Techn. Univ., Diss.--Ilmenau, 2007. / Enth. außerdem: Thesen.

Potsdam, University, Diss., 2003.

Peer-to-peer file sharing has overturned the traditional way to communication, and has great impacts on society. But as so far, there are only few researches concerning this problem from users¡¦ point of view, why and how users take use of it is still equivocal. Therefore in this research, I examined the motivations and behavior of P2P uses with uses and gratifications approach, and further more, whether motivations for P2P uses explain users¡¦ behaviors and considered the contribution of individual characteristics are also examined. As for motivations, a factor analysis revealed five motivations to use P2P file sharing software: Information seeking, Convenience, Library storage, Interpersonal communication and Self-achievement. Motivations are related to individual characteristics, including gender, age, the duration of internet use and P2P use, income, and education. Several motivations and individual differences predict P2P use. And grouping users with cluster analysis, this research found three types of users: highly involved users, low involved users, and those who just want to download files. Highly involved users launch software frequently, have the strong motivations and are willing to share files with others. On the contrary, low involved users use less frequently, and have the relatively weak motivation of P2P use. Those who just download files are unwilling to share files with others.

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Thesis (M.A.) -- Central Connecticut State University, 2007. / Thesis advisor: Marc Goldstein. "... in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts in Psychology." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 81-89). Also available via the World Wide Web.

To accommodate aids orphans and children living with abuse, a 'House of Refuge,' which I call Uthando, was established adjacent to an informal settlement from funds raised by pupils from another private school in the area. A number of pupils from the private (donor) school were trained as peer counsellors and interacted with the pupils at Uthando for at least 18 months providing basic counselling and learning support. Although peer group influence starts later in a child’s life - generally by pre-adolescence - it can be enormously powerful in transmitting culture, values, and norms that influence behaviour. By failing to consider peers in understanding interventions with young people and within communities there is a high probability of implementing interventions that are ineffective. The concept of school support teams is not new but the use of peer support within community projects needed further exploration. The question arose: What are the experiences of peer counsellors within an ongoing community project? In this case study reflective journals and participant observation were used to identify the experiences of the peer counsellors at Uthando. Ten themes emerged from the data obtained in the empirical component of this inquiry. In each case, a definition of each experience was formulated based on the journal entries themselves and on personal observation data. These definitions may not exactly reflect the formal definitions found in other sources but have been carefully formulated to reflect the unique nature of the adolescent peer counsellor’s experiences at Uthando. / Prof. J. Pillay

A dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Education in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Education in the Department of Educational Psychology and Special Education at the University of Zululand, 2005. / This research study focuses on peer education and its impact on students' lifestyle and behaviour. Peer education is a critical approach for behaviour change. The present investigation had two objectives. The first aim was to determine the nature of the impact of peer education on students' lifestyle and behaviour. The second aim was to find out whether factors such as age, gender, year of study, course of study, and duration of involvement in the programme have the impact on peer education. The questionnaire was administered to all trained peer educators at Border Technikon. Results indicated that all respondents agreed that peer education was educationally relevant and offered accurate information. Furthermore, the results indicated that peer educators older and below 20 years are less likely to have a positive opinion on the impact of peer education on behavioural changes compared to those older than 20years of age. Comparing second and third years, the results show that every second year who agrees that the programme has an impact on behavioural changes there are five third years who agree with that opinion. The results show that duration of involvement in peer education influences the opinion on the impact of the peer education on behavioural changes. Differences in faculties have no influence in the way peer educators perceive peer education programme. This study supports the conclusion that peer education can improve students' HTV/AIDS prevention, knowledge, attitudes, and self-efficacy.

Today the telecommunication market is faced with the situation that customers are requesting for new telecommunication services, especially value added services. The concept of Next Generation Networks (NGN) seems to be a solution for this, so this concept finds its way into the telecommunication area. These customer expectations have emerged in the context of NGN and the associated migration of the telecommunication networks from traditional circuit-switched towards packet-switched networks. One fundamental aspect of the NGN concept is to outsource the intelligence of services from the switching plane onto separated Service Delivery Platforms using SIP (Session Initiation Protocol) to provide the required signalling functionality. Caused by this migration process towards NGN SIP has appeared as the major signalling protocol for IP (Internet Protocol) based NGN. This will lead in contrast to ISDN (Integrated Services Digital Network) and IN (Intelligent Network) to significantly lower dependences among the network and services and enables to implement new services much easier and faster. In addition, further concepts from the IT (Information Technology) namely SOA (Service-Oriented Architecture) have largely influenced the telecommunication sector forced by amalgamation of IT and telecommunications. The benefit of applying SOA in telecommunication services is the acceleration of service creation and delivery. Main features of the SOA are that services are reusable, discoverable combinable and independently accessible from any location. Integration of those features offers a broader flexibility and efficiency for varying demands on services. This thesis proposes a novel framework for service provisioning and composition in SIP-based peer-to-peer networks applying the principles of SOA. One key contribution of the framework is the approach to enable the provisioning and composition of services which is performed by applying SIP. Based on this, the framework provides a flexible and fast way to request the creation for composite services. Furthermore the framework enables to request and combine multimodal value-added services, which means that they are no longer limited regarding media types such as audio, video and text. The proposed framework has been validated by a prototype implementation.

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With the network popularization, applications on network are increasing day by day. VoIP (Voice over IP) is one of exciting developments on network applications, and its voice quality has been as good as traditional phones. Furthermore, IP phone users do not afford expensive communication costs, but go to the expense of broadband service. Therefore, more and more people start to use IP phone. After meeting certain requirements of basic communication, users could ask for more additional services. In the thesis, a voicemail service is built under SIP (Session Initiation Protocol). Users can keep missing call by recording voice with digital files, and then, one can receive recorded files from E-mail. Besides, small social networks can communicate with IP phones by using pear-to-pear telephony, which costs less money and labor due to no cost on building servers.