Media Items Research Articles

SESAME

With the recent popularity of social network services, a significant volume of heterogeneous social media data is generated by users, in the form of texts, photos, videos and collections of points of interest, etc. Such social media data provides users with rich resources for exploring content, such as looking for an interesting video or a favorite point of interest. However, the rapid growth of social media causes difficulties for users to efficiently retrieve their desired media items. Fortunately, users' digital footprints on social networks such as comments massively reflect individual's fine-grained preference on media items, that is, preference on different aspects of the media content, which can then be used for personalized social media search. In this article, we propose SESAME, a fine-grained preference-aware social media search framework leveraging user digital footprints on social networks. First, we collect users' direct feedback on media content from their social networks. Second, we extract users' sentiment about the media content and the associated keywords from their comments to characterize their fine-grained preference. Third, we propose a parallel multituple based ranking tensor factorization algorithm to perform the personalized media item ranking by incorporating two unique features, viz., integrating an enhanced bootstrap sampling method by considering user activeness and adopting stochastic gradient descent parallelization techniques. We experimentally evaluate the SESAME framework using two datasets collected from Foursquare and YouTube, respectively. The results show that SESAME can subtly capture user preference on social media items and consistently outperform baseline approaches by achieving better personalized ranking quality.

Ambient intelligence and ergonomics in Asia

Ambient intelligence (AmI) is one of the most important advances in computer technology in the mobile era. By being aware and applying knowledge of ergonomics (human factors), AmI system users will be in better shape and health, become more effective and find using AmI system a more pleasant and enjoyable experience. This special issue contains selected papers from the 1st international conference on ambient intelligence and ergonomics in Asia (AmIE 2013), which was held at Taichung city, Taiwan, July 3–5, 2013. The conference attracted a large number of scientific papers that contributed to the state-of-the-art in the fields of ambient intelligence and ergonomics. After a strict review, five articles from researchers around the world were finally accepted. To determine an understandable algorithm that could be used by designers to create novel concept designs, M.T. Wang and C.C. Yang selected the popular motor scooter as a sample product, and used the most distinctive front handle cover as a design target. Their method included three phases: preparation, construction of conceptual creativity, and semantic analysis. After comparing random idea sketches with designs available on the market, they observed that certain concept designs obtained using this method were exceptionally innovative, and could be easily redesigned for an actual product. A.M. Otebolaku and M.T. Andrade investigated context-aware recommendation techniques for implicit delivery of contextually relevant online media items. The proposed recommendation service identifies a user’s dynamic contextual situation from the device’s built-in sensors, and uses case-based reasoning to determine the user’s current contextual preferences. The effectiveness of the proposed recommendation service was evaluated with a case study. Gripping and pinching are frequently used hand strength in various occupational activities and in clinical evaluation of the hand. Therefore, formulating grip and pinch prediction models with easily obtainable personal parameters will help facilitate the design and evaluation of workplace environments or facilitate the hand impairment or progression assessments. P.C. Sung, C.C. Hsu, C.L. Lee, Y.-S.P. Chiu, and H.L. Chen developed maximum voluntary contraction (MVC) grip and key pinch strength prediction models using regression method and artificial neural networks (ANN). An ANN is a prevalent humanized computing method that imitates the central nervous system of a human. To estimate the cycle time of a job in a wafer fabrication factory, H.C. Wu and T. Chen proposed a joint use of a classification and regression tree (CART) and back propagation network (BPN). In their method, a BPN is constructed to estimate the cycle times of jobs of a branch. A real case was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology. C.T. Tseng, Y.L. Lee, and C.C. Chou designed an AmIbased decision support system that combined an electromagnetism-like mechanism (EM) and sensory data to aid human operators in making decisions regarding the T. Chen (&) Department of Industrial Engineering and Systems Management, Feng Chia University, Taichung, Taiwan e-mail: tcchen@fcu.edu.tw

Mining affective text to improve social media item recommendation

Social media websites, such as YouTube and Flicker, are currently gaining in popularity. A large volume of information is generated by online users and how to appropriately provide personalized content is becoming more challenging. Traditional recommendation models are overly dependent on preference ratings and often suffer from the problem of “data sparsity”. Recent research has attempted to integrate sentiment analysis results of online affective texts into recommendation models; however, these studies are still limited. The one class collaborative filtering (OCCF) method is more applicable in the social media scenario yet it is insufficient for item recommendation. In this study, we develop a novel sentiment-aware social media recommendation framework, referred to as SA_OCCF, in order to tackle the above challenges. We leverage inferred sentiment feedback information and OCCF models to improve recommendation performance. We conduct comprehensive experiments on a real social media web site to verify the effectiveness of the proposed framework and methods. The results show that the proposed methods are effective in improving the performance of the baseline OCCF methods.

