Topic 8 - Applications, tools & services

30 minutes walk ..?

After a very late breakfast on Sunday I started to work on the subject exercise tasks for topics 7 and 8. I had almost completed topic 7 when my wife sat down to have her lunch switching on a movie called “Outsourced”.

An American company outsources their call centre to India and sends the call centre manager, Todd to India to train the new call centre manager, Puro. The cross cultural differences Todd experiences and the Indian staff at the office experiences are shown really well. Despite the cultural differences, Asha, a strong opinionated Indian girl and Todd find them selves’ getting closer, into a relationship. I think it presented topics such as globalization, cultural aspects, human factors within each of us regardless of culture in easy, light and funny way.

I know this task meant to give much needed physical exercise as well as relaxation to the mind by taking a 30 minute walk. However after moving the lawn the day before, I think I have a good reason to sitback and watch a movie without feeling guilty.

The avalanche of applications self interview

Q1. Is there a value in using blogs, wikis and social networks in online education?

I think this provides a very good experience in distance or online education environments. It creates a sense of students belonging to a classroom. We can get to know about other students by reading their profile, see them if there is a picture on their blog or social network site. This provide an opportunity to see each others work. Creates an opportunity to share and learn from each other. At the same time because there is a wide range of different applications available we can choose a tool which we are familiar with or easy to learn.

Q2. Does social networks really help boost business?

A quick browse on the web of many major businesses's web sites shows majority of them if not all has a link to at least one of these networks facebook, twitter, secondlife, linked-in or del.icio.us. Coca cola is currently auditioning in facebook for their next TV commercial. And very hot out of the press is about a movie called "paranormal activity" that was produced with a budget as low as $16,000.00 which has gained more than 1 million hits and positive reviews after advertising on the Internet. This has definitely generated the box office reputation

Data portability, FOAF and the Semantic

1. Watched the video, directly from YouTube as I could not get the sound working from the link.
   
2. Data portability is promising new possibilities. A new way of organizing, facilitating search of data on the web. On the FOAF web site it describes few example usages such as, being able to search for “web page recommendations made by people who work for medical organizations”,
   or search for “recent publications by people I’ve co-authored documents with”.
   
   The concept is to make it possible for machines to identify the content of the documents.
   
   On the other side I think this will make it more difficult to maintain official online presence and personal online presence. Further if I do not want my information to be published in a way that can be searched do I have this control?
   Edd Dumbill’s writing XML Watch: Finding friends with XML & RDF is really good in describing few of the issues this kind of sharing will cause.
   One of the other concerns is regardless of the technology accuracy of the content will rest much on the practices of people. For example people using search engine optimization techniques to get high ranking for their pages, though the content is not that quality.
   
3. FOAF has two main features, the ability to be linked together to form a web of data with well defined semantics and being a RDF application it facilitates easily harvesting and aggregation.
   
   FOAF vocabulary defines it’s schema and specification.
   
   An example from http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/
   a very basic document describing a person:
   <foaf:Person rdf:about="#me" xmlns:foaf=http://xmlns.com/foaf/0.1/>
   <foaf:name>Dan Brickley</foaf:name>
   <foaf:mbox_sha1sum>241021fb0e6289f92815fc210f9e9137262c252e</foaf:mbox_sha1sum> <foaf:homepage rdf:resource="http://danbri.org/" />
   <foaf:img rdf:resource="/images/me.jpg" />
   </foaf:Person>
   
   
   This enables the writing or creation of FOAF tags.
   
   These tags should be placed in a RDF document. Using Resource Description Framework (RDF) FOAF gains extensibility that allows mixing of specific description vocabularies such as geographical or mapping data.
   
   Once the RDF file is created it can be published on the web.
   
   There are 3 methods listed in An introduction to FOAF for publishing FOAF data.
   
   • Through foaf:knows tag
   • Through foaf bulletin board
   • Through auto-discovery
   
   The most efficient way would be to use the auto-discovery method.
   It allows the FOAF document to be linked to a html page using a link tag.
   
   <link rel="meta" type="application/rdf+xml" title="FOAF" href="foaf.rdf" />
   
   This is similar to RSS readers automatically locating the RSS file when pointed to a page with RSS feed.
   

Aggregation, syndication and the social engine

What is RSS

Really Simple Syndication is a web content syndication format and all RSS files must conform to XML 1.0 specification. This makes RSS a XML based specification. The root element of the document should be <RSS> and there should be <channel> element. There are two required elements in the channel element as <title> and <link> RSS 2.0 specification at W3C

Aggregation

RSS aggregation refers to using a program to gather and sort RSS feeds. This method provides users quick way of finding out site update rather than manually checking for site updates.

Syndication

Web syndication refers to the content being made available to multiple other sites. This is typically done in the form of summary of updates to the site.

How to subscribe to a RSS feed

A feed reader program is required to be installed in your computer. W3schools lists the below feed readers,

• RssReader
• FeedDemon
• Blogbot

Once you have the feed reader, click on the rss button displayed on the feed reader or click on the rss button displayed on the web site which you want to subscribe.

Digg

Is the term assigned to people voting for a submitted story. The more digs a story attracts it is shown on the main page of digg.com.

