bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Knowledge Engineering Support for Intelligent Software Test Optimization
Authors: Mala D. Jeya
Published: May 2011

Software testing is one of the most important processes in Software Development Life Cycle (SDLC) to ensure quality of software product. A large number of approaches for test data generation and optimization in software testing have been reported with varying degrees of success. In recent years, the application of artificial intelligence (AI) techniques in software testing to achieve quality software is an emerging area of research. It combines the concepts of the two domains AI and Software Engineering and yields innovative mechanisms that have the advantages of both of them. This chapter demonstrates the development of a novel software test sequence optimization framework using intelligent agents based graph searching technique. To ensure the quality, a set of test adequacy criteria such as path coverage, state coverage, and branch coverage have been applied in the approach discussed in this chapter, while achieving optimization.
Tools and Datasets for Mining Libre Software Repositories
Authors: Robles Gregorio , González-Barahona Jesús M. , Izquierdo-Cortazar Daniel , Herraiz Israel
Published: May 2011

Thanks to the open nature of libre (free, open source) software projects, researchers have gained access to a rich set of data related to various aspects of software development. Although it is usually publicly available on the Internet, obtaining and analyzing the data in a convenient way is not an easy task, and many considerations have to be taken into account. In this chapter we introduce the most relevant data sources that can be found in libre software projects and that are commonly studied by scholars: source code releases, source code management systems, mailing lists and issue (bug) tracking systems. The chapter also provides some advice on the problems that can be found when retrieving and preparing the data sources for a later analysis, as well as information about the tools and datasets that support these tasks.
Design of a Learning Activity in Second Life
Authors: Molka-Danielsen Judith , Balandin Susan
Published: May 2011

Second Life™ (SL) is now an accepted platform for educational activities. SL supports a range of activities from informal meetings to complete courses offered in the 3D world as part of a university’s curriculum. Learning activities within SL can be identified as a form of e-learning that facilitates learning through the mediating artifacts of the technology. This chapter explores the use of SL using learning activities that are designed to activate students and to facilitate the creation of social activities within groups. The chapter uses the theoretical lens of Activity Theory to examine the operational mechanisms behind designing a course activity that engages people with lifelong disability in the active teaching of health professionals about disability.
Exploring Alternative Assessments to Support Digital storytelling for Creative Thinking in Primary School Classrooms
Authors: Tay Lee Yong , Lim Siew Khiaw , Lim Cher Ping
Published: May 2011

This chapter documents the use of digital storytelling as a teaching approach to facilitate the learning of creative thinking among students (aged 7 and 8) in a primary school setting. A constructive teaching approach is adopted to allow students to create their own digital stories based on an authentic experience and express their thoughts. The focus of this chapter is to show how a shift from traditional classroom assessment to more flexible, alternative assessment format facilitates higher level thought processes (e.g., creative thinking) and range of skills. Several issues and challenges of using alternative assessment in digital storytelling are explored and discussed. Findings suggest that digital storytelling may be effectively used as an approach to foster creative thinking. They also suggest that refinements to the assessment process are needed to make it more formative in nature.
The Impact of Electricity Market and Environmental Regulation on Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS) Development in China
Authors: Ang Zhao
Published: May 2011

Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS) has been regarded as a significant mitigation strategy to tackle global warming although the uncertainties of carbon price and CCS technology exist. Given that China is the biggest coal consumer and around four fifths of its electricity comes from coal power plants, many think CCS has to plays a central role in cutting the carbon emission of China’s coal power fleet. Most existing researches on CCS development in China emphasize the importance of sufficient funding, technological access, and market readiness, but put little light on the role of environmental regulation and electricity market establishment. This chapter examines the impact of Chinese electricity market establishment and environmental regulatory institution on CCS. This chapter argues that Chinese government should protect Intellectual Property Right (IPR), liberalize electricity market, and enforce environmental regulation in order to harvest CCS benefits successfully.
A Study of English Mobile Learning Applications at National Chengchi University
Authors: Che Pei-Chun , Lin Han-Yi , Jang Hung-Chin , Lien Yao-Nan , Tsai Tzu-Chieh
Published: May 2011

The pervasive popularity of the Internet in the past decade has changed the way many students live and learn, in part, because modern technology has made it possible for learners to access Real-Time Multimedia information on the Internet, or research any topic of interest to them from virtually any computer anywhere in the world. Students can also receive immediate feedback from their peers and/or their teachers when involved in collaborative projects. As a result, teachers of all disciplines need to incorporate the Internet and the concept of mobile learning into today’s classrooms to take advantage of this technology. This research investigated the response of English majors to a mobile learning platform (NCCU-MLP) developed at National Chengchi University (NCCU) in which they were involved as participants. The goal of the NCCU-MLP is to improve the students’ English ability as well as to update the teachers’ understanding of how to use the technology. The purpose of this research was to investigate the responses of students to a mobile learning environment. The research involved 18 participants in a pilot study and 37 participants in a follow-up study who participated in a group activity involving mobile learning activities. The students were asked to complete the activity following which they completed a brief survey of their response to the mobile learning activity. The findings indicate a positive response from the participants regarding the content and procedures involved in the activity. Technical support for the project was found to need enhancement for future projects of this nature.
Context-Aware Pervasive Services for Smart Cities
Authors: Meier René , Lee Deirdre
Published: May 2011

