Context Awareness

— It is no surprise that the notion of situation is key to situation awareness. The development of the discipline can thus benefit from careful analysis of the notion. In this paper, we approach this by proposing an ontology of situations and scenes. The main contribution of this ontology is that it accounts for how situations progress in time changing qualitatively, constituting what we call scenes. The ontology is built by reusing basic elements from the Unified Foundational Ontology (UFO). It addresses objects, occurrences, and their formal relations to situations and scenes. We use the theory of embodiment proposed by the philosopher Kit Fine to explicate how scenes and situations form wholes constituted of parts.

Obesity among children around the world has now reached an alarming level. Obesity affects one out of every ten children or teenagers all over the world. Parents should be the one responsible for their children well-being. With the advent of mobile technology, various mobile app have been developed to help people to manage their daily lives. This paper discusses on the development and evaluation of the Body Mass Index (BMI) Percentile Monitor, a mobile app for monitoring children's obesity status by parents. The results of the evaluation indicated that the parents highly rated the application in terms of usefulness, ease of use, hedonic motivation, outcome/future Use and satisfaction.

سال گذشته بیش از 14 سیستم های توصیه گر برای مقالات علمی  به طور فزآینده ای محبوب شده اند، به طوری که در  مقالات علمی، اختراع ثبت شده، صفحات وب و سایر موارد در این زمینه منتشر شده اند. سیستم های توصیه گر مقالات 170 با استفاده از اطلاعات زمینه ای سعی دارند بر اساس عملکرد، سلیقههای شخصی، رفتارهای کاربر و بسته به زمینهای که در آن مورد استفاده قرار گرفتهاند، به هر کاربر پیشنهادهایی را ارائه دهند که با تمایلات شخصی کاربر تطابق داشته باشند. از آنجایی که حجم مقالات روز به روز در حال افزایش است و سیستم های توصیه گر توانایی پوشش این حجم عظیم را برای پردازش مقالات با توجه به سلایق کاربر را ندارند، به همین دلیل برای پوشش و پردازش سریع این حجم از مقالات نیاز به استفاده از  کاهش) است. سیستم پیشنهادی این پژوهش ابتدا برای هر مقاله پروفایلی را تشکیل –پردازش موازی(برنامه نویسی نگاشت می دهد که حاوی اطلاعات زمینه و دامنه ی مقاله می باشد سپس با توجه به دامنه کاری کاربر و دامنه مقالات، سیستم به کاربر مقالاتی را توصیه خواهد کرد. از آنجایی که حجم داده های مورد استفاده جزء داده بزرگ می باشد و زمان نیز یک فاکتور مهم در این پژوهش است به همین علت از بستر هدوپ و برنامه نویسی موازی برای پیاده سازی سیستم استفاده شده است . عملکرد سیستم پیشنهادی با معیارهایی همچون رضایت کاربر و دقت سنجیده شد که نتایج رضایت بخش را به همراه داشته است

Recommender systems are software frameworks that employ a specific type of information filtering technique, aiming at recommending information items or social elements that are likely to be of interest to the user. Herein, we present the evaluation results of the recently prototyped tourism recommender system (TRS). We followed a formal evaluation process to validate the usability of two versions of the TRS by users in realistic environments; the first is a typical web recommender system (wTRS), while the second is a system that enables ...

