Pervasive handheld computing systems

The technological role of handheld devices is fundamentally changing. Portable computers were traditionally application specific. They were designed and optimised to deliver a specific task. However, it is now commonly acknowledged that future handheld devices need to be multi-functional and need to be capable of executing a range of high-performance applications. This thesis has coined the term pervasive handheld computing systems to refer to this type of mobile device. Portable computers are faced with a number of constraints in trying to meet these objectives. They are physically constrained by their size, their computational power, their memory resources, their power usage, and their networking ability. These constraints challenge pervasive handheld computing systems in achieving their multi-functional and high-performance requirements. This thesis proposes a two-pronged methodology to enable pervasive handheld computing systems meet their future objectives. The methodology is a fusion of two independent and yet complementary concepts. The first step utilises reconfigurable technology to enhance the physical hardware resources within the environment of a handheld device. This approach recognises that reconfigurable computing has the potential to dynamically increase the system functionality and versatility of a handheld device without major loss in performance. The second step of the methodology incorporates agent-based middleware protocols to support handheld devices to effectively manage and utilise these reconfigurable hardware resources within their environment. The thesis asserts the combined characteristics of reconfigurable computing and agent technology can meet the objectives of pervasive handheld computing systems

Feminist Information Activism: Newsletters, Index Cards and the 21st Century Archive

Feminist Information Activism: Newsletters, Index Cards and the 21st-century Archive develops an original approach to studying feminisms media infrastructures, focusing on U.S. lesbian feminism from the early 1970s to the present. The dissertation proposes the concept of feminist information activism, in which engagements with commonplace media facilitate access to marginalized information and networks through purposefully designed interfaces. Newsletter print culture and other activist-oriented information contexts such as bibliographic and indexing projects, and community archives, sought to unite feminist publics with difficult-to-find published materials. In each of these cases, activists worked to collect and parse large amounts of information that would make marginal lesbian lives visible, adopting various information management and compression techniques to do so. These tactics often created anxieties over the effects rationalization procedures might have on information that ultimately attempted to represent messy and politically complex feminist lives. To address these tensions, activists re-worked existing standards in information management through the use of new networks, the design of unique subject-classification schemes, and the appropriation of tools such as index cards and early computer databases. Chapter one investigates 1970s newsletter culture, drawing on a select print archive to argue that these documents imagined a mode of network thinking critical to feminist social movements prior to the web. Chapter two examines indexing and bibliography projects of the 1980s, tracing their critical appropriations of early database computing through interviews, archival research in these projects papers, and historical research on indexing standards gathered from late 20th-century instructional manuals. Chapters three and four draw out connections between these print forms and todays digital feminisms through a study of ongoing digitization practices at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Through interviews and observation with archives staff, and documentary research in organizational records, these chapters examine feminisms influence on the design and implementation of accessible digitization projects that counter accepted archival standards. Framed by the historical chapters on feminist print activism; this study of feminist digitization re-casts indexing and bibliographic projects of the 1980s, and newsletters of the 1970s as media histories that situate todays digital feminisms in a longer genealogy.Feminist Information Activism: Newsletters, Index Cards and the 21st-century Archive develops an original approach to studying feminisms media infrastructures, focusing on U.S. lesbian feminism from the early 1970s to the present. The dissertation proposes the concept of feminist information activism, in which engagements with commonplace media facilitate access to marginalized information and networks through purposefully designed interfaces. Newsletter print culture and other activist-oriented information contexts such as bibliographic and indexing projects, and community archives, sought to unite feminist publics with difficult-to-find published materials. In each of these cases, activists worked to collect and parse large amounts of information that would make marginal lesbian lives visible, adopting various information management and compression techniques to do so. These tactics often created anxieties over the effects rationalization procedures might have on information that ultimately attempted to represent messy and politically complex feminist lives. To address these tensions, activists re-worked existing standards in information management through the use of new networks, the design of unique subject-classification schemes, and the appropriation of tools such as index cards and early computer databases. Chapter one investigates 1970s newsletter culture, drawing on a select print archive to argue that these documents imagined a mode of network thinking critical to feminist social movements prior to the web. Chapter two examines indexing and bibliography projects of the 1980s, tracing their critical appropriations of early database computing through interviews, archival research in these projects papers, and historical research on indexing standards gathered from late 20th-century instructional manuals. Chapters three and four draw out connections between these print forms and todays digital feminisms through a study of ongoing digitization practices at the Lesbian Herstory Archives. Through interviews and observation with archives staff, and documentary research in organizational records, these chapters examine feminisms influence on the design and implementation of accessible digitization projects that counter accepted archival standards. Framed by the historical chapters on feminist print activism; this study of feminist digitization re-casts indexing and bibliographic projects of the 1980s, and newsletters of the 1970s as media histories that situate todays digital feminisms in a longer genealogy

