Sven A. Miller's List: Various Scienfic Online Contributions

Media and advertising companies still use the same old demographics to understand audiences, but they're becoming increasingly harder to track online, says media researcher Johanna Blakley. As social media outgrows traditional media, and women users outnumber men, Blakley explains what changes are in store for the future of media.

Current methods for controlling one's avatar in a virtual environment interacting with intelligent virtual agents (IVAs) are unnatural, typically requiring a complex set of keyboard commands for controlling your avatar, and dialog menus for interacting with IVAs. Recent advances in markerless body and motion tracking, speech and gesture recognition technologies, coupled with intelligent agent/behavior modeling and speech synthesis technologies, now make it possible to naturally control one's avatar through the movement of one's body and to interact with IVAs through speech and gesture. These capabilities are now just beginning to emerge in the arena of computer gaming, and offer great promise for military training. In this paper we describe our recent work integrating motion capture, gesture recognition, speech recognition, natural language understanding, and intelligent agent/behavior modeling technologies to produce more natural mechanisms for avatar control as well as IVAs that are able to understand relatively unconstrained speech and recognize human movement and gesture. We illustrate these capabilities within the domain of roadside security checkpoint training, where trainees are able to gesture (e.g., wave forward, stop, point to a location) and speak to IVAs (drivers and passengers) in the scene.

In this study, we investigated the effect of using the social network site Facebook for discussions in an online course. Data were collected from concurrent offerings of an introductory educational psychology course, one using Facebook discussion boards and the other Moodle forums. We measured student perceptions of social presence and the frequency and length of their discussion interactions. Evaluation of this data indicated that there were no differences in our measures. We discuss why the potential benefits of Facebook for online teaching may not have emerged in this study and provide suggestions for further research in this area.

This blog was founded in 2003 on the philosophy of a read/write Web - a Web in which people can create content as easily as they consume it. This trend eventually came to be known as Web 2.0 - although others preferred Social Web - and was popularized by activities like blogging and social networking.

In a survey conducted over May and June this year, PR network Oriella asked media moguls how the Internet was affecting their business, their publishing formats and even the quality of the content issuing forth from their newsrooms.

HOW BLOGS AND SOCIAL MEDIA AGENDAS RELATE AND DIFFER FROM THE TRADITIONAL PRESS

In der Studie „State of the News Media" zeichnet Journalismus-Forscher Tom Rosenstiel ein düsteres Bild der Medien. Im Interview beschreibt er nun Lösungen für den Journalismus.

"The Charter for Media Literacy exists to support the establishment of media literacy across Europe. By signing the Charter, organisations and individuals endorse a specific definition of media literacy, and commit to actions that will contribute to its development. The Charter thus facilitates consensus and networking amongst those working for media literacy in different countries across Europe. This website holds a database of Charter signatories, which can be searched by country, media sector and education sector. The Charter is also available in other languages."

"While debate is going on as to how text messaging and its distant cousin ‘tweeting’ is degrading formal writing among teens, a media literacy expert at University of Illinois has said that these new forms of communication have a far bigger role to play in education and research."

"Now, these are arm wrestle questions, but I want to tell you about questions that are more related to empathy and that really, very often, are the questions that people have been waiting their whole lives to be asked."

"Humans have expended a great deal of intellectual energy over the past few thousand years trying to understand the morality (or amorality) of seeking pleasure. Most of philosophy begins with the question of what defines the (or a) good life. But what if the answer to what makes us happy comes down to how much of a particular chemical is circulating in our brain at any particular moment?"

"Im Internet wird gelogen und übertrieben. Dieses Vorurteil scheint in Social Networks wie Facebook nicht der Realität zu entsprechen. Eine psychologische Studie hat ergeben, dass die Profile den Charakter ihrer Besitzer realistisch widerspiegeln. Die Forscher können das auch erklären. "

"For tens of thousands of years our ancestors understood the world through myths, and the pace of change was glacial.The rise of scientific understanding transformed the world within a few centuries.Why? Physicist David Deutsch proposes a subtle answer."