The university system in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is concerned with student attendance for lectures, and it is the responsibility of lecturers to monitor student attendance for each lecture. By the end of the semester, students get an attendance register indicating which lectures the student has attended and it reports the calculated percentage for each student's attendance in each course. Universities have regulated the mechanisms and the acceptable percentages of student absence. The process for a lecturer to manually check student attendance consumes a lot of time and effort, either during the lecture or when in the process of emptying absenteeism and inserting it into the university's electronic system. Therefore, Saudi universities compete to find modern methods of checking student attendance that will avoid the disadvantages of manually taking attendance. For this reason, they have produced electronic attendance systems, for example, using a student's fingerprint, an eye recognition system, or a mobile phone system to read a QR code designed for the same purpose. All of these systems have the disadvantage that they consume a lot of time, as all students have to line up at the fingerprint reader or the eye detector for identification. Therefore, the problem of the consumption of lecture time is still present, even with these modern systems. Therefore, the aim of this research is to propose a smart mobile application that is able to check the attendance of students without having to consume lecture time or require any effort from the lecturer. The system automatically recognizes the attendance of students through their university ID cards. Each lecturer would use his/ her own mobile phone to use the proposed system to check the attendance of students instead of using manual method to register the attendance of students and the students' ID cards that are detected by coming within range of the lecturer reader would represent present students, and missing student ID cards represent absent students

In Kenya, TVET programmes in technical institutes of science and technology usually target the population of students who do not progress to secondary school and higher levels of education. However, while the number of students in schools continues to increase due to population growth, the number of school leavers enrolling in technical institutes of science and technology for various career courses has remained low over the years. This paper is a report of a study whose objective was to determine whether and how awareness and institutional accessibility influenced the choice of training by students in technical institutes of science and technology in Bungoma County in Kenya. The study was guided by social cognitive career theory of 1994 as posited by Lent, Brown and Hackett. A mixed methods methodology and descriptive survey research design guided the study. Purposive, stratified and simple random techniques were employed to select the research sample. The sample comprised of students pursuing Artisan Certificate and Diploma levels of training. A sample size of 291 students from a population of 1124 was used. The data was collected using questionnaires whose reliability and validity was tested and determined. Descriptive statistics was used in data analysis with the help of the statistical package for social sciences (SPSS) programme. The results indicated that students were aware of TVET institutions but were unaware of the courses offered and the entry requirements. These could be among the factors contributing to low enrolment in TVET institutions in the region. Most of the TVET institutions in Bungoma County were accessible by the students. The study recommended that the TVET institutions should advertise their courses more especially by sending their brochures to primary and secondary schools.

The unconscious mind tends to disregard negations in its processing of semantic meaning. Therefore, messages containing negated concepts can ironically prime mental representations and evaluations that are opposite to those intended. We hypothesized that the subtle presentation of a negated concept (e.g., “no smoking”) would activate ironic motivational orientations as well. We tested this hypothesis in a public health context. Smokers viewed photographs in which no-smoking signs were either inconspicuously embedded (prime) or edited out (control). Primed smokers showed amplified automatic approach tendencies toward smoking-related stimuli, but not toward smoking-unrelated stimuli. Since passive priming effects generally serve to facilitate forms of action, not inhibit them, anti-smoking and other public health campaigns may ironically increase the very behaviors they seek to reduce.

Phronetic organizational research is an approach to the study of management and organizations focusing on ethics and power. It is based on a contemporary interpretation of the Aristotelian concept phronesis, usually as ‘prudence’. Phronesis is the ability to think and act in relation to values, to deliberate about ‘things that are good or bad for humans’ in the words of Aristotle (1976:1140a24–b12). Phronetic organizational research effectively provides answers to the following four value-rational questions, for specific problematics in management and organization studies: 1. Where are we going with this specific management problematic? 2. Who gains and who loses, and by which mechanisms of power? 3. Is this development desirable? 4. What, if anything, should we do about it?

Overview of ongoing research in the CISA group (WISE research lab) at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel. The group is investigating cross-media information spaces and architectures, interactive paper and augmented reality solutions as well as multimodal and multi-touch interaction frameworks. Thereby, we are doing research on new document formats for representing information across different types of media as well as fluid user interfaces for interacting with the resulting cross-media information spaces. A significant part of our research is based on applying and extending the resource-selector-link (RSL) hypermedia metamodel.