Context-aware media recommendations for smart devices

The emergence of pervasive computing, the rapid advancements in broadband and mobile networks and the incredible appeals of smart devices are driving unprecedented universal access and delivery of online-based media resources. As more and more media services continue to flood the Web, mobile users will continue to waste invaluable time, seeking content of their interest. To deliver relevant media items offering richer experiences to mobile users, media services must be equipped with contextual knowledge of the consumption environment as well as contextual preferences of the users. This article investigates context-aware recommendation techniques for implicit delivery of contextually relevant online media items. The proposed recommendation services work with a contextual user profile and a context recognition framework, using case base reasoning as a methodology to determine user’s current contextual preferences, relying on a context recognition service, which identifies user’s dynamic contextual situation from device’s built-in sensors. To evaluate the proposed solution, we developed a case-study context-aware application that provides personalized recommendations adapted to user’s current context, namely the activity he/she performs and consumption environment constraints. Experimental evaluations, via the case study application, real-world user data, and online-based movie metadata, demonstrate that context-aware recommendation techniques can provide better efficacy than the traditional approaches. Additionally, evaluations of the underlying context recognition process show that its power consumption is within an acceptable range. The recommendations provided by the case study application were assessed as effective via a user study, which demonstrates that users are pleased with the contextual media recommendations.

Social Networking Policies in Nursing Education

Social networking use has increased exponentially in the past few years. A literature review related to social networking and nursing revealed a research gap between nursing practice and education. Although there was information available on the appropriate use of social networking sites, there was limited research on the use of social networking policies within nursing education. The purpose of this study was to identify current use of social media by faculty and students and a need for policies within nursing education at one institution. A survey was developed and administered to nursing students (n = 273) and nursing faculty (n = 33). Inferential statistics included χ², Fisher exact test, t test, and General Linear Model. Cronbach's α was used to assess internal consistency of social media scales. The χ² result indicates that there were associations with the group and several social media items. t Test results indicate significant differences between student and faculty for average of policies are good (P = .0127), policies and discipline (P = .0315), and policy at the study school (P = .0013). General Linear Model analyses revealed significant differences for "friend" a patient with a bond, unprofessional posts, policy, and nursing with class level. Results showed that students and faculty supported the development of a social networking policy.

Clustering Media Items Stemming from Multiple Social Networks

We have created and evaluated an algorithm capable of deduplicating and clustering exact- and near-duplicate media items of type photo and video that get shared on multiple social networks in the context of events. This algorithm works in an entirely ad hoc manner without requiring any pre-calculation. When people attend events, they more and more share event-related media items publicly on social networks to let their social network contacts relive and witness the attended events. In the past, we have worked on methods to accumulate such public user-generated multimedia content in order to summarize events visually, for example, in the form of media galleries or slideshows. In this paper, first, we introduce social-network-specific reasons and challenges that cause near-duplicate media items. Second, we detail an algorithm for the task of deduplicating and clustering exact- and near-duplicate media items stemming from multiple social networks. Finally, we evaluate the algorithm's strengths and weaknesses and thoroughly compare its performance with the state-of-the-art feature detection algorithms SIFT, ASIFT and SURF and show that for the given use case it performs almost equally well accuracy-wise, but strongly outperforms speed-wise.

Public social monitoring reports and their effect on a policy programme aimed at addressing the social determinants of health to improve health equity in New Zealand

The important role that monitoring plays in advancing global health is well established. However, the role of social monitoring as a tool for addressing social determinants of health (SDH) and health equity-focused policies remains under-researched. This paper assesses the extent and ways in which New Zealand's (NZ) Social Reports (SRs) supported a SDH- and health equity-oriented policy programme nationally over the 2000-2008 period by documenting the SRs' history and assessing its impact on policies across sectors in government and civil society.We conducted key-informant interviews with five senior policy-makers and an e-mail survey with 24 government and civil society representatives on SRs' history and policy impact. We identified common themes across these data and classified them accordingly to assess the intensity of the reports' use and their impact on SDH- and health equity-focused policies. Bibliometric analyses of government publications and media items were undertaken to empirically assess SRs' impact on government and civil society.SRs in NZ arose out of the role played by government as the "benevolent social welfare planner" and an understanding of the necessity of economic and social security for "progress". The SRs were linked to establishing a government-wide programme aimed at reducing inequalities. They have been used moderately to highly in central and local government and in civil society, both within and outside the health sector, but have neither entered public treasury and economic development departments nor the commercial sector. The SRs have not reached the more universal status of economic indicators. However, they have had some success at raising awareness of, and have stimulated isolated action on, SDH.The NZ case suggests that national-level social monitoring provides a valuable tool for raising awareness of SDH across government and civil society. A number of strategies could improve social reports' effectiveness in stimulating action on SDH.