Smart environments support the activities of individuals by enabling context-aware access to pervasive information and services. This article presents the iTransIT framework for building such context-aware pervasive services in Smart Cities. The iTransIT framework provides an architecture for conceptually integrating the independent systems underlying Smart Cities and a data model for capturing the contextual information generated by these systems. The data model is based on a hybrid approach to context-modelling that incorporates the management and communication benefits of traditional object-based context modelling with the semantic and inference advantages of ontology-based context modelling. The iTransIT framework furthermore supports a programming model designed to provide a standardised way to access and correlate contextual information from systems and ultimately, to build context-aware pervasive services for Smart Cities. The framework has been assessed based on a prototypical realisation of an architecture for integrating diverse intelligent transportation systems in Dublin and by building context-aware pervasive transportation services for urban journey planning and for visualising traffic congestion.
A Comprehensive Solution for Ambient Intelligence
Authors: Villanueva Felix J. , Moya Francisco , Santofimia Fernando Rincon , Villa David , Barba Jesus , Rincon Fernando , Lopez Juan Carlos
Published: May 2011

Ubiquitous computing, pervasive computing, ambient intelligence, etc. are research lines that, with slight differences, emphasizes their efforts in improving everyday life of users. However, all these approaches share a common set of requirements, for the underlying IT infrastructure, devoted to support advanced services. A key component of these, sometimes called “new paradigms”, is the fact that technology is found embedded in the environments were we live. In this paper we are going to propose a comprehensive vision for modelling this type of environments from a practical point of view. This work cover form HW developments, which seamless integrate in the environment, to automatically generated services based on user needs. In the last decade, authors of this work have been proponents of a unified approach, based on the distributed object abstraction, allowing synergies to be better exploited. Remote device management, wireless sensor and actuator networks, hardware components and now even reconfigurable hardware platforms and service platforms are considered as part of a large evolving system sharing a common middleware and a single design methodology.
A Comprehensive Model for Assessing the Organizational Readiness of Knowledge Management
Authors: Sohrabi Babak , Raeesi Iman , Khanlari Amir , Forouzandeh Sakineh
Published: May 2011

Nowadays, the key to an organization’s success is the ability to assess its readiness to create and improve the processes underlying its strategy. Realizing the fact that knowledge plays important roles in attaining competitive edge and strategic goals, managers give much emphasis on Knowledge Management (KM). However, implementing knowledge management or knowledge-sharing projects in an organization require significant organizational prerequisites. Lacking proper infrastructures and prerequisites, not only make the knowledge management process unprofitable, but also it might incur harmful effects as well. To decrease such risks, it is proposed to introduce the readiness assessment, in order to gauge a company’s appetite for the work involved in implementing the knowledge management. In this research, critical success factors have been extracted from comprehensive literature reviews and they have been surveyed through a questionnaire, distributed among 130 knowledge management experts. Then, to validate the measurement of the multi-item constructs, Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) was used. Identifying effective variables and their grouping into related factors, the second questionnaire was employed for readiness assessment of an IT firm working in Iran. The final results were presented with Radar diagrams. Finally, promoting propositions were provided based on the firm’s current status.
Visual Medical Information Analysis
Authors: Papadogiorgaki Maria , Mezaris Vasileios , Chatzizisis Yiannis
Published: May 2011

Images have constituted an essential data source in medicine in the last decades. Medical images derived from diagnostic technologies (e.g., X-ray, ultrasound, computed tomography, magnetic resonance, nuclear imaging) are used to improve the existing diagnostic systems for clinical purposes, but also to facilitate medical research. Hence, medical image processing techniques are constantly investigated and evolved. Medical image segmentation is the primary stage to the visualization and clinical analysis of human tissues. It refers to the segmentation of known anatomic structures from medical images. Structures of interest include organs or parts thereof, such as cardiac ventricles or kidneys, abnormalities such as tumors and cysts, as well as other structures such as bones, vessels, brain structures and so forth. The overall objective of such methods is referred to as computer-aided diagnosis; in other words, they are used for assisting doctors in evaluating medical imagery or in recognizing abnormal findings in a medical image. In contrast to generic segmentation methods, techniques used for medical image segmentation are often applicationspecific; as such, they can make use of prior knowledge for the particular objects of interest and other expected or possible structures in the image. This has led to the development of a wide range of segmentation methods addressing specific problems in medical applications. In the sequel of this article, the analysis of medical visual information generated by three different medical imaging processes will be discussed in detail: Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), Mammography, and Intravascular Ultrasound (IVUS). Clearly, in addition to the aforementioned imaging processes and the techniques for their analysis that are discussed in the sequel, numerous other algorithms for applications of segmentation to specialized medical imagery interpretation exist.
Angiographic Images Segmentation Techniques
Authors: Nóvoa Francisco J. , Curra Alberto , López M. Gloria , Mato Virginia
Published: May 2011