More information: https://beatsigner.com/cross-media-information-spaces-and-architectures.html

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a dynamic global information network consisting of Internet-connected objects, such as radio frequency identifications, sensors, and actuators, as well as other instruments and smart appliances that are becoming an integral component of the Internet. Over the last few years, we have seen a plethora of IoT solutions making their way into the industry marketplace. Context-aware communications and computing have played a critical role throughout the last few years of ubiquitous computing and are expected to play a significant role in the IoT paradigm as well. In this paper, we examine a variety of popular and innovative IoT solutions in terms of context-aware technology perspectives. More importantly, we evaluate these IoT solutions using a framework that we built around well-known context-aware computing theories. This survey is intended to serve as a guideline and a conceptual framework for context-aware product development and research in the IoT paradigm. It also provides a systematic exploration of existing IoT products in the marketplace and highlights a number of potentially significant research directions and trends.

IF YOU CONSIDER THAT THE PRESENCE OF ALL FIVE SENSES ARE REQUIRED TO BE FULLY AWARE OF ANYTHING, THEN OUR AWARENESS DOES NOT EXTEND BEYOND OUR FARTS. 

MEANWHILE EVERYTHING ELSE KNOWS EVERYTHING = AWARENESS DUE TO THE ANU AND SPACE.  ONENESS IS REAL AND A PROBLEM AS MIGHT BE OBVIOUS SINCE WE ARE NOT IN IT, BY DESIGN.

Safety and security are two risk-driven aspects that are
usually tackled separately. The importance of considering safety and
security as dependent aspects and co-engineering them together as
cyber-security is highlighted with the advent of Internet of Things
(IoT) which has a direct or indirect effect on how safety and security
are managed in critical environments.

As an emerging technology, IoT, has provided a promising opportunity in
the appearance of Industry 4.0 and Smart Work Environments (SWEs). As
with all new technologies, SWEs introduce various issues and
opportunities. On one hand, as more devices are getting integrated in
the IoT technology, SWEs become more and more vulnerable to the security
threats. And hence new approaches should be proposed to protect the
sensitive and critical resources in the SWEs. On the other hand, the IoT
technology provides the chance to acquire ambient and monitoring data to
be exploited to identify and treat the risks related to safety. While
this is an advantage to protect persons' safety, the security policies
should allow the treatment of the risks when necessary by adapting to
the safety-related context in each situation.

In this thesis, the security and safety of the risk-prone SWEs are
tackled. Starting with safety, a run-time risk management methodology is
proposed that exploits an automated risk assessment process that is
developed considering the commonly adopted risk assessment techniques in
the industry. In addition, an ontology is designed and developed to
extract safet knowledge in a computer-readable way. Coming to security,
a risk-adaptive Access Control (AC) model based on Attribute-Based
Access Control (ABAC) is developed considering hierarchical
safety-related contexts. Upon receiving risk descriptions, based on the
designed meta-rules, the AC system adapts the security rules to allow
risk treatment.

For over fifty years, successive waves of critique have underscored that the apolitical character of much of Political Science research betrays the founding mission of the discipline to have science serve democracy. The Caucus for a New Political Science was originally based on such a critique, and the Perestroika movement in the discipline included a call for more problem-driven as opposed to theory- or method-driven work that would better connect Political Science research to ongoing political struggles. In recent years, movements for a public Sociology and public Anthropology as well as dissonant movements in Economics and related fields have added to the insistence that social science research was too often disconnected from the real world. Phronetic Social Science has emerged out of the ferment for change in the social sciences, starting with the much-debated book by Bent Flyvbjerg, Making Social Science Matter (Cambridge 2001). Flyvbjerg critiqued the social sciences for mimicking the natural sciences while proposing an alternative approach that focuses research on helping people address the problems they are facing in the context they are facing them. Today, Phronetic Social Science goes beyond the call for an alternative approach to social inquiry and its growing adherents are providing evidence that this alternative approach to doing research can enrich the social sciences by more effectively connecting research to efforts to address real world problems as people experience them. This essay provides a genealogy of efforts to connect Political Science to politics, a review of the major critiques of mainstream research, an explication of the rationale for more problem-driven, mixed methods research, a specification of the key principles of the phronetic approach, and examples of its application in the public realm. The essay concludes with implications for realizing a more political Political Science by way of taking a phronetic approach.