Your Natural Breasts

FigureAs a service to our readers, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery® reviews books, DVDs, practice management software, and electronic media items of educational interest to reconstructive and aesthetic surgeons. All items are copyrighted and available commercially. The Journal actively solicits information in digital format (e.g., CD-ROM and Internet offerings) for review. Reviewers are selected on the basis of relevant interest. Reviews are solely the opinion of the reviewer; they are usually published as submitted, with only copy editing. Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery® does not endorse or recommend any review so published. Send books, DVDs, and any other material for consideration to: Ronald P. Gruber, M.D., Review Editor, Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery, UT Southwestern Medical Center, 5959 Harry Hines Boulevard, POB1, Suite 300, Dallas, Texas 75390-8820. Although the concept of fat grafting in plastic surgery is over a century old, enthusiasm for its use in aesthetic and reconstructive surgery of the breasts has gained momentum over the past decade. Drs. Khouri and Biggs have made significant contributions to understanding and refining techniques for fat transfer to the breasts. They have extensively described Brava (Brava, LLC, Miami, Fla.) and autologous fat transfer for breast augmentation and reconstruction and have accumulated significant experience with their technique. In Your Natural Breasts: A Better Way to Augment, Reconstruct, and Correct Using Your Own Fat, Drs. Khouri and Biggs outline their concepts, technique, and outcomes using Brava and autologous fat transfer. The book is divided into three sections. The first section provides a history of fat transfer to the breasts, outlines concepts for Brava and autologous fat transfer, compares Brava and autologous fat transfer with traditional techniques, and discusses some potential challenges with Brava and autologous fat transfer. In the second section, the applications for Brava and autologous fat transfer for cosmetic breast reconstruction are presented, and in the third section, the applications for Brava and autologous fat transfer for breast cancer reconstruction are outlined. This book contains many before-and-after photographs showing results following Brava and autologous fat transfer. These results are a testament to the versatility of this technique. What is particularly impressive are the results shown in Chapters 16 and 17 describing the use of Brava and autologous fat transfer for salvage reconstructions after failed implant and flap reconstructions. In these challenging cases, I do not know whether it is possible to achieve the results that are shown by any other approach for breast reconstruction. The results in Chapter 10 are equally impressive; correction of developmental deformities, including tuberous breasts, is shown. This book is well suited for patients who are interested in finding out more information about breast reconstruction and the option of Brava and autologous fat transfer. The authors have made a conscious effort to discuss the information in a way that is easy for patients to understand. There are many patient stories throughout the book—these provide patients’ perspective on their journey and will help to not only inform prospective patients but also reassure them that there is hope. For the plastic surgeon performing aesthetic and reconstructive surgery of the breast using Brava and autologous fat transfer, this book would be very useful to help inform patients about this technique and prepare them for this surgery. In summary, Your Natural Breasts: A Better Way to Augment, Reconstruct, and Correct Using Your Own Fat, will be useful to both patients considering breast reconstruction and plastic surgeons performing Brava and autologous fat transfer.

Rhinoplasty

Rhinoplasty

Using Force: Australian Newspaper Depictions of Contacts Between the Police and Persons Experiencing Mental Illness

The media creates and sustains knowledge about socially relevant issues such as crime, mental illness, and policing. Past research suggests that while the media portrayal of the police is undoubtedly complex, their portrayal of people experiencing mental illness remains mainly negative. The depiction of their encounters in the mass media is of considerable interest because of the influential role the media has on public opinion and debate; however, there is a lack of current research in this area. This study aimed to examine media items in the major newspapers across Australia between January 2006 and December 2007 (n = 77) to investigate their portrayal of this interface. The dominant themes encountered in the initial analysis depicted people experiencing mental illness as dangerous and a threat to the public, where the mental health system has failed to manage them adequately. Further analyses found that people experiencing mental illness were stigmatised in a third of the media items reviewed and were represented significantly more negatively in these encounters than the police. Implications of these findings and some suggestions regarding possible strategies that could improve socially responsible media reporting and public discourse on mental illness are proposed.

