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The writing process has traditionally been seen ‘as a lonely journey’ to typify the lack of support that students experience for writing outside the classroom. This paper examines an attempt of The Writing Portal (TWP), a supplementary online writing platform, to support students’ writing needs throughout the five stages of the writing process, viz., planning, drafting, revising, editing, and publishing. Social constructivist principles underpin TWP, which was designed to engender collaboration amongst its student participants. Not only does TWP provide links to evaluated Internet resources and a writing portfolio, but it also features collaboration tools such as the Group Forum, chat, a writing portfolio, a private messaging system, and a comment function for pages or articles created. Thus, it is very much akin to a ‘one-stop centre’ for academic writing within a flexible and supportive environment. In this qualitative case study, 16 third-year TESL pre-service teachers at a Malaysian Teacher Education Institute embarked on a 12-week writing course using TWP. Qualitative data in the form of students’ online discourses, task reflections, log files, and digital artefacts were captured to explore how TWP's affordances supported students’ writing needs. In addition, Soller's collaborative learning conversation skills (CLCS) taxonomy was used as an analytical framework to investigate the collaborative learning engendered in the online environment. The findings indicate that TWP served its purpose by addressing students’ writing needs at all stages of the writing process as they accomplished multiple writing tasks. Additionally, evidence of collaborative learning is evident in three functions of TWP: the Group Forum, chat, and the comments for pages/articles. However, there are differences between the frequencies of the specific skills used for each function. To conclude, TWP appears to be a successful tool at supporting students at all stages of the writing process. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although China has a long history of cartography and map collections, the condition of China's map collections and accessibility to geographic and digital data is still unknown to world counterparts. This paper discusses the paper and digital map collections situation in China from the perspective of multiple collections and from sharing services. Paper map collections are introduced through a survey and analysis of the National Library of China, Peking University Library, and Beijing Normal University Library. Dynamic map service Web sites and the related Web infrastructure are introduced as being representative of digital map collections in China. The Data Sharing Platform of Earth System Science (DSPESS) of the National Science and Technology Infrastructure of China, which has operated for more than ten years, is used as a case study to analyze digital map data sets sharing and services. Digital map data collection characteristics, the data sharing policy, user distribution, and the stewardship staff of DSPESS are analyzed. We also present challenges and potential demands facing China's map data collection and sharing services from the perspectives of a sharing mechanism, financial support, technical challenges, and allocation of professional staff resources. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Kim White and Sarah Townsend created the End[of] Paper blog while preparing for their panel on "Electronic Book Technologies." In their blog they discussed innovations in creative-critical works, reference works; mass market publications; electronic textbooks; ephemera; and collaborative constructions. They also discussed issues of preservation; standardization; and literacy. Fittingly, their paper was presented in blog format. Exemplary texts from each category were presented. Links to many of these texts as well as the text of the presentation itself can he found on the blog website "End [of] Paper" www. endofpaper. blogspot.com. To accompany your web journey, we are including a bibliography of related electronic resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a lack of empirical research in the use of computers in assessment. A study was conducted to compare student performance in computerized and paper-and-pen multiple-choice tests and assess the extent and effect of 'computer anxiety'. The LXR.TEST 5.1 software was used for the computerized test. A validated rating scale was used to assess computer anxiety. Most students had little computer experience other than in word processing. Only about a third of the students had moderate to mild computer anxiety. Neither computer experience nor anxiety correlated significantly with performance in the computer test. Whereas students performed significantly better in the paper test than in the computer test, there was no statistical difference in ranking in the two assessments formats. This suggests that computer-based assessment could be used with confidence for the purposes of ranking students, but care should be taken in using it for grading. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An introduction is presented in which the editor discusses various reports within the issue on topics including anatomised computer-assisted language learning, use of the Writing Portal online writing platform by language students, and teaching English language to Korean students.

The paper presents the results of a quasi-experimental study which was conducted with a view to determining the effect of an intervention in the form of the application of teacher-designed Internet-based resources (i.e., websites, podcasts, movie clips) that students could use autonomously on the development of pronunciation of the English regular past tense -ed ending. The sample consisted of 45 Polish secondary school learners. Participants were divided into three groups, two treatment and one control. The intervention spanned two weeks. The lessons in treatment group 1 were conducted by means of online resources and those in treatment group 2 were carried out in a traditional way (i.e., without autonomous recourse to computer-assisted pronunciation teaching). The students in the control group did not receive any instruction related to the pronunciation feature in question over that time. The data were gathered by means of perception and production tests administered before (pretest) and after (immediate and delayed posttests) the treatment, and subjected to quantitative analysis. The results, supported by the participants' evaluation of the two types of pedagogic intervention, indicate that although the effects of the experimental treatments proved to be comparable, the use of online resources produced more durable gains and was more favorably evaluated by learners. This provides a rationale for using computer technology as a tool for enhancing traditional teaching of English pronunciation in secondary school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reviews the web site Medical Teachers from the medical associations.

