Risk is one of the main features of modern societies. With the Internet a new media has appeared, which on the one hand has increased the risk associated with information: free accessibility, interactivity, globality, and connectivity of personal, economical, political and media communication have all led to a loss of journalistic control over the information market. On the other hand Internet-...

What makes computer-mediated groups tick and/or stick? To what degree are computermediated discussants really sustained “groups”? Does the grouping quality reflect anything beyond technical structure? Are technical structure and grouping related? How do threads define groups, or viceversa? Does any of this change between academic and commercial networks? We propose that one useful perspective f...

The internet is information media and social media for online consumers to seek information on the websites and opinions from other consumers. This study examined how the three dimensions of interactivity (control, direction of communication, and synchronicity) affected the users’ online information seeking process. According to past studies, individual differences such as knowledge of product ...

T he communication between scientists and the public is changing. Major drivers of this change are the rapid evolution of the Internet, now in its web 2.0 version with an abundance of video-sharing websites, blogging platforms and social networks; the ubiquity of mobile devices; and the merging of individual and public communication. The new infrastructures allow nearly instantaneous access to ...

This paper describes the design and development of a session-layer load balancing mechanism and its deployment in a mobile surveillance system named Mobile E-Witness (MEW), which we have developed (Ghini et al., Multimedia Tools and Applications, 37(3), 293–318, 2008). The load balancing mechanism proposed in this paper allows MEW to effectively meet interactivity requirements and it is based o...

Bluetooth today, has conquered almost all mobile devices including Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs), handhelds, smart phones and mobile phones. Unlike the internet, where one has to rely on a third party to provide a wireless connection, Bluetooth is inexpensive and easily available with no dependence on manufacturers or service providers and can prove beneficial in short range communication....