Multimedia Features Research Articles

The London Mayoral websites:cyberdemocracy or cybermediocracy?

The London Mayoral Election of 4 May 2000 was probably the first in British electoral history when all the candidates had established a presence in cyberspace. An analysis of the 11 websites showed that politicians are beginning to realise the potential influence of the Web in political circles, both as a means of publication and also for canvassing support. Most of the web pages were well designed with a reasonable amount of content and simple levels of interactivity. Multimedia features were also evident on most sites, though in terms of currency and timeliness of information, some improvements could still be made.

An Interview with Adam Silver, President and Chief Operating Officer, NBA Entertainment

Introduction Adam Silver, President and Chief Operating Officer of NBA Entertainment, has a pivotal leadership role in one of the most progressive sporting organisations in the world. With responsibility for the NBA's and WNBA's television, film, Internet, publishing and event relationships domestically and internationally, Silver finds himself working with not only US networks such as NBC, TNT, TBS and ESPN but also more than 125 international television companies. One of his most recent initiatives was the creation and development of NBA.com TV--the NBA's new 24-hour digital television network that represents a convergence of Internet and television technologies. In this interview with Dr Bill Sutton from the University of Massachusetts, Silver provides an insight into the way in which new technology is radically altering the way in which sports programming is delivered, and comments on some of the likely consequences of this transformation. WS: Adam, for the benefit of our readership, please discuss your career path and current responsibilities with the National Basketball Association (NBA). AS: I am the President and Chief Operating Officer of NBA Entertainment (NBAE), which manages the NBA's and WNBA's (Women's National Basketball Association) television, film, Internet, publishing, photos, merchandising, marketing partnerships, media properties and event relationships domestically and internationally. We have an extremely dedicated, smart and creative staff of about 425 professionals who have helped make NBAE an Emmy Award-winning production and digital media company and one of the largest providers of sports television and digital media in the world. We manage the NBA's and WNBA's game telecasts on NBC, TNT, TBS, ESPN and Lifetime and more than 125 international television networks. This season, NBA games and other NBA programming are broadcast in 205 countries around the world. In the past six months, we created and developed NBA.com TV--a 24-hour digital television network--and significantly enhanced our award-winning Internet sites, NBA.com and WNBA.com, significantly enhancing our content, multimedia features and e-commerce capabilities. NBAE produces several weekly shows, top-selling sports home videos and the promotional commercials and public service announcements for the NBA and WNBA. During my tenure as NBAE President, we've created--and strengthened--many of the NBA's relationships with the entertainment. industry and have instituted relationships with Columbia TriStar Television, BET and Nickelodeon among others to develop NBA-themed television programs. We are also currently producing two films for theatrical release, including the IMAX presentation, Michael Jordan to the Max (May 2000). I joined the NBA in 1992 as Special Assistant to Commissioner Stern. Before that I was a Litigation Associate at the New York law firm of Cravath, Swaine & Moore, where I concentrated on media and antitrust cases. I was a law clerk to Judge Kimba Wood at the Federal District Court in New York City and a Legislative Aide in Washington DC to Congressman Les AuCoin. I graduated from Duke University and the University of Chicago Law School. WS: What do you perceive to be your major role as the person responsible for NBA Entertainment? AS: My role is to create opportunities to enhance the fan experience through a combination of traditional and new media, with the ultimate goal being to grow the sport of basketball and the NBA brand on a global basis. Strictly from a marketing point of view, we are looking at opportunities to further provide more personalized access to our game and players for our core fans as well as for new audiences. In the future we will see the development of on-line global communities in which fans worldwide can access interactive features while watching a game in a virtual environment. Knowing that a miniscule percentage of the world's population has an opportunity to attend our games, we are making every effort to enhance the NBA experience through digital media. …

Application of multi-media database system in detection and expectation of groundwater quality degradation: A case study-North Jordan

This research work makes use of database management system (applying multi-media features) for future detection and expectation of groundwater quality degradation. Five locations in North Jordan were chosen and very carefully collected various samples were tested and results recorded. Recorded results data were fed into the designed and implemented multi-media database system (MMDS) then the system generated its detection and expectation of future groundwater quality degradation. In addition to that the system itself has generated all required graphs and plots which show the future expectation as well as other required graphs and figures. Sections of this paper explains experiment word, as well as results and discussions, and finally future expansion.