Heart-related pathologies are among the most frequent health problems in western society. Symptoms that point towards cardiovascular diseases are usually diagnosed with angiographies, which allow the medical expert to observe the bloodflow in the coronary arteries and detect severe narrowing (stenosis). According to the severity, extension, and location of these narrowings, the expert pronounces a diagnosis, defines a treatment, and establishes a prognosis. The current modus operandi is for clinical experts to observe the image sequences and take decisions on the basis of their empirical knowledge. Various techniques and segmentation strategies now aim at objectivizing this process by extracting quantitative and qualitative information from the angiographies.
Speech-Based Clinical Diagnostic Systems
Authors: Alonso Hernández Jesús Bernardino , Henríquez Rodríguez Patricia
Published: May 2011

It is possible to implement help systems for diagnosis oriented to the evaluation of the fonator system using speech signal, by means of techniques based on expert systems. The application of these techniques allows the early detection of alterations in the fonator system or the temporary evaluation of patients with certain treatment, to mention some examples. The procedure of measuring the voice quality of a speaker from a digital recording consists of quantifying different acoustic characteristics of speech, which makes it possible to compare it with certain reference patterns, identified previously by a “clinical expert”. A speech acoustic quality measurement based on an auditory assessment is very hard to assess as a comparative reference amongst different voices and different human experts carrying out the assessment or evaluation. In the current bibliography, some attempts have been made to obtain objective measures of speech quality by means of multidimensional clinical measurements based on auditory methods. Well-known examples are: GRBAS scale from Japon (Hirano, M.,1981) and its extension developed and applied in Europe (Dejonckere, P. H. Remacle, M. Fresnel-Elbaz, E. Woisard, V. Crevier- Buchman, L. Millet, B.,1996), a set of perceptual and acoustic characteristics in Sweden (Hammarberg, B. & Gauffin, J., 1995), a set of phonetics characteristics with added information about the excitement of the vocal tract. The aim of these (quality speech measurements) procedures is to obtain an objective measurement from a subjective evaluation. There exist different works in which objective measurements of speech quality obtained from a recording are proposed (Alonso J. B.,2006), (Boyanov, B & Hadjitodorov, S., 1997),(Hansen, J.H.L., Gavidia-Ceballos, L. & Kaiser, J.F., 1998),(Stefan Hadjitodorov & Petar Mitev, 2002),(Michaelis D.; Frohlich M. & Strube H. W. ,1998),(Boyanov B., Doskov D., Mitev P., Hadjitodorov S. & Teston B.,2000),(Godino-Llorente, J.I.; Aguilera-Navarro, S. & Gomez-Vilda, P. , 2000). In these works a voiced sustained sound (usually a vowel) is recorded and then used to compute speech quality measurements. The utilization of a voiced sustained sound is due to the fact that during the production of this kind of sound, the speech system uses almost all its mechanisms (glottal flow of constant air, vocal folds vibration in a continuous way, …), enabling us to detect any anomaly in these mechanisms. In these works different sets of measurements are suggested in order to quantify speech quality objectively. In all these works one important fact is revealed; it is necessary to obtain different measurements of the speech signal in order to compile the different aspects of acoustic characteristics of the speech signal.
An Advanced Concept of Altered Auditory Feedback as a Prosthesis-Therapy for Stuttering Founded on a Non-Speech Etiologic Paradigm
Authors: Prado-Velasco Manuel , Fernández-Peruchena Carlos
Published: May 2011

Persistent Developmental Stuttering affects 1-2% of the world adult population. Its etiology is still unknown, although modern neuroimaging techniques have shown a new and exciting perspective of earlier ideas and hypotheses. However, it is now clear that a new approach to understand the true nature of the disorder is needed. We present a new etiological model of persistent developmental stuttering based on a deep analysis of earlier models and on the stuttering phenomenology, described in basic, clinical, and even ethnographic sources. One of the more stimulating conclusions has been the suggestion that stuttering is a non-speech based disorder, in opposition to the accepted belief. The implications of this model have guided the design of a new adaptive AAF device for prosthetic and therapeutic functions. It is supported by a wearable multimodal intelligent system, which evolves from a preliminary proposal presented in (Prado & Roa, 2007).
Variational Approach Based Image Pre- Processing Techniques for Virtual Colonoscopy
Authors: Chen Dongqing , Farag Aly A. , Falk Robert L. , Dryden Gerald W.
Published: May 2011

