Context-awareness in mobile tourist information systems: challenges for user interaction

Context in mobile tourist information systems is typically captured as the current location of the user. Few systems consider the user's interests or wider context of the sights. This paper explores ideas of how to model, observe, evaluate, and exploit a richer notion of context in this application area. We discuss the influence of such a richer context model on the user interaction for both the capturing of context and the context-aware user/device interactions

A Generic Alerting Service for Digital Libraries

Users of modern digital libraries (DLs) can keep themselves up-to-date by searching and browsing their favorite collections, or more conveniently by resorting to an alerting service. The alerting service notifies its clients about new or changed documents. Proprietary and mediating alerting services fail to fluidly integrate information from differing collections. This paper analyses the conceptual requirements of this much-sought after service for digital libraries. We demonstrate that the differing concepts of digital libraries and its underlying technical design has extensive influence (a) the expectations, needs and interests of users regarding an alerting service, and (b) on the technical possibilities of the implementation of the service. Our findings will show that the range of issues surrounding alerting services for digital libraries, their design and use is greater than one may anticipate. We also show that, conversely, the requirements for an alerting service have considerable impact on the concepts of DL design. Our findings should be of interest for librarians as well as system designers. We highlight and discuss the far-reaching implications for the design of, and interaction with, libraries. This paper discusses the lessons learned from building such a distributed alerting service. We present our prototype implementation as a proof-of-concept for an alerting service for open DL software

A distributed alerting service for open digital library software

Alerting for Digital Libraries (DL) is an important and useful feature for the library users. To date, two independent services and a few publisher-hosted proprietary services have been developed. Here, we address the problem of integrating alerting as functionality into open source software for distributed digital libraries. DL software is one application out of many that constitute so-called meta-software: software where its installation determines the properties of the actual running system (here: the Digital Library system). For this type of application, existing alerting solutions are insufficient; new ways have to be found for supporting a fragmented network of distributed digital library servers. We propose the design and usage of a distributed Directory Service. This paper also introduces our hybrid approach using two networks and a combination of different distributed routing strategies for event filtering

A distributed directory service for Greenstone

Greenstone is a software for creating and maintaining distributed digital library collections. It provides a sophisticated federation mechanism for the collections. In order to support alerting notification about changes in the distributed collections, we propose a distributed directory service for the management of the distributed Greenstone installations. The Greenstone directory service (GDS) acts on top of the distributed Greenstone structure for the management of collections. This paper describes both, the initial distributed Greenstone structure and the distributed directory service

Spirochaetal jaundice

The jaundice, which occurred among coal- miners working in certain collieries in East Lothian, was diagnosed clinically by Professor G. Lovell Gulland, and proved bacteriologically by the writer, to be of spirochaetal origin (January 1924).Wild rats and field mice from. the infected mining area were incriminated as carriers of the causal organism in Scotland for the first time (January 1924):..The diagnosis in 22 cases of the disease was based on the combined clinical, laboratory and experimental observations described. In 22, jaundice was a feature. In 1T7, haemorrhage, mainly epistaxis, occurred. In 17, spïrochaetes were found in the urine. Spirochaetal jaundice was produced in two guinea -pigs inoculated with urine from two of the patients, and in eight "spotted" lung haemorrhages were the only signs of infection.The figure for the death rate among coal -miners approximates very closely that reported by Inada in Japan, viz. - 50.6 per cent.The establishment of a diagnosis by means of ,bacteriological procedure was attempted. Blood examination for the spirochaete proved negative in all cases, as did guinea pig inoculations with suspected 1. blood. The urinary examination for the .presence of the spirochaete proved more helpful, but the organism; was never observed under the dark- ground microscope or in stained films in typical form. The results, of guinea pig inoculation with suspected urine containing spirochaetes were very uncertain. The writer is of the opinion, however, that in cases of jaundice in which the clinical signs point to the spirochaetal form,and in the urine of which granular spirochaetes are found, the chain of evidence is strong enough to justify the diagnosis of spirochaetal jaundice.As an aid in diagnosis, serological methods were applied in several cases but without very definite results. No agglutination of the spirochaete was observed when tested with the blood serum of four patients during convalescence, but a lytic action of the serum on the spirochaete was demonstrated in a few instances. The serological aspect of human infection was not studied to any extent owing to the difficulty of obtaining material for this purpose. The writer was instrumental in effecting the pr-eparration of a specific anti-serum from the local strain of the organism. The number of human cases in which it has been used, is too few, however, to state an opinion regarding its efficacy.The chief prophylactic measure is agreed to be rat extermination as far as possible,- and moreover in infected coal-mines, improved drainage7as Inada found that this measure was responsible for a decrease in the incidence of the disease in certain wet mines in Japan. The usual precautions applied to other infectious diseases should also be put into force. Active immunization was established by the Japanese who administered spirochaetal vaccines with very satisfactory results

An individualized psychosocial approach for "treatment resistant" behavioral symptoms of dementia among aged care residents

Background: Behavioral symptoms of dementia are common among residents in mainstream aged care settings, and have a substantial impact on residents and professional caregivers. This study evaluated the impact of individualized psychosocial interventions for behavioral symptoms through a small preliminary study.Method: Interventions were delivered to a patient group of 31 psychogeriatric aged care residents who presented with behavioral symptoms of dementia that had failed to respond to pharmacological treatment approaches. Outcome data on severity of behaviors, health service utilization and staff burden of care were collected.Results: A modest but significant reduction in staff ratings of the severity of aggressive and verbally agitated behavioral symptoms was found, with an associated reduction in their perceptions of the burden of caring for these patients. Reduced behavioral disturbance was associated with a reduction in the requirement for primary care consultations, and all participants were able to continue to reside in mainstream aged care facilities, despite an increase in the severity of dementia.Conclusions: This study supported the use of individualized psychological strategies for behavioral symptoms at all stages of dementia. Methodological limitations of this preliminary study are discussed.<br /

Visual analysis of document triage data

As part of the information seeking process, a large amount of effort is invested in order to study and understand how information seekers search through documents such that they can assess their relevance. This search and assessment of document relevance, known as document triage, is an important information seeking process, but is not yet well understood. Human-computer interaction (HCI) and digital library scientists have undertaken a series of user studies involving information seeking, collected a large amount of data describing information seekers' behavior during document search. Next to this, we have witnessed a rapid increase in the number of off-the-shelf visualization tools which can benefit document triage study. Here we set out to utilize existing information visualization techniques and tools in order to gain a better understanding of the large amount of user-study data collected by HCI and digital library researchers. We describe the range of available tools and visualizations we use in order to increase our knowledge of document triage. Treemap, parallel coordinates, stack graph, matrix chart, as well as other visualization methods, prove to be insightful in exploring, analyzing and presenting user behavior during document triage. Our findings and visualizations are evaluated by HCI and digital library researchers studying this proble

Bankruptcy--Section 70c--Recent Reactions To \u3cem\u3eConstance v. Harvey\u3c/em\u3e

Renewed interest in section 70c has developed recently, primarily because of several significant decisions in the federal courts. It is the purpose of this comment to consider the impact of these developments on the power of the trustee to avoid otherwise valid security devices

The developing vision of tennessee williams

This study traces central themes throughout the main body of Williams\u27 work, shows that there is unity of purpose and a thematically valid reason for the violence and the seeming contradictions in his plays