Partially compressed-encrypted domain robust JPEG image watermarking

Digital media is often handled in a compressed and encrypted form in Digital Asset Management Systems. And watermarking of the compressed encrypted media items in the compressed-encrypted domain itself is required sometimes for copyright violation detection or other purposes. In this paper, we propose a robust image watermarking technique for partially compressed-encrypted JPEG images. However, arbitrary embedding of a watermark in a partially compressed encrypted image can cause drastic degradation of the quality as the underlying change may result in random decrypted values. In addition, due to the encryption the compression efficiency may become very low. Thus the challenge is to design a watermarking technique that provides good watermarked image quality and at the same time gives good compression efficiency. While the proposed technique embeds watermark in the partially compressed-encrypted domain, the extraction of watermark can be done in the encrypted or decrypted domains. The experiments show that the watermarked image quality is good and the reduction in compression efficiency is low. The proposed watermarking technique is robust to common signal processing attacks. The watermark detection performance of the proposed scheme is better than the existing encrypted domain watermarking techniques.

Comprehensive Knowledge of HIV among Women in Rural Mozambique: Development and Validation of the HIV Knowledge 27 Scale

BackgroundThe relationship between HIV knowledge and HIV-related behaviors in settings like Mozambique has been limited by a lack of rigorously validated measures.MethodsA convenience sample of women seeking prenatal care at two clinics were administered an adapted, orally-administered, 27 item HIV-knowledge scale, the HK-27. Validation analyses were stratified by survey language (Portuguese and Echuabo). Kuder-Richardson (KR-20) coefficients estimated internal reliability. Construct validity was assessed with bivariate associations between HK-27 scores (% correct) and selected participant characteristics. The association between knowledge, self-reported HIV testing, and HIV infection were evaluated with multivariable logistic regression.ResultsParticipants (N = 348) had a median age of 24; 188 spoke Portuguese, and 160 spoke Echuabo. Mean HK-27 scores were higher for Portuguese-speaking participants than Echuabo-speaking participants (68% correct vs. 42%, p<0.001). Internal reliability was strong (KR-20>0.8) for scales in both languages. Higher HK-27 scores were significantly (p≤0.05) correlated with more education, more media items in the home, a history of HIV testing, and participant work outside of the home for women of both languages. HK-27 scores were independently associated with completion of HIV testing in multivariable analysis (per 1% correct: aOR:1.02, 95%CI:0.01–0.03, p = 0.01), but not with HIV infection.ConclusionsHK-27 is a reliable and valid measure of HIV knowledge among Portuguese and Echuabo-speaking Mozambican women. The HK-27 demonstrated significant knowledge deficits among women in the study, and higher scores were associated with higher HIV testing probability. Future studies should evaluate the role of the HK-27 in longitudinal studies and in other populations.

Trends in Patron Use of Physical Media Materials and Subscription Online Media Databases at the University of Louisville: A Ten-Year Study

This study analyzes circulation trends of physical media materials (CDs, LPs, DVDs, and VHS tapes), as well as usage data of subscription online streaming media databases at the University of Louisville for the ten-year period of 2002–2011. As patron use of the library's subscription online streaming media databases such as Naxos Music Library and Alexander Street Press Classical Music Library has increased each year over the past decade, the circulation of physical media items has decreased significantly during the same time period.

Framings and coverage of climate change in Swedish specialized farming magazines

Climate change is a fundamental challenge for which agriculture is sensitive and vulnerable. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has identified relevant information as key to enabling appropriate climate adaptation and mitigation action. Information specifically directed to farmers can be found, for example, in specialized farming magazines. While recent studies examine how national news media frame climate change, less—if any—studies have addressed climate framings and coverage in specialized media. Media framings are storylines that provide meaning by communicating how and why an issue should be seen as a problem, how it should be handled, and who is responsible for it. This paper analyses the framings and coverage of climate change in two Swedish specialized farming magazines from 2000 to 2009. It examines the extent of the climate change coverage, the content of the media items, and the dominant framings underlying their climate change coverage. The study identifies: increased coverage of climate change starting in 2007; frequent coverage of agriculture’s contribution to climate change, climate change impacts on agriculture, and consequences of climate politics for agriculture; and four prominent frames: conflict, scientific certainty, economic burden, and action. The paper concludes that climate change communicators addressing farmers and agricultural extension officers should pay attention to how these frames may be interpreted by different target audiences. Research is needed on how specialized media reports on climate-related issues and how science-based climate information is understood by different groups of farmers and which other factors influence farmers’ engagement in climate mitigation and adaptation.

Call for Manuscripts: Media Clips – August 2012

This call solicits media items with mathematical content; submissions must include relevant questions and solutions.

