42162120
Digitizing Old Photographs for the Web
In the last few years, both small family photo collections and huge library and museum collections have been digitized and made available on the Web. In this article, we discuss reasons for digitizing. We describe an ongoing project in which children and adults in a technology-oriented after-school program in rural Michigan are digitizing photographs for a local historical society.
31784785
Tiger: Educational Research in the Age of the Internet
45778067
Children's Use of New Technology for Picture-Taking
Photographs are often associated with children: People have children, they take pictures of them. We don't very often think about children as picture-takers, but our recent work has moved us in that direction. As part of an interest in children's use of new technology, we have studied children's picture-taking with new camera, computer, and Web technology. In this article, we discuss why and how children take pictures. We also discuss the issue of photofakery.
20360552
Internet attitudes and Internet use: some surprising findings from the HomeNetToo project
HomeNetToo is a longitudinal field study to examine the antecedents and consequences of home Internet use in low-income families. Among the antecedents considered are attitudes about the Internet and their ability to predict Internet use. Participants in the project were 117 adults who completed attitude measures at pre-trial, 3 months, 9 months and post-trial (16 months) and had their Internet use automatically recorded. Ethnographic accounts of their experiences with the Internet were also obtained. Findings indicate that attitudes about privacy and reliability of information on the Internet predict Internet use, but not as expected. Participants who believed less in privacy and reliability of information used the Internet more, even after the contributions of demographic characteristics (race and age), pre-trial experience using the Internet, and actual Internet use during the preceding time period were considered. Attitudes about the potential harm to children and health from Internet use predicted less use. Implications for efforts to reduce the digital divide, the importance of gathering both quantitative and qualitative data, and directions for future research are discussed.
27884919
Writing photo captions for the Web
Photographs are rarely self-sufficient. They need captions. A caption tells us something about the person or thing photographed, also something about the photographer. In this article, we discuss how to write photo captions for the Web. We provide examples from adultso and childrenos work.
1706033
Hierarchical Clustering Algorithms for Document Datasets
Fast and high-quality document clustering algorithms play an important role in providing intuitive navigation and browsing mechanisms by organizing large amounts of information into a small number of meaningful clusters. In particular, clustering algorithms that build meaningful hierarchies out of large document collections are ideal tools for their interactive visualization and exploration as they provide data-views that are consistent, predictable, and at different levels of granularity. This paper focuses on document clustering algorithms that build such hierarchical solutions and (i) presents a comprehensive study of partitional and agglomerative algorithms that use different criterion functions and merging schemes, and (ii) presents a new class of clustering algorithms called constrained agglomerative algorithms, which combine features from both partitional and agglomerative approaches that allows them to reduce the early-stage errors made by agglomerative methods and hence improve the quality of clustering solutions. The experimental evaluation shows that, contrary to the common belief, partitional algorithms always lead to better solutions than agglomerative algorithms; making them ideal for clustering large document collections due to not only their relatively low computational requirements, but also higher clustering quality. Furthermore, the constrained agglomerative methods consistently lead to better solutions than agglomerative methods alone and for many cases they outperform partitional methods, as well.
15310670
A Recent-Biased Dimension Reduction Technique for Time Series Data
There are many techniques developed for tackling time series and most of them consider every part of a sequence equally. In many applications, however, recent data can often be much more interesting and significant than old data. This paper defines new recent-biased measures for distance and energy, and proposes a recent-biased technique based on DWT for time series in which more recent data are considered more significant. With such a recent-biased technique, the dimension of time series can be reduced while effectively preserving the recent-biased energy. Our experiments have demonstrated the effectiveness of the proposed approach for handling time series.
8188664
Scalable On-Demand Streaming of Nonlinear Media
A conventional video file contains a single temporally-ordered sequence of video frames. Clients requesting on-demand streaming of such a file receive (all or intervals of) the same content. For popular files that receive many requests during a file playback time, scalable streaming protocols based on multicast or broadcast have been devised. Such protocols require server and network bandwidth that grow much slower than linearly with the file request rate. This paper considers ldquononlinearrdquo video content in which there are parallel sequences of frames. Clients dynamically select which branch of the video they wish to follow, sufficiently ahead of each branch point so as to allow the video to be delivered without jitter. An example might be ldquochoose-your-own-endingrdquo movies. With traditional scalable delivery architectures such as movie theaters or TV broadcasting, such personalization of the delivered video content is very difficult or impossible. It becomes feasible, in principle at least, when the video is streamed to individual clients over a network. For on-demand streaming of nonlinear media, this paper analyzes the minimal server bandwidth requirements, and proposes and evaluates practical scalable delivery protocols.
2358820
Subscription Propagation and Content-Based Routing with Delivery Guarantees
Subscription propagation enables efficient content-based routing in publish/subscribe systems and is a challenging problem when it is required to support reliable delivery in networks with redundant routes. We have designed a generic model and a highly-asynchronous algorithm accomplishing these goals. Existing algorithms can be interpreted as different encodings and optimizations of the generic algorithm and hence their correctness can be derived from the generic algorithm.
6260525
Teaching surface design made easy
All popular computer graphics textbooks have chapters on curves and surfaces [1, 5, 6, 7]. Teaching these chapters could be one of the most challenging tasks in a computer graphics course because of the involved mathematics and the difficulty of visualizing the anticipated effects of the theoretical results. We certainly can skip these chapters and only rely on the polyhedron world, because Gouraud’s or Phong’s shading algorithms could make polyhedra objects appear as realistic curvilinear ones. Unfortunately, real world applications such as ship hull and car body design are usually curvilinear and may only be approximated using polyhedron models. Thus, to address this problem and to make teaching surface design easier, we have designed a pedagogical tool as part of our NSF supported project [8]. One of our goals is to provide the students with an interactive environment which is used to visualize, experiment and verify important and fundamental concepts and algorithms. While there are good textbooks on curve and surface design [3, 4, 9], we can only find two pedagogical aids. Yen’s video program [11] only provides one way information flow. Rockwood and Chambers [10] describe a multimedia tutorial on computer aided geometric design which runs on Windows. It is basically a tutorial that introduces concepts using some animation but lacks a