How multimedia functions in engineering education

This article examines how interactive multimedia can be used to support and enhance the teaching and learning process in engineering education. It starts by looking at the key features of multimedia (multiple media, delivery control, and interactivity) and describes their benefits and limitations from an educational viewpoint. Criteria for selecting topics to be delivered by interactive multimedia are then discussed with an emphasis on using multimedia to add value. Finally, advice is offered about the integration of interactive multimedia into a curriculum.

Multimedia-journalistiek: de journalist en het Internet

Every news medium has its own journalistic style. As nobody doubts the qualities of the Internet as a news medium, we wondered how this new medium influences or changes the classic way of doing journalism. A first group of changes can be summarised in the term ‘computer assisted reporting’. Computer assisted reporting already existed before the Internet became a mass medium and refers to the use of the computer during the making of a journalistic work. In this article it is used to indicate the importance of the Internet as a journalistic tool. Secondly, a lot of new information and news services can be found on the Internet. Compared with other news media, they have their own style and characteristics. The author describes the influence on journalism of interactivity, multimedia features, the use of hypertext en hypermedia, and the timeliness. Also the fear for the de-intellectualisation of the journalistic functions and the increased use of technology is explained. Finally, we describe the current discussion on the role of the journalist in highly atomised editorial systems used on the Internet.

Computer-assisted diagnosis of pediatric rheumatic diseases.

AI/RHEUM is a multimedia expert system developed originally to assist in the diagnosis of rheumatic diseases in adults. In the present study we evaluated the usefulness of a modified version of this diagnostic decision support system in diagnosing childhood rheumatic diseases. AI/RHEUM was modified by the addition of 5 new diseases to the knowledge base of the system. Criteria tables for each of the diseases included in the knowledge base were modified to suit the needs of children. The modified system was tested on 94 consecutive children seen in a pediatric rheumatology clinic. AI/RHEUM made the correct diagnosis in 92% of the cases when the diagnosis was available in the knowledge base of the system. It was also shown to be effective in the education of pediatric trainees through its multimedia features. AI/RHEUM is an expert system that may be helpful to the nonspecialist as a diagnostic decision support system and as an educational tool.

Children as designers of educational multimedia software

A surge of interest has been seen in the use of multimedia in educational computer applications. Some researchers examine which particular benefits media provide for students' learning. A different approach looks at students' learning experience while creating their own educational multimedia applications. We present and discuss the results of a project in which seven teams of elementary school students were involved in designing and implementing interactive multimedia resources in science for younger children. We found that students improved significantly in their science understanding and programming skills. While the student teams included many multimedia features in their software, a closer examination of students' individual contributions to the software product revealed that not every aspect of multimedia programming afforded the same type learning opportunities for science and programming. We discuss the benefits and problems of integrating science content with multimedia design and discuss why the quality of dynamic and interactive components in students' multimedia production proved to be a better indicator of students' learning than the quantity of multimedia produced. Furthermore, we address how students' learning experience is also impacted by their conceptions of multimedia users.

Instructional software for closed laboratories in CS1

The purpose of this paper is to describe the instructional software that is used on our campus to support closed laboratories in CS1. In addition to promoting the general benefits gained from closed labs, it has been highly successful at: encouraging collaborative learning; providing a consistent and user-friendly lab environment, providing instructors a software tool for creating new labs or editing existing labs; providing instructors a means for easily adapting lab materials to individual preferences; and permitting instructors to integrate multimedia features into laboratories.

Multimedia Requirements for Management and Control of Manufacturing Systems

There is a clear trend in computer communications to apply fast and high bandwidth networking methods and elements. Their spread in the office environment is very promising and straight forward, but their direct application in manufacturing environment needs some prior investigation. How will it effect the management and. control tasks in manufacturing systems? Besides other effects, it will enable the widespread use of multimedia features, and the authors focus on that issue. After giving a bunch of application oriented discussion topics, an experimental pilot system is detailed, that should be oriented in the future to make some application experiments with manufacturing system.

