Project "flappy crab": an edu-game for music learning

This paper discusses some possibilities of gamification and remixing process for music education.Analysesalsothe concepts of gamification, mashup, remix and presents its possible usage in education –music teaching -throughthe development of the project/educational game “Flappy Crab”.The article begins with a brief introduction to the concepts of education, gamification, remix and mashup and software development. After that, we will make the summarypresentation of the music edu-game “Flappy Crab”, a clone of the GEARS Studios Flappy Bird,developed for mobiles devices with the Unity3D game-engine.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Social Media and the Public Sector

{Excerpt} Social media is revolutionizing the way we live, learn, work, and play. Elements of the private sector have begun to thrive on opportunities to forge, build, and deepen relationships. Some are transforming their organizational structures and opening their corporate ecosystems in consequence. The public sector is a relative newcomer. It too can drive stakeholder involvement and satisfaction. Global conversations, especially among Generation Y, were born circa 2004. Beginning 1995 until then, the internet had hosted static, one-way websites. These were places to visit passively, retrieve information from, and perhaps post comments about by electronic mail. Sixteen years later, Web 2.0 enables many-to-many connections in numerous domains of interest and practice, powered by the increasing use of blogs, image and video sharing, mashups, podcasts, ratings, Really Simple Syndication, social bookmarking, tweets, widgets, and wikis, among others. Today, people expect the internet to be user-centric

The intersection of people, technology and local space. PPGIS and Web in practice for participatory planning

Dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Master of Science in Geospatial TechnologiesThis study concerns about the contributions of Web 2.0 tools to Public Participation Geographic Information System (PPGIS) and of PPGIS to participatory planning. Web 2.0 tools are increasingly occupying an important role in the universe of geographic information consciousness. Both Web 2.0 and PPGIS are about decentralization, public mapping, and local knowledge, encouraging throughout productive results. The project develops a Web 2.0 PPGIS mashup application through free, easy-to-use tools. It consists of a Web mapping service, with eligible GI layers, where users explore and comment. A database stores the contributions in a format supported by GIS. Finally, we set a first version at Canela – Brazil, to test the usefulness of the method on a real planning scenario. Results shown it is a valuable approach for engaging the public in participatory planning. It promotes communications among users and with decision makers in a more interactive and straightforward way. The Web 2.0 PPGIS is easy to set and understandable by nonexperts, and can be easily applied on other contexts

Censoring Maps in Google China? Visual Analysis through Foucault\u27t Power/Knowledge

This thesis explores aspects of map censorship in Google China through a theoretical framework based on Foucault’s power/knowledge. Comparing results of content analysis of maps in Google Ditu in Google China and Google Maps in Google Dot Com, the thesis analyzes the degree of censorship of maps in the Google geoweb. My findings are a higher density of labeling in Google Ditu in comparison with Google Maps, the absence of VGI in Google Ditu, the limitation of zoom level at Google Ditu, and the absence of Street View in China. This thesis suggests possible explanations to differences in map information between Google Ditu and Google Maps

IPTV 2.0 from Triple Play to social TV

International audienceThe great success of social technologies is transforming the Internet into a collaborative community. With a vision of IPTV 2.0, this paper presents our research work towards the exploitation of social phenomena in the domain of TV. Based on the advantage of IP Multimedia Subsystem (IMS) service architecture, the current IPTV service is extended from two aspects: TV-enriched communication and sociability-enhanced TV. Two applications namely TV Buddy and Social Electronic Program Guide (EPG) are proposed to demonstrate them respectively. Finally, we developed a prototype system on Ericsson IMS Software Development Studio (SDS)

Strong Female Characters: Jane Austen\u27s vs. The Mashups\u27

The comparison of Strong Female Characters in Jane Austen’s novels Pride & Prejudice and Sense & Sensibility, with the altered characters in the monster mashups by Seth Grahame-Smith and Ben Winters, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, respectively, reveals differences between the two society’s understanding and portrayal of strength and femininity. Because these texts are so closely connected – Austen is listed as a co-author of both mashups – the differences evident in the representations of women more clearly reveal the differing cultural values. Close textual analysis of the development of three primary female characters – Marianne Dashwood, Elinor Dashwood, and Elizabeth Bennet – through their respective novels and their parallel journeys in the mashups demonstrates that the mashups have weakened the characters. Though the mashups are advertised as making Austen’s characters into Strong Female Characters, Austen’s women are already strong

