Big Data Computing for Geospatial Applications

The convergence of big data and geospatial computing has brought forth challenges and opportunities to Geographic Information Science with regard to geospatial data management, processing, analysis, modeling, and visualization. This book highlights recent advancements in integrating new computing approaches, spatial methods, and data management strategies to tackle geospatial big data challenges and meanwhile demonstrates opportunities for using big data for geospatial applications. Crucial to the advancements highlighted in this book is the integration of computational thinking and spatial thinking and the transformation of abstract ideas and models to concrete data structures and algorithms

Deaf Education in Early Childhood: Bilingual approaches in Mainland China from 1996-2004

This study investigates Sign Bilingual Education experimental projects introduced by Non Governmental Organizations for deaf children in their early childhood in six sites in five cities in Mainland China from 1996 to 2004. It focuses on the ways in which those involved – above all those in the NGOs – discussed and debated the principles and issues on the one hand and the practices and intended outcomes on the other. Three guiding research questions were formulated after the study of existing related literature: 1) What were the perspectives and claims of the advocators and the opponents of Chinese Sign Bilingual Education (SBE)? 2) What was the reality of the models of SBE seen through the eyes of those responsible? 3) What were the characteristics of the models? Ethnographic methods were used in all six experimental sites including interviews, classrooms observations, and archive studies, during a period from autumn 2003 to summer 2008. Data were analysed using a continuous question and comparison method to establish themes and issues which were common to the many participants and different experiments and sites in this China Case. The findings are presented in a taxonomy format on the basis of what the Sign Bilingual Education insiders perceived and presented. This taxonomy covers 1) the aims, the perspectives, the claims and the common propositions of Chinese Sign Bilingual Education organizers; 2) the characteristics of Chinese Sign Bilingual Education models; 3) the common claims of successful outcomes of the Sign Bilingual Education models; 4) the two types of Sign Bilingual Education models: Two-plus-two model for rural area and Two-plus-four model for urban area. The data suggest Sign Bilingual Education models in mainland China in the period under consideration, are rights-oriented models, developmental models, and tools for the reform of deaf education. A ‘Two-plus-four model’ has been developed which is referred to as a strong bilingual/ weak bicultural Sign Bilingual Education model

A Digital Game Maturity Model

Game development is an interdisciplinary concept that embraces artistic, software engineering, management, and business disciplines. Game development is considered as one of the most complex tasks in software engineering. Hence, for successful development of good-quality games, the game developers must consider and explore all related dimensions as well as discussing them with the stakeholders involved. This research facilitates a better understanding of important dimensions of digital game development methodology. The increased popularity of digital games, the challenges faced by game development organizations in developing quality games, and severe competition in the digital game industry demand a game development process maturity assessment. Consequently, this study presents a Digital Game Maturity Model to evaluate the current development methodology in an organization. The objective is first to identify key factors in the game development process, then to classify these factors into target groups, and eventually to use this grouping as a theoretical basis for proposing a maturity model for digital game development. In doing so, the research focuses on three major stakeholders in game development: developers, consumers, and business management. The framework of the proposed model consists of assessment questionnaires made up of key identified factors from three empirical studies, a performance scale, and a rating method. The main goal of the questionnaires is to collect information about current processes and practices. This research contributes towards formulating a comprehensive and unified strategy for game development process maturity assessment. The proposed model was evaluated with two case studies from the digital game industry

Participant Domain Name Token Profile for security enhancements supporting service oriented architecture