The university system in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is concerned with student attendance for lectures, and it is the responsibility of lecturers to monitor student attendance for each lecture. By the end of the semester, students get an attendance register indicating which lectures the student has attended and it reports the calculated percentage for each student's attendance in each course. Universities have regulated the mechanisms and the acceptable percentages of student absence. The process for a lecturer to manually check student attendance consumes a lot of time and effort, either during the lecture or when in the process of emptying absenteeism and inserting it into the university's electronic system. Therefore, Saudi universities compete to find modern methods of checking student attendance that will avoid the disadvantages of manually taking attendance. For this reason, they have produced electronic attendance systems, for example, using a student's fingerprint, an eye recognition system, or a mobile phone system to read a QR code designed for the same purpose. All of these systems have the disadvantage that they consume a lot of time, as all students have to line up at the fingerprint reader or the eye detector for identification. Therefore, the problem of the consumption of lecture time is still present, even with these modern systems. Therefore, the aim of this research is to propose a smart mobile application that is able to check the attendance of students without having to consume lecture time or require any effort from the lecturer. The system automatically recognizes the attendance of students through their university ID cards. Each lecturer would use his/ her own mobile phone to use the proposed system to check the attendance of students instead of using manual method to register the attendance of students and the students' ID cards that are detected by coming within range of the lecturer reader would represent present students, and missing student ID cards represent absent students

Mobile tourist guides have attracted considerable research interest during the past decade resulting in numerous standalone and web-based mobile applications. Particular emphasis has been given to personalisation of services, typically based on travel recommender systems used to assist tourists in choosing places to visit; these systems address an important aspect of personalization and hence reduce the information burden for the user. However, existing systems fail to exploit information, behaviours, evaluations or ratings of other tourists with similar interests, which would potentially provide ground for the cooperative production of improved tourist content and travel recommendations. In this paper we extend this notion of travel recommender systems utilizing collaborative filtering techniques while also taking into account contextual information (such as the current user’s location, time, weather conditions and places already visited by the user) for deriving improved recommendations in pervasive environments. We also propose the use of Wireless Sensor Network (WSN) installations around tourist sites for enabling precise localization and also providing mobile users convenient and inexpensive means for uploading tourist information and ratings about Points of Interest (POI) via their mobile devices. We also introduce the concept of ‘context-aware rating’, whereby user ratings uploaded through WSN infrastructures are weighted higher to differentiate among users that rate POIs using the mobile tourist guide application while onsite and others using the Internet away from the POI.

The term ‘phronetic social science’ was coined in Making Social Science Matter (Flyvbjerg 2001). However, as pointed out in that volume and by Schram (2006), phronetic social science existed well before this particular articulation of the concept, but it was just not organized, recognized or named as such. Rather, it occurred here and there as scholars had adopted phronesis-like methods for their own purposes. The present title is the first organized volume of empirical–practical work in phronetic social science. Before Making Social Science Matter, phronesis, as a critical term of Aristotelian philosophy, had been theorized and its continuing importance as a key concept in Western thought had been convincingly argued by distinguished philosophers like Hans Georg Gadamer, Hannah Arendt, Alasdair MacIntyre and Richard J. Bernstein, among others. But no one had developed the theory and philosophy of phronesis into a practical methodology that could be applied by researchers interested in actually practising a phronetic social science. Making Social Science Matter developed such a methodology. Its implications were discussed and developed further in Making Political Science Matter (Schram and Caterino 2006). After these two theoretical–methodological contributions, it was evident that an important next step in demonstrating the usefulness of phronetic social science would be to illustrate, with concrete examples, how applied phronesis works in practical, empirical social science research. The contributions on applied phronesis contained in the present volume make clear that this next step has now been taken.

