Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

T-Mobile Usa Inc. V. Department Of Finance For Baltimore City: What The Latest Salvo In Disproportional Cellular Phone Taxation Means For The Future, Daniel P. Slowey

Duke Law & Technology Review

Seventeen percent of the average monthly cellular phone bill in 2004 was comprised of federal, state, and local taxes. As the number of wireless subscribers across the nation continues to increase, states, cities, and counties are increasingly seizing upon cellular taxation as a panacea for budget shortfalls. The Maryland Tax Court’s recent decision in T-Mobile USA, Inc. v. Department of Finance for Baltimore City held state and county taxes on the sale of individual cellular lines as legal excise taxes rather than illegal sales taxes. This iBrief will highlight the origins of telecommunications taxation, examine the ruling in T-Mobile in …

Regression Cubes With Lossless Compression And Aggregation, Yixin Chen, Guozhu Dong, Jiawei Han, Jian Pei, Benjamin W. Wah, Jianyong Wang

Kno.e.sis Publications

As OLAP engines are widely used to support multidimensional data analysis, it is desirable to support in data cubes advanced statistical measures, such as regression and filtering, in addition to the traditional simple measures such as count and average. Such new measures will allow users to model, smooth, and predict the trends and patterns of data. Existing algorithms for simple distributive and algebraic measures are inadequate for efficient computation of statistical measures in a multidimensional space. In this paper, we propose a fundamentally new class of measures, compressible measures, in order to support efficient computation of the statistical models. For …

The Impact Of Video Conferencing Technology On Students' Interactivity In Gender Segregated Campuses, Najla Alraway

All-Inclusive List of Electronic Theses and Dissertations

This study of the impact of video conferencing in students' interactivity in gender segregated universities was conducted at United Arab Emirates University (UAEU) as a gender segregated university. The purpose of the study was to identify the affect of video conferencing technology on student-student, and student-instructor interaction. Moreover, the study examined students' willingness tQ participate in BlackBoard online discussion as a strategy to increase student-student and student-instructor interactions in video conferencing courses at gender segregated universities.

Implicit Online Learning With Kernels, Li Cheng, S. V. N. Vishwanathan, Dale Schuurmans, Shaojun Wang, Terry Caelli

Kno.e.sis Publications

We present two new algorithms for online learning in reproducing kernel Hilbert spaces. Our first algorithm, ILK (implicit online learning with kernels), employs a new, implicit update technique that can be applied to a wide variety of convex loss functions. We then introduce a bounded memory version, SILK (sparse ILK), that maintains a compact representation of the predictor without compromising solution quality, even in non-stationary environments. We prove loss bounds and analyze the convergence rate of both. Experimental evidence shows that our proposed algorithms outperform current methods on synthetic and real data.

Inside Unlv, Diane Russell, Cate Weeks, Shane Bevell, Mamie Peers, Lori Bachand

Inside UNLV

No abstract provided.

Digital Radio Cultures In Europe: Progress To Date And Prospects For The Future:A Review Of Research Produced By Drace, Brian O'Neill, Stephen Lax

Conference Papers

Digital Radio Cultures in Europe (DRACE), was established in 2004 under the COST Action A20 “The Impact of the Internet on Mass Media in Europe”. The original configuration of the COST A20 group included provision for an internet and music research group but this was re-focussed following a re-organisation in which DRACE was more formally incorporated. The group comprises 14 researchers with specific interests in radio from Norway, Finland, Denmark, Greece, Germany, Hungary, Portugal, Croatia, the United Kingdom and Ireland. The objective of the research group is to be at the forefront of empirical research on changes in radio cultures …

{Ontology: Resource} X {Matching : Mapping} X {Schema : Instance} :: Components Of The Same Challenge, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Ontologies enable us to elevate syntactic and structural processing in an information system/Web to an information system/Web powered with semantic processing. Experience has shown that monolithic and tightly coupled approaches seldom succeed, and majority of information systems and applications will need to deal with plurality of ontologies in a loosely coupled environment (i.e., independently evolving ontologies and inter-ontology relationships, existence of different contexts for different users/applications etc.) Development of such loosely-coupled multi-ontology environments entails development of techniques for ontology mapping/alignment, multi-ontology query processing, and much more.

