Establishing the design knowledge for emerging interaction platforms

While awaiting a variety of innovative interactive products and services to appear in the market in the near future such as interactive tabletops, interactive TVs, public multi-touch walls, and other embedded appliances, this paper calls for preparation for the arrival of such interactive platforms based on their interactivity. We advocate studying, understanding and establishing the foundation for interaction characteristics and affordances and design implications for these platforms which we know will soon emerge and penetrate our everyday lives. We review some of the archetypal interaction platform categories of the future and highlight the current status of the design knowledge-base accumulated to date and the current rate of growth for each of these. We use example designs illustrating design issues and considerations based on the authors’ 12-year experience in pioneering novel applications in various forms and styles

Performance evaluation of floating content for context-aware applications

Context-awareness is a peculiar characteristic of an expanding set of applications that make use of a combination of restricted spatio-temporal locality and mobile communications, to deliver a variety of services. Opportunistic communications satisfy well the communication requirements of these applications, because they naturally incorporate context. Recently, an opportunistic communication paradigm called "Floating Content" was proposed, to support infrastructure-less, distributed content sharing. It aims at ensuring the availability of data within a certain geographic area called "anchor zone". In literature, the focus was on understanding the asymptotic properties of the floating lifetime, i.e., the duration of time for which content floats in the anchor zone. Instead, our objective is to characterize the performance of context-aware applications using floating content as a communication service. First, we present a simple approximate analytical model for accessing the viability of floating content to act as a communication service for context-aware applications. We focus on the "success probability", which captures the likelihood for a user to receive the content when traversing the anchor zone and apply our analysis to estimate the success probability for three representative categories of context-aware applications, and show how the system can be configured to achieve the application’s target. Second, we investigate the impact of different mobility models on the performance of context-aware applications that use floating content. In particular, we consider four different mobility models, and, by using extensive simulation experiments, we investigate the performance of three different categories of context-aware applications. By comparing the simulation results to the performance predictions of our previously proposed simple analytical model, we show that our model can provide useful performance predictions even for complex and realistic mobility models. Simulation results under different mobility models also confirm the viability of floating content to act as a communication service for a variety of context-aware applications. Finally, we investigate the performance of floating content in a real world setting by developing and deploying an Android mobile application based on floating content in an office and a university campus environment. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first ever experimental evaluation of floating content service in a real setting. Our results provide quite interesting indications for the viability and the implementation of applications using floating content in the considered environments. We also propose a novel simple analytical model that accounts for the peculiarities of the mobility patterns in such a real world setting, and that can accurately predict the effectiveness of floating content for the implementation of context-aware applications in an office and a campus setting.Programa Oficial de Doctorado en Ingeniería TelemáticaPresidente: Claudio E. Casetti.- Secretario: Carlos Jesús Bernardos Cano.- Vocal: Antonio García Marqué

Viewing the Future? Virtual Reality In Journalism

Journalism underwent a flurry of virtual reality content creation, production and distribution starting in the final months of 2015. The New York Times distributed more than 1 million cardboard virtual reality viewers and released an app showing a spherical video short about displaced refugees. The Los Angeles Times landed people next to a crater on Mars. USA TODAY took visitors on a ride-along in the "Back to the Future" car on the Universal Studios lot and on a spin through Old Havana in a bright pink '57 Ford. ABC News went to North Korea for a spherical view of a military parade and to Syria to see artifacts threatened by war. The Emblematic Group, a company that creates virtual reality content, followed a woman navigating a gauntlet of anti- abortion demonstrators at a family planning clinic and allowed people to witness a murder-suicide stemming from domestic violence.In short, the period from October 2015 through February 2016 was one of significant experimentation with virtual reality (VR) storytelling. These efforts are part of an initial foray into determining whether VR is a feasible way to present news. The year 2016 is shaping up as a period of further testing and careful monitoring of potential growth in the use of virtual reality among consumers

An exploration of teachers' understanding of their questioning practices in science lessons in early primary teaching in Thailand

PhD ThesisBased on social constructivist perspectives (Rojas-Drummond and Mercer, 2003), teachers’ questioning may have a direct impact on children’s learning and the development of children’s thinking. Most research into teachers’ questioning has been conducted in Western countries. However, in-depth qualitative research on teachers’ questioning practices in science classrooms in early primary education in Thailand is under-researched. Understanding teachers’ questioning practices will contribute to the improvement of teaching practices and teacher training programmes. This study aimed to explore Thai early primary teachers’ understanding of their questioning practices in terms of questioning purposes, question types and strategies, and to explain the factors that influence those classroom practices, in the context of science teaching in Thailand. A qualitative case study approach within the interpretivist paradigm was employed. Data were mainly gathered in the form of video recordings of classroom interaction, through videomediated interviews and relevant documents, such as lesson plans. This study is based on teacher reflections on questioning in which teachers identified some questions that they had asked. Through an inductive analysis of the data using template analysis, the current study found that teachers reported asking questions for a range of purposes in science teaching. Eleven such purposes were identified: gaining attention, checking if pupils can recall information, checking prior knowledge, checking understanding, enhancing knowledge, integrating with other topic areas, encouraging observation, hypothesizing, experimenting, building understanding, and encouraging pupils’ thinking. The finding shows that purposes relevant to hypothesizing, experimenting, and building understanding had a considerately higher proportion of open questions than closed ones. Another important finding was that eight categories of questioning strategies were employed by teachers in the classroom. The most commonly reported questioning strategy was repeating. It can be concluded that teachers’ understanding of questioning was closely in line with the concept of scaffolding assistance. This is because teachers reported that some purposes in asking questions assisted learning and were linked to the questioning strategies used. This research contributes to existing knowledge by providing a conceptual model of Thai teachers’ questioning practice in the science classroom. The proposed model is based on social constructivist theory, which is comprised of the three major elements of questioning purposes, ii question types, and strategies, and three layers of influencing factors: teacher cognition, cultural factors, and contextual factors.Suratthani Rajabhat Universit

