This study investigates and records the production of a digital media artwork blackBOX: Painting A Digital Picture of Documented Memory, generated through the media technologies of interactive multimedia, exploiting the creative potentials of digitally produced music, sound, image and text relationships in a disc based and online (Internet) environment. The artwork evolves from an imaginary electronic landscape that can be uniquely explored/ played in a non-sequential manner. The artwork/ ‘game’ is a search for the protagonist Nina’s hybrid cultural identity. This is mirrored in the exploration of random, fragmentary and non-linear experiences designed for the player engaged with the artwork. The subjective intervention of the player/ participant in the electronic artwork is metaphoric of the improvisational tendencies that have evolved in the Greek Blues (Rembetika), Jazz, and Hindustani musical and performative dance forms. The protagonist Nina’s discovery of these musical forms reveal her cultural/ spiritual origins. As a musical composer arranges notes, melodies and harmonies, and sections of instruments, so too, the multimedia producer designs a ensemble of audio-visual fragments to be navigated. Dance also becomes a driving metaphor, analogous to the players movement in and through these passages of image/ sound/ text and as a movement between theories and ideas explored in the content of the program. The central concern is to playfully reverse, obscure, distort the look of the dominating/colonialist gaze, in the production of an interactive ‘game’ and allow the girl to picture herself. One of my objectives is to explore the ways in which social research can be undertaken by the creation of an interactive program in the computer environment utilising interactive digital media technologies. The study reveals that, through the subjective intervention of the (player) user4 with the digital artefact, a unique experience and responsiveness is produced with the open ended text. The work is comprised of a website http://www.strangecities.net; an interactive CD-ROM; a gallery installation; digital photomedia images; and a written thesis documenting and theorising the production. 4 The term user, while widely debated has been in usage from the 1980s to refer to the unique human interaction with the digital artefact, electronic screen work, and computer interface.

The increasing popularity and rapid development of the Internet and specifically the World-Wide Web in recent years has led to an exponential growth of users around the world in many different application areas. Following this growing trend, many eager educators have also embraced this new technology and have begun to use it as a tool in delivering education. A plethora of applications has already been developed in an attempt to implement educational content in this way. A general concern for many researchers is that most of these applications are not efficient in delivering educational outcomes and fail to achieve their educational goal. In the present project we propose that the present failure to deliver educational outcomes in an efficient way has its origins in the lack of concern and focus of developers on modern learning theory. Therefore, in this work we establish the foundations in terms of an interdisciplinary contribution from areas such as, educational learning theory, human-computer interaction and web design guidelines for the design and implementation of web pages aimed at facilitating the teaching and tutoring of basic statistics concepts. As a result of this work, a specific set of learning theories were researched and analyzed, the basic ideas of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) were explored and a set of appropriate principles from HCI were chosen. Furthermore, a selected group of Web design guidelines were researched, studied and selected to ensure that the final product contributes to the efficient delivery of subject content and effective achievement of learning outcomes. In addition, a number of parallels were formulated and discussed between the different areas of research. The establishment of a series of combined principles will not only contribute to the aims of the present project but also to further projects initiated by the Department of Econometrics at The University Sydney.

While emerging technologies such as interactive multimedia are increasingly being employed in computerised music instruction, understanding of participant music listening behaviours in interactive multimedia music instruction is currently very limited. With the aim of elucidating music listening behaviour, the central concern of this work is to identify and explain participant interactions with the audio components of interactive multimedia music instruction. The investigation employs a novel documentation procedure, which extends the application of digital audio recording technology, to provide a finely calibrated analysis of the audio activity of a sample of 20 undergraduate music education majors during individual sessions with two commercially-available interactive multimedia music instruction programs. Graphically-based Sound Activity Profiles, which the researcher developed specifically for the current investigation, characterise and summarise participant interactions with audio components, while an analysis of questionnaire responses and follow-up interview transcripts provides supplementary information that further explains participants' music listening behaviours. The results of the investigation show that music listening behaviours during the study sessions were highly variable. While extensive participant interaction with music examples occasionally reflected attentive music listening behaviours, many study sessions were characterised by brief, fragmentary music excerpts and lengthy periods of silence. Participants spent as little as five percent of their session time listening to music and as much as 88 percent of the session time in silence. A substantial number of the study cohort frequently interrupted the music examples they had activated. Participants' perceptions of the extent of their interaction with music examples were frequently inaccurate, as subjects often substantially overestimated the amount of session time they had spent listening to music. The study findings suggest that many interactive multimedia music instruction participants would benefit from interventions that elicit more extensive and prolonged interaction with music examples. Accordingly, recommendations include a call for research to develop and test software designs that incorporate automated monitoring of session audio activity so that dynamic on-screen information about music listening behaviour can be provided to interactive multimedia music instruction participants. Such information may encourage participants to modify inappropriate music listening behaviours.