A human factors perspective on volunteered geographic information

This thesis takes a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the unique abilities of Volunteered Geographic Information (VGI) to enhance the utility of online mashups in ways not achievable with Professional Geographic Information (PGI). The key issues currently limiting the use of successful of VGI are the concern for quality, accuracy and value of the information, as well as the polarisation and bias of views within the user community. This thesis reviews different theoretical approaches in Human Factors, Geography, Information Science and Computer Science to help understand the notion of user judgements relative to VGI within an online environment (Chapter 2). Research methods relevant to a human factors investigation are also discussed (Chapter 3). (Chapter 5) The scoping study established the fundamental insights into the terminology and nature of VGI and PGI, a range of users were engaged through a series of qualitative interviews. This led the development of a framework on VGI (Chapter 4), and comparative description of users in relation to one another through a value framework (Chapter 5). Study Two produced qualitative multi-methods investigation into how users perceive VGI and PGI in use (Chapter 6), demonstrating similarities and the unique ability for VGI to provide utility to consumers. Chapter Seven and Study Three brought insight into the specific abilities for VGI to enhance the user judgement of online information within an information relevance context (Chapter 7 and 8). In understanding the outcomes of these studies, this thesis discusses how users perceive VGI as different from PGI in terms of its benefit to consumers from a user centred design perspective (Chapter 9). In particular, the degree to which user concerns are valid, the limitation of VGI in application and its potential strengths in enriching the user experiences of consumers engaged within an information search. In conclusion, specific contributions and avenues for further work are highlighted (Chapter 10)

Survey on geographic visual display techniques in epidemiology: Taxonomy and characterization

Many works have been done on the topic of Geographic Visual Display with different objectives and approaches. There are studies to compare the traditional cartography techniques (the traditional term of Geographic Visual Display (GVD) without Human-Computer Interaction (HCI)) to Modern GIS which are also known as Geo-visualization, some literature differentiates and highlight the commonalities of features and architectures of different Geographic Visual Display tools (from layers and clusters to dot and color and more). Furthermore, with the existence of more advanced tools which support data exploration, few tasks are done to evaluate how those tools are used to handle complex and multivariate spatial-temporal data. Several test on usability and interactivity of tools toward user's needs or preferences, some even develop frameworks that address user's concern in a wide array of tasks, and others prove how these tools are able to stimulate the visual thought process and help in decision making or event prediction amongst decision-makers. This paper surveyed and categorized these research articles into 2 categories: Traditional Cartography (TC) and Geo-visualization (G). This paper will classify each category by their techniques and tasks that contribute to the significance of data representation in Geographic Visual Display and develop perspectives of each area and evaluating trends of Geographic Visual Display Techniques. Suggestions and ideas on what mechanisms can be used to improve and diversify Geographic Visual Display Techniques are provided at the end of this survey

Modeling Users Feedback Using Bayesian Methods for Data-Driven Requirements Engineering

Data-driven requirements engineering represents a vision for a shift from the static traditional methods of doing requirements engineering to dynamic data-driven user-centered methods. App developers now receive abundant user feedback from user comments in app stores and social media, i.e., explicit feedback, to feedback from usage data and system logs, i.e, implicit feedback. In this dissertation, we describe two novel Bayesian approaches that utilize the available user\u27s to support requirements decisions and activities in the context of applications delivered through software marketplaces (web and mobile). In the first part, we propose to exploit implicit user feedback in the form of usage data to support requirements prioritization and validation. We formulate the problem as a popularity prediction problem and present a novel Bayesian model that is highly interpretable and offers early-on insights that can be used to support requirements decisions. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves high prediction accuracy and outperforms competitive models. In the second part, we discuss the limitations of previous approaches that use explicit user feedback for requirements extraction, and alternatively, propose a novel Bayesian approach that can address those limitations and offer a more efficient and maintainable framework. The proposed approach (1) simplifies the pipeline by accomplishing the classification and summarization tasks using a single model, (2) replaces manual steps in the pipeline with unsupervised alternatives that can accomplish the same task, and (3) offers an alternative way to extract requirements using example-based summaries that retains context. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed approach achieves equal or better classification accuracy and outperforms competitive models in terms of summarization accuracy. Specifically, we show that the proposed approach can capture 91.3% of the discussed requirement with only 19% of the dataset, i.e., reducing the human effort needed to extract the requirements by 80%