There is ferment in the social sciences. After years of sustained effort to build a science of society modelled on the natural sciences, that project, long treated with suspicion by some, is now openly being rethought. A critical intervention in this period of reflection was Making Social Science Matter (MSSM) by Bent Flyvbjerg, published in 2001. In that book Flyvbjerg challenged the very idea of social science as a science modelled on the natural sciences. Flyvbjerg argued that, as the social sciences study human interactions that involve human consciousness, volition, power and reflexivity, attempts to build generalizable, predictive models such as those for the natural world are misplaced and even futile.

In this article Annie Abrahams gives a short personal, yet critical overview of her always collaborative and often participatory artistic practice. Based on her experiences she tries to formulate some general preconditions for it to be successful. She finds that an awareness of hardware and software influences, clear and open protocols, familiarisation with the technology, an active role and a hospitable environment for the participants are obligatory to allow them to enjoy an aesthetics of attention and trust, where their choices and behavior count.

Due to the popularity of smart mobile phones and context-aware technology, various contextual data relevant to users' diverse activities with mobile phones is available around us. This enables the study on mobile phone data and context-awareness in computing, for the purpose of building data-driven intelligent mobile applications, not only on a single device but also in a distributed environment for the benefit of end users. Based on the availability of mobile phone data, and the usefulness of data-driven applications, in this paper, we discuss about mobile data science that involves in collecting the mobile phone data from various sources and building data-driven models using machine learning techniques, in order to make dynamic decisions intelligently in various day-today situations of the users. For this, we first discuss the fundamental concepts and the potentiality of mobile data science to build intelligent applications. We also highlight the key elements and explain various key modules involving in the process of mobile data science. This article is the first in the field to draw a big picture, and thinking about mobile data science, and it's potentiality in developing various data-driven intelligent mobile applications. We believe this study will help both the researchers and application developers for building smart data-driven mobile applications, to assist the end mobile phone users in their daily activities.

In last couple of years of Learning and Technology,
we have observed the exponential growth of ICT
tools, especially Mobile and other handheld devices
along with the established and resilient IT
infrastructure. This is already strengthening the IT
services including Wireless Communication and
availability of several other devices for user
easiness and enables new epoch for learning and
knowledge, especially for smart cities which
promises to have a modern communication
infrastructure. The development transforms the
traditional learning to context responsive learning
as well. Ubiquitous Learning is becoming a new
learning trend, based on Learner centred approach.
The research work in this paper will present an
overview of the Ubiquitous Computing, Ubiquitous
Learning Environment (ULE) similar to the OSI
layered architecture.

Positioning systems and frameworks use various techniques to determine the position of an object. Some of the existing solutions combine different sensory data at the time of positioning in order to compute more accurate positions by reducing the error introduced by the used individual positioning techniques. We present OpenHPS, a generic hybrid positioning system implemented in TypeScript, that can not only reduce the error during tracking by fusing different sensory data based on different algorithms, but also also make use of combined tracking techniques when calibrating or training the system. In addition to a detailed discussion of the architecture, features and implementation of the extensible open source OpenHPS framework, we illustrate the use of our solution in a demonstrator application fusing different positioning techniques. While OpenHPS offers a number of positioning techniques, future extensions might integrate new positioning methods or algorithms and support additio...

We apply the concept of users' emotion vectors (UVECs) and movies' emotion vectors (MVECs) as building components of Emotion Aware Recommender System. We built a comparative platform that consists of five recommenders based on content-based and collaborative filtering algorithms. We employed a Tweets Affective Classifier to classify movies' emotion profiles through movie overviews. We construct MVECs from the movie emotion profiles. We track users' movie watching history to formulate UVECs by taking the average of all the MVECs from all the movies a user has watched. With the MVECs, we built an Emotion Aware Recommender as one of the comparative platforms' algorithms. We evaluated the top-N recommendation lists generated by these Recommenders and found the top-N list of Emotion Aware Recommender showed serendipity recommendations.