L'exploitation de documents multimédia est en plein essor. Nous savons maintenant bien exploiter de très grandes bases d'images photographiques et y faire des recherches par le contenu efficaces. L'étape suivante consiste à se tourner vers des documents plus complexes, comme le sont les vidéos et les bandes sonores. Une des principales difficultés afférentes au traitement de tels documents vient de leur caractère temporel. Décrire de l'audio et de la vidéo revient ainsi à fabriquer des séquences de descriptions dont il est important de préserver l'ordre et l'enchaînement. Cette thèse propose deux méthodes d'indexation de documents multimédia séquentiels. La première se base sur l'utilisation de l'alignement dynamique (DTW) pour la comparaison de séquences et propose une méthode présentant des gains significatifs en termes de coût de calcul par rapport aux méthodes existantes. La seconde méthode est appliquée spécifiquement à la recherche de reprises musicales. Il s'agit d'effectuer un premier filtrage des régions temporelles susceptibles d'être mises en correspondance avec la requête, avant d'appliquer une robustification temporelle.

<p>Realisering av streamingtjenester i P2P-nettverk er en utfordring fordi slike nettverk er preget av dynamikk og stadige endringer i forhold til nodenes tilgjengelighet. Hvis en node som leverer en mediestrøm blir utilgjengelig, vil det oppstå avbrudd i avspillingen hos mottakernoden. Utgangspunktet for denne hovedoppgaven er et ønske om å kunne gjøre streaming med tilfredsstillende tjenestekvalitet til en realitet i P2P-nettverk. Målet er å spesifisere en metode som bidrar til å forbedre den opplevde ressurstilgjengeligheten i slike nettverk.</p><p>P2P-systemer kjennetegnes generelt ved at de består av noder på randen av Internett, at samtlige noder bidrar med ressurser og kommuniserer direkte med hverandre og at hver node er en selvstyrende enhet. Det finnes to hovedkategorier P2P-systemer, “ekte” og “hybride”, samt en rekke applikasjonsområder. Streaming innebærer at innholdsleveranse gjøres i sanntid. Sanntidsleveranse krever at data leveres til mottaker i tide og at pakker leveres i rett rekkefølge. I P2P-nettverk, hvor omgivelsene preges av dynamikk og heterogenitet, er dette en stor utfordring. Flere teknikker kan benyttes for å håndtere slike omgivelser, men utfordringene knyttet til tilgjengelighet framstår som uløste og samtidig kritiske med tanke på oppnåelig tjenestekvalitet.</p><p>Vårt bidrag i retning av å forbedre den opplevde ressurstilgjengeligheten er en metode som blant annet benytter multinodestreaming som leveranseteknikk. Multinodestreaming innebærer å dele en strøm i flere delstrømmer og hente disse fra forskjellige noder. Delstrømmene kan da flettes ved mottak og spilles av som én strøm. Konsekvensen av at en node blir utilgjengelig vil kun bli kvalitetsdegradering av avspillingen, og ikke totalt avspillingsbrudd. Tilgjengeligheten kan forbedres ytterligere ved å utføre effektiv overtakelse av tapte delstrømmer. Ved å implementere metoden i en prototyp, er det mulig å teste dens funksjon og effekt. Testene viser at kvalitetsdegraderingen på avspillingen, som følge av at en node blir utilgjengelig, kun er midlertidig hvis en annen node kan overta leveransen. Reetablering av en delstrøm kan gjøres på gjennomsnittlig 4,7 sekunder. Enkeltnodestreaming ville til sammenligning medført fullt avspillingsbrudd. Resultatene sannsynliggjør derfor at multinodestreaming kan bidra til å forbedre den opplevde ressurstilgjengeligheten for streamingtjenester i P2P-nettverk.</p>