Multimedia file serving with the OS/390 LAN Server

The rapidly increasing storage and transmission capacities of computers and the progress in compression algorithms make it possible to build multimedia applications that include audio and video. Such applications range from educational and training videos, delivered to desktops in schools and enterprises, to entertainment services at home. Applications developed for stand-alone personal computers can be deployed in distributed systems without change by using the client/server model and file servers that allow the sharing of applications among many users. The OS/390™ LAN Server has been enhanced to support multimedia data delivery. Resource management and admission control, wide disk striping to provide high data bandwidths, and multimedia-specific performance enhancements have been added. The resulting server benefits from the robustness, scalability, and flexibility of the S/390® system environment, which allows it to move into new multimedia applications. Multimedia support on a robust, widely installed platform with little or no additional hardware requirements gives customers the opportunity to enhance their existing applications with multimedia features and then expand their capacity as the demands of the applications increase. This multimedia server platform is in use with several interesting applications.

The feature interaction problem in networked multimedia services — present and future

Feature interaction problems have been a serious issue among intelligent network services for a number of years, but, until now, the issue has not been investigated for existing and emerging networked multimedia services. This paper describes the final results of the feature interactions in a multimedia systems project which determined the level of threat that the problem posed to the networked multimedia domain. After considering the causes of the problem, some existing multimedia services are described and illustrative multimedia feature interaction scenarios provided. Issues with future networks are outlined and the paper concludes by outlining some possible approaches for handling the problem in the future.

Senior Health Advisor, Version 1.0

Personal computers have become an integral component of physicians' offices and are used for a variety of purposes, including practice finance and business, patient records, and information services. Among the last, for instance, physicians can receive medical information from a variety of sources in great detail in a number of current media, including textbooks and journals on CD-ROM and a host of services on the Internet. However, use of the office computer system as a service to the patient has lagged behind. One can easily imagine a computer available in the doctor's office with extensive patient-friendly information on health problems using extensive CD multimedia features. The Senior Health Advisor is an attempt to provide patient information specifically for the elderly. Unfortunately, it is a relatively primitive attempt. The program looks, feels, and operates like a DOS-based program of five years ago, although it does operate under Windows. It takes little

A Multi-media Cd-rom To Provide Tailored Nutrition Education For Low-income And Multiethnic Populations

LEARNING OUTCOME: To examine the feasibility and consumer acceptance of a CD-ROM for nutrition education.Interactive technologies potentially offer an avenue for valid and inexpensive nutritional assessment and counseling. Furthermore, CD-ROM programs may be designed to provide nutrition information which is tailored to an individual's needs. We have developed a CD-ROM for nutrition education targeted to meet the needs of lower income multi-ethnic (white, black and Hispanic) populations. Fat and fruit and vegetable intake are the primary dietary behaviors of focus in the program. The program includes a brief dietary intake assessment component. Stage of change and food sufficiency are also assessed. Assessment information is utilized to tailor the nutrition education component of the program to the participant. The interactive and multi-media features of CD-ROM technology were capitalized in the development of the program. For example, the program is voice guided which should facilitate use of the program by those with limited literacy. Formative, process and summative evaluations of the program are in progress at several medical centers.

An Electronic CG&A: Computer Graphics Education

IEEE CG&A will publish an extra issue on the World Wide Web in the coming months, consisting of computer graphics education topics originally planned for the May edition. The special electronic issue will fully utilize audio, video, animation, and other multimedia facilities of the Internet. We have exceptional special-issue editors, Scott Owen and Jose Encarnacao (recipient of the 1995 ACM Siggraph Steven Anson Coons Award), who have gathered a celebrated group of contributors. The editors selected electronic entries designed to provide a hands-on introduction to multimedia tools for education, not to simply repeat static, electronic copies of printed articles on the Web. All articles, like those of the printed publication, were peer reviewed. The special-issue authors all agreed to participate in this experiment, and for this we are very grateful. We are particularly excited about this topic and its aggressive use of multimedia features of the Internet. The editorial board chose this special issue on graphics education to experiment with multimedia publication because educational uses of the Web are widespread, and our printed magazine cannot represent them adequately. We expect this experiment to benefit the IEEE Computer Society at large. It also fits CG&A's legacy of incubating new graphics ideas, journals, and specialties. CG&A features technical contributions that help communicate ideas using graphics, pictures, and images the WWW is a communication tool we need to learn to use. The following abstracts of the planned electronic articles show you what's coming. We'll let you know as material is posted on our Web site. Then, we encourage you to get wired, log on, connect, and interact with the special multimedia WWW issue on graphics education. Meanwhile, check out the special features already posted on our Web sire at http ://www.computer.org/pubs/cg&a/cg&a.htm.

