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The article explores Bitchute, a video-hosting platform associated with the Far/Alt Right, with the aim of understanding how it reconfigures political communication and the digital public sphere. Methodologically, the article employs the walkthrough method and non-participant observation to identify the main features and functionalities offered to users. These include a set of values that prioritise creators, an algorithmic organisation that keeps users engaged with a single creator channel rather than with the same topic across channels; and embedded buttons for tips and pledges for creators enabling them to directly monetise their content. The content posted on Bitchute tends to coalesce around politicised cultural issues. It is noteworthy that although Bitchute hosts some advertising, it does not use data for microtargeting and in general makes limited use of user data. We interpret these findings as suggesting that Bitchute constitutes a media infrastructure that encourages, incentivises and sustains microcelebrities of the Far/Alt Right, who act as ideology entrepreneurs. Bitchute can therefore be seen as an infrastructure for the multiplication/sustenance of ideological entrepreneurs/political influencers who vie for the attention and money of far-right publics. If we can speak of a structural transformation of the public sphere associated with Alt Tech, our discussion of Bitchute suggests that this takes the form of a political media infrastructure that enables the continued existence and consolidation of a new type of political actor, the ideology entrepreneur. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the versatile use of TikTok among Japanese media users in the context of the platform's increased appeal during the COVID-19 pandemic. Japanese users have adopted global trends of sharing creative content under prominent hashtags to spread a sense of togetherness in a time of social isolation. As social forms of entertainment are disrupted and paused, the practice of singing and dancing on TikTok is substituted for the joy of singing in a karaoke bar. This study adopts a walkthrough method to provide an analysis of TikTok's sociotechnical affordances and employs a content analysis for close reading of users' videos and their accompanying captions and hashtags. The study reveals that the socialities previously afforded by karaoke cultures linger in TikTok song and idol dance challenges and duets, hashtag initiatives mimicking karaoke practices, and users' endeavours to become 'TikTok famous'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Practical educational assessment tools for adolescents champion student voice, use technology to enhance engagement, highlight discrepancies in school experience, and provide actionable feedback. We report a series of studies that detail an iterative process for developing a new school climate assessment tool: (1) item generation that centres student voice, (2) the design of a web-based app, (3) item revisions informed by student and educator feedback, and (4) the identification and confirmation of the underlying factor structure of the assessment tool. The resulting School Climate Walkthrough provides scores on nine dimensions of school climate and 73 additional observational items. The web-based application produces instantaneous reports that display systemic differences in how various student demographic groups experience school. This process can guide future research in building the next generation of educational assessments for adolescents and disrupting harmful or exclusionary school practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual effects, such as real-time dynamic reflections, are fundamental for realistic rendering of 3D scenes and walkthrough animations containing multiple moving objects, since they provide the correct identification of their relative distance and of their material properties, generating a closer perception of reality. Most rendering algorithms that generate realistic effects are quite expensive, such as ray tracing, usually used in offline rendering. This paper presents a solution for generating reflections, that we have developed with a real-time hybrid algorithm for rendering rigid objects in realistic dynamic scenes. The algorithm combines rasterization, the screen space reflection (SSR) technique, with pure GPU-ray tracing algorithm through deferred rendering pipeline, doing SSR per pixel and creating a mask with failed pixels to apply ray tracing for those pixels instead. The results demonstrate a significant improvement in performance with a very little perceptual loss in quality of our hybrid algorithm, when compared to the full ray tracing solution. In terms of FPS results, our hybrid solution remains positioned (most of the time) in between the SSR and the pure ray tracing’s methods, during the walkthrough. Besides, it scales quite well for realistic dynamic scenes with 3D rigid objects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Unix shell dgsh provides an expressive way to construct sophisticated and efficient non-linear pipelines. Such pipelines can use standard Unix tools, as well as third-party and custom-built components. Dgsh allows the specification of pipelines that perform non-uniform non-linear processing. These form a directed acyclic process graph, which is typically executed by multiple processor cores, thus increasing the processing task’s throughput. A number of existing Unix tools have been adapted to take advantage of the new shell’s multiple pipe input/output capabilities. The shell supports visualization of the process graphs, which can also aid debugging. Dgsh was evaluated through a number of common data processing and domain-specific examples, and was found to offer an expressive way to specify processing topologies, while also generally increasing processing throughput. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Epidemiological changes in the population lead to an increasing number of elderly people with a chronic disease. Telehealth is proposed as one of the solutions for the growing challenges of the health care system caused by these changes. The telehealth system eWALL seeks to promote the independent living of people with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, mild cognitive impairment or age related impairments. The eWALL system is in a developmental stage in which partners from 14 different European countries are included. A three phase cognitive walkthrough-approach was performed on the eWALL system in order to evaluate the usability of the system. First the cognitive walkthrough performed by experts, second, rating of the identified usability problems identified by other medical partners, and third, discussion on a plenary telecommunication call among medical partners and technical partners. (n=119) usability problems were identified distributed among the 14 functionalities of the telehealth system. The majority of the usability problems were discovered in the functionalities: ‘TV’ (n=21), ‘Calendar’ (n=20), and ‘Environmental box’ (n=18). The least usability problems were identified in the functionalities: ‘My sleep’ (n=1), ‘Photo frame’ (n=2), and ‘My Everyday Life’ (n=3).The results of the cognitive walkthrough served as a concrete, structured and constructive collaborative tool between the medical partners and the technical partners involved in the eWALL project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Informatica (03505596) is the property of Slovene Society Informatika and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The past few years have witnessed a dramatic growth in the number and variety of graphics intensive mobile applications, which allow users to interact and navigate through large scenes such as historical sites, museums and virtual cities. These applications support many clients and impose a heavy requirement on network resources and computational resources. One key issue in the design of cost efficient mobile walkthrough applications is the data transmission between servers and mobile client devices. In this paper, we propose an effective progressive mesh transmission framework that stores and divide scene objects into different resolutions. In this approach, each mobile device progressively receives and processes only the object’s details matching its display resolution which improves the overall system’s response time and the user’s perception. A fine grained cache mechanism is used to keep the most frequently requested objects’ details in the device memory and consequently reduce the network traffic. Experiments, in simulated and real world environment, are used to illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework under various settings of the virtual scene and mobile device configuration. Experimental results show that the proposed framework can improve the walkthrough system performance in mobile devices, with a relatively small overhead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In modern walkthrough applications, storing massive datasets has become easy and inexpensive due to the availability of gigantic disk-based storage devices including hard drives, DVDs, and Blu-ray discs. However, fetching data from these devices for processing and rendering in interactive environments remains a bottleneck as data transfer speed has not kept pace with the sizes of both the secondary storage and main memory.Out-of-core algorithms are commonly used as a solution to transfer data efficiently from the secondary storage to main memory. Existing algorithms strongly rely on suitable data layout algorithms to reduce the data fetch time. However, in spite of all commonly used techniques, the total time required to seek and transfer data can still easily exceed the budget for total data fetch time. In this work, we propose an orthogonal approach to aggregate data and store them redundantly in multiple places in the storage device to ensure consistent data fetching performance. We pose this as a linear integer programming problem to minimize the amount of redundancy subject to the fetch time budget constraint. We provide an implementation on datasets with hundreds of millions of triangles to demonstrate how this data clustering can be created in practice and how the optimal solution is found. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To avoid use errors when handling medical equipment, it is important to develop products with a high degree of usability. This can be achieved by performing usability evaluations in the product development process to detect and mitigate potential usability problems. A commonly used method is cognitive walkthrough (CW), but this method shows three weaknesses: poor high-level perspective, insufficient categorisation of detected usability problems, and difficulties in overviewing the analytical results. This paper presents a further development of CW with the aim of overcoming its weaknesses. The new method is called enhanced cognitive walkthrough (ECW). ECWis a proactive analyticalmethod for analysis of potential usability problems. The ECWmethod has been employed to evaluate user interface designs of medical equipment such as home-care ventilators, infusion pumps, dialysis machines, and insulin pumps. The method has proved capable of identifying several potential use problems in designs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this work is the semantic visualization of complex 3D city models containing numerous dynamic entities, as well as performing interactive semantic walkthroughs and flights without predefined paths. This is achieved by using a 3D multilayer scene graph that integrates geometric and semantic information as well as by the performance of efficient geometric and what we call semantic view culling. The proposed semantic-geometric scene graph is a 3D structure composed of several layers which is suitable for visualizing geometric data with semantic meaning while the user is navigating inside the 3D city model. BqR-Tree is the data structure specially developed for the geometric layer for the purpose of speeding up rendering time in urban scenes. It is an improved R-Tree data