It has been seen that there is a lack of accessibility to the Internet and computers within the low-income community of Gonzales, CA. The impact of limited accessibility within the community is affecting the way individuals gain the knowledge necessary in attaining their goals and becoming self-sufficient. This project helped collect data to build a collaboration to help bridge the gap. The method used to obtain this data was a questionnaire that was conducted through phone calls. Sufficient data was collected to determine what organizations LFC can work with to offer Internet access at a lower cost to the low-income community. LFC will develop an implementation plan in the near future

Combining Emotion and Facial Nonamanual Signals in Synthesized American Sign Language

Conference proceedings from the the 14th international ACM SIGACCESS conference on Computers and accessibility-2012. ASSETS \u2712. Boulder, CO, USA, October 22 - 24, 2012. New York, NY, USA: ACM. 249-250