In this thesis, an Interactive Video Data Service (IVDS) is developed. This service provides a mechanism for television viewers to interact with the program they are watching. Possible interactions include purchasing products from home shopping programs and requesting information from advertisers. Within the project, two areas were focused upon: channel simulation and the Repeater Unit. Additionally, the overall system was discussed along with its background. The purpose of channel simulation was to demonstrate the viability of the unique communication channel model proposed for the IVDS system. This channel was implemented using uni-directional transmissions, without acknowledgments. The Repeater Unit was designed to be a message processing system, intended to relay messages from system users to the home office. The design entailed both hardware and software. The hardware requirements were for a high level design, while the software required not only design, but implementation. / Master of Science

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Thomas W. Malone ... [et al.]. / "August 1985." / Bibliography: p. 12.

International Telemetering Conference Proceedings / October 17-20, 1994 / Town & Country Hotel and Conference Center, San Diego, California / This paper describes the application software used in the Message Processing System at the Air Force Development Test Center (AFDTC), Eglin AFB. The focus is on the Alpha AXP application software designed and developed to log, process, and reformat IRIG Chapter 8 1553 data. The main data reduction and editing capabilities of the processing phase are explained: message output selection, message output sampling, message translation, error identification, and IRIG Chapter 8 time editing. The design of and methods used to produce the output files, the BBNProbe STD file, and the 1553 message summary report are described. This software’s flexibility and comprehensiveness in processing, reducing, and re-formatting 1553 message data will enable AFDTC to satisfy current and future post-mission processing requirements.

The primary purpose of this study was to examine the potential joint influence of need for cognition (NC), the dispositional preference for engaging in (or avoiding) effortful cognitive processing of information, and type of smoking risk message (i.e., factual and evaluative messages similar in message content and length) on the construction of smoking-relevant risk perceptions among college smokers. A secondary purpose was to examine potential mechanisms through which changes in risk perception might occur. 227 college smokers evaluated one of three pamphlets, (1) a factual (i.e., primarily fact-based) smoking risk pamphlet, (2) an evaluative (i.e., primarily emotion based) smoking risk pamphlet, or (3) a control pamphlet unrelated to smoking. Among occasional smokers, NC interacted with type of risk message to influence perceptions of post-pamphlet risk for several of the risk perception outcomes examined. Specifically, smokers lower in NC reported higher levels of perceived risk in response to the evaluative pamphlet whereas smokers higher in NC reported greater perceived risk in response to the factual pamphlet. The interaction did not predict risk perception outcomes among daily smokers. Significant changes in the mechanisms examined were not observed. Findings provide evidence that NC interacts with type of smoking risk message to influence changes in smoking-related health risk perceptions among occasional college smokers. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

The problem that this thesis deals with is that the intense competition and increasing consumer power in the health industry calls for the operating companies to take consumers’ considerations into account when advertising their products. It is further suggested that consumers will be extra careful before buying health-related products due to their direct effect on their personal health. Thus, companies selling health-related products must gain an understanding of how consumers form their judgments of the advertisements for the same in order to be able to create persuasive and thus effective advertisements. The purpose of this thesis is to understand consumers’ views of different persuasion strategies used for advertising health-related products and how these affect their willingness to purchase the advertised product. This will be done as a means to provide the concerned companies with a basis for how to create positively perceived, yet effective, advertisements. In order to fulfill the purpose of this thesis a qualitative study was conducted through the use of focus groups. During the focus groups the participants were, among other things, encouraged to discuss their views of three different advertisements for health-related products. Each advertisement represented one persuasion strategy used in the advertising of health-related products. The gathered data was interpreted and analyzed by comparing it with theories from previous research. The study shows that consumers require extensive information and strong evidence behind the arguments provided in advertisements for health-related products. Advertisements that communicate consequences that correspond to consumers’ existing beliefs are likely to be positively perceived. Conversely, if the communicated consequences contradict consumers’ beliefs their responses are likely to be negative. Consumers that are more informed in regards to the products are more likely to critically judge the advertisements for the same. The likelihood that consumers’ attitudes will be reflected in their behavior increases along with the strength of their attitudes.