structure based on a quadtree spatial partitioning which improves the rendering speed of the usual R-trees when view culling is implemented in urban scenes. The BqR-Tree is defined by considering the city block as the basic and logical unit. The advantage of the block as opposed to the traditional unit, the building, is that it is easily identified regardless of the data source format, and allows inclusion of mobile and semantic elements in a natural way. The usefulness of the 3D scene graph has been tested with low structured data, which makes its application appropriate to almost all city data containing not only static but dynamic elements as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper presents the results of an experiment measuring the effect of four different input devices on overall task performance for desktop virtual walkthroughs. The input devices tested are: a keyboard, a mouse, a joystick and a gamepad. The results indicate that the participants completed the tasks in significantly less time and distance travelled with the mouse than with the three other input devices. The use of the mouse also significantly reduced the number of collisions, while the use of the gamepad resulted in significantly more collisions. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: Objectives: To assess the effectiveness of two usability evaluation methods, cognitive walkthrough (CW) and think aloud (TA), for identifying usability problems and to compare the performance of CW and TA in identifying different types of usability problems. Methods: A CW was performed by two usability evaluators and 10 physicians were recruited to perform a TA usability testing of a CPOE system (Medicator). The severity of identified usability problems was determined and the usability problems were categorized based on the User Action Framework (UAF). The potential of usability problems to cause medication errors was also determined. The thoroughness, validity and effectiveness of the two methods were compared. Results: Fifty seven unique usability problems of different severity, spread over the four phases of interaction as defined by the UAF, were identified. The effectiveness of the TA method for identifying usability problems was 0.08 higher than that of the CW (0.70 vs. 0.62). The thoroughness (the extent to which a method can identify existing usability problems) of the TA was higher for the “Planning” and “Assessment” phases and lower for the “Translation” phase (as defined by UAF). The thoroughness of TA for identifying problems that may potentially result in medication errors was higher than that of CW (0.81 vs. 0.68). The number of usability problems identified by each of the methods was significantly less than the total number of detected real usability problems in Medicator (p <0.001). The observed differences between the number of real usability problems identified by CW and TA (38 vs. 41), the difference between the average severity of the detected problems by CW and TA (2.37 vs. 2.41), and the difference for identifying problems potentially resulting in medication errors (15 vs. 18) were not statistically significant (p >0.4). Conclusions: This study shows that although TA showed a slightly better effectiveness, there is no significant difference between the performance of the CW and the TA methods in terms of number of usability problems identified and the mean severity of these problems. Since no single evaluation method will uncover all of the usability problems a combination of methods is advised as the most appropriate approach, especially if usability problems can lead to potentially fatal outcomes. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

This article presents a local LR error repair method that repairs syntax errors quickly by adoption of the A* algorithm that helps remove unproductive configurations. The new method also enhances the repair quality by adoption of a flexible edit strategy to support shifting symbols unrestrictedly, as well as inserting and deleting symbols, in order to repair invalid input strings. Experimental results show that the new method excels existing works in repair quality and efficiency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Informal communications media pose new challenges for information-systems design, but the nature of informal interaction offers new opportunities as well. This paper describes NetLens-E-mail, a system designed to support exploration of the content-actor network in large e-mail collections. Unique features of NetLens-E-mail include close coupling of orientation, specification, restriction, and expansion, and introduction and incorporation of a novel capability for iterative projection between content and actor networks within the same collection. Scenarios are presented to illustrate the intended employment of NetLens-E-mail, and design walkthroughs with two domain experts provide an initial basis for assessment of the suitability of the design by scholars and analysts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Objective: Usability evaluation is now widely recognized as critical to the success of interactive health care applications. However, the broad range of usability inspection and testing methods available may make it difficult to decide on a usability assessment plan. To guide novices in the human–computer interaction field, we provide an overview of the methodological and empirical research available on the three usability inspection and testing methods most often used. Methods: We describe two ‘expert-based’ and one ‘user-based’ usability method: (1) the heuristic evaluation, (2) the cognitive walkthrough, and (3) the think aloud. Results: All three usability evaluation methods are applied in laboratory settings. Heuristic evaluation is a relatively efficient usability evaluation method with a high benefit–cost ratio, but requires high skills and usability experience of the evaluators to produce reliable results. The cognitive walkthrough is a more structured approach than the heuristic evaluation with a stronger focus on the learnability of a computer