<p>Med den här uppsatsen vill vi undersöka vilka förutsättningar, samt vilka hinder och möjligheter, som finns för multimediala presentationsformer av journalistik på svenska tidningars webbplatser. Vi har undersökt vilka attityder som finns kring multimedia, på vilka sätt de undersökta tidningarna arbetar med multimedia i dag och hur de vill arbeta med det i framtiden. Vi har också undersökt hur de tänker kring själva utformningen av de multimediala presentationsformerna.</p><p>Vi har använt oss av explorativa intervjuer med fem personer som har nära anknytning till den multimediaproduktion som bedrivs i dag, och analyserat dessa utifrån Gunnar Nygrens studier av konvergens och divergens, Mark Deuzes teorier om onlinejournalistik, samt Richard E. Mayer och Julianne H. Newtons teorier om den mänskliga hjärnans betydelse i inlärning och journalistik. De medieföretag vi besökt är Dagens Nyheter, Svenska Dagbladet och Svenska Grafikbyrån.</p><p>Resultatet av vår undersökning visar att attityderna kring multimediala presentationsformer är positiva och att respondenterna ser ljust på framtiden, men alla är överens om att Sverige ligger långt efter exempelvis USA och Spanien när det gäller hur mycket multimedia som används. Faktorer som har bromsat utvecklingen i Sverige är, enligt våra resultat, att man inte riktigt vet hur produktionen ska organiseras, vem som ska producera multimedia. Bristen på inspiration och goda svenska exempel är det kanske största hindret. Goda exempel och inspiration finns utomlands och i nöjes- och reklamindustrin, men traditioner och journalistiska ideal hindrar journalister från att hitta dem. Klart är också att journalisterna inte har reflekterat djupare kring utformning och inlärning ur ett teoretiskt perspektiv, utan går mest på magkänsla – en magkänsla som kanske ännu inte finns på redaktionerna.</p>

No description available.

The increasing power and ubiquity of mobile wireless devices is enabling real-time information delivery for many diverse applications. A crucial question is how to allocate finite network resources efficiently and fairly despite the uncertainty common in highly dynamic mobile ad hoc networks. We propose a set of routing protocols, Self-Balancing Supply/Demand (SBSD), to address that question. The SBSD model is based on economic principles; the supply of requested information is increased (by being available at more nodes) in accordance with the number of network participants requesting it. / Each replica of a message is assigned a utility value that reflects the estimated network congestion caused by all replicas of that message. This utility function is designed to reflect the expected changes in network congestion over time. We derive mathematical proofs to demonstrate properties of SBSD, including maximum flooding depth, fair allocation of bandwidth over competing messages, and the relationship between utility and network congestion. We also present simulation results for scenarios including random and vehicular mobility as well as extensions for high-density environments.

Within social media and popular culture, new and diverse forms of online identity representation are emerging in virtual spaces. As traditional literacy practices yield to newer literacies, these forms of identity representation require and receive critical scrutiny. Personalized avatars are one such form. They provide a site through which individuals may represent themselves as a constructed product of identity and the discursive practices that contribute to it. / This qualitative study explores the cultural politics of representation with ten teenaged girls who constructed personalized avatars for social networking sites. Its purpose is to investigate the truth effects about representation, girlhood identity and culture, and to analyze the power structures present in the narrative and graphic images of girlhood self-representation. As part of this analysis, personalized avatars are deconstructed as forms of visual language within a broader context of critical media literacy. / The ubiquitous character of social networking places girls and their images under a scrutiny within which they become objects of a regulatory gaze. Drawing from a cultural studies methodology, this study utilizes critical ethnography informed by feminist poststructuralism to examine the politics of this gaze and to articulate the tensions between attempting to be true to lived experience while remaining cognizant of the always partial and ever political nature of representation. This framework challenges normative notions of the self and attempts to expose how power structures within a site of avatar production intersect with girlhood performative desire. / This study finds that normative discourses around gender, ability, class, ethnicity, and beauty govern representation for teenaged girls in online spaces in a manner similar to real life locations. Despite a widely held belief that girls have an expanded capacity to represent themselves through online forums of individual creativity, this study suggests that structures of social media continue to contribute to the power of these regulatory discourses. This study finds that girls report a constant insecurity and questioning around their self-representations and, as such, these findings have implications for critical media education as well as future research related to girlhood identities in new media spaces.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Hong Kong University of Science and Technology, 2006. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 130-138). Also available in electronic version.