In 1997, the recently appointed French Prime Minister Lionel Jospin took a firm stance in favor of the Internet and announced an ambitious program to develop information technology and networks. In a country characterized by the lingering presence of the Minitel and bureaucratic reluctance to Internet solutions, this allocution, referred as the Hourtin speech, has been acknowledged as a turning-point in French internet policies. However, little is known about the dynamics that made such a statement possible. Based on interviews and personal archive of key actors, this paper offers to investigate the administrative and political processes that enabled such a change of position at the highest level of the State. While the role played by civil servants or government officials in promoting the development of the Internet in France has often been overlooked in internet histories, we offer new insight on the political work and administrative mobilizations that contributed to the diffusion of internet solutions and more broadly, to the advent of a digital revolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the experiences of Filipino workers recruited for technology and communications work by international aid agencies involved in the Typhoon Haiyan response. Filipino workers, many of whom were personally coping with the social and economic impact of this disaster, were hired on short-term contracts to test and implement various digital humanitarian innovations such as feedback and hazard mapping technological platforms. These workers were doubly marginalized: first, as tech workers whose work was viewed by aid officers on the ground as less substantial than that of food or shelter programs; and second, as local voices often drowned out by national and international colleagues. Moving beyond the usual figure of the cosmopolitan and adventure-seeking Western humanitarian acting on distant suffering, this paper draws attention to local aid workers’ aspirations for personal and professional mobility as they seize novel opportunities opened up by the digital humanitarian agenda. It outlines how the digital humanitarian project’s ambition to facilitate the inclusion of disaster-affected communities is fundamentally undermined by labor arrangements that doubly marginalize local aid workers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

On the occasion of Shakespeare's death 400 years ago and given his affinity to the "common people", the question is raised of the survival of his vocabulary in English dialect words as represented by Joseph Wright's English Dialect Dictionary (EDD; 1898-1905), which is still the best source on the areal distribution of dialect in the UK and overseas from 1700 to 1904, with some likelihood of validity even today. With the help of software recently launched (EDD Online), this paper counts the Shakespeare words that survived in English dialects, and records their distribution across works, time and place. The results generally testify to their ubiquity in the dialects of the UK and most English-speaking overseas countries, but also reveal reliefs across historical periods and countries. As a by-effect, the paper familiarises readers with some of the fascinating research possibilities provided by the EDD Online interface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally, distance students have completed their re- search in an electronic environment and off-campus librarians have strived to meet the needs of these students using a variety of methods. Today our students are familiar with the Web as a medium of interaction, and library usage has changed as a result of electronic services on the Internet. Given the dramatic increase in usage of our Off-Campus Library Services' Web site, a survey was conducted to determine whether the content of the site and the services offered were simple and useful to our users. This paper presents the results of the survey as well as a discussion of the changes to the site as a result of feedback from students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographic information system (GIS) users rely heavily on the versatile operations of GIS software and the abundant variety of geospatial data from different resources to satisfy their application requirements. However, the convenient use of GIS software has resulted in users easily ignoring the threat of data misuse because of the lack of understanding of data quality. Here we argue that data quality considerations must be coherently assimilated into the GIS operation design to visually present helpful information and ensure the accuracy of data for decision making. Data completeness is selected in this paper to demonstrate how the use of data quality information opens a new dimension to the design of future GIS software. We propose a new model for the representation, analysis, and visualization of data completeness information. With the brand new quantitative measures and informative visual approach, understanding of the data completeness of the illustrated contents in the map interface is enhanced, and inappropriate dataset selection can be effectively prevented. Thus, this paper presents an innovative, integrated and geospatial concept of future GIS operation design, where users are constantly aware of the continuously changing status of data quality based on formalized and quantitative data quality theories. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In English as a second language (ESL) writing pedagogy, much attention has been given to electronic portfolio (e-portfolio) assessment via social networking sites. However, little is known about how Facebook can be used as an e-portfolio platform. Hence, this paper describes the impact of Facebook-based e-portfolio on ESL students’ writing practices and the challenges they encountered in implementing this type of e-portfolio. For this purpose, 171 first-year university students completed a 15-item self-report questionnaire and provided details on the problems they encountered during the e-portfolio implementation. Results indicate that Facebook-based e-portfolio had a positive impact on students’ writing practices, making it a viable tool for e-portfolio assessment. Nevertheless, some challenges and suggestions for future implementation were reported. The paper concludes with implications for writing assessment practices and future studies. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Kernel Density Estimation (KDE) is an important approach to analyse spatial distribution of point features and linear features over 2-D planar space. Some network-based KDE methods have been developed in recent years, which focus on estimating density distribution of point events over 1-D network space. However, the existing KDE methods are not appropriate for analysing the distribution characteristics of certain kind of features or events, such as traffic jams, queue at intersections and taxi carrying passenger events. These events occur and distribute in 1-D road network space, and present a continuous linear distribution along network. This paper presents a novel Network Kernel Density Estimation method for Linear features (NKDE-L) to analyse the space–time distribution characteristics of linear features over 1-D network space. We first analyse the density distribution of each linear feature along networks, then estimate the density distribution for the whole network space in terms of the network distance and network topology. In the case study, we apply the NKDE-L to analyse the space–time dynamics of taxis’ pick-up events, with real road network and taxi trace data in Wuhan. Taxis’ pick-up events are defined and extracted as linear events (LE) in this paper. We first conduct a space–time statistics of pick-upLEin different temporal granularities. Then we analyse the space–time density distribution of the pick-up events in the road network using the NKDE-L, and uncover some dynamic patterns of people’s activities and traffic condition. In addition, we compare the NKDE-L with quadrat method and planar KDE. The comparison results prove the advantages of the NKDE-L in analysing spatial distribution patterns of linear features in network space. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Geoportals have been widely implemented by national spatial data infrastructures (NSDI) to provide users with the ability to search for geospatial resources over the Internet. This paper proposes an approach that can improve the functionalities of the conventional geoportals by adding recommendation capabilities to the execution mechanisms of geoportals. The geoportals with recommendation capability are able to analyse users' activities and recommend geospatial resources to users based on their desires and preferences. A hybrid recommendation mechanism based on the singular value decomposition (SVD) method is developed to provide required prediction and recommendation capabilities. Spatial attributes of geospatial resources along with users' characteristics are utilised to improve the quality of the recommendations. To evaluate the feasibility of the proposed approach, a prototype system was developed and implemented. The results show that the recommender geoportal can relatively predict users' desires and preferences and provide them with useful geospatial resources. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online petitions are an important feature of contemporary political engagement in advanced democracies. In this paper we report on a unique data set - covering a five year period and over 17,000 petitions - documenting the development of the Change.org platform in Australia. Australia presents an interesting case as, until very recently, there was no national government hosted online petition site. Our analysis results in three findings that advance scholarship on online petitions. First, we find the majority of petitions are in fact targeted at government, and that their issue area is of a political nature. Second, we find that most signers of petitions sign a single petition - they are not serial participants. Finally, we show that ‘super users’ of the online petition system engage broadly as well as often. Together these findings demonstrate that online petition creation and signing - even on commercial platforms - is a distinct and important part of citizen engagement in politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents data from the analyses of political party web pages during the 2009 European Parliament elections in Estonia. It examines the presence and absence of web 2.0 features on the sites and aims to find out whether interactivity-based applications are used by parties to increase participation and to foster deliberative politics. Estonia as a small ex-Soviet country has emerged after the Soviet Union collapse as one of the most advanced e-societies in the world. Therefore, Estonia is chosen as a case study to explore whether and how decision makers use web 2.0 elements for fostering Habermasian dialogue between the citizens and the power holders in the society where technical obstacles for deliberative politics do not exist any longer. The results show that the Estonian parties still focus on the one-sided or top-down model of communication, based on web 1.0 features, even though all conditions for deliberation from the technical and infrastructural side in Estonia are fulfilled. The paper concludes with a discussion on the possible reasons parties might not be interested in using web 2.0 elements in their web campaign and how it might be linked to the conditions where citizens’ participation and interest in politics is low. There is also emphasis on the need for further systematic comparative research in order to draw conclusions on the changes in the online campaigning and political communication process in the era of cyber-democracy. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Traffic collision analysis is essential for reducing traffic injuries. While most traditional approaches focus on the time dimension of traffic collisions, the recent past has witnessed a growing awareness of the spatial dimension in a geographical context. In this paper, 70 studies on the application of GIS to the spatial analysis of traffic collisions are reviewed. The purpose of the paper is to provide a systematic analysis of the major advancements in applied GIS for studying traffic collisions in space since the mid-1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Laboratories are generally regarded as critical to engineering education, and yet educational institutions face significant challenges in developing and maintaining high-quality laboratory facilities. Remote laboratories are increasingly being explored as a partial solution to this challenge, with research showing that – for the right learning outcomes – they can be viable adjuncts or alternatives to conventional hands-on laboratories. One consequential opportunity arising from the inherent support for distributed access is the possibility of cross-institutional shared facilities. While both technical feasibility and pedagogic implications of remote laboratories have been well studied within the literature, the organisational and logistical issues associated with shared facilities have received limited consideration. This paper uses an existing national-scale laboratory sharing initiative, along with a related survey and laboratory sharing data, to analyse a range of factors that can affect engagement in laboratory sharing. The paper also discusses the implications for supporting ongoing laboratory sharing. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Since the beginnings of Islam, awqāf or religious endowments have been the medium through which various public services (i.e. schools, hospitals, and mosques) have been provided to communities. Historically, endowments were both insulated from state authority and an emanation of imperial and/or state power. Modern day Muslim scholars have taken a renewed interest in waqf, particularly as Muslim societies look to revive those indigenous institutions which promote cultural sustainability. This paper examines perceptions of the role of waqf in Muslim society as evidenced in current online fatāwā and writings by Muslim scholars. These sources are drawn from English-medium, Muslim web organizations and sites which have particular appeal among Muslims living in the West. This literature propagates a historical narrative of waqf which highlights the institution's moral significance, civic identity, and economic efficiency, and plays down its pre-nineteenth-century links to state power and its potential inefficiency. According to modern day scholars, endowments, with the proper legal framework in place, can promote civil society and sustainability. In a bid to examine these issues, the paper analyzes how online sources address the historical development of waqf and legal