Media Ecologies

In this chapter, we frame the media ecologies that contextualize the youth practices we describe in later chapters. By drawing from case studies that are delimited by locality, institutions, networked sites, and interest groups (see appendices), we have been able to map the contours of the varied social, technical, and cultural contexts that structure youth media engagement. This chapter introduces three genres of participation with new media that have emerged as overarching descriptive frameworks for understanding how youth new media practices are defi ned in relation and in opposition to one another. The genres of participation—hanging out, messing around, and geeking out—refl ect and are intertwined with young people’s practices, learning, and identity formation within these varied and dynamic media ecologies

The Charming Science of the Other: The cultural analysis of the scientific search for life beyond earth

This dissertation presents the cultural study of scientific search for extraterrestrial life conducted over the past sixty years by the scientific community. It introduces an original piece of research that conceptualises the extraterrestrial life hypothesis as a significant part of the general world-view, constantly shaped by the work and discoveries of science. It sheds light on the ways in which alien life is imagined and theorised and presents its concept in both the scientific community and in popular culture. Drawing from anthropology of science it offers elaboration of ‘culture of science’ and ‘scientific culture’ and describes the scientific search for other life as a specific culture of science, here referred to as ‘charming science’. The three scientific search methods: message sending, analysing of cosmic signals and the search for extrasolar planets are conceptualised as the three search modes: messaging, listening and exploring respectively. This work introduces the extraterrestrial ‘Other’ as a profoundly cultural concept, firstly presented as the missing subject of ‘charming science’. Exploration of public understanding the extraterrestrial life and popular imagination of the ‘Other’ is intended to introduce the scientific search in broader social context and address the role of science in contemporary Western world. The dissertation draws on the multi-sited and multi-method ethnographic fieldwork conducted over two years in the UK. The research methods included interviewing (semi-structured face-to-face interviews and interviews conducted via email), participation (conferences and scientific meetings), and data collection from the global ‘online’ community including social networks

Spartan Daily, February 21, 2002

Volume 118, Issue 20https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/9794/thumbnail.jp

Improving Creativity in Temporary Virtual Teams

We live in an interconnected world in which physical location has become less of a hindrance to communication, yet newer message transmission media alter not only the process but also the content of creative communication. While temporary virtual teams offer alternatives to solve issues which resist resolution using traditional approaches, virtual team characteristics can limit the ability to create novel and useful solutions. Since creativity is a necessary and significant requirement for success across a wide variety of domains, this poses a serious challenge for those intending to improve organizational creativity through the use of virtual teams and exposes the difficulty of studying creativity in a virtual environment. The author creates a modular online research tool to more effectively study how eight characteristics of virtual teams interact to improve or restrict creativity: depersonalization, time pressure, noise, level of organization, degree of autonomy, range of potential solution categories, expectation, clarity of purpose, and potential personal gain. The design and implementation of the virtual creativity research environment are examined and used to research whether it is possible to improve the creativity of ad-hoc online teams. Qualitative analysis of twenty quasi-experimental groups with total 136 participants determined a statistically significant difference between groups with two selected environments, with an effect size over 2.5. While the ability to control individual environmental elements is within the ability of the research tool created in this study, a multivariate analysis of individual elements was outside the scope of this initial study, but is suggested for further research

Spartan Daily, October 31, 2003

Volume 121, Issue 45https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/9911/thumbnail.jp

Spartan Daily, February 7, 1989

Volume 92, Issue 7https://scholarworks.sjsu.edu/spartandaily/7798/thumbnail.jp

Data Aggregation Technique to Provide Security for Wireless Sensor Networks

Due to restricted computational power and energy assets, the aggregation of information from numerous sensor nodes is performed at the aggregating node and is typically done by using basic techniques, for example by averaging. Node compromising attacks more likely occur after such sort of aggregations of data. As wireless sensor networks are generally unattended and do not use any tamper resistant equipment, they are extremely vulnerable to compromising attacks. Therefore, determining the trustworthiness of information and the reputation of sensor hubs is vital for wireless sensor networks. As the execution of low power processors drastically enhances, future aggregator nodes will be equipped for performing more refined information aggregation algorithms, in this way making WSN less vulnerable. WSN stands for Wireless Sensor Networks. For this reason, Iterative algorithms hold high value. These algorithms take the data aggregated from different sources and give a trust appraisal of these sources, generally in the form of comparing weight variables which are given to information obtained from every source. In this paper, we show that few existing iterative filtering calculations, while altogether more vigorous against collusion attacks than the basic averaging methods, are in fact susceptive to a novel refined collusion attack which we launch. To address this security issue, we propose a change for iterative filtering procedures by giving an underlying estimation to such algorithms which make them collusion resistant as well as more precise and faster for merging purposes