Designing Against the Status Quo

Community + Culture features practitioner perspectives on designing technologies for and with communities. We highlight compelling projects and provocative points of view that speak to both community technology practice and the interaction design field as a whole

Securing the Next Generation

Weak authentication practices that rely on passwords for security have led to widespread data breaches and successful phishing attacks. Recent advances in the cost and usability of hardware security tokens have made the prospect of effectively augmenting password-based authentication or removing it altogether a possibility. To actualize this, a paradigm change in how people learn to authenticate accounts on-line must occur. Towards this end, we describe a curriculum to teach high-school students the perils of passwords and a program to distribute hardware security tokens to them as they are first setting up their on-line presence in order to improve the security of the next generation

Presence and Engagement in an Interactive Drama

In this paper we present the results of a qualitative, empirical study exploring the impact of immersive technologies on presence and engagement, using the interactive drama Façade as the object of study. In this drama, players are situated in a married couple’s apartment, and interact primarily through conversation with the characters and manipulation of objects in the space. We present participants ’ experiences across three different versions of Façade – augmented reality (AR) and two desktop computing based implementations, one where players communicate using speech and the other using typed keyboard input. Through interviews and observations of players, we find that immersive AR can create an increased sense of presence, confirming generally held expectations. However, we demonstrate that increased presence does not necessarily lead to more engagement. Rather, mediation may be necessary for some players to fully engage with certain interactive media experiences. Author Keywords Virtual or augmented reality experiences, interactive drama

CyberPDX: An Interdisciplinary Professional Development Program for Middle and High School Teachers

CyberPDX is an annual professional development program hosted at Portland State University. Our long-term goal is to broaden participation in cybersecurity. Since 2016, over 70 middle and high school teachers from the Pacific Northwest have participated in the STREAM program, which offers interdisciplinary instruction in programming, cryptography, personal security, policy, literature, and arts. In this poster, we share our interdisciplinary curriculum, present data on short-term impacts, and describe our in-progress work to evaluate the program’s longer term impacts

Hepatitis A Virus Capsid Protein VP1 Has a Heterogeneous C Terminus

Hepatitis A virus (HAV) encodes a single polyprotein which is posttranslationally processed into the functional structural and nonstructural proteins. Only one protease, viral protease 3C, has been implicated in the nine protein scissions. Processing of the capsid protein precursor region generates a unique intermediate, PX (VP1-2A), which accumulates in infected cells and is assumed to serve as precursor to VP1 found in virions, although the details of this reaction have not been determined. Coexpression in transfected cells of a variety of P1 precursor proteins with viral protease 3C demonstrated efficient production of PX, as well as VP0 and VP3; however, no mature VP1 protein was detected. To identify the C-terminal amino acid residue of HAV VP1, we performed peptide sequence analysis by protease-catalyzed [(18)O]H(2)O incorporation followed by liquid chromatography ion-trap microspray tandem mass spectrometry of HAV VP1 isolated from purified virions. Two different cell culture-adapted isolates of HAV, strains HM175pE and HM175p35, were used for these analyses. VP1 preparations from both virus isolates contained heterogeneous C termini. The predominant C-terminal amino acid in both virus preparations was VP1-Ser274, which is located N terminal to a methionine residue in VP1-2A. In addition, the analysis of HM175pE recovered smaller amounts of amino acids VP1-Glu273 and VP1-Thr272. In the case of HM175p35, which contains valine at amino acid position VP1-273, VP1-Thr272 was found in addition to VP1-Ser274. The data suggest that HAV 3C is not the protease responsible for generation of the VP1 C terminus. We propose the involvement of host cell protease(s) in the production of HAV VP1