INTERNET ADDICTION: A REVIEW OF THE FIRST TWENTY YEARS

Easy access to communication and information technologies has increased our dependence on technology for various aspects of our lives. Nevertheless, this remarkable growth of Internet Usage has been inextricably paired with a rise of excessive and dysfunctional Internet use. Conceptualized around 1996, a few years after the inception of the World Wide Web, Internet addiction has developed into a global issue influencing varying segments of the population at different levels. Despite heated debates on its addictive nature, consensus is emerging regarding the existence of this problematic behavior. In this paper we provide a comprehensive overview of the literature on Internet addiction in last 20 years. Purpose of this paper is to present crucial findings on Internet addiction to health profession. Besides numerous benefits of Internet use, the virtual environment brings various risks in every age group. The Internet is very significant in the everyday activities of children and youth and professional interventions with this age group should be specific considering their developmental characteristics. Exposure to online risks can have long-lasting and intense negative effects. Effective programs in prevention and treatment should include a multi-sectoral and interdisciplinary approach. Detail review of the symptomatology, diagnosis model an possibilities of treatment can be multiple beneficial to the health professionals and other helping professions due to actual needs for interventions in the field of the internet addiction treatment. Internet addiction is slowly becoming a societal concern as it particularly affects adolescents and children, who are more exposed and consequently more vulnerable. Findings presented in the paper can benefit in practice of treatment internet addiction and also as framework for further researches in the field

Issues faced by vision-impaired users of interactive TV search facilities

This paper reports two studies of digital television users. The first study investigates the behaviour of non-impaired users to understand typical usage patterns and problem-solving, attempting three representative tasks using a digital television terrestrial receiver. Videos were analysed to identify problem incidents and attempts at recovery. Patterns observed included misidentifying handset menu options leading to extended guessed action, repeated misspecification of task and repeated re-performance to confirm actions. The results show that interaction with Digital TV in its current handset-based form involves considerable reactive action specification and corrective action, suggesting that interaction endemically difficult for those with various levels of low vision. The second study, a less formal probe of users with visual impairments, suggests that even users with relatively mild visual impairments may struggle with current two-device interaction. However, suitable strategies for supporting vision impaired users may as much to do with user preferences rather than simply accessibility. We conclude by discussing the efficacy of current two-device interaction support and possible future directions

TOWARDS THE APPLICATION OF BLOCKCHAIN TECHNOLOGY FOR IMPROVING TRADE FACILITATION IN CEFTA 2006

The benefits and value drivers of customs digitalization are considerable. The key motivation is the efficiency associated with minimizing the cost of managing documents throughout the trade process, including costs associated with the exchange of documents with other countries, as well as the procurement and facilitation of those documents. Since it is of general knowledge that effective trade facilitation signifies reliability and security of the trade transactions we think that blockchain technology may be able to offer a high level of confidence in these areas to both traders and regulators. The proposal presented in this paper is focused on jointly moving all (customs) stakeholders towards a standardized integration of collaborative processes. By investigating blockchain solutions along with technology and standards, we propose a pathway to achieving an international system-to-system integration. Taking into consideration the realization of deeper integration among the countries, especially in the field of trade and digital integration, we try to analyze how blockchain technology can help support that integration. In order to analyze the possible application of this technology for deepening CEFTA integration through enhancing trade facilitation we briefly refer to its’ positive aspects. Instead of developing individual software solutions in CEFTA countries it might be beneficial to move services to a blockchain technology platform. While currently, this might be hindered by local policies, blockchain technology will have its’ influence and application in trade facilitation as it has in many other fields. With full awareness of the possible threats and challenges, it is of the utmost importance to engage in discovering the most compatible pathway to apply this technology in regional trade facilitation and deepen digital integration among CEFTA member countries

The Role of Eye Gaze in Security and Privacy Applications: Survey and Future HCI Research Directions

For the past 20 years, researchers have investigated the use of eye tracking in security applications. We present a holistic view on gaze-based security applications. In particular, we canvassed the literature and classify the utility of gaze in security applications into a) authentication, b) privacy protection, and c) gaze monitoring during security critical tasks. This allows us to chart several research directions, most importantly 1) conducting field studies of implicit and explicit gaze-based authentication due to recent advances in eye tracking, 2) research on gaze-based privacy protection and gaze monitoring in security critical tasks which are under-investigated yet very promising areas, and 3) understanding the privacy implications of pervasive eye tracking. We discuss the most promising opportunities and most pressing challenges of eye tracking for security that will shape research in gaze-based security applications for the next decade

Mashpoint: surfing the web in a data-oriented way

Simple information lookup tasks (e.g. 'What the weather like in London?' or 'What is the population of the UK?'), are currently well supported with traditional search engines, and more recently with intelligent personal assistants. Intensive knowledge tasks, (e.g. 'How do countries with low GDP per capita rank in emigration?'), however, require combining and cross referencing data from multiple sources to get to an answer have typically not been well supported. Our ability to support these types of information tasks on the Web is currently compromised by the inherent document/application nature of the Web itself. End-user mashup tools traditionally approach this problem by assisting users in structuring unstructured content form web pages and then support information-oriented tasks over the structured content. Motivated by the fact that more and more structured data is available on Web pages we investigate another possible solution: how to extend traditional Web navigation, which the majority of end users find intuitive, to include more data-centric behaviour. With mashpoint we propose a simple architecture, which would support an interaction that allows web pages to be linked based on similarities of the entities in their data. Linked in this way, queries that traditionally require the tedious work of joining information form several pages can be performed with simple web-like navigation. The paper focuses on evaluating if the proposed interaction is one that users would be able to understand to execute intensive knowledge tasks. We ran two separate studies: first to explore if the interaction concepts introduced are easily learnable and to gather initial feedback on our prototype, and second to explore design options which can inform how to address discovery challenges when large amount of pages are linked in this way, therefore assessing the feasibility of this model to work on a Web-scale.</p

THE DAY OF THE WEEK EFFECT IN SOUTH EASTERN EUROPE STOCK MARKETS

The main aim of this research is to examine existence of day of the week effect on the stock market indices infive countries from South Eastern Europe (SEE): Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Macedonia and Serbiain the most recent period which is characterized by the bear market (from 2006 to 2011). The methodology used theregression with dummy variables, or so called Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) model. In addition Wald test is applied.The results imply that the mean daily return of the all five SEE indices is negative on Monday. The day of the weekeffect is found only in Croatian and Bulgarian Stock Market. In both stock markets, the mean daily returns of theleading indices are lower on Monday than the other days of the week and the results are statistically significant. Thelower Monday mean daily returns are found also in Macedonian stock exchange index, but the results are notstatistically significant. The mean daily returns of BELEX15 and BIFX indices in Tuesday are lower than mean dailyreturn on Monday, but also without statistical significance

The Effect of Dyadic Interactions on Learning Rotate Gesture for Technology-Naïve Older Adults

Older adults having limited experience with modern computing technology may find it difficult to learn touch gestures, especially the more complex rotate gesture. Social interactions, as implied by social constructivism, are assumed to be powerful in enabling older adults to acquire the skill of touch gestures. The social effect can be reinforced with the motivational effect of digital games. To verify the assumption, we conducted empirical studies with 59 older adults, who were divided into two groups: 17 Singles and 21 Dyads. They were asked to play a set of digital games on a multi-touch tabletop. Results show that on average Dyads have spent significantly longer time in the games and have performed a significantly higher number of correct rotate gestures than Singles. Future work focuses on analyzing the emotional aspect of social interactions and identifying further applications of social gaming to other ageing issues