With increasingly more complex information spaces on the Internet, recommender systems have emerged as critical tools to alleviate information overload and to assist decision making. Although such systems generate personalized recommendations based on users' learned preferences, most recommenders do not consider the fact that a user's decision or preferences may vary across contexts and situations. Context-aware recommender systems, on the other hand, not only adapt to user preferences, but also consider the contextual situations. This chapter provides a broad introduction to Context-Aware Recommender Systems (CARS). We especially focus on algorithmic approaches for integrating context into the recommendation framework, including approaches based on context selection and context-aware collaborative filtering. We also discuss evaluation strategies for CARS; available data sets and open-source libraries; and lessons learnt from the practical applications.

In a previous paper (Braud, Shafer, & Andrews, 1993), we reviewed the scientific literature dealing with the purported ability to detect when one is being watched or stared at by someone situated beyond the range of the conventional senses. Surveys indicated that between 68% and 94% of various samples reported having had staring detection experiences in their everyday lives. Previous investigations provided suggestive evidence that persons were indeed able to detect, consciously, when they were being stared at under conditions in which precautions were taken to eliminate possible subtle sensory cues. In particular, positive conscious-guessing results were obtained in two studies in which sensory cueing was eliminated through use of one-way mirrors (Peterson, 1978) and use of a closed-circuit television system (Williams, 1983). We hypothesized that stronger effects might be obtained if relatively "unconscious" auto-nomic nervous system activity were used as the indicator of staring detection, rather than conscious guessing. Our reasoning was that autonomic reactions might be less distorted by higher cognitive processes and therefore might provide a purer and more sensitive indicator. We presented the results of two original experiments in which sympathetic nervous system activation was assessed by means of electrodermal monitoring during ran

Interaction design is a major issue for mobile information systems in terms of not only the choice of input-output channels and presentation of information, but also the application of context-awareness. To support experimentation with these factors, we have developed a platform that supports the rapid prototyping of multi-channel, multi-modal, context-aware applications. The paper presents the main components of the platform and describes how it was used to develop a tourist information system for an international arts festival where interaction was based on a combination of speech input-output and interactive paper.

Recommender systems are software frameworks that employ a specific type of information filtering technique, aiming at recommending information items or social elements that are likely to be of interest to the user. Herein, we present the evaluation results of the recently prototyped Tourism Recommender System (TRS). We followed a formal evaluation process to validate the usability of two versions of the TRS by users in realistic environments; the first is a typical web recommender system (wTRS), while the second is a system that enables tourist content recommendations addressed to mobile users (mTRS). The usability evaluation tests have been undertaken at the municipality of Mytilene, Greece.

Abstract—Recently, Automated checkout shopping trolley technologies have taken an advance step than the previous introduced self-checkout system in terms of greater convenience, ease-of-use and greater efficiency. As this technology is considerable new in the market of developing countries, hence it is vital to explore the perception of consumers toward the use of automated checkout trolley. The purpose of this paper is to examine the perceptions and expectations of both enterprise users and end users toward the proposed ...

Positioning systems and frameworks use various techniques to determine the position of an object. Some of the existing solutions combine different sensory data at the time of positioning in order to compute more accurate positions by reducing the error introduced by the used individual positioning techniques. We present OpenHPS, a generic hybrid positioning system implemented in TypeScript, that can not only reduce the error during tracking by fusing different sensory data based on different algorithms, but also also make use of combined tracking techniques when calibrating or training the system. In addition to a detailed discussion of the architecture, features and implementation of the extensible open source OpenHPS framework, we illustrate the use of our solution in a demonstrator application fusing different positioning techniques. While OpenHPS offers a number of positioning techniques, future extensions might integrate new positioning methods or algorithms and support additional levels of abstraction including symbolic locations.