This research proposes a new secure token profile for improving the existing Web Services security standards. It provides a new authentication mechanism. This additional level of security is important for the Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), which is an architectural style that uses a set of principles and design rules to shape interacting applications and maintain interoperability. Currently, the market push is towards SOA, which provides several advantages, for instance: integration with heterogeneous systems, services reuse, standardization of data exchange, etc. Web Services is one of the technologies to implement SOA and it can be implemented using Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP). A SOAP-based Web Service relies on XML for its message format and common application layer protocols for message negotiation and transmission. However, it is a security challenge when a message is transmitted over the network, especially on the Internet. The Organization for Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS) announced a set of Web Services Security standards that focus on two major areas. “Who” can use the Web Service and “What” are the permissions. However, the location or domain of the message sender is not authenticated. Therefore, a new secure token profile called: Participant Domain Name Token Profile (PDNT) is created to tackle this issue. The PDNT provides a new security feature, which the existing token profiles do not address. Location-based authentication is achieved if adopting the PDNT when using Web Services. In the performance evaluation, PDNT is demonstrated to be significantly faster than other secure token profiles. The processing overhead of using the PDNT with other secure token profiles is very small given the additional security provided. Therefore all the participants can acquire the benefits of increased security and performance at low cost

Annual Research Report, 2010-2011

Annual report of collaborative research projects of Old Dominion University faculty and students in partnership with business, industry and government.https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/or_researchreports/1000/thumbnail.jp

Shanghai Symphony Orchestra in 'C' Major (1879 to 2010)

Shanghai Symphony Orchestra is a fascinating institution. It was first founded in 1879 under the name of Shanghai Public Band and was later, in 1907, developed into an orchestra with 33 members under the baton of German conductor Rudolf Buck. Since Mario Paci an Italian pianist became its conductor in 1919, the Orchestra developed swiftly and was crowned the best in the Far East 一 by a Japanese musician Tanabe Hisao in 1923. At that time, Shanghai was semi-colonized by the International Settlement and the French Concession controlled by the Shanghai Municipal Council and the French Council respectively. They were both exempt from local Chinese authority. The Orchestra was an affiliated organization of the former: the Shanghai Municipal Council. When the Chinese Communist Party took over mainland China in 1949, the Orchestra underwent dramatic transformations. It was applied as a political propaganda tool performing music by composers from the socialist camp and adapting folk Chinese songs to Western classical instruments in order to serve the masses. This egalitarian ideology went to extremes in the notorious 10-year Cultural Revolution. Surprisingly, the SSO was not disbanded; rather it was appropriated by the CCP to create background music for revolutionary modern operas such as Taking Tiger Mountain by Strategy. The end of Cultural Revolution after Mao's death in 1976 ushered in a brand new Reform-and-Opening-up era marked by Deng Xiaoping s public claim: Getting rich is glorious! Unlike previous decades when the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra together with music it performed was made to entertain the general masses, elitism came back under a social entourage characterized by Chinese-style socialism. The concept of elite, however, is worth a further thought. Shanghai is not only home to a large number of Chinese middle class but also constitutes a promising paradise for millions of nouveau riches which resembles, to a great extent, the venture land for those Shanghailanders a century ago. This thesis, as the title indicates, puts the historical development of the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra from 1879 to 2010 in C major applying Pierre Bourdieu's cultural capital theory so as to understand how this extraordinary musical currency is produced, represented, appropriated and received by different groups of people in Shanghai across five distinct historical stages. Cultural appropriation tactics and other relevant theories such as cultural imperialism and post colonialism are also combined to make sense of particular social environment in due course. To put the SSO in C major does not infer that this musical institution and music it performed through all these years are reduced to economic analysis. Nonetheless, the inner value of music itself is highlighted in each historical period. A psychological concept affordance, first applied by Tia DeNora in music sociology, is also integrated to help comprehend how and what Chinese people or the whole nation latched on to certain pieces of music performed at the SSO in different historical phases. Moreover, musicological analysis is carried out in due course to elaborate on the feasibility of, for example, adopting Chinese folk songs to Western classical instruments and creating a hybrid music type during Cultural Revolution. Aesthetic value of music is thus realized in the meantime. Archival research is mostly used in this thesis supplemented by one focus group and one in-depth interview with retired players at the SSO. Fieldwork of this research is mainly based in the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra Archive; although materials from Shanghai Library and Shanghai Municipal Archive are also collected and made use of