With the increase of requesting personal information online, unauthorized disclosure of user privacy is a significant problem faced by today's Internet. As a typical identity theft, phishing usually employs fraudulent emails and spoofed web sites to trick unsuspecting users into divulging their private information. Even legitimate web sites may collect private information from unsophisticated users such as children for commercial purposes without their parents' consent. The Children's Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) of 1998 was enacted in reaction to the widespread collection of information from children and subsequent abuses identified by the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). COPPA is aimed at protecting child's privacy by requiring parental consent before collecting information from children under thirteen. In this thesis, we propose two solutions for ensuring user online privacy. By analyzing common characteristics of phishing pages, we propose a client-side tool, Trident, which works as a browser plug-in for filtering phishes. The experiment results show that Trident can identify 98-99% online and valid phishing pages, as well as automatically validate legitimate pages. To protect child's privacy, we introduce the POCKET (parental online consent on kids' electronic privacy) framework, which is a technically feasible and legally sound solution to enforce COPPA. Parents answer a questionnaire on their privacy requirements and the POCKET user agent generates a privacy preferences file. Meantime, the merchants are required to possess a privacy policy that is authenticated by a trusted third party. Only web sites that possess and adhere to their privacy policies are allowed to collect child's information; web sites whose policies do not match the client's preferences are blocked. POCKET framework incorporates a transaction protocol to secure the data exchange between an authenticated client and a POCKET-compliant merchant. / Master of Science

This research has examined the role of teacher presence in online education. The research has been guided by two research questions: 1) are there challenges to consistently establishing teacher presence in online courses?; and 2) can the role of teacher presence be assumed, in part, by the learning medium? The Community of Inquiry framework as outlined by Garrison, Anderson, and Archer (2000) has framed the discussion about the role of teacher presence in online education. Three research projects are presented to explore the research questions. The first study is a case study that examines twelve online instructors’ engagement and experience teaching online over a year at the University of Saskatchewan. The next study builds on that study by exploring teacher engagement and satisfaction of 28 online instructors at the University of Regina using survey techniques. Together the studies suggest that teacher engagement in online courses might be affected by the culture of the university. The third study addresses the second question by creating the NECSUS social computing environment, which assumes some functions of teacher presence. The NECSUS system has been tested in a graduate level ethics courses and demonstrates that it has the potential to support a community of inquiry. This is further demonstrated by the presentation of a NECSUS-like system design that could be modified to support a non-formal learning community for a commercial online education course for snowmobile safety. The outcome of this research suggests that the Community of Inquiry framework can inform the design of learning environments and that assume some responsibilities traditionally assumed by the instructor.

Computing has evolved from isolated machines, providing calculative support of applications, toward communication networks that provide functional support to groups of people and embedded systems. Perhaps, one of the most compelling feature and benefit of computers is their overwhelming computing efficiency. Today, we conceive distributed computational systems of an ever-increasing sophistication, which we then apply in various settings – critical support functions of our society just to name one important application area. The spread and impact of computing, in terms of so-called information society technologies, has obviously gained a very high momentum over the years and today it delivers a technology that our societies have come to depend on. To this end, concerns related to our acceptance of qualities of computing, e.g., dependability, are increasingly emphasized by users as well as vendors. An indication of this increased focus on dependability is found in contemporary efforts of mitigating the effects from systemic failures in critical infrastructures, e.g., energy distribution, resource logistics, and financial transactions. As such, the dependable function of these infrastructures is governed by means of more or less autonomic computing systems that interact with cognitive human agents. However, due to intricate system dependencies as well as being situated in our physical environment, even the slightest – unanticipated – perturbation in one of these embedded systems can result in degradations or catastrophic failures of our society. We argue that this contemporary problem of computing mainly is due to our own difficulties in modeling and engineering the involved system complexities in an understandable manner. Consequently, we have to provide support for dependable computing systems by means of new methodologies of systems engineering. From a historical perspective, computing has evolved, from being supportive of quite well defined and understood tasks of algorithmic computations, into a disruptive technology that enables and forces change upon organizations as well as our society at large. In effect, a major challenge of contemporary computing is to understand, predict, and harness the involved systems’ increasing complexity in terms of constituents, dependencies, and interactions – turning them into dependable systems. In this thesis, we therefore introduce a model of open computational systems, as the means to convey these systems’ factual behavior in realistic situations, but also in order to facilitate our own understanding of how to monitor and control their complex interdependencies. Moreover, since the critical variables that govern these complex systems’ qualitative behavior can be of a very elusive nature, we also introduce a method of online engineering, whereby cognitive agents – human and software – can instrument these open computational systems according to their own subjective and temporal understanding of some complex situation at hand.

