Peripatetic electronic teachers in higher education

This paper explores the idea of information and communications technology providing a medium enabling higher education teachers to act as freelance agents. The notion of a ‘Peripatetic Electronic Teacher’ (PET) is introduced to encapsulate this idea. PETs would exist as multiple telepresences (pedagogical, professional, managerial and commercial) in PET‐worlds; global networked environments which support advanced multimedia features. The central defining rationale of a pedagogical presence is described in detail and some implications for the adoption of the PET‐world paradigm are discussed. The ideas described in this paper were developed by the author during a recently completed Short‐Term British Telecom Research Fellowship, based at the BT Adastral Park

Do Stated Preference Values Predict Revealed Behavior in “New” Markets for Ecosystem Services? A Comparison of Experiments Addressing Establishing A Market for Farmland Ecosystem Services

Resource /Energy Economics and Policy,

Growing the use of Virtual Worlds in education : an OpenSim perspective

The growth in the range of disciplines that Virtual Worlds support for educational purposes is evidenced by recent applications in the fields of cultural heritage, humanitarian aid, space exploration, virtual laboratories in the physical sciences, archaeology, computer science and coastal geography. This growth is due in part to the flexibility of OpenSim, the open source virtual world platform which by adopting Second Life protocols and norms has created a de facto standard for open virtual worlds that is supported by a growing number of third party open source viewers. Yet while this diversity of use-cases is impressive and Virtual Worlds for open learning are highly popular with lecturers and learners alike immersive education remains an essentially niche activity. This paper identifies functional challenges in terms of Management, Network Infrastructure, the Immersive 3D Web and Programmability that must be addressed to enable the wider adoption of Open Virtual Worlds as a routine learning technology platform. We refer to specific use-cases based on OpenSim and abstract generic requirements which should be met to enable the growth in use of Open Virtual Worlds as a mainstream educational facility. A case study of a deployment to support a formal education curriculum and associated informal learning is used to illustrate key points.Postprin

Foundations, Properties, and Security Applications of Puzzles: A Survey

Cryptographic algorithms have been used not only to create robust ciphertexts but also to generate cryptograms that, contrary to the classic goal of cryptography, are meant to be broken. These cryptograms, generally called puzzles, require the use of a certain amount of resources to be solved, hence introducing a cost that is often regarded as a time delay---though it could involve other metrics as well, such as bandwidth. These powerful features have made puzzles the core of many security protocols, acquiring increasing importance in the IT security landscape. The concept of a puzzle has subsequently been extended to other types of schemes that do not use cryptographic functions, such as CAPTCHAs, which are used to discriminate humans from machines. Overall, puzzles have experienced a renewed interest with the advent of Bitcoin, which uses a CPU-intensive puzzle as proof of work. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive study of the most important puzzle construction schemes available in the literature, categorizing them according to several attributes, such as resource type, verification type, and applications. We have redefined the term puzzle by collecting and integrating the scattered notions used in different works, to cover all the existing applications. Moreover, we provide an overview of the possible applications, identifying key requirements and different design approaches. Finally, we highlight the features and limitations of each approach, providing a useful guide for the future development of new puzzle schemes.Comment: This article has been accepted for publication in ACM Computing Survey

A Semantic Grid Oriented to E-Tourism

With increasing complexity of tourism business models and tasks, there is a clear need of the next generation e-Tourism infrastructure to support flexible automation, integration, computation, storage, and collaboration. Currently several enabling technologies such as semantic Web, Web service, agent and grid computing have been applied in the different e-Tourism applications, however there is no a unified framework to be able to integrate all of them. So this paper presents a promising e-Tourism framework based on emerging semantic grid, in which a number of key design issues are discussed including architecture, ontologies structure, semantic reconciliation, service and resource discovery, role based authorization and intelligent agent. The paper finally provides the implementation of the framework.Comment: 12 PAGES, 7 Figure

Sustainable touring: exploring value creation through social marketing

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to examine the social marketing-based approach to live performance adopted by Jack Johnson and its potential as the basis of a developmental model for sustainable touring. Design/methodology/approach – Musician Jack Johnson has been recognised as a leader in his approach to sustainable touring. The research approach uses stakeholder interviews to examine his “Sleep Through the Static” tour from a phenomenological perspective. Findings – The activities adopted during the global tour provide “upstream” contributions to social change agendas as well as “downstream” contributions to change behaviour. “Downstream” contribution leans towards closed behaviour settings for the corporate community and open behaviour settings for the social community. Limitations are the extent of resources required; better understanding of audience targets and their perceived value of behaviour change. Research limitations/implications – The use of a single example means that consideration of the success of this model is limited to one approach when others might offer other options. However, the phenomenological approach is sufficient to begin to understand the value creation process at work here. Practical implications – A range of performers in different cultural areas might consider the potential of this approach as a means to contribute to sustainable touring goals. Originality/value – Much of the literature available for event managers focuses on environmental concerns to the neglect of other dimensions of sustainability. This work highlights how the social marketing of sustainable development offers a wider scope to touring performers

Survivable algorithms and redundancy management in NASA's distributed computing systems

The design of survivable algorithms requires a solid foundation for executing them. While hardware techniques for fault-tolerant computing are relatively well understood, fault-tolerant operating systems, as well as fault-tolerant applications (survivable algorithms), are, by contrast, little understood, and much more work in this field is required. We outline some of our work that contributes to the foundation of ultrareliable operating systems and fault-tolerant algorithm design. We introduce our consensus-based framework for fault-tolerant system design. This is followed by a description of a hierarchical partitioning method for efficient consensus. A scheduler for redundancy management is introduced, and application-specific fault tolerance is described. We give an overview of our hybrid algorithm technique, which is an alternative to the formal approach given

TRAVEL, CULTURAL TOURISM AND LOCAL DEVELOPMENT. THE OPPORTUNITY OF THE TABULA PEUTINGERIANA

ROMIT PROJECT, www.romit.or

Becoming the Olympics: The Sound Proof series of exhibition (2008-2012)

Presentation at the Heritage Architecture LanDesign conference. Organised by Le Vie dei Mercanti and sponsored by Forum UNESCO. http://www.leviedeimercanti.it/2013eng