Colorectal cancer includes cancer of the colon, rectum, anus and appendix. Since it is largely preventable, it is extremely important to detect and treat the colorectal cancer in the earliest stage. Virtual colonoscopy is an emerging screening technique for colon cancer. One component of virtual colonoscopy, image preprocessing, is important for colonic polyp detection/diagnosis, feature extraction and classification. This chapter aims at an accurate and fast colon segmentation algorithm and a general variational-approach based framework for image pre-processing techniques, which include 3D colon isosurface generation and 3D centerline extraction for navigation. The proposed framework has been validated on 20 real CT Colonography (CTC) datasets. The average segmentation accuracy has achieved 96.06%, and it just takes about 5 minutes for a single CT scan of 512*512*440. All the 12 colonic polyps with sizes of 6 mm and above in the 20 clinical CTC datasets are found by this work.
Optimization of Medical Supervision, Management, and Reimbursement of contemporary Home Care
Authors: Spyropoulos B. , Botsivaly M. , Tzavaras A. , Koutsourakis K.
Published: May 2011

Adapting medical and managerial decision-making (Spyropoulos, 2006a) in the modern home care environment is a cardinal prerequisite, in order to ensure, first, an economically sustainable development of the aging population healthcare (Scarcelli, 2001); second, the rehabilitation services required for impaired persons; and finally, the psychosomatic support necessary in the developed countries, during the next decades. Thus, a strategic question emerges that is how home care will be medically supervised and financially reimbursed. The present study attempts to describe the present situation and the contemporary technological trends in home care; more specific, it is focused on a system developed by our team that intends first, to enable the optimal documentation of the provided home care, and second, to facilitate the acquisition of all relevant financial data, leading to a fair remuneration of the services offered.
Questing for Standards
Authors: Elwell Mark G.
Published: May 2011

This chapter reports on movements toward de facto standards for role playing games in the freely accessible and configurable shared virtual environment of Second Life. All users can not only freely join, but also construct and implement role playing games of their own design. Consequently, new games are constantly emerging, and others either persisting or failing. The resulting body of practice has implications for business, technological, and social dimensions of computer games. To elucidate these implications, this chapter presents the case of the Role Play Nexus, a venue created for role playing game designers, managers, and players to share experiences, questions, resources, and proposals for sustainable ventures and communities in Second Life. Issues, controversies, and problems are identified, and solutions and recommendations discussed. Source material is drawn from transcripts of public lectures, discussions and demonstrations, from interviews, and from participant observation.
Game Led HCI Improvements
Authors: Barlow Michael
Published: May 2011

This chapter covers these recent advances in HCI technology. It conveys the technological and engineering basis of the key current & successful technologies – for instance discussing the accelerometer, IR, and Bluetooth features of the Wiimote, or the basis of and EEG technology underpinning the recent BCI devices. Further, it discusses why these technologies have proved to be successful, how they are transforming the game industry, and how they are crossing back over into mainstream computing.
Meaningful Video Games
Authors: Schafer Stephen Brock , Yu Gino
Published: May 2011

The development of more meaningful video games is becoming increasingly possible by recent advances in video game technologies, neurosciences, and biofeedback. In the near future, meaningful video games will be designed to facilitate personal-psychological transformation. Unlike “serious games” that focus on education and “conditioning” the mind, meaningful games will cultivate emotional intelligence, somatic awareness, and archetypal integration in order to “un-condition” the mind and thereby facilitate psychologically meaningful personal transformations. Meaningful game research will access the dynamics of psychological transformation in order to enhance archetypal awareness, intuition, and insight on the part of players. Within the genre of meaningful video games, Drama-Based Games (DBG) add an unprecedented dimension for psychological engagement and decision-making. Because they extend psychological player immersion to the dimension of “physical” interactivity, (DBG) incorporate the full range of psychological functions defined by Carl Jung. Because psychological experiences are correlated with physiological processes, DBG may be used as research instruments for quantifying diverse biometric-psychological interactions that occur during game play. Advances in electronics now enable the real-time and non-intrusive capturing of physiological data such as brain waves (e.g., electroencephalography), heart-rate variability, skin response, and facial expression. This data can provide an objective basis for measuring dimensions of the cognitive unconscious in test subjects as they respond to game experiences. The ultimate goal of research is to provide veridical data relative to the psychological parameters of an increasingly mediated global environment—a Psychecology—and to study the ensuing world-view.
How has the Internet Evolved the Videogame Medium?
Authors: Anagnostou Kostas
Published: May 2011

