An app for personal searches:more-private, non-volatile searches with stigmergic inspiration

Web searching has long become a ubiquitous behavior amongst Internet users. Much has been changing: odds are that the thousands of results of yesterday have become millions of results today, but did that significant jump in quantity translate to an increase in the perceived results' quality and their applications? Some users might feel personalization efforts as stereotypification or even as inaccurate biases; they may also beware that every click on every search result may reinforce and contribute to (in)accurate representation of them - and would prefer searching without tracking. "Personal Searcher" is a work-in-progress app that makes it possible to search more anonymously. It also makes it possible to keep a private local-only history of one's searches and build personal ranking systems based on that history and other data. The goal is to benefit from local offline personalization, but search online as anonymously as possible.N/

Current Online Health Information Searching Practices of New Zealanders: Preliminary Results from a Pilot Study

The availability of free health information online makes the Internet a popular source for health information. The upward trend of online health information seeking has made this a popular research topic. While many researchers have explored various facets of online health information searching, limited information is available on online health information searching within Aotearoa New Zealand. Existing research studies are dated and do not reflect current online health information searching practices. Thus, in this research in progress paper, we describe the online health information searching behaviour of New Zealanders (n=40). Key findings indicate a variety of sources are used. Participants search experience was either generally good or good. However, there is a need to educate online consumers about local health portals and to pay attention to information sources. Participants indicate the manner in which a search is performed could influence their search experience

Internet Adoption Barriers for Small Firms in the Netherlands

Small firms are not adopting the Internet with the same speed their larger brothers do. This despite the fact that Internet can offer a great deal of advantages to small firms. This study aims to explore several factors that influence small businesses in their choice of Internet use (e.g. benefits and barriers). The main barriers to Internet adoption and to developing a Web presences are simply the concern that the Internet or the Website would not lead to more efficiency or lower costs. However, the results show that a number of the benefits that Dutch small firms are deriving from their Websites can be described as “border-crossing”. These results seem to confirm the “international image of Dutch businesses, well aware of the small size of the local market and always searching for potential business opportunities abroad

Children Prioritize Virtual Exotic Biodiversity over Local Biodiversity

Environmental education is essential to stem current dramatic biodiversity loss, and childhood is considered as the key period for developing awareness and positive attitudes toward nature. Children are strongly influenced by the media, notably the internet, about biodiversity and conservation issues. However, most media focus on a few iconic, appealing, and usually exotic species. In addition, virtual activities are replacing field experiences. This situation may curb children knowledge and concerns about local biodiversity. Focusing our analyses on local versus exotic species, we examined the level of knowledge and the level of diversity of the animals that French schoolchildren are willing to protect, and whether these perceptions are mainly guided by information available in the internet. For that, we collected and compared two complementary data sets: 1) a questionnaire was administered to schoolchildren to assess their knowledge and consideration to protect animals, 2) an internet content analysis (i.e. Google searching sessions using keywords) was performed to assess which animals are the most often represented. Our results suggest that the knowledge of children and their consideration to protect animal are mainly limited to internet contents, represented by a few exotic and charismatic species. The identification rate of local animals by schoolchildren was meager, suggesting a worrying disconnection from their local environment. Schoolchildren were more prone to protect “virtual” (unseen, exotic) rather than local animal species. Our results reinforce the message that environmental education must also focus on outdoor activities to develop conservation consciousness and concerns about local biodiversity

LIS–lnterlink—connecting laboratory information systems to remote primary health–care centres via the Internet

A pilot study was performed to evaluate the feasibility of using the Internet to securely deliver patient laboratory results, and the system has subsequently gone into routine use in Poland. The system went from design to pilot and then to live implementation within a four-month period, resulting in the LIS-Interlink software product. Test results are retrieved at regular intervals from the BioLinkTM LIS (Laboratory Information System), encrypted and transferred to a secure area on the Web server. The primary health-care centres dial into the Internet using a local-cell service provided by Polish Telecom (TP), obtain a TCP/IP address using the TP DHCP server, and perform HTTP ‘get’ and ‘post’ operations to obtain the files by secure handshaking. The data are then automatically inserted into a local SQL database (with optional printing of incoming reports)for cumulative reporting and searching functions. The local database is fully multi-user and can be accessed from different clinics within the centres by a variety of networking protocols

Identifying the attack sources of botnets for a renewable energy management system by using a revised locust swarm optimisation scheme

Distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks often use botnets to generate a high volume of packets and adopt controlled zombies for flooding a victim’s network over the Internet. Analysing the multiple sources of DDoS attacks typically involves reconstructing attack paths between the victim and attackers by using Internet protocol traceback (IPTBK) schemes. In general, traditional route-searching algorithms, such as particle swarm optimisation (PSO), have a high convergence speed for IPTBK, but easily fall into the local optima. This paper proposes an IPTBK analysis scheme for multimodal optimisation problems by applying a revised locust swarm optimisation (LSO) algorithm to the reconstructed attack path in order to identify the most probable attack paths. For evaluating the effectiveness of the DDoS control centres, networks with a topology size of 32 and 64 nodes were simulated using the ns-3 tool. The average accuracy of the LS-PSO algorithm reached 97.06 for the effects of dynamic traffic in two experimental networks (number of nodes = 32 and 64). Compared with traditional PSO algorithms, the revised LSO algorithm exhibited a superior searching performance in multimodal optimisation problems and increased the accuracy in traceability analysis for IPTBK problems

Internet Research and Appropriate Content: Keeping Students Safe on the Internet

Since the advent of the Internet, educators have struggled with the problem of utilizing its research potential while protecting students from viewing inappropriate content such as pornography, illegal substances and hate-oriented websites. Schools need to face this challenge with a plan for how to best protect children from offensive material while allowing quality research opportunities. This study uses research from experts in the field and a survey of 156 teachers to determine the best way to maximize Internet research and protect children from offensive material online. This study is the first to survey teachers for their opinions on Acceptable Use Policies (AUPs), Internet filters and local control of Internet technology. Most of the teachers surveyed are overall pleased with their school’s current efforts to protect kids from inappropriate material on the Internet. AUPs alone are not good deterrents to searching for offensive material. Internet filters, while controversial, do offer a wall of protection from this material. Teachers overall would like their schools to have more control over the filtering devices. The hope is that this information can be used to help school districts implement or alter policy to better protect kids while offering quality research opportunities