AIDA: a methodology independent support tool for educational software authoring

Many authoring tools have been proposed in an attempt to find more effective ways to face the challenge of developing educational software. However, most of them are reported to be restrictive, since they are strongly connected to a specific educational software development methodology. The AIDA (Ambiente Integrado para o Desenvolvimento de Aplicações educacionais) authoring environment was developed at the University of Coimbra having as its main objectives the support of most of the activities involved in authoring and making educational software development easier. The AIDA system is based on a design module, i.e. a prototyping tool allowing the creation of Windows-based software, including multimedia features. The system assists evaluation activities and it caters also for support on translation and cultural adaptation, as well as on the reutilization of educational materials. The use of the AIDA environment is illustrated by three small examples using different development methodologies.

A neutral object data model for integrated building design and construction environment

Construction and civil engineering projects include large numbers of design elements, materials, activities, in addition to a diversity of data types and complex relationships. The need to adopt appropriate representational schemes and database technologies that can handle complex data types and relationships continue to hinder the search for solutions to an integrated design-construction environment. This paper describes a scheme that classifies and codes design information to support an integrated building design data model. The model is conceptual and based on the object-oriented paradigm. It uses concepts such as objects, attributes and different relations between objects. The main feature of the model is a set of hierarchies of design objects which have classes for describing the various aspects of design elements of a building. These classes represent elements, materials, geometry and construction activities represented by work sections. The model provides classes of data items from which the designer can select to model the various pieces of design elements and their associated work sections. Attributes provide information included in design and construction documents like drawings, specifications and bills of quantities. The model deals with a diversity of data abstracts including multimedia features like sound and video that can be stored in different design documents.

Effects of computer-based cognitive restructuring on rationally mediated self-esteem.

Fifty-six 11th- and 12th-grade students with below-average self-esteem were classified by gender and randomly assigned to either computer-based cognitive restructuring or a relaxation-training control condition. The computer intervention (laden with multimedia features such as color video clips, stereo music, digitized speech, and engaging graphics) targeted irrational beliefs linked in previous research to low self-esteem. Participants were assessed repeatedly as they progressed through the program; depending on the tenacity of each belief held, the program provided a variety of cognitive restructuring responses. Multivariate and univariate effects on four measures of rationality and self-esteem favored computer-based cognitive restructuring.

Innovative multimedia instruction and sophisticated problem-solving exercise and testing in engineering statics and structural planning

Details of innovative utilization of multimedia features such as color and audio in instruction, and 10 interactive computer-graded problem-solving lessons with new problems at each execution time and sophisticated judgment of students' answers, developed in project Interactive Computer-based Instruction and Testing in Engineering Statics, are described. © 1996 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

ARCADIA: A System for the Integration of Angiocardiographic Data and Images by an Object-Oriented DBMS

Use of data base techniques to store medical records has been going on for more than 40 years. Some aspects still remain unresolved, e.g., the management of textual data and image data within a single system. Object-orientation techniques applied to a database management system (DBMS) allow the definition of suitable data structures (e.g., to store digital images): some facilities allow the use of predefined structures when defining new ones. Currently available object-oriented DBMS, however, still need improvements both in the schema update and in the query facilities. This paper describes a prototype of a medical record that includes some multimedia features, managing both textual and image data. The prototype here described considers data from the medical records of patients subjected to percutaneous transluminal coronary artery angioplasty. We developed it on a Sun workstation with a Unix operating system and ONTOS as an object-oriented DBMS.

Multimedia Journal Articles: Promises, Pitfalls and Recommendations

Abstract Advances in technology now make it possible to augment the format of traditional journal articles with integrated multimedia features that include sound, video, dynamic images and interactivity. The purpose of this report is to explore some of the issues involved in taking such a step. The theoretical rationale for how interactive multimedia journal (IMMJ) articles can support the reader's comprehension processes is present, based on earlier research on the effects of using various media to accompany text and narration. We discuss some of the limitations and problems in the use of the IMMJ format, based on our initial experiences with a prototype used to communicate a complex multimedia‐based instructional intervention. We conclude with recommendations for how to use this format most effectively, avoid common pitfalls, and develop initial tests of its impact on audiences.