Locally weighted regression is a non-parametric technique of regression that is capable of coping with non-stationarity of the input distribution. Online algorithms like Receptive FieldWeighted Regression and Locally Weighted Projection Regression use a sparse representation of the locally weighted model to approximate a target function, resulting in an efficient learning algorithm. However, these algorithms are fairly sensitive to parameter initializations and have multiple open learning parameters that are usually set using some insights of the problem and local heuristics. In this thesis, we attempt to alleviate these problems by using a probabilistic formulation of locally weighted regression followed by a principled Bayesian inference of the parameters. In the Randomly Varying Coefficient (RVC) model developed in this thesis, locally weighted regression is set up as an ensemble of regression experts that provide a local linear approximation to the target function. We train the individual experts independently and then combine their predictions using a Product of Experts formalism. Independent training of experts allows us to adapt the complexity of the regression model dynamically while learning in an online fashion. The local experts themselves are modeled using a hierarchical Bayesian probability distribution with Variational Bayesian Expectation Maximization steps to learn the posterior distributions over the parameters. The Bayesian modeling of the local experts leads to an inference procedure that is fairly insensitive to parameter initializations and avoids problems like overfitting. We further exploit the Bayesian inference procedure to derive efficient online update rules for the parameters. Learning in the regression setting is also extended to handle a classification task by making use of a logistic regression to model discrete class labels. The main contribution of the thesis is a spatially localised online learning algorithm set up in a probabilistic framework with principled Bayesian inference rule for the parameters of the model that learns local models completely independent of each other, uses only local information and adapts the local model complexity in a data driven fashion. This thesis, for the first time, brings together the computational efficiency and the adaptability of ‘non-competitive’ locally weighted learning schemes and the modelling guarantees of the Bayesian formulation.

Over the past ten years institutions of higher education throughout the country have begun to expand their educational offerings to the online environment. While the benefits of online education have been touted by administrators and institutions across the country, the actual impact on students' education is unclear (Distance learning student services: An interview with CTDLC executive director Ed Klonoski.2004; Planning reaps variety of benefits for distance programs.2006; Restauri, 2004; Yang & Cornelius, 2004). Many authors including Cox (2005) and Vail (2006) have found that in their rush to take advantage of the online market, many schools have failed to adequately prepare and develop both the educational and student services foundation needed for a successful online education program. This dissertation seeks to provide insight into the development of the online educational student services environment within the community college setting. Based on the work of Orlikowski and Gash (1994), an examination of the technological frames of institutional stakeholders was performed. Through this analysis a clearer picture of the online services development process was achieved. Furthermore, the theory of technological frames was examined to proved a framework from which organizations may examine their own institutional structures Using a multifaceted qualitative case study approach, this dissertation explored both the level of satisfaction students are receiving from the online student services environment and the technological frames of stakeholders that contributed to the current state of service. The findings of this research provided insight into current practices as well as contributed to the literature through the expansion of the theory of technological frames.

As new technology develops, society develops with it; we find new ways to interact with our business associates, our friends, and our family. This study looks specifically at the ways individuals in our contemporary community express sexuality and how dating and forming new relationships is being affected. We begin with a brief history on the study of sex and sexuality, and continue with a section exploring theories and more contemporary research on the subject. Focusing on current social phenomenon such as gender objectification and the anonymity pertaining to online interactions, we investigate social media and phone/computer applications focused on dating. We look for answers to questions regarding how the evolution of sexuality influences power structures within a community, through empirical interviews and hidden online observations, and from a feminist perspective. The intricacies of text communication and the interpretation of such interactions is a cornerstone of modern dating, which this thesis analyses closely by looking at how the participants initiate contact with potential partners.