In this chapter we review and discuss the impact of mass adoption of the Internet and its assorted technologies is having on the evolution of the videogame medium. Specifically, we reflect on how the Internet has enabled the creation of novel game platforms and types, triggered the improvement of game development process, expanded the game audience and increased innovation in game creation. Crucially, the Internet has transformed videogames into a massive socialization platform with far reaching consequences into society and economy.
Toward Introducing Semantic Capabilities for WSRP
Authors: Wilkinson Kevin , Polgar Jana
Published: May 2011

The emergence of web services technology has introduced a problem: how can we ensure that requests are successfully matched with advertisements when consumers and producers may use different terminology to describe the same service or the same terminology to describe different ones? Popular approaches to solving this problem are reviewed which involve the use of ontologies to improve the semantic content of the matchmaking process. When services are presentation-oriented rather than merely data-oriented, another layer of difficulty is introduced. The architecture of Web Services for Remote Portlets is discussed extensively, including the interaction cycle between the client and the producer to maintain state variables for each remote session of a portlet to provide sufficient background for readers. A comparison is made between the way concepts are implemented in two different portlet specifications – IBM Portlet API and JSR168 specification. Architecture is proposed to support the automated use of dynamic services for remote portlets, the motivation for which is the lack of expressivity of the current standards to represent the semantic requirements and capabilities of data and user-facing web services.
The Changing World of ICT and Health
Authors: Chhanabhai Prajesh , Holt Alec
Published: May 2011

Information and Communication Technology (ICT) has undergone rapid change in the last decade and it is now readily accessible within many communities. This change has resulted in a revolution in the healthcare sector as technology has steadily empowered the health consumer. However, the problem of the digital divide remains and may be widening with the growth of technology. This chapter will examine how developing countries have overcome this problem by using varying communication techniques to share health information. The chapter also suggests how mobile phones can provide a more accessible conduit for sharing health information in developing countries as opposed to the Internet alone. These changes need to be embraced in order to provide a framework that will allow ICT to narrow, rather than widen the gap between the information poor and the information rich.
Integration of COBIT, Balanced Scorecard and SSE-CMM as an Organizational & Strategic Information Security Management (ISM) Framework
Authors: Goldman James E. , Ahuja Suchit
Published: May 2011

The purpose of this chapter is to present an integrated framework that addresses the need for organizational information security requirements as well as alignment between business, IT and information security strategies. This is achieved via the integrated use of control objectives for Information Technology (COBIT) and balanced scorecard (BSC) frameworks, in conjunction with Systems Security Engineering Capability Maturity Model (SSE-CMM) as a tool for performance measurement and evaluation, in order to ensure the adoption of a continuous improvement approach for successful sustainability. This integrated framework has been presented at the IEEE Symposium on Security & Privacy (2009) and the International Conference on Business/IT Alignment (2009). The goal is to investigate the strengths, implementation techniques, and potential benefits of such an integrated approach. The integrated use of COBIT, BSC, and SSE-CMM can provide a more comprehensive mechanism for strategic information security management–one that is fully aligned with business, IT, and information security strategies.
A Model of the Relationship among Consumer Trust, Web Design and User Attributes
Authors: Zhang Xiaoni , Prybutok Victor R. , Ryan Sherry D. , Pavur Robert
Published: May 2011

One important aspect of consumer relationships is trust. Conducting business on the Web is relatively new compared to traditional business and many of the factors related to consumer trust related to the Web remained unexplored. To increase our understanding about trust building on the Internet, this article studies trust with a focus on its relationship to Web design characteristics, specifically perceived quality of presentation, perceived ease of navigation, and several user attributes: prior internet experience, Web users’ self efficacy, and gender differences. A research model is proposed that builds upon prior research on trust. A survey is developed based on the constructs and relationships in the model. The data analysis and results confirm five out of eight of the hypotheses associated with the model. Theoretical and practical implications are provided.
Towards a Characterization of the Developmental Environment of Web Applications and its Business Implications
Authors: Kamthan Pankaj
Published: May 2011

The Web has been changing since its inception. In particular, the evolution of the developmental environment of Web Applications has been multi-directional. This chapter provides a conceptual characterization of such technical directions, relationships between these directions, and their implications towards business organizations. The consequences of a commitment to these directions are considered with the support of examples and/or empirical studies as appropriate. The challenges faced by Semantic Web Applications and Social Web Applications are briefly outlined.
Testbed Implementation of a Pollution Monitoring System Using Wireless Sensor Network for the Protection of Public Spaces
Authors: Roy Siuli , D Anurag , Bandyopadhyay Somprakash
Published: May 2011