Active Semantic Electronic Medical Record, Amit P. Sheth, Sangeeta Agrawal, Jonathan Lathem, Nicole Oldham, H. Wingate, K. Gallagher

Kno.e.sis Publications

The healthcare industry is rapidly advancing towards the widespread use of electronic medical records systems to manage the increasingly large amount of patient data and reduce medical errors. In addition to patient data there is a large amount of data describing procedures, treatments, diagnoses, drugs, insurance plans, coverage, formularies and the relationships between these data sets. While practices have benefited from the use of EMRs, infusing these essential programs with rich domain knowledge and rules can greatly enhance their performance and ability to support clinical decisions. Active Semantic Electronic Medical Record (ASEMR) application discussed here uses Semantic Web technologies to …

An Examination Of Conflict Conversation In An Online Community: The Pie Fight At Dailykos.Com, Samantha Isabella Soma

Dissertations and Theses

The increasing popularity of the social web and online communities requires the attention of researchers of conflict resolution. Although there are many ways to resolve conflict offline, the ways in which conflict takes place within a native online context have not been much studied. Are any of the tools and strategies that are used to improve communication offline used successfully online, or are some other strategies taking their place? What communication patterns occur within an online community equipped with comment moderation capabilities? This research is a case study and addressed these questions by performing a qualitative analysis of comment conversations …

On The Complexity Of Horn Description Logics, Markus Krotzsch, Sebastian Rudolph, Pascal Hitzler

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Horn-SHIQ has been identified as a fragment of the description logic SHIQ for which inferencing is in PT_IME with respect to the size of the ABox. This enables reasoning with larger ABoxes in situations where the TBox is static, and represents one approach towards tractable description logic reasoning. In this paper, we show that reasoning in Horn-SHIQ, in spite of its low datacomplexity, is E_xpT_IME-hard with respect to the overall size of the knowledge base. While this result is not unexpected, the proof is not a mere modification of existing reductions since …

A Framework For Schema-Driven Relationship Discovery From Unstructured Text, Cartic Ramakrishnan, Krzysztof Kochut, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

We address the issue of extracting implicit and explicit relationships between entities in biomedical text. We argue that entities seldom occur in text in their simple form and that relationships in text relate the modified, complex forms of entities with each other. We present a rule-based method for (1) extraction of such complex entities and (2) relationships between them and (3) the conversion of such relationships into RDF. Furthermore, we present results that clearly demonstrate the utility of the generated RDF in discovering knowledge from text corpora by means of locating paths composed of the extracted relationships.

Oxford Internet Institute, Priscilla Finley

Library Faculty Research

The Oxford Internet Institute hosts over 50 archived Webcasts of speakers, events, and conference sessions on Internet-related research and education intended to shape policy and practice.

Inside Unlv, Cate Weeks, Brenda Griego, David Ashley, Mamie Peers, Shane Bevell, Gian Galassi

Inside UNLV

No abstract provided.

How To Reason With Owl In A Logic Programming System, Markus Krotzsch, Pascal Hitzler, Denny Vrandecic, Michael Sintek

Computer Science and Engineering Faculty Publications

Logic programming has always been a major ontology modeling paradigm, and is frequently being used in large research projects and industrial applications, e.g., by means of the F-Logic reasoning engine OntoBroker or the TRIPLE query, inference, and transformation language and system. At the same time, the Web Ontology Language OWL has been recommended by the W3C for modeling ontologies for the Web. Naturally, it is desirable to investigate the interoperability between both paradigms. In this paper, we do so by studying an expressive fragment of OWL DL for which reasoning can be reduced to the evaluation of Horn logic programs. …

When Is Employee Blogging Protected By Section 7 Of The Nlra?, Katherine M. Scott

Duke Law & Technology Review

The National Labor Relations Act forbids employers from retaliating against certain types of employee speech or intimidating those who engage in it. This iBrief examines how blogging fits into the current statutory framework and recommends how the National Labor Relations Board and the courts should address the unique features of employee blogs.

Inside Unlv, Diane Russell, Shane Bevell, David Ashley, Cate Weeks, Jennifer Lawson

Inside UNLV

No abstract provided.

A Blogger's Blog: Exploring The Definition Of A Medium, Danah Boyd

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph of Introduction]

While blogging is piquing the interest of mainstream media, youth, academic researchers, and entrepreneurial Silicon Valley, only a fraction of Internet users read blogs and many do not even know what the term means. Reports on how many people read blogs vary (Rainie 2005, Comscore 2005), but even in the United States, less than 50% of Internet users read blogs and many do not even know when they do (Buchwalter 2005). Numerous tools have been built to support blogging and people have extended those tools to do a wide variety of things that may or may …

Thoughts On Blogging By A Poorly Masked Academic, Michael Benton

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

My first attempt at blogging was the creation of Dialogic. I was working as an adjunct in 2004 at the University of Kentucky and developing original media literacy projects and assignments online. I had heard reports that universities might start claiming that course work developed on their servers would be technically the property of the university that owned the server. The precarious nature of adjunct life makes us susceptible to rumor, so I began to search for a new, cheap, relatively unmonitored forum to develop course work and to archive the wealth of information I was finding online. …