mechanisms shaping the regulation of endowments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the problem of partitioning an individual GPS trajectory data into homogeneous, meaningful segments such as stops and trips. Signal loss and signal noise are highly prevalent in human trajectory data, and it is challenging to deal with uncertainties in segmentation algorithms. We propose a new trajectory segmentation algorithm that detects stop segments in a noise-robust manner from GPS data with time gaps. The algorithm consists of three steps that impute time gaps, split data into base segments and estimate states over a base segment. The state-dependent path interpolation was proposed as a framework for gap imputation to deal with locational and temporal uncertainties associated with signal loss. A spatiotemporal clustering-based trajectory segmentation was proposed to detect spatiotemporal clusters of any shape regardless of density to cut a trajectory into internally similar base segments. Fuzzy inference was employed to deal with borderline cases in determining states over base segments based on input features. The proposed algorithm was applied to detect stop/move episodes from raw GPS trajectories that were collected from 20 urban and 19 suburban participants. Sensitivity analysis was conducted to guide the choice of parameters such as the temporal and spatial definitions of a stop. Experimentation results show that the proposed method correctly identified 92% of stop/move episodes, and correctly estimated 98% of episode duration. This study indicates that a sequence of state-dependent gap imputation, clustering-based data segmentation and fuzzy-set-based state estimation can satisfactorily deal with uncertainty in processing human GPS trajectory data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite both scholarly and popular claims that citizen journalism (CJ) represents a growing democratizing force in the journalistic field, recent scholarship in the area has noted the decline of the organizational population of CJ. In this paper, we investigate how individual characteristics of sites and the dynamics of larger organizational population affect a CJ site’s risk of experiencing a mortality. Drawing on the largest sample to date of US-based English-language CJ sites, this study examines the risk of site mortality through an event history framework. Findings indicate that the strongest predictor of a site’s mortality is the age of the site, consistent with organizational population theory’s ‘liability of newness.’ We also find that for-profit and community-based sites have lower rates of site mortality, indicating that adopting legitimate conventions of journalism may serve as a protective buffer to site death. The results offer mixed evidence on whether CJ has become more professionalized via attrition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the development of a Dutch online programme called Long Live Love+ focusing on positive, coercion-free relationships, contraception use, and the prevention of STIs, using the Intervention Mapping (IM) approach. All six steps of the approach were followed. Step 1 confirmed the need for a sexual health programme targeting young people aged 15 and over enrolled in higher level secondary education. Step 2 resulted in the production of a series of matrices-of-changes, including detailed programme objectives at the behavioural and the psycho-social level. Step 3 involved the selection of relevant methods and applications. Step 4 consisted of programme development, resulting in a sexual health programme with online and offline components, and including interactive exercises. Step 5 focused on adoption and implementation and included the production of a detailed teacher manual. Step 6 involved detailed planning for the process and effect evaluation and included interviews with teachers and focus group discussions with students to evaluate their experiences of the programme. The inclusion of a linkage group – and especially the inclusion of teachers in the development of the programme – turned out to be essential in terms of developing a programme in line with their context and needs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past decade there is a growing concern about how state governments could exert political control upon the Internet system. Most explanations on Internet control point to the authoritarian nature of political system. It is true that in general Internet control practices are more evident in politically closed regimes and less so in fully liberal democracies. A clear match between the level of democracy and the degree of Internet freedom, however, could hardly be found in the middle of political regime continuum that contains various sorts of hybrid polities. This paper tries to look beyond the regime factor and identify the major determinants that shape Internet control outcomes in competitive (yet not fully democratic) political systems. It chooses to investigate three Southeast Asian countries, Malaysia, Thailand, and Indonesia, which constitute a clear mismatch between their regime types and the level of Internet control. Pointing out the indeterminacy of regime type, this paper constructs an alternative model that addresses the intensity of online transgressiveness and the capacity of online civil society. While online transgressiveness propels governments to seek Internet control strategies, online civil society represents an inhibiting force, the cohesiveness of which determines the extent to which societal resistance against Internet censorship might succeed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In these early years of the twenty-first century, we must look at how the truly cross-cutting information technology supports other innovations, and how it will fundamentally change the information positions of government, private sector and the scientific domain as well as the citizen. In those positions, location will be a prominent linking pin. The classical top-down system architectures of information exchange will be diluted by peer-to-peer and bottom-up channels, forcing us to rethink their designs. We should not only focus on better architectures, but need to attend to a different economy of information exchange, in which the ‘client’ is not only the information sink, but has become an important source as well. The laws of this rising ‘infoconomy’ have yet to be settled on. This special issue on ‘Digital Earth Applications: Technological design and organizational strategies’ brings together a number of papers that shed light on this future information ecosystem in which location-specific information will be exchanged between stakeholders. The introduction presents a framework that combines geoinformation streams and organisations brokering between government, science, private sector and citizens. This novel framework helps us improve the appreciation of those papers. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Objective. While there have been several reviews exploring the outcomes of various eHealth studies, none have been gastroenterology-specific. This paper aims to evaluate the research conducted within gastroenterology which utilizes internet-based eHealth technology to promote physical and psychological well-being. Material and methods. A systematic literature review of internet-based eHealth interventions involving gastroenterological cohorts was conducted. Searched databases included: EbSCOhost Medline, CINAHL, and PsycINFO. Inclusion criteria were studies reporting on eHealth interventions (both to manage mental health problems and somatic symptoms) in gastroenterology, with no time restrictions. Exclusion criteria were non-experimental studies, or studies using only email as primary eHealth method, and studies in language other than English. Results. A total of 17 papers were identified; seven studies evaluated the efficacy of a psychologically oriented intervention (additional two provided follow-up analyses exploring the original published data) and eight studies evaluated disease management programs for patients with either irritable bowel syndrome, inflammatory bowel disease (IBD) or celiac disease. Overall, psychological eHealth interventions were associated with significant reductions in bowel symptoms and improvement in quality of life (QoL) that tended to continue up to 12 months follow up. The eHealth disease management was shown to generally improve QoL, adherence, knowledge about the disease, and reduce healthcare costs in IBD, although the studies were associated with various methodological problems, and thus, this observation should be confirmed in well-designed interventional studies. Conclusions. Based on the evidence to date, eHealth internet-based technology is a promising tool that can be utilized to both promote and enhance gastrointestinal disease management and mental health. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the design community, while a number of studies that have focused on studying product reviews in various design analysis perspectives, contextual annotation of identified terms (e.g. product features) has not been fully explored. This paper proposed a learnable approach towards discovering contextual tags from product reviews. A ranking algorithm, FacetRank, is proposed to rank important key terms along with an approach to discover contextual annotation of the terms from review documents. The evaluation of our proposal is performed using two annotated corpus to examine our algorithm's contextual tagging performance. A case study using a small collection of laptop reviews is also reported to showcase how our algorithm can be applied towards product feature understanding and multi-faceted product ontology development. Finally, we conclude this paper with some indications for future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Today, open systems are needed for real time analysis and warnings on geo-hazards and over time can be achieved using Open Source Geographical Information System (GIS)-based platform such as GeoNode which is being contributed to by developers around the world. To develop on an open source platform is a very vital component for better disaster information management as far as spatial data infrastructures are concerned and this would be extremely vital when huge databases are to be created and consulted regularly for city planning at different scales, particularly satellite images and maps of locations. There is a big need for spatially referenced data creation, analysis, and management. Some of the salient points that this research would be able to definitely contribute with GeoNode, being an open source platform, are facilitating the creation, sharing, and collaborative use of geospatial data. The objective is development of an automated natural hazard zonation system with Internet-short message service (SMS) warning utilizing geomatics for sustainable societies. A concept of developing an internet-resident geospatial geohazard warning system has been put forward in this research, which can communicate alerts via SMS. There has been a need to develop an automated integrated system to categorize hazard and issue warning that reaches users directly. At present, no web-enabled warning system exists which can disseminate warning after hazard evaluation at one go and in real time. The objective of this research work has been to formalize a notion of an integrated, independent, generalized, and automated geo-hazard warning system making use of geo-spatial data under popular usage platform. In this paper, a model of an automated geo-spatial hazard warning system has been elaborated. The functionality is to be modular in architecture having GIS-graphical user interface (GUI), input, understanding, rainfall prediction, expert, output, and warning modules. A simplified but working prototype of the system without the GIS-GUI module has been already tested, validated, and reported. Through this paper, a significantly enhanced system integrated with webenabled- geospatial information has been proposed, and it can be concluded that an automated hazard warning system has been conceptualized and researched. However, now the scope is to develop it further. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines patterns of political activity and campaigning onTwitterin the context of the 2012 election in the Australian state of Queensland. Social media have been a visible component of political campaigning in Australia at least since the 2007 federal election, withTwitter, in particular, rising to greater prominence in the 2010 federal election. At state level, however, they have remained comparatively less important thus far. In this paper, uses ofTwitterin the Queensland campaign from its unofficial start in February through to the election day of 24 March 2012 are tracked. Using innovative methodologies for analysing Twitter activities, developed by the research team, this study examines the overall patterns of activity in the relevant hashtag #qldvotes, and tracks specific interactions between politicians and other users by following some 80 Twitter accounts of sitting members of parliament and alternative candidates. Such analysis provides new insights into the different approaches to social media campaigning which were embraced by specific candidates and party organizations, as well as an indication of the relative importance of social media activities, at present, for state-level election campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Advances in digital technology have made the recent past seem like a foreign country. Media historians did things very differently in 2002. In the last decade, hundreds of historical newspapers and periodicals have been digitised and made available to researchers via online archives. Whilst the emergence of these resources has generated contrasting responses from historians, an increasing number of researchers are now embracing the new methodological possibilities created by keyword-searchable digital archives. As the first examples of this scholarship begin to appear on the horizon, this paper considers whether media history is on the cusp of a ‘digital turn’. It outlines the existing responses to digital methodologies, deconstructs digital newspapers in order to explore how they differ from their paper originals and uses case studies drawn from my own research into the late-Victorian transatlantic press to demonstrate how new methodologies might be applied. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper presents an analysis of how volunteerism can neutralize impulses for mobilization. An ethnographic case study of shelter animal advocates, or individuals promoting shelter reform to ensure that companion animals impounded at animal shelters receive proper medical and behavioral care and are given opportunity for adoption, illuminates a specific set of mechanisms that explain why they have not engaged in collective action such as protest. The findings speak to the complex debate about the relationship between volunteerism, political engagement, and social change by identifying five processes that undercut shelter animal advocates’ capacity to act collectively in protest of how the shelter is run: (1) periods of grievance interruption; (2) exposure to the target’s institutional narratives; (3) relational ties to the target; (4) conflict avoidance; and (5) maintenance of identity as volunteers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a revolution taking place in teacher/learner/technology relations. At primary, secondary and tertiary education levels, teachers and students are being confronted by new technologies, new pedagogies, new relationships in teacher-student roles, as well as reconsiderations about how information is to be learned. The growth of information technology and its permeation into schools and universities and in the wider world for adults and older people, is quickly becoming ubiquitous. At the same time, and again at all levels, education for relationships, gender, sexuality and reproductive health has never been more urgently needed. Universities provide pre-service teacher education, but very few include courses on learning and teaching in sexuality education. This paper aims to provide an analysis of whether sexuality education pedagogies, using MOOCs (Massive Open Online Courses), might enhance or detract from competent, in-person delivery of professional quality sexuality education, to people of all ages. Possible advantages and/or disadvantages that characterise MOOCs are identified for the teaching and learning of sexuality education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

New theoretical approaches to the state have posed challenges for the comparative analysis of the organizational features of states. The analysis of state bodies and state agencies has largely been confined to the sub-discipline of public administration, and has been resistant to the systematic classification that has made progress possible in other areas of comparative politics. This article argues that there is much to be gained by reconceptualizing state bodies in a comparative context. This paper profiles the classification system underlying the construction of the Irish State Administration Database (ISAD). This paper sets out a new approach to conceptualizing the organizational and functional features of states. ISAD not only provides a valuable research resource for work on the Irish state, but also can provide a framework for building a comparative research agenda. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This paper provides a review of multimodal biometric person authentication systems. The paper begins with an introduction to biometrics, its advantages, disadvantages, and authentication system using them. A brief discussion on the selection criteria of different biometrics is also given. This is followed by a discussion on the classification of biometric systems, their strengths, and limitations. Detailed descriptions on the multimodal biometric person authentication system, different modes of operation, and integration scenarios are also provided. Considering the importance of information fusion in multi-biometric approach, a separate section is dedicated on the different levels of fusion, which include sensor-level, feature-level, score-level, rank-level, and abstract-level fusions, and also different rules of fusion. This paper also presents an overview of some performance parameters and error rates for biometric person authentication systems. A separate section is devoted to the recent trends in biometrics field, namely, adaptive biometric system, analysis of complementary and supplementary information, and physiological biometrics. The paper concludes with a discussion on the issues that are currently holding the deployment of multimodal biometric person authentication systems and a possible scope for future work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective. To conduct an audit of the Omniview-SisPorto® central monitoring station (CMS) and determine the effect of the measures undertaken to correct identified problems. Methods. All cardiotocograms (CTGs) recorded in randomly selected days of 2006 and 2009, both in the outpatient clinic and labor ward, were reviewed to assess the following parameters: tracing identification, duration, signal quality, signal loss, acquisition method, and time elapsed between tracing-end and birth. A random sample of cases was compared with original paper recordings and 25%% of CTGs were re-retrieved for comparison with first retrieval. Results. Antepartum tracings were identified in 92%% of cases. Mean signal quality rose from 96.4%% in 2006 to 97.1%% in 2009 ( p == 0.009). Mean signal loss fell from 7.4%% to 5.8%% ( p == 0.012). Intrapartum CTGs were identified in 44%% of cases in 2006 and in 69%% in 2009 ( p < 0.001). Mean interval between tracing-end and birth decreased from 12.0 to 8.4 min ( p < 0.001). Coincidence of variables in tracings retrieved twice increased between 2006 and 2009. All retrieved tracings matched the original paper recordings. Several technical problems identified in 2006 were not found in 2009. Conclusions. The Omniview-SisPorto® system showed reliable recording, storage, and retrieval of CTGs. Auditing of fetal CMSs allows improvement of their performance and use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet has become a venue for men who have sex with men to search for sexual partners. Some of these men intentionally seek unprotected anal intercourse with other men ('bareback' sex). This paper focuses on the creation, use, and content of Internet personal profiles of men who have sex with men in the greater New York City metropolitan area who use bareback sites for sexual networking. We used a mixed-methods approach to examine data from a cybercartography of Internet sites conducted during the first phase of the research (199 personal profiles) and from in-depth interviews conducted during its second phase (120 men who have sex with men who sought partners online for bareback sex). Results indicate that men generally followed offline stereotypical patterns in their online profiles. However, men who disclosed being HIV-positive were more likely to include face and head pictures. Overall, the images they used were heavily sexualised in accordance with group norms perceived and reinforced by the websites' design and imagery. Bottom-identified men tended to be more explicit in the exposition of their sexual and drug use interests online. This paper highlights how certain virtual and social performances play upon and reinforce other, in the flesh, performances. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The rapid development in Internet technology and its big popularity has led some universities around the world to incorporate web-based learning in some of their programmes. The present paper introduces a comprehensive survey of the publications about using remote laboratories in electrical engineering education. Remote laboratories are web-based, real-time laboratories that enable students to measure and control the measurements remotely in their own time. The survey highlights the features of many recent remote laboratories and demonstrates the software and networking technologies used. The paper provides a comprehensive overview on several aspects related to remote laboratories development. The paper concentrates on the publications appearing during the last decade. The review is arranged according to the area of specialisation, then chronologically. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Keeping in mind the potential consequences that digital communication may hold for democratic societies, this research focuses on better understanding the web presence of UK youth organizations. It is interesting to examine how such organizations tie their theoretical conception of citizenship (their ‘offline’ philosophy) to the choices they make about web presence (their ‘online’ structure). Web presence – in this case, websites but also the use of Web 2.0 applications – can aim to provide information and promote participation, but can also encourage a particular view of citizenship and use certain forms of communication to advance this view. This paper focuses on seven youth organizations that embrace either a more conventional or non-conventional view of citizenship and have expanded their web presence from a dedicated website into Web 2.0, particularly social networking sites. First, I will summarize interview findings with web producers to better understand the philosophy behind web presence of the youth organization, along with a look at official website content. Second, I will provide a first look at how such organizations have adapted to Web 2.0, specifically via Facebook and Twitter. This paper contributes to an understanding of how online spaces and in particular the adaptation to Web 2.0 reflect offline views towards citizenship, a particularly important focus in an environment of increasing concern as to how to reach youth via technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses a fundamental empirical question using data collected in a northeastern US city: does deliberation occur in online forums? While face-to-face deliberation is well documented, there are few empirical studies that address its online counterpart. Deliberation is supposed to foster an educative, rational, open and inclusive dialogue that leads to legitimate policy outcomes. In this paper, the authors develop and operationalize a measure of deliberation in order to investigate the extent to which it is manifested online. In particular, the authors study five regionally defined web forums hosted by the primary newspaper of a mid-sized northeastern US city. Drawing a two-week sample of posts from these forums, the authors then examine them for indicators of deliberation. Firstly, this paper addresses research about if and how the internet affects social life, including traditional notions of deliberation. Next, the authors argue that sociological studies of democratic participation require conceptualization of lived deliberation, and outline a Symbolic Interactionist approach to studying online, deliberative interaction in order to do so. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of this work for future theory and empirical investigation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following offers an overview of what it means for cities to be 'smart.' It draws the supporting definitions and critical insights into smart cities from a series of papers presented at the 2009 Trans-national Conference on Creating Smart(er) Cities. What the papers all have in common is their desire to overcome the all too often self-congratulatory nature of the claims cities make to be smart and their over-reliance on a distinctively entrepreneurial route to smart cities. Individually, they serve to highlight the major challenges cities face in their drive to become smart. Collectively they begin to uncover what it means for cities to be smart. Together the papers offer an alternative route to smart cities laid down by those advocating a more neo-liberal roadmap, rooted in a critically aware knowledge-base and more realistic understanding of what it means for cities to be smart(er). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper examines the IntelCities Community of Practice (CoP) supporting the development of the organization's capacity-building, co-design, monitoring, and evaluation of e-government services. It begins by outlining the IntelCities CoP and goes on to set out the integrated model of electronically enhanced government (e-government) services developed by the CoP to build the capacity to co-design, monitor, and evaluate the IntelCities' e-Learning platform, knowledge-management system, and digital library. The paper goes on to examine the information technology (IT) underlying this set of semantically interoperable e-government services supporting the crime, safety, and security initiatives of socially-inclusive and participatory urban regeneration programs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although overweight and obese individuals are turning to Internet communities for social support for weight loss, there is no validated online instrument for measuring the subjective social support experiences of participants in these communities. The authors' objective was to determine whether an online version of a validated paper questionnaire, the Weight Management Support Inventory, is appropriate for measuring social support among members of Internet weight loss communities. The authors administered the paper and online versions of the questionnaire in random, counterbalanced fashion to 199 members of a large Internet weight loss community. Scores for the paper and online versions were comparable in between-subjects and within-subjects comparisons. Convergent validity is suggested by the finding that participants who posted messages on Internet forums several times per day reported more social support than those who posted less frequently. However, the instrumental (tangible) support items did not load significantly on the instrumental support factor, suggesting that instrumental support is not relevant to the social support exchanged among participants in these communities. The authors conclude that the online, modified Weight Management Support Inventory, without items for instrumental support, is an appropriate instrument for measuring social support for weight loss among members of Internet weight loss communities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a case study oral history project involving high school students who interview elders and publish in full text and full digital video on a public Web site, www.tellingstories.org. Telling Their Stories: Oral History Archives Project (OHAP) is a combination of a high school elective history course at The Urban School of San Francisco, a digital video oral history production protocol, a public Web site, and a growing collaboration with other educational institutions from around the country. Students learn oral history technique, conduct two-hour long video-recorded interviews, complete the transcription, edit movies, and publish to the OHAP Web site. Most OHAP interviews deal with witnesses of key twentieth century events involving acts of discrimination, including survivors, witnesses and liberators of the Nazi Holocaust, Japanese American internees, and elders involved in the southern Civil Rights Movement. The paper also examines the preparation and efficacy of student-conducted oral histories via the OHAP model. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The appearance of the semantic web has caused an ever-increasing use of ontologies as formal tools to represent knowledge explicitly in various applications. Since data integration is an essential part of information systems, ontology alignment is becoming more important in the web world. Moreover, applications on the web such as agents need to fuse information automatically and on-the-fly. This paper presents a methodology to automate spatial ontology alignment. In this paper, linguistic scales and extensional information of ontologies as demonstrators of concept semantics along with the structural information of ontologies are used to discover semantic correspondences in a new way. A procedure to compose results from extensional and intensional approaches is presented and error sources and fusion issues are highlighted. The methodology is tested on a case study, which is related to two ontologies containing road data. The results of the ontology alignment indicate a precision of 0.81, and a recall of 0.7. Such achievements present the high efficiency of the proposed method. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