Air pollution is an important environmental issue that has a direct effect on human health and ecological balance. Factories, power plants, vehicles, windblown dust and wildfires are some of the contributors to pollution. Reasonable simulation tools exist for evaluating large scale sensor networks; however, they fail to capture significant details of node operation or practical aspects of wireless communication. Real life testbeds capture the realism and bring out important aspects for further research. In this article, we present an implementation of a wireless sensor network testbed for automatic and real-time monitoring of environmental pollution for the protection of public spaces. The article describes the physical setup, the sensor node hardware and software architecture for “anytime, anywhere” monitoring and management of pollution data through a single, Web-based graphical user interface. The article presents practical issues in the integration of sensors, actual power consumption rates and develops a practical hierarchical routing methodology.
A GPS Based Deterministic Channel Allocation for Cellular Network in Mobile Computing
Authors: Khanbary Lutfi Mohammed Omer , Vidyarthi Deo Prakash
Published: May 2011

The scarcity of the radio channel is the main bottleneck toward maintaining the quality of service (QoS) in a mobile cellular network. As channel allocation schemes become more complex and computationally demanding, alternative computational models that include knowledge-based algorithms and provide the means for faster processing are becoming a topic of research interest. An efficient deterministic technique, capable of handling channel allocation problems, is introduced as an alternative. The proposed model utilizes the Global Positioning System (GPS) data for tracing the hosts’ likely movements within and across the cells and allocates the channels to the mobile devices accordingly. The allocation of the channels to the mobile hosts is deterministic in the sense that the decision of the channel allocation is based on the realistic data received from the GPS about the hosts’ movements. The performance of the proposed technique has been evaluated by conducting the simulation experiments for the two parameters—call blocking and handoff failures. Also, a comparison of the proposed model with an earlier model has been carried out to estimate the effectiveness of the proposed technique. Experimental results reveal that the proposed technique performs better and is more realistic as well.
Language and Performing Arts
Authors: Mohochi E. Sangai , Wachanga D. Ndirangu
Published: May 2011

One of the many consequences of globalization and the new world order is the increased cross border interaction among people, leading to more transfer and exchange of knowledge, technology, values and virtues, vices and viruses, and other traits among nations. One area that has been impacted heavily by this flow, largely aided by the Internet and other emerging media, is culture. To a large extent, though, the transfer of cultural practices appears to be more from the western and more developed world to the weaker, economically and politically less powerful nations. But what is borrowed is indigenized, sometimes entirely altered, to meet the needs of local communities. These changes are reflected in Africa’s music scene, dances, and other genres of popular culture. Within that context, this chapter aims at meeting two goals. First, to analyze the extent to which musicians, especially the youth, have managed to maintain a balance between educating and entertaining society at the local level, while keeping abreast with emerging global trends and influences. Particularly, it will show how the young generation of East African musicians uses music to sensitize the public by serving as critics of the management of public affairs and how this has contributed to political change. Secondly, it will investigate the effects that these emerging practices have had on the use of African languages in the performing arts.
Biodiversity Modelling Experiences in Ukraine
Authors: Prydatko Vasyl , Kolomytsev Grygoriy
Published: May 2011

Biodiversity modeling in Ukraine was recently developed in order to support policy making and for providing information to e.g. the reporting to the UN Convention of Biological Diversity. This is the first and highly ambitious study on biodiversity and its conditions in Ukraine and some surrounding countries. It includes four different methods to assess and project biodiversity changes: the indicative-index approach, the GLOBIO Mean Species Abundance (MSA) and two species based approaches, one using habitat changes as driving factor (EEBIO) and the other includes climate change (SDM_GLM). The indicative-index methodology dealt with 128 species and demonstrated low impact of climate change from 1950-2002, and is presented in a special Web-agro-biodiversity-searchable ‘BINU’ system for the users in Ukraine. It contains 96 agro-biodiversity indicators-indices. The EEBIO approach links species distribution maps, compiled from different sources to habitat change maps, resulting in a series of 800 GIS maps. The MSA-approach gives a general view of the intactness of biodiversity and shows a low impact of climate change by 2002 and a high impact due to habitat loss. A training package for educational purposes is derived from the analyses. The SDM-GLM-approach provided detailed species-based maps of the expected changes in habitats condition caused by land use change and climate change. Finally, the selected 54 indicator species (vascular plants, insects, amphibians, birds and mammals) demonstrated a surprising diversity of SDM-GLM-trends by 2030-2050. It proved that expected climate change, together with land-use change would provoke numerous expected and unexpected species-habitat alterations. If the final model is correct, then in the near future in Ukraine in particular, scientists and decision makers will by 2050 find about 4% of new species or will lose up to 13% of existing species.
Sustainable Land Use and Watershed Management in Response to Climate Change Impacts
Authors: Loi Nguyen Kim
Published: May 2011