Robust Watermarking of Compressed and Encrypted JPEG2000 Images

Digital asset management systems (DAMS) generally handle media data in a compressed and encrypted form. It is sometimes necessary to watermark these compressed encrypted media items in the compressed-encrypted domain itself for tamper detection or ownership declaration or copyright management purposes. It is a challenge to watermark these compressed encrypted streams as the compression process would have packed the information of raw media into a low number of bits and encryption would have randomized the compressed bit stream. Attempting to watermark such a randomized bit stream can cause a dramatic degradation of the media quality. Thus it is necessary to choose an encryption scheme that is both secure and will allow watermarking in a predictable manner in the compressed encrypted domain. In this paper, we propose a robust watermarking algorithm to watermark JPEG2000 compressed and encrypted images. The encryption algorithm we propose to use is a stream cipher. While the proposed technique embeds watermark in the compressed-encrypted domain, the extraction of watermark can be done in the decrypted domain. We investigate in detail the embedding capacity, robustness, perceptual quality and security of the proposed algorithm, using these watermarking schemes: Spread Spectrum (SS), Scalar Costa Scheme Quantization Index Modulation (SCS-QIM), and Rational Dither Modulation (RDM).

Discovering multirelational structure in social media streams

In this article, we present a novel algorithm to discover multirelational structures from social media streams. A media item such as a photograph exists as part of a meaningful interrelationship among several attributes, including time, visual content, users, and actions. Discovery of such relational structures enables us to understand the semantics of human activity and has applications in content organization, recommendation algorithms, and exploratory social network analysis. We are proposing a novel nonnegative matrix factorization framework to characterize relational structures of group photo streams. The factorization incorporates image content features and contextual information. The idea is to consider a cluster as having similar relational patterns; each cluster consists of photos relating to similar content or context. Relations represent different aspects of the photo stream data, including visual content, associated tags, photo owners, and post times. The extracted structures minimize the mutual information of the predicted joint distribution. We also introduce a relational modularity function to determine the structure cost penalty, and hence determine the number of clusters. Extensive experiments on a large Flickr dataset suggest that our approach is able to extract meaningful relational patterns from group photo streams. We evaluate the utility of the discovered structures through a tag prediction task and through a user study. Our results show that our method based on relational structures, outperforms baseline methods, including feature and tag frequency based techniques, by 35%--420%. We have conducted a qualitative user study to evaluate the benefits of our framework in exploring group photo streams. The study indicates that users found the extracted clustering results clearly represent major themes in a group; the clustering results not only reflect how users describe the group data but often lead the users to discover the evolution of the group activity.

Finding film resources

As interdisciplinary cultural studies programs become increasingly prevalent in North America, many humanities-trained scholars find themselves drawn to study film from a similar perspective. Finding source materials such as copies of canon films and appropriate scholarly resources is complicated by library lending policies that do not extend to media items, or foreign films with formats different from those collected by one’s institution. This article examines such problematic issues for patrons looking for films and includes personal experiences at several research institutions in both Los Angeles and Paris, with advice and insight for the potential researcher writing about film for academic purposes.

FINANCIAL ANALYSIS OF CRANE GROUP AUSTRALIA

Crane group has continued to develop and enhance its manufacturing capabilities. Starting in the mid 1990s, the company has some success as it revamped its network distribution op- erations. This study identifies whether this company has a strong financial fundamentals and whether investment in the company will be of a long term nature. Its financial statements had been analysed during 5 year period (2004 – 2008). The data were compiled from Annual reports; ASX historical information; Government reports; Media Items and Website Data. The analysis will cover company’s recent financial position, performance and cash flow, including liquidity; profitability; short-term asset management; risk; leverage and capital structure; and trend and horizontal analysis over the last five years. It shows that the past financial position, performance and cash flow have no guarantee for future performance. In addition, this report considers that this company has the fundamental criteria required for long term investment. It is recommended that the client monitor the position in 6-12 months in light of the share price at that time, the capital markets and ongoing evidence of Crane Group Limiter’s sales growth in the weakening economy. It cannot be stated that the com- pany is immune to an economic downturn. Crane Group has delivered dividends consistently over the last few years.

Media reports on dementia: Quality and type of messages in Australian media

To analyse changes in the quantity and quality of media reporting about dementia in Australian media between two time periods. A media retrieval service collected all news items related to dementia. Quality ratings based on previously developed criteria were made for a stratified random sample of items - 1129 items for 2000/2001 and 1606 for 2006/2007. Nine items of quality were assessed. A summary score for quality was constructed. The content of the sampled media items was also coded. Overall, the mean total quality score for dementia-related items significantly improved over the study period. There were very large improvements in quality of reporting of 'sensationalism', 'language' and 'provision of information about help services' and some small deterioration in quality for 'medical terminology' and 'illness versus person'. A very positive finding here is that generally the quality of reporting dementia has improved over the period studied.