A new method to discern which definitions of technical terms are correct, by contextualizing academic fields such as e-learning and English as a Foreign Language into their actual cultural/institutional, disciplinary, and temporal/historical dimensions.

In the paper I evaluate an ideomotor (comparator model) and a premotor (action selection) model of sense of agency. It is argued that the premotor model is overall more satisfactory in explaining sense of agency but, as I claim, its explanatory power is limited – i.e., there are certain cases where it falls short of it. Accordingly, an alternative model of sense of agency is outlined, which treats the awareness of action as an epiphenomenon.

As sensor networks become increasingly ubiquitous, we envision an instrumented environment that can provide varying amounts of information to mobile applications immersed within the network. Such a scenario deviates from existing deployments of sensor networks which are often highly application-specific and generally funnel information to a central collection service for a single purpose. Instead, we target future scenarios in which multiple mobile applications will leverage sensor network nodes opportunistically and unpredictably. This paper introduces the DAIS (Declarative Applications in Immersive Sensor networks) middleware platform that enables the development of these adaptive mobile applications. Our approach focuses on minimizing communication in the sensor network to best ensure the network’s lifetime. DAIS localizes data collection and sensor interaction to only the regions of the network required for the applications ’ immediate data needs. At the programming interface le...

Abstract—Recently, Automated checkout shopping trolley technologies have taken an advance step than the previous introduced self-checkout system in terms of greater convenience, ease-of-use and greater efficiency. As this technology is considerable new in the market of developing countries, hence it is vital to explore the perception of consumers toward the use of automated checkout trolley. The purpose of this paper is to examine the perceptions and expectations of both enterprise users and end users toward the proposed ...

With a point of departure in the concept "uncomfortable knowledge," this article presents a case study of how the American Planning Association (APA) deals with such knowledge. APA was found to actively suppress publicity of malpractice concerns and bad planning in order to sustain a boosterish image of planning. In the process, APA appeared to disregard and violate APA's own Code of Ethics. APA justified its actions with a need to protect APA members' interests, seen as preventing planning and planners from being presented in public in a bad light. The current article argues that it is in members' interest to have malpractice critiqued and reduced, and that this best happens by exposing malpractice, not by denying or diverting attention from it as APA did in this case. Professions, organizations, and societies that stifle critique tend to degenerate and become socially and politically irrelevant "zombie institutions." The article asks whether such degeneration has set in for APA and planning. Finally, it is concluded that more debate about APA's ethics and actions is needed for improving planning practice. Nine key questions are presented to constructively stimulate such debate.

This work deals with use of Open Source technologies for implementing mobile GIS solutions, in order to face the need of moving GIS applications from desktop or web platforms to mobile platforms - like PDAs, smartphones, etc. - accordingly with the great and growing diffusion of mobile devices and location based services. The implemented mobile GIS is a client-server solution based on a Java servlet inside Apache Tomcat servlet container. The GIS functionalities are obtained by MapServer Java MapScript and by some classes implemented expressly. The paper will discuss the technological aspects of the mobile GIS and will show some specific applications, in particular for archaeological contexts and for issues of civil protection. Moreover, other related topics will be treated: how to make the mobile GIS context aware, how to integrate it with user positioning and object of interest location, how to face some problems (slow loading of images, connection costs) coming from the chosen ar...

An exposition concerning my collaborative webcam performance projects, focussing on / trying to determine the special aspects of machine mediated communication and collaboration. I wanted to use this opportunity to organise the material from three of my webcam performance projects (Huis Clos / No Exit, Duet Satz 1, 2, 3,4 and Angry Women) in a way that would reveal their essence in a few short lines. This, as I should have known, is impossible. It is about performance, it is about processes and human beings being transformed. I formulated motives, described means and I managed to give this research a succint philosophical and political background. Relevant experiences and reactions are clustered and a short text and conclusion distilled. ISSN 2235-0225