With the changes in climatic, biophysical, socio-cultural, economic, and technological components, paradigm shifts in natural resources management are unavoidably and have to be adapted/modified to harmonize with the global changes and the local communities’ needs. This chapter focuses on sustainable land use and watershed management in response to climate change impacts. The first part covers some definitions and background on sustainable land use, watershed management approach, and sustainable watershed management. The second part describes the use of the Geographic Information System (GIS) and Spatial Decision Support System (SDSS) model focusing on the framework for a planning and decision making, computer-based system for supporting spatial decisions. The mathematical programming has been reviewed focusing on optimization algorithms that include optimization modeling and simulation modeling for decision making. Finally, the example of methodology development for sustainable land use and watershed management in response to climate change in Dong Nai watershed, Vietnam is presented.
User-Centered Maintenance of Concept Hierarchies
Authors: Eckert Kai , Meusel Robert , Stuckenschmidt Heiner
Published: May 2011

Taxonomies are hierarchical concept representations that have numerous important applications from improved indexing of document collections to faceted browsing and semantic search applications. The maintenance of taxonomies includes the dynamic extension, analysis, and visualization of these representations. Instead of focusing on the construction of taxonomies from scratch, however, the authors describe several successful approaches to the semi-automatic maintenance of taxonomies. These approaches have in common that they incorporate the human expert as a central part of the system.
Cross-Site Scripting
Authors: Raya Almudena Alcaide , Alis Jorge Blasco , Herrero Eduardo Galán , Diaz-Pabón Agustín Orfila
Published: May 2011

As any other computer program, Web applications are susceptible of including vulnerabilities that may not only disrupt the provided service, but also facilitate private and personal information to an attacker. As these applications are usually public or even publicized, attacks are expected to be more and more frequent, making it necessary to supply the means to provide an adequate level of security in the utilization of Web applications.
Analysis of the Variables which Determine a Good E-Marketing Strategy
Authors: Sainz de Abajo Beatriz , Díez Isabel de la Torre , Coronado Miguel López
Published: May 2011

Internet marketing covers all aspects related to the promotion and sale of a product or service through the Internet. This chapter demonstrates how adequate planning is fundamental in a Small and Medium-sized Enterprise (SME) to increase sales. The objective is to analyze the aspects which must be taken into consideration when developing a good e-marketing strategy and to study some of the different alternatives that the Internet and e-marketing make available to us: e-mail marketing, viral e-marketing, geomarketing, and positioning within search engines. Also the concept of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) will be analyzed. The leap into the global market is not easy and the reduction in budgets has inspired marketing professionals to adopt strategies which can be measured and the results controlled, pointing out that the online tactics and tools used by the vast majority of marketing professionals in their strategic plan are banners, search engines, and e-mail.
Advanced Technologies and Tourism Behaviour
Authors: Pantano Eleonora , Servidio Rocco
Published: May 2011

The current chapter provides an overview of the most advanced technologies for tourism sector, with emphasis on pervasive environments, which represent innovative systems based on an efficient integration of Virtual Reality (VR) and affective world. The aim is to show how tourism industry might exploit the current advances in Information and Communication Technology (ICT), such as VR, web-based technologies, mobile devices, etc., to catch tourists’ attention and gain competitive advantages over competitors. In particular, these technologies are capable of promoting touristic destination in a global perspective and affect potential tourist decision-making process, by investigating the main characteristics and possible integrations. Moreover, especially pervasive environments are efficient tools to entertain and attract tourists’ interest, by showing potential destinations in an innovative and exciting way capable of influencing users’ decision-making process. In addition, this chapter outlines the possible implications for both marketers and tourists.
Aspect-Oriented Programming and Aspect.NET as Security and Privacy Tool for Web and 3D Web Programming
Authors: Safonov Vladimir O.
Published: May 2011

This chapter covers the use of aspect-oriented programming (AOP) and Aspect.NET, an AOP toolkit for the .NET platform, to implement Web and 3D Web security and privacy. In this chapter the author shows that AOP is quite suitable as a trustworthy software development tool. AOP and Aspect.NET basics are overviewed using simple examples. Principles of applying Aspect.NET for Web and 3D Web security and privacy implementation are also discussed. The chapter presents a library of sample aspects implementing security and privacy for Web programming.
Integrating Culture with E-Learning Management System Design
Authors: Archee Ray , Gurney Myra
Published: May 2011

Although it is a legal requirement of all organizations to permit sensorially, cognitively, and physically disabled persons equitable access to public website information, cultural factors are seldom considered as important in the design of online information content. But many tertiary institutions have a highly diverse, multicultural student body whose learning needs require special attention. Usually, instructors transform existing lectures and exercises, then adds links, and discussions to create Web-supported units, but without any real understanding of possible cultural artifacts or inherent limitations of their online interfaces. This study reports on the results of an action research study whereby students were asked to comment on their preferences for three uniquely different purpose-built WebCT pages which comprised near-identical content. The students showed a definite preference for a sparse, menu-driven webpages as opposed to a colorful, congested, all-in-one interface, or the bare-bones WebCT interface.
Localization for E-Learning
Authors: Karel-Longuevergne Diana
Published: May 2011