Theatre, performance and digital culture

A thesis submitted to the University of Wolverhampton in partial fulfilment of the requirement of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.This thesis proposes that the theory of aesthetic agency derived from gaming in digital culture may be used as a lens through which live theatre and performance may be analysed. I argue that the aesthetics, immersion and play with identity in live theatre and performance are informed by digital culture through the behaviour and agency of the participants, be they audience or participants. Using a grounded theory methodological approach, four large-scale outdoor immersive productions and two traditional theatrical productions have been selected to provide a comparative analysis using aesthetic agency. Aesthetic agency is central to the analysis of immersion and play with identity in the productions selected. Comprising intention, perceivable consequence, narrative potential, transformation, co-presence and presence aesthetic agency is the feeling of pleasure audience and participants derive through the experience of live theatre and performance. Analysis using aesthetic agency in immersive productions examines qualities such as interaction and participation, discovery, understanding social rules, proximity to points of engagement within the performance, the use of narrative or gameplay, liminality and the suspension of disbelief and the use of physical or imaginary boundaries. Aesthetic agency in play with identity uses qualities of transportation, presence and co-presence and is analysed using themes of liminality, ritual, agency and memory which offer the opportunity of real experience within the virtual environments. The outcomes of the study highlight the opportunities to analyse and understand the meaning making process in live theatre and performance in a new manner through the lens of aesthetic agency derived from digital culture. Through examples, the outcomes show how digital culture theory may be used in live theatre and performance to examine and explain the experience for spectators and participants. The future use of aesthetic agency as a dramaturgical tool then becomes a possibility which may enhance the development process and enrich the subsequent experience of spectators and participants. Further, aesthetic agency may find utility as a dramaturgical tool when used to aid the creation of new live productions

Mining a Small Medical Data Set by Integrating the Decision Tree and t-test

[[abstract]]Although several researchers have used statistical methods to prove that aspiration followed by the injection of 95% ethanol left in situ (retention) is an effective treatment for ovarian endometriomas, very few discuss the different conditions that could generate different recovery rates for the patients. Therefore, this study adopts the statistical method and decision tree techniques together to analyze the postoperative status of ovarian endometriosis patients under different conditions. Since our collected data set is small, containing only 212 records, we use all of these data as the training data. Therefore, instead of using a resultant tree to generate rules directly, we use the value of each node as a cut point to generate all possible rules from the tree first. Then, using t-test, we verify the rules to discover some useful description rules after all possible rules from the tree have been generated. Experimental results show that our approach can find some new interesting knowledge about recurrent ovarian endometriomas under different conditions.[[journaltype]]國外[[incitationindex]]EI[[booktype]]紙本[[countrycodes]]FI

Earth Observation Open Science and Innovation

geospatial analytics; social observatory; big earth data; open data; citizen science; open innovation; earth system science; crowdsourced geospatial data; citizen science; science in society; data scienc

Beyond the Ebook: Digital Ecologies and the Future of the Author-Publisher Relationship, and Bibliotek: A Novel

This thesis examines changes in book publishing arising from digital distribution and textual ecology, and how these affect the traditional publisher-author relationship. It considers how the inclusion of fan writers into the industry may help publishing develop in positive ways. The critical exegesis develops a model for a transformative, sharing readership to work with the industry, helping to revitalise the form; while the creative component, science fiction novel, Bibliotek, extrapolates how this model could function

Dynamic Interaction and Manipulation of Web Resources

In this thesis we join methods for evaluating queries over interlinked resources via link traversal with approaches for the integration of data over interlinked schemata via reasoning. Our approach allows for the on-the-fly alignment and processing of dynamically retrieved data in a streaming fashion including incremental query answering. We go beyond the simple consumption of exposed information by enabling manipulations of remote resources in a parallel execution system

Libro de jAUTI 2014

El III WORKSHOP DE TV DIGITAL INTERACTIVA (WTVDI) en conjunto con las jAUTI 2014 III Jornadas Iberoamericanas de difusión y capacitación sobre Aplicaciones y Usabilidad de la TVDI se realizaron durante Webmedia 2014 XX Simpósio Brasilero de Sistemas Multimedia y Web e ntre el 18 y 21 de noviembre de 2014 en la ciudad de João Pessoa (Paraíba, Brasil). El Workshop de TV Digital Interativa (WTVDI) tuvo su primera edición en 2005 en XVIII SIBGRAPI y su segunda edición en 2010 en XVI Webmedia. En esta última edición se realizó junto a jAUTI 2014, el tercer encuentro de investigadores latinoamericanos que formam a REDAUTI Red temática en Aplicaciones y Usabilidad de la Televisión digital Interactiva financiada por el PROGRAMA IBEROAMERICANO DE CIENCIA Y TECNOLOGÍA PARA EL DESARROLLO (CYTED), formada por 225 investigadores de 36 grupos (29 universidades y 7 empresas) de 12 países iberoamericanos. Este libro reúne los trabajos presentados por investigadores de la academia y de la industria en el desarrollo e implementación de tecnologías relacionadas a aplicaciones y usabilidad en TV Digital Interactiva

Video Vortex reader : responses to Youtube

The Video Vortex Reader is the first collection of critical texts to deal with the rapidly emerging world of online video – from its explosive rise in 2005 with YouTube, to its future as a significant form of personal media. After years of talk about digital convergence and crossmedia platforms we now witness the merger of the Internet and television at a pace no-one predicted. These contributions from scholars, artists and curators evolved from the first two Video Vortex conferences in Brussels and Amsterdam in 2007 which focused on responses to YouTube, and address key issues around independent production and distribution of online video content. What does this new distribution platform mean for artists and activists? What are the alternatives