PayPal is the leader in the field of online payment platform. Their ability to prevent fraudulent activities and PayPal´s high safety is the main reason for its success. PayPal is mostly used in costumer to costumer market but their business market users are also rising. Users are secured with a buy and sell insurance when they use PayPal services. If someone has purchased something online that then are not delivered, or that deviates markedly from the seller's description, PayPal can reimburse the full amount of the goods. Other services such as transferring money between friends are also possible. PayPal´s buy and sell insurance is what online purchasers’ value the most when they are shopping online and PayPal is at the forefront of this. If this type of insurances that PayPal provides would not exist people would purchase online less than they do today. PayPal has revolutionized and ameliorate the entire online purchase market for everyone with their safe payment platform.

Personalized instruction has long been a goal of behavior analysis in the education of typically developing populations, one important element of which is the delivery of lectures in new formats. This study tested feasibility of online lecture delivery by comparing online and in-class delivery of lectures using an adapted alternating treatments design. Each week, the lecture component of a unit of an introductory behavior analysis course was presented either online or in-class, alternating week to week. The alternation was counterbalanced between two sections, where one section saw the lecture for a given unit -online while the other did it in-class, allowing for comparison between lectures of a given unit as well as across units within a section. First attempt quiz scores were measured. No significant difference in the trend of quiz scores between conditions was detected, averaging 73.1% (range, 50.4% to 83.4%) for online and 72.8% (range, 54.8 to 84%) for in-class conditions. This suggests that online lectures are a feasible alternative lecture delivery in this introductory behavior analysis course. This experimental methodology may also be used to test other instructional techniques as well. The ability to place lectures online, opens the door to further, more refined, experimentation with modern instructional methods such as the “flipped classroom.”

This diploma thesis focuses on the role of social network Facebook in the process of English teaching and learning at the second level at Czech primary schools. The theoretical part concentrates on the methodology typically used in TEFL during 20th and 21st century, online teaching and learning as well as communication, describes the history and development of Facebook and deals with the question of online safety. The practical part firstly informs the reader about the development of the research procedure, states the aims and describes the research background. Secondly it deals with the data collection, assessment and evaluation and presents the results acquired from the research. The research was designed to reveal the possible benefits of the use of Facebook in the TEFL process; it consisted of a questionnaire and two types of observation performed by the author of this thesis.

The purpose of this study was to examine the extent to which the message structure of an online word-of-mouth referral influences the booking intentions of lodging consumers. The objectives were (1) determine what elements of the message structure of an online word-of-mouth referral influenced the booking intention of lodging consumers and (2) determine whether message structure moderated the relationships between beliefs, attitudes, norms, and booking intentions of online lodging consumers. A Web-based survey instrument was administered to 158 undergraduate students from eight different hospitality management course sections. Each course section was exposed to one of eight conditions. To address the first objective of the study, two separate two-way ANOVA procedures were employed to determine the main and interaction effects of type of claim (positive versus negative) and type of conclusion (implicit versus explicit) within one-sided messages and type of claim (positive claim first versus negative claim first) and type of conclusion (implicit versus explicit) within two-sided messages, the third element of the message structure examined was type of conclusion (explicit vs. implicit).To address the second objective, structural equation modeling (SEM) was used to determine whether message structure moderated the relationships between beliefs, attitudes, norms, and booking intentions of online lodging consumers The findings from the ANOVA indicated there was a significant main effect for positive one-sided messages. Respondents that received only positive online word-of-mouth messages had significantly higher booking intention scores (M = 3.84, SD = 1.57) than respondents that received only negative online word-of-mouth messages (M = 2.63, SD = 1.61; F (1, 75) = 10.67, p = .002). There was no significant interaction for type of claim and type of conclusion within the one-sided condition, F (1, 75) = 0.66, p = .419.The findings from SEM analysis indicate sidedness would moderate the relationship between beliefs, attitudes, norms, and booking intentions of online lodging consumers. Specifically, the relationship between behavioral beliefs and normative beliefs was stronger in the sample of respondents exposed to the one-sided message (β = .52, p = .002) than in the sample of respondents exposed to the two-sided message (β = .31, p = .011). This study suggests that lodging companies could benefit from a human-centered approach to understanding online word-of-mouth message structure and thereby consumer information behavior.