Localization and translation often go ‘hand in hand’, as explained in the first chapter, but as this author explains and illustrates, localization requires the skills of an experienced professional or company to address cultural nuances in e-learning that could, if not addressed, have a negative impact on learners, on learning, and in some cases, on business. In this chapter, you learn how names, characters, wordplay, technical jargon, geoculturalism, etc. in e-learning courses should be addressed so that users sense that the course was developed ‘locally’, for them. In addition, avoid the ‘technological pitfalls’ related to embedded text, audio and video synchronization, and so forth.
Seeing People with Disabilities as a Culture in the E-Learning Environment
Authors: Keller Kathy
Published: May 2011

A statement by the President’s Council on Disability: “Technology for most people makes things easier. For people with disabilities, technology makes things possible.”
Derivation of Use Cases from the Topological Computation Independent Business Model
Authors: Osis Janis , Asnina Erika
Published: May 2011

In Model Driven Architecture (MDA), business requirements for the information system are described in a Computation Independent Model (CIM), which additionally can describe knowledge of the business, and structure and behavior of both business and supporting information system. In object-oriented software development requirements are described by use cases. Use cases and identification of them are informal and application-oriented. Goal-based approaches provide a more systematic way for discovering use cases from informal knowledge about a system. The main and very important difference of the approach suggested in this chapter is that we ground our domain analysis on a mathematical engineering model, Topological Functioning Model. It is a formal holistic computation independent business model, whose characteristics help in avoiding challenges in functional requirements caused by non-systematic approaches and fragmental nature of use cases, namely, completeness, traceability and compliance with the problem domain.
Quality-Driven Database System Development
Authors: Dubielewicz Iwona , Hnatkowska Bogumila , Huzar Zbigniew , Tuzinkiewicz Lech
Published: May 2011

The chapter presents a quality-driven, MDA-based approach for database system development. It consists of four parts. The first part gives a short presentation of quality models and basic MDA concepts. The second one discusses the specific relationships between software development and quality assessment processes. The third part presents the Q-MDA framework which combines the aforementioned processes. The framework is next tailored for database systems design. In particular the authors discuss the relationship between MDA models and data models. The last part contains an example of the framework application. The example shows how the specification and evaluation of the quality of database models can influence the process of database system development.
Online Monitoring of Electrochemical Degradation of Paracetamol through a Biomimetic Sensor
Authors: Calora Quintino de Oliveira Mariana , Roberto de Vasconcelos Lanza Marcos , Luis Paz Jara José , Sotomayor Maria Del Pilar Taboada
Published: May 2011

This paper reports, for the first time, the online monitoring to the electrochemical degradation of the paracetamol using a biomimetic sensor coupled to a Flow Injection Analysis (FIA) system. The electrochemical degradation of the drug was carried out in aqueous medium using a flow-by reactor with a DSA anode. The process efficiency was monitored at real time by the biomimetic sensor constructed by modifying a glassy carbon electrode with a Nafion membrane doped with iron tetrapyridinoporphyrazine (FeTPyPz). Simultaneously, we carried out off-line analysis by liquid chromatography (HPLC) during the experiments in order to validate the proposed system. In addition, to investigate the degradation products of the paracetamol electrolysis, we used the techniques of UPLC/MS and GC/MS.
Ultrasonographic Imaging of Normal and Impacted Omasum in Indian Crossbred Cows
Authors: Imran Sheikh , Tyagi S. P. , Kumar Amit , Sharma Shivali
Published: May 2011

Omasal impaction is a serious disease problem in cattle in India, but it is difficult to diagnose clinically. Ultrasonography has been proposed for the noninvasive evaluation of omasal disease. The objectives of this study were to compare the in vitro and in vivo ultrasonographic appearance of the omasum and to compare omasal appearance, limits, and size in clinically healthy cows with those in cows having confirmed omasal impaction. A 3.5 MHz curvilinear transducer was used to image and record the appearance of the omasum in vitro in a water bath, and its appearance, dorsal and ventral limits, and size in 10 healthy Indian Jersey/Red Sindhi crossbred cows. The results were compared with the ultrasonographic data collected from 5 cows with omasal impaction, as confirmed at necropsy. On moving the transducer dorsoventrally in each intercostal space and below the costal arch, the wall of omasum could be seen as an echogenic arc-like structure. The difference between mean dorsoventral extents of the normal and impacted omasums was statistically insignificant. These results suggest that ultrasonographic imaging may not be useful in the diagnosis of omasal impaction in Indian crossbred cows, however, additional studies may be warranted.