application. Major drawbacks of the cognitive walkthrough are the required level of detail of task and user background descriptions for an adequate application of the latest version of the technique. The think aloud is a very direct method to gain deep insight in the problems end users encounter in interaction with a system but data analyses is extensive and requires a high level of expertise both in the cognitive ergonomics and in computer system application domain. Discussion and conclusions: Each of the three usability evaluation methods has shown its usefulness, has its own advantages and disadvantages; no single method has revealed any significant results indicating that it is singularly effective in all circumstances. A combination of different techniques that compliment one another should preferably be used as their collective application will be more powerful than applied in isolation. Innovative mobile and automated solutions to support end-user testing have emerged making combined approaches of laboratory, field and remote usability evaluations of new health care applications more feasible. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The framework of boxels is developed to represent 2.5D datasets, such as urban environments. Boxels are axis-aligned non-intersecting boxes which can be used to directly represent objects in the scene or as bounding volumes. Guibas and Yao have shown that axis-aligned disjoint rectangles in the plane can be ordered into four total orders so that any ray meets them in one of the four orders. This is also applicable to boxels, and it is shown that there exist four different partitionings of the boxels into ordered sequences of disjoint sets, called antichains, so that boxels in one antichain can act as occluders of the boxels in subsequent antichains. The expected runtime for the antichain partitioning is , where n is the number of boxels. This partitioning can be used for the efficient implementation of virtual drivethroughs and ray tracing. Boxels can also be easily organized into hierarchies to speed up the rendering. For drivethroughs, the antichains are processed in front-to-back order together with a run-length encoding of the boxel horizon, yielding real-time rendering of scenes with up to 300,000 buildings. For ray tracing, a ray intersects at most one boxel in an antichain, and the time to determine that boxel is for most “natural” scenes, and at worst, logarithmic in the size of the antichain. Objects which are not axis-aligned can also be handled by a simple modification. Boxel rendering can also be parallelized for multi-core machines. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

In this paper, we introduce a timed extension of the extended finite state machines model. On one hand, we consider that (output) actions take time to be performed. This time may depend on several factors, such as the value of variables. On the other hand, our formalism allows us to specify time-outs. In addition to presenting our language, we develop a testing theory. First, we define 10 timed conformance relations and relate them. Second, we introduce a notion of timed test and define how to apply tests to implementations. Finally, we give an algorithm to derive sound and complete test suites with respect to the implementation relations presented in the paper. This paper represents an extended and improved version of [1]. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article provides information on the proposed diverge-merge processor (DMP) architectural concept. According to the author, DMP can perform dynamic predication of complicated control-flow graph (CFG) structures and easily acquires the newly formed execution paths. In addition, DMP provides a large performance improvement in solving a branch-handling problem through dynamic predication of a wide range of difficult to predict branches during runtime execution in an efficient manner and does not increase hardware complexity. Its benefits include overcoming three major limitations in software predication, providing a good performance and highest energy efficiency, and allowing multiple predication in complex branches.

The article provides information on debugging concurrency errors in flight data recorder (FDR) through deterministic replay. According to the author, FDR records information in a low overhead performance during operation. However, it does not have the capability to solve memory race recording. In addition, deterministic replay requires a recorder which records information during multithread function and a replayer which utilizes the logged information, with a binary program to replay the original execution. Figures on the performance of a base multicore system which supports FDR, race recording worked in FDR, and results on the evaluation of FDR are presented.

The article provides information on three automatic, instructional level of software-only recovery techniques, which presents different trade-offs in reliability and performance. Software-recovery techniques include, Swift-R, which adds a majority voting with reliable applications, triple redundancy using multiplication protection (Trump) intertwines, the original program with an AN-encoded program version and mask which enforces static invariants. According to the author, this technique offers a wide spectrum of options for fault capacity, which increases reliability in a reasonable cost performance, and does not require new design or hardware specification.

The article provides information on the proposed AVIO concept in concurrent-program invariant, which captures programmer's atomicity assumptions. According to the author, AVIO is one of the innovative, comprehensive, invariant based approach which detect general atomicity violations. In addition, AVIO automatically identifies the important code segments and utilize invariants to perform online detection of violations and does not require programmer intervention. The author stresses that its innovative approach, through access interleaving invariants, is a comprehensive solution with bug detection ability and accuracy.