While overall road deaths in Australia have fallen since the late 1980's and the impact of road-safety advertising appears to be positive, alcohol-related road fatalities remain the leading cause of death among young Australian adults. Fatality and injury rates continue within this cohort despite increases in alcohol-related knowledge, continuing education efforts in the Australian school system, increased funding for police enforcement and high media presence of road safety advertising (Peder et al 2004). Notwithstanding advances in communication technologies, highly graphic, emotional, shock style television advertising remains the primary medium for road safety message dissemination. Rather than targeting those highest at-risk for drink driving, road safety advertisements typically target an undifferentiated general audience. To date understanding the process by which road safety advertising influences attitudes and behaviour has been the centre of fear arousal research. Nonetheless, there has been little examination of how young adults who differ in drink-driving risk-propensity (high versus low) respond to and process anti-drink driving advertisements designed to modify an avoidable behaviour. Taking a receiver oriented approach, the focus of this study examines how young adult, novice drivers who differ in 'need-for-sensation' (NFS) risk propensity respond to, and process, anti-drink driving advertisements that differ in arousal capacity (i.e. high, low sensation-value). The investigation was conducted in two stages: Study 1 (qualitative) and Study II (quantitative). Study I, the qualitative phase, explored by focus group interviews attitudes, perceptions, beliefs and experiences of sixty young adults aged 18 to 25 years towards alcohol consumption, drink-driving, and anti-drink driving advertising. The major qualitative finding is that young adults characterise drink-driving as a rational, deliberate, planned and accepted behaviour. Young adults were aware of the choices available for not drinking and driving and were aware of the health, social and physical (self and property) risks associated with alcohol consumption and associated behaviours. Nonetheless, the short-term personal experiences of revelry and group cohesion were more pertinent to them on an everyday basis. Alcohol consumption and drink-driving behaviour did not appear to differ between university and nonuniversity students or gender, yet there were differences in attitudes and behaviour across the degree studied within the university cohort. Study II, the quantitative phase, was segmented into three sections. First, the study provides empirical support for NFS as a relevant a priori individual differences segmentation variable for differentiating between those more likely, versus less likely, to engage in responsible drink-driving behaviour. As expected low NFS individuals were more likely to not drink and drive. Second, findings support an interaction effect between an advertisement's sensation value and individual differences variable, NFS, on response outcomes. High NFS individuals engaged in higher levels of adaptive appraisal on the high sensation-value advertisement condition as compared to the low sensationvalue advertisement condition. Low NFS individuals did not discriminate across either advertisement condition. Adaptive appraisal was not counteracted by a corresponding increase in maladaptive appraisal. Both high and low NFS individuals viewed the high sensation-value advertisement condition with high levels of perceived threat and viewed the low sensation-value advertisement with higher levels of perceived efficacy. Yet, although high NFS individuals viewed the high sensation-value advertisement with high levels of threat they simultaneously viewed this advertisement with low levels of perceived efficacy. Third, NFS was not found to be a strong predictor moderating the relationship between message processing (cognitive, sensory, narrative) and response outcomes. The findings indicate strong support for a direct relationship between two modes of message processing: cognitive and narrative processing and response outcomes. Message recipients processed anti-drink driving advertisements via two routes to persuasion. There was stronger cognitive processing evident on advertisements possessing high arousal capacity, whereas stronger narrative processing was evident on low arousal capacity advertisements. This study suggests that those advertisements that possess high arousal capacity have the capability of facilitating attention to the central argument, the consequences of drinking and driving, as well as how drinking and driving may affect the message recipients' life. Alternatively, those messages that impart high levels of rational information have the capability of increasing attention to the peripheral cues in the message. It is also suggested that different styles of message processing, central versus peripheral, act in a synergistic way to influence response outcomes which indicates that there is no single route to persuasion. Individuals process messages in a complex manner attending to various signals in order to evaluate various components of the message. For road safety practitioners and social marketers the results of this study illustrates practical benefits for the design of anti-drink driving advertisements based on the segmentation variable NFS. The finding that high NFS individuals require advertisements that possess high levels of arousal capacity (i.e.: high in sensation-value) is an important development. Importantly, low NFS individuals do not discriminate in accepting the recommendations of advertisements that differ in arousal capacity clearly suggests that they accept messages regardless of their arousal capacity. This finding indicates that the goal of road traffic authorities, advertising agencies and social marketers should be directed towards targeting high NFS individuals who are more atrisk for a drink-drive fatality. That message recipients process anti-drink driving messages via two routes to persuasion indicates that message designers need to consider the mix between the sensation-value of the message and consideration of the way message recipients' process the message, i.e. via central/systematic versus peripheral/heuristic components of the advertisement. Further investigation into the dual processing of anti-drink driving advertisements once individuals are exposed to the message is warranted to further understand the psychological processes influencing message processing. The findings of this research have important implications for both practitioners and academics. This research has provided an insight into the complexity of young adult's response outcomes and message processing of fear-based anti-drink driving messages.

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Clusters of workstations are becoming increasingly popular as a low-budget alternative for supercomputing power. In these systems,message-passing is often used to allow the separate nodes to act as a single computing machine. Programmers of such systems face a daunting challenge in understanding the performance bottlenecks of their applications. This is largely due to the vast amount of performance data that is collected, and the time and expertise necessary to use traditional parallel performance tools to analyze that data. The goal of this project is to increase the level of performance tool support for message-passing application programmers on clusters of workstations. We added support for LAM/MPI into the existing parallel performance tool,P aradyn. LAM/MPI is a commonly used, freely-available implementation of the Message Passing Interface (MPI),and also includes several newer MPI features,such as dynamic process creation. In addition, we added support for non-shared filesystems into Paradyn and enhanced the existing support for the MPICH implementation of MPI. We verified that Paradyn correctly measures the performance of the majority of LAM/MPI programs on Linux clusters and show the results of those tests. In addition,we discuss MPI-2 features that are of interest to parallel performance tool developers and design support for these features for Paradyn.

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