On 3rd November 2007 General Parvez Musharraf imposed a State of Emergency on Pakistan. During the State of Emergency the judiciary was turned upside down, the media selectively censored and many lawyers and human rights activists were arrested. While the lower classes remained relatively silent and carried on with their daily routines, an unprecedented movement against Musharraf, but more so pro-democracy and pro-judiciary, swept the country. This paper analyses the interrelation between the political concerns of a specific (upper-middle class) class subculture, the extraordinary means of communication available to them and the development of the protest. The paper argues that the way in which the protest was organised and negotiated was profoundly rooted in class divisions affecting consumption and production in the field of new media, and that where convergence between new and old media occurred, this was not enough to significantly involve other classes. The paper concludes by highlighting how meta-mediatic outputs and productions aimed primarily at a foreign audience nevertheless had an important role in changing the nature of the Pakistani public sphere, although it confutes theories that new media can produce social change at a great speed. The data was collected through participant observation, monitoring of internet blogs and videos, collection of articles in the English press, and interviews with prominent figures in the protest. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses free online and Internet tools that can be adapted by librarians for use with library instruction and information literacy training, with a focus on social media and Web 2.0 technologies, including social networking websites Facebook and Twitter, blogs, RSS, wikis, and video sharing. Many students already use these technologies and are readily engaged with the library when the technologies are incorporated into library websites and classes. There are challenges in using these technologies, especially in countries with oppressive governments. This paper is based, in part, on a presentation the authors gave at the UNESCO Training the Trainers in Information Literacy Workshop at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina in Alexandria, Egypt in November 2008. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Caravela is a computing platform that has been designed in academia to implement distributed stream-based computing based on the flow-model. This paper is focused on the new meta-pipeline execution mechanism, which allows to set up a pipeline of flow-models to be executed in parallel but with data streams flowing in sequence along them. A model and programming tools are presented to develop the proposed meta-pipeline in the Caravela platform. These tools are important, namely to tackle the deadlock problem that can occur due to uninitialised input data streams. A new efficient algorithm is also proposed to identify off-line the uninitialised edges in a 'pipeline graph'. Moreover, optimisation techniques are also proposed to reduce the computation time and the amount of memory required to implement the proposed algorithm, and a graphical user interface (GUI) was implemented to facilitate the programming of applications with the meta-pipeline approach. The experimental results presented in this paper show the practical interest of the meta-pipeline approach for stream-based computing and the effectiveness of both the proposed algorithm and the developed GUI for programming the Caravela platform. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the concept of E-Prime (E') holds practical benefits to effective listening for students of interpersonal communication. In advancing this argument, the paper includes a concise review of relevant literature on E-Prime, defensiveness, and conflict, with particular emphasis on verbal aggression. The literature demonstrates that traditional imperatives to reduce listener defensiveness need careful consideration. In fact, offering unqualified assertions for listeners to reduce defensiveness may place students at undue risk for harm. This paper reviews pedagogical uses of E-Prime in interpersonal communication courses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper explores the relationship between formative assessment and social software. Formative assessment practices though beneficial for student learning become marginalised and constrained in open and distance learning environments in higher education. Feedback is a key factor in formative assessment and learners can benefit from the deployment of emerging technologies and the opportunities for participation and dialogue afforded by social software. This paper explores and proposes a conceptual framework for this relationship. The claim is that the social dimensions of emerging technologies - specifically, blogs and wikis - allow for formative assessment practices to be re-invented or at the very least facilitated by essentially participative and student-focussed interventions. A comparison of these technologies against formative assessment mechanisms identifies the types of processes that these new tools might best support to encourage effective feedback approaches that both empower the learner and enhance their learning experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a new concept, distributed geospatial information processing (DGIP), which refers to the process of geospatial information residing on computers geographically dispersed and connected through computer networks, and the contribution of DGIP to Digital Earth (DE). The DGIP plays a critical role in integrating the widely distributed geospatial resources to support the DE envisioned to utilise a wide variety of information. This paper addresses this role from three different aspects: 1) sharing Earth data, information, and services through geospatial interoperability supported by standardisation of contents and interfaces; 2) sharing computing and software resources through a GeoCyberinfrastructure supported by DGIP middleware; and 3) sharing knowledge within and across domains through ontology and semantic searches. Observing the long-term process for the research and development of an operational DE, we discuss and expect some practical contributions of the DGIP to the DE. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]