The back stroke buddy

Thesis (S.B.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Mechanical Engineering, 2005.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.The objective of this thesis was to study and improve one's own physical intelligence. Through studying bodily movements of people trying to accomplish new tasks, I realized one way to enhance physical intelligence was through teaching devices. My area of expertise in training was swim instruction, as I have been teaching swim lessons for over seven years. The initial problems that new swimmers encounter involve getting accustom to the water, submerging their heads, and floating on their backs. As a swim teacher, one can verbally instruct students through the first two problem areas, but in order to float on one's back, there are methods required to facilitate this skill. The most widely used approach is for a swim teacher to support the back of the student's head and neck with his/her hand and guide the student through the water. The goal of this thesis is to eliminate the need for constant support from a swimming teacher by developing a device which will apply the same teaching technique, yet enable students to learn using this device to swim on their backs without assistance. The apparatus created by following the criteria set forth is aptly named The Back Stroke Buddy. This apparatus consists of three parts - a head support, a neck support, and a base. A swimmer's head will lie in the middle of the base while the head and neck support, which are located below the base, cradle the back of the head and provide support. This device is made out of soft foam which allows it to be robust and one size fits all. While it does meet all the necessary requirements set forth, The Back Stroke Buddy does have other added benefits. This device, due to its durable nature, allows the user to swim into an obstacle such as the wall or a lane line while remaining unscathed. Although this device does enable the swimmer to float on his/her back, the strokes which can be performed while using it are limited because of shoulder interference. Future work on this product involves making The Back Stroke Buddy more conducive to all arm movements, obtaining a patent and producing it large scale to be sold in stores.by Gregory Paul Fonder.S.B

Homebound: STS-M1301 A Study on Television Writing in the Science Fiction Genre

This project is a scene-by-scene outline of an original television pilot script in the science fiction genre. The outline is based on research conducted in both the television and science fiction fields, providing the project with a firm foundation in television screenwriting structure as well as insights into the characteristics of the science fiction genre. Additional research was carried out on the topic of developing realistic, engaging characters for the screen. This project serves to broaden the writer’s portfolio upon graduation while giving him a chance to study the world of television, which contains numerous differences from the field of cinematic arts

Seasteads, Landgrabs and International Law

In 2008, Patri Friedman, the Google-based grandson of Milton Friedman, came together with Peter Thiel, the Silicon Valley venture capitalist who founded PayPal, the data analytics company Palantir Technologies, and made early investments in Facebook and several other start-ups, to found ‘The Seasteading Institute’ (TSI). As Joe Quirk, the current president of TSI and author of Seasteading, TSI’s manifesto, tells it: Peter is a US-rated chess master; Patri has competed in the World Series of Poker. The two strategic thinkers hit it off. After years of contemplating the laws for governance while writing code as an employee at Google, Patri was able to describe to Peter why law is code and why government is in principle an information technology – which means that governance can progress to serve humanity with unimaginable Silicon Valley speed if only subjected to fluid market competition among anyone empowered to innovate. Peter was sold. The idea that brought together Friedman, Thiel, Quirk, and others involved colonizing the seas by building modular floating structures—houses, office buildings, factory floors, sporting arenas, and so on — that could be arranged into atolls and archipelagos. ‘Seasteads’, as they are called by derivation from ‘homesteads’, are intended to have a dynamic character. TSI suggests that individual units might be detached from one formation and towed to another; and that such formations will in time come to occupy many parts of the ocean, including areas just off state coasts—thus within zones of national jurisdiction—as well as the high seas.King's College, University of Cambridg

Developing and Testing a Density Microworld

This paper outlines a design study conducted in an after-school program setting with middle-school aged children in an urban district in the North Eastern United States in order to: 1) design a microworld for Density in order to deepen students\u27 content knowledge of Density, 2) design a set of content knowledge items to assess and characterize students\u27 prior knowledge with regard to density, 3) characterize their inquiry skills before using the microworld, and 4) characterize their inquiry processes via their log files generated as they work within the microworld