Swam

This is a graphical representation of user activity as stories are dugg in real time. The more people are digging a story it is shown in a brightly coloured circle.

Stack

This is a graphical representation of user activity in real time, up to a 100 stories at once are shown. Brightly coloured stories have more digs.

Social bookmarking

A system that allows users to share web content, resources by creating a link to that particular content or resource and then sharing the link. These links can be created with additional metadata that would describe what the link is about, rank or vote about the quality of the content. Anytime anywhere sharing is made possible. At the same time an update made by one person can be seen by the whole group easily.

Tag

In web publishing tag refers to marking up the web page using html tags. These tags describe what the document structure is. There could be a header tag <h>, a paragraph element <p> and so on. In social bookmarking context tag refers to associating a category to the particular bookmark or link. If the resource is about cars, some of the possible tags that may be used are, cars, drive, automotive & or the particular brand names.

Elgg

It is a open source, social networking engine. You can use elgg to run, intranets, educational or your own social networking site. System requirements to run elgg are Apache web server, MYSQL database, PHP scripting language. It provides an array of functionality and scalability to increase from the default functionality. User, object, file and site management Social graph to show relationships between users, objects and other sites Access control RSS, FOAF, XFN for content syndication Blogs, File repository, Message board, Private messaging, Pages and activity See the list of features at Elgg.

Topic 7 - Devices for display and interaction

Touch screen mobile devices

Origin of touch screens

One of the early touch screens which was used as part of an educational project was in 1972 for a project called PLATO (Programmed Logic for Automated Teaching Operations). Worlds earliest commercial touch screen was HP-150 which was used in 1983.

What is a touch screen?

Touch screen is a display that can detect the presence and location of a touch within the display area. Although touch screens generally refer to touch by hand or finger, there are other types which detect the presence of a stylus.

Primary purpose

They enable the user to interact with what’s displayed on the screen directly and mostly without the use of any additional equipment such as a mouse.

Technologies used

Resistive touch screen technology recognizes the touch by a change in electrical current caused by the pressure applied to the screen. Capacitive touch screen technology responds to finger touch only and they use a charge storing material surface and circuits located at the corners of the screen measures the capacitance of a person touching the overlay. SAW (Surface Acoustic Wave) technology uses acoustic waves and sends them across a clear glass panel with a series of transducers and reflectors. When a finger touches the screen the waves are absorbed causing a touch event to be registered from that point. Infrared technology uses a controller to pulse a grid of infrared light beams over the screen and a touch obstructs the beams which help to identify the X and Y coordinates.

Advances on this technology

Apple iPod touch has taken the technology further by an enhanced user interface that not only detects the location of one point it detects the presence of more than one finger and the direction you move them. The software used to classify your touch is called as gesture software.

Popular examples of touch screen mobile devices

Mobile phones, game consoles, automotive GPS use the advantage of touch screen to enhance the usability and practicality of such devices.

Situations where the device improves the display or interaction over any alternative device

I think GPS is an ideal example where the device improves the interaction over any alternative.

Aged care & technology innovation

mHealth is beginning to extend eHealth and has the potential to be practical and bring technology and people(patients and carers) closer together. Mobile phone will be a prominent device with mHealth solutions.

Safe2Walk was launched in September 27 by Alzheimer’s Australia. The solution combines GPS and mobile phone technology. Patients can wear the device and it updates the location every 60 seconds to a web site. Carers can log into a secure web site to find out the patients location. In emergency situations the wearer can press a button which can store up to 3 pre programmed emergency phone numbers. The system will automatically divert the call to 2nd and 3rd numbers if the primary number is busy.
Popular science 2009 describes below solutions which utilise mobile phones.
Nokia N79 phone which interacts via Bluetooth with a heart monitor and records heart rate along with other information such as route, altitude, speed and distance. The software can chart the user’s progress and allow the user to compare it with another chart on the Nokia’s sports tracker web site.
Soon there will be mobile devices on the market that connect with blood-pressure cuffs and diabetics’ glucose meters. They will be able to send statistics directly to your doctor and alerts will remind you to check your statistics and what your target numbers are.
Mobile devices for 2012 and beyond will check vital statistics automatically which will receive signals from implantable sensors. This information will be relayed to the doctor who can send back instructions for the implants. The phone could then signal the sensor to take extra measurements or eventually to release a dose of insulin or painkiller.
GlowCaps is a smart-lid that fits the standard pill containers. It uses wireless technology to monitor when the pill box is opened and when it isn’t. If at the prescribed times the pill box isn’t opened it will alert via few different methods. First it will set on an alert light indicator fixed in the house, if the container is still not opened it will send a message to the service provider by connecting via wireless signals and the service provider can then place an automated call or SMS back to the user.
Scan avert is another new wireless health application that will help users avoid eating something that they are allergic to or that might interfere with a medicine they are prescribed. Users need to register with the scan avert service first and identify allergies, dietary preferences, illnesses and conditions, prescriptions and other criteria. Once registered they can use their mobile phone camera to scan a product before they purchase at the grocery and scan avert will compare nutritional information and alert the user if it might cause problems to the user.