Blogademia, Craig Saper

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Academics, especially in the arts and humanities, have taken to blogs like ducks to water. At the same time, some of these blogs, especially those produced by graduate students and untenured faculty, have opened themselves to charges of wasting time gossiping about colleagues, and wallowing in unprofessional discourse, instead of working on serious scholarship. One blogger told me confidentially,

I just password-protected my blog for the period of my job search after reading this article in the Chronicle of Higher Ed, I actually got in trouble with my senior colleagues last semester for making a posting about …

Design And Play: Weblog Genres Of Adolescent Girls In Israel, Carmel L. Vaisman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Unique circumstances existing in the Israeli blogsphere have attracted many adolescent girls. In recent years, a growing number of weblogs belonging to adolescent girls are challenging blogging norms, creating a tension between written narratives and performance narratives that combine design and play practices. Existing weblog research has explored the connections between gender, linguistic features, and genre but has not examined visual blog genres, nor questioned the role of features inherent in weblog software in the formation of gendered blog genres and blogging norms. Based on a work-in-progress of a larger scope, I shall argue that design supportive features distinctive to …

[Introduction:] Blogging And (Expatriate) Identity, Lauren Elkin

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

In Lettres parisiennes: Histoires d'exil, an exchange of letters on exile between francophone writers Nancy Huston and Leila Sebbah, Huston, a native of Alberta, Canada who moved to Paris in her early twenties, explains that she doesn't write in cafes because she would hate to be mistaken for the stereotypical "American in Paris": "one of those young women who I resemble a little too closely, with their blue, blue eyes and their bizarrely healthy skin, who you find sitting at café tables scribbling ostensibly in their diaries ("today: Mona Lisa") or filling out postcards ("Dear John, can you believe …

Identity And Credibility In The Global Blogosphere, David Sasaki

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The post-national writer, in all its manifestations, is the most interesting and fruitful thing to have happened to world literature since the birth of modernism. It's safe to say this will be the literary hallmark of the new century, with the internet its Gutenberg. And post-nationalism itself is a sign of hope. After centuries of barbarity, a Union in Europe only became possible when it was harder to define who was French or German or Italian or Dutch. We can imagine what the world would be like if only Americans would become post-American.

That was Eliot Weinberger speaking …

My Life In The Panopticon: Blogging From Iran, Esther Herman

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

The Panopticon is a prison that was developed in the 19th century. All of the cells face inward toward a tower. Guards sit in the tower where they can see everything that is happening within the cells. The prisoners cannot see the guards. They do not even know if a guard is in the tower or not. The prisoners feel watched whether they are being watched or not. As such, they internalize the notion of being watched and become their own guards.

Why I Blog: Part 1, Michael Benton (Compiler)

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Why I Blog: Part 2, Michael Benton (Compiler)

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Two Papers, Me In Between [External Link], Lilia Efimova

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

Democracy Defended: Polibloggers And The Political Press In America, Erica Johnson

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

Since their creation less than a decade ago, blogs have metamorphosed from a relatively unknown activity into a recognized phenomenon. Political blogs have shown the potential to influence the functioning of American democracy. As the importance of blogs has grown, there has been heated discussion about whether or not to consider political blogs as a form of political journalism, an important aspect of American democracy. To resolve the debate, the author examines the two principal democratic responsibilities of the media: gatekeeper and government watchdog. The author selected two widely-read political blogs, Instapundit and Eschaton, and one influential newspaper, the …

The Lo(N)G Revolution: The Blogosphere As An Alternative Public Sphere?, Anna Notaro

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

It is a familiar argument that we are witnessing a period of major cultural and technological upheaval, yet this recognition is rarely related to a recognition of the long history of critical reflection on the nature of cultural and social change. One of the aims of this essay is to consider the most recent discussions over technology and its political impact in the light of the seminal arguments of Raymond Williams. In Television: Technology and Cultural Form. (1974) Williams writes:

Over a wide range from general television through commercial advertising to centralised information and data-processing systems, the technology …

Webfestschrift For Wealth Bondage [External Link], (Blog) The Happy Tutor

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

No abstract provided.

The Blogging Of Everyday Life, Tama Leaver

Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture

[First paragraph]

Writing in the early 1980s, Michel de Certeau, one of the most influential theorists of 'the everyday', warned:

Marginality is today no longer limited to minority groups, but is rather massive and pervasive; this cultural activity of the non-producers of culture, an activity that is unsigned, unreadable, and unsymbolized, remains the only one possible for all those who nevertheless buy and pay for the showy products through which a productivist economy articulates itself. Marginality is becoming a universal. A marginal group has now become a silent majority.[1]

Throughout The Practice of Everyday Life, de Certeau argues for …