Socially (un)acceptable

Access to social media sites via public libraries is patchy in Scotland, says Christine Rooney-Browne, and it’s time to bring them all into the world of shared communities

A new method for interacting with multi-window applications on large, high resolution displays

Physically large display walls can now be constructed using off-the-shelf computer hardware. The high resolution of these displays (e.g., 50 million pixels) means that a large quantity of data can be presented to users, so the displays are well suited to visualization applications. However, current methods of interacting with display walls are somewhat time consuming. We have analyzed how users solve real visualization problems using three desktop applications (XmdvTool, Iris Explorer and Arc View), and used a new taxonomy to classify users’ actions and illustrate the deficiencies of current display wall interaction methods. Following this we designed a novel methodfor interacting with display walls, which aims to let users interact as quickly as when a visualization application is used on a desktop system. Informal feedback gathered from our working prototype shows that interaction is both fast and fluid

Blogging: an opportunity for librarians to communicate, participate and collaborate on a global scale

Blogs are an important element of the second generation of the web; or ‘Web 2.0’ as it is commonly referred to. ‘Web 2.0’ refers to the evolution from static "read only" web pages (Web 1.0) to dynamic, interactive pages encouraging users to create, interact and share content across multiple applications (O’Reilly, 2005). Blogging, along with other Web 2.0 technologies such as social networking, wikis, social bookmarking, photo sharing, video sharing, and microblogging, form part of the emergent ‘social media’ family; a collection of online tools that encourage users to communicate, participate, and collaborate on a global scale. Many library and information professionals have embraced blogging as a platform to document their career, enhance their profile, network with other librarians; and share anecdotes about their lives as librarians. The aim of this article is to present a brief overview of the history of blogs and a short review of literature related to blogging, libraries and reference librarians. It will also provide a list of recommended blogs, a discussion of the advantages of reading and writing blogs and some top tips for starting up your own blog

What's Been Happening to Charitable Giving Recently? A Look at the Data

Examines the impact of the recession on giving by individuals, foundations, bequests, and corporations; the effects of tax policy changes on individual giving and bequests; and the potential effects of capping the charitable deduction at 28 percent

Stages of development: remembering old Sydney in Ruth Park\u27s \u27Playing Beatie Bow\u27 and a Companion Guide to Sydney

Ruth Park\u27s Playing Beatie Bow (1980) can easily be read as a bildungsroman, a novel of self-development or apprenticeship. Falling between the child and the Young Adult category, it is the story of an adolescent girl who comes to terms with the part she plays in a family romance. This plot, in keeping with other Oedipal dramas, matches personal development with issues of social, cultural and national importance. However, in tension with this thematic of personal and cultural progression is Park\u27s exploration of the contradictory role that the fetish plays in a female coming-of-age narrative. This essay analyses Park\u27s deployment of the fetish object as a medium that introduces her protagonist to working class life in Old Sydney but, at the same time, points to the unreliability of this form of signification. In doing so, the question of whether Park depicts The Rocks as a stage for a story that mythologises personal, cultural and national origins is explored. Is Playing Beatie Bow another narrative about self and cultural maturation that, via recourse to an Irish working-class history in The Rocks, legitimises colonial and postcolonial desires for belonging? Addressing this question is my reading of the novel as a captivity narrative, as well as a bildungsroman. This essay highlights the role of the female as fetish in the captivity narrative. Contrasting fetishism to other, more institutionalised and enshrined, memorial processes, it contests the notion that authorial fascinations with the colonial past are necessarily concerned with totalising ownership claims and/or revisionist historical practices. Finally, Park\u27s cultural performance as travel writer, in her The Companion Guide to Sydney (1973), is linked to Playing Beatie Bow\u27s deployment of the fetish as an object through which capture of the past is always partial and unreliable

Experiencing visual impairment in a lifetime home: an interpretative phenomenological inquiry

Lifetime home standards (LTHS) are a set of standards aimed at making homes more accessible. Previous research, however, indicates that LTHS do not adequately meet the needs of those with sensory impairments. Now, with visual impairment set to increase globally and acknowledging the recognised link between quality of dwelling and wellbeing, this article aims to examine the experiences of visually impaired people living in lifetime homes. The objectives are to investigate existing lifetime homes and to identify whether LTHS meet occupants’ needs. Qualitative semi-structured interviews were carried out with six visually impaired people living in homes designed to LTHS in Northern Ireland. Collected data was analysed using interpretative phenomenological analysis identifying three super-ordinate themes: (1) living with visual impairment; (2) design considerations and (3) coping strategies. A core theme of balance between psychological and physical needs emerged through interconnection of super-ordinate themes. Although there are benefits to living in lifetime homes, negative aspects are also apparent with occupants employing several coping strategies to overcome difficulties. Whilst residents experience negative emotions following visual impairment diagnoses, results suggest that occupants still regard their homes as key places of security and comfort in addition to then highlighting the need for greater consideration of specific individual needs within general guidelines

Creation and detection of hardware trojans using non-invasive off-the-shelf technologies

As a result of the globalisation of the semiconductor design and fabrication processes, integrated circuits are becoming increasingly vulnerable to malicious attacks. The most concerning threats are hardware trojans. A hardware trojan is a malicious inclusion or alteration to the existing design of an integrated circuit, with the possible effects ranging from leakage of sensitive information to the complete destruction of the integrated circuit itself. While the majority of existing detection schemes focus on test-time, they all require expensive methodologies to detect hardware trojans. Off-the-shelf approaches have often been overlooked due to limited hardware resources and detection accuracy. With the advances in technologies and the democratisation of open-source hardware, however, these tools enable the detection of hardware trojans at reduced costs during or after production. In this manuscript, a hardware trojan is created and emulated on a consumer FPGA board. The experiments to detect the trojan in a dormant and active state are made using off-the-shelf technologies taking advantage of different techniques such as Power Analysis Reports, Side Channel Analysis and Thermal Measurements. Furthermore, multiple attempts to detect the trojan are demonstrated and benchmarked. Our simulations result in a state-of-the-art methodology to accurately detect the trojan in both dormant and active states using off-the-shelf hardwar

INVISQUE as a tool for intelligence analysis: the construction of explanatory narratives

We report an exploratory user-study in which a group of civil servants with experience of, or involvement in, intelligence analysis used the tool INVISQUE to address a problem using the 2011 VAST dataset. INVISQUE uses a visual metaphor that combines searching, clustering and sorting of document surrogates with free-form manipulation on an infinite canvas. We were interested in exposing the behaviours and related cognitive strategies that users would employ to better understand how this and similar environments might better support intelligence type work. Our results include the observation that the search and spatial features of the system supported participants in establishing, elaborating and systematically evaluating explanatory narratives that accounted for the data. Also, visual persistence at the interface allowed them to keep track of searches and to re-find documents when their importance became apparent. We conclude with reflections on our findings and propose a set of guidelines for developing systems that support sensemaking