Object correlations are common semantic patterns in walkthrough (WT) systems. They can be exploited for improving the effectiveness of storage caching, prefecthing, data layout, and minimization of query-response times. Previous approaches for reducing I/O access time are seldom investigated. On the other side, data mining techniques extract implicit, previously unknown and potentially useful information from the databases. However, those methods are presented for typical data mining datasets and not suitable for our WT system datasets. This paper proposes a class of novel and efficient pattern-growth method for mining various frequent sequential traversal patterns in the WT. Our pattern-growth method adopts a divide-and-conquer approach to decompose both the mining tasks and the databases. The frequent sequential traversal patterns are used to predict the user navigation behavior and help to reduce disk access time with proper placement patterns into disk blocks. We also define the terminologies such as paths, views, and objects used in the model. We have done extensive experiments to demonstrate how these proposed techniques not only significantly cut down disk access time, but also enhance the accuracy of data prefetching. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present visibility computation and data organization algorithms that enable high-fidelity walkthroughs of large 3D geometric data sets. A novel feature of our walkthrough system is that it performs work proportional only to the required detail in visible geometry at the rendering time. To accomplish this, we use a precomputation phase that efficiently generates per cell vLOD: the geometry visible from a view-region at the right level of detail. We encode changes between neighboring cells' vLODs, which are not required to be memory resident. At the rendering time, we incrementally construct the vLOD for the current view-cell and render it. We have a small CPU and memory requirement for rendering and are able to display models with tens of millions of polygons at interactive frame rates with less than one pixel screen-space deviation and accurate visibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present the rationale, implementation and performance features of a virtual lab environment for an electronic circuits course. The primary purpose of the tool is to aid the student in learning debugging techniques by providing an environment that emulates some of the failure modes of a real lab. The tool is implemented as a Java application. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A walkthrough method for evaluating virtual reality (VR) user interfaces is described and illustrated with a usability assessment of a virtual business park application. The method is based on a theory of interaction that extends Norman's model of action. A walkthrough analysis method uses three models derived from the theory. The first model describes goal-oriented task action, the second exploration and navigation in virtual worlds, while the third covers interaction in response to system initiative. Each stage of the model is associated with generic design properties that specify the necessary support from the system for successful interaction. The evaluation method consists of a checklist of questions using the properties and following the model cycle. Use of the method uncovered several usability problems. Approaches to evaluation of VR applications and future work are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1980, System Development Corporation (SDC) delivered software for a modern air defense system (ADS) for a foreign country. Development of the ADS software was a successful SCD project where all products were delivered within budget and within an ambitious 25 month schedule. This paper describes SDC's approach and experience in developing ADS software. SDC's software development approach included the first time use of an oft-the-shelf operating system for a major air defense system, the application of a selective set of modern software development techniques, and use of a matrix management structure. SDC's successful application on ADS of a commercial (`pent- log system, a higher order language, a Program Design Language, a Pro- gram Production Library, structured walk-throughs, structured programming techniques, incremental build implementation and test procedures, interactive development, and word processing is described. A discussion of the advantages realized and difficulties encountered in the ADS matrix management structure is presented. The paper concludes with a summary of how SDC will develop software on future projects as a result of its experience on ADS. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Walkthroughs, also known as FAQs or strategy guides, are player-authored documents that provide step-by-step instructions on how to play and what to do in order to finish a given video game. Exegetical in their length and detail, walkthroughs require hours of exacting labor to complete. Yet authors are rarely compensated for work that markedly differs from other kinds of fan creativity. To understand their motivations, I interviewed six veteran GameFAQs authors, then inductively analyzed the transcripts. Open coding surfaced five themes attributable to each participant. Together, these themes constitute a shifting mix of motivations, including altruism, community belonging, self-expression, and recognition -- primarily in the form of feedback and appreciation but also from compensation. These findings increase our understanding of the motivations that drive fan labor, even as they complicate assumptions about its exploitation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I attend to two areas of increasing significance in relation to Web 2.0 since its announcement in 2005. The first is a focus on the non-human in digital media research, and the second is the normalisation of dating apps in society. Building upon ideas from speculative design and speculative method, I introduce the idea of speculative devices, those things that are set in place based on a conjecture of an outcome. Drawing upon a case study of Ashley Madison, generated using a walkthrough method and analysis of media coverage, I demonstrate how the speculative devices of bots and profiles can operate, and why. I argue we need to give careful thought to how our research and practice is understood, and conducted where speculative devices are concerned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Focuses on the importance of usability walkthroughs for testing the usability of a user interface design of a software under development. Overview of a usability walkthrough; Characteristics of the usability walkthrough; Advice for organizing participants for the walkthrough.

This paper reviews two walkthrough methods for the web design practitioner to assess their web-based systems. Their relative advantages and weaknesses, and suggestions for web evaluation are offered, with a brief website example. Based on these analyses, some changes are suggested to website evaluation to improve accuracy and reliability of the current walkthrough methods; however, it is not a comparison between the walkthrough techniques in order to determine which technique is best at detecting usability problems of a website. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]