Digital media

Digital music streaming websites have taken over the musical landscape. While
the digital music market is booming, both data and time have revealed that the current
system as it exists will not provide a sustainable future for creators of content or for
technology companies. Although some consumers are willing to pay for content they can access for free, many are still enjoying content without paying. Both the technology
companies and creators of content have sacrificed to meet consumer demands, but the
technology companies have been too willing to make creators of content be the ones
paying for ‘free.’ Recent legislative efforts have provided a good start to balancing a system that is clearly in distress, but there is still much be done to move the music industry forward. This paper examines the current issues facing the digital music streaming industry and several legislative and industry-prompted efforts in current discussion.

The purpose of this mixed methods study was twofold. First, the study
assessed whether Davis’ (1989) Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) was
useful in predicting instructional usage of the interactive whiteboard (IWB), as
reported by K-8 teachers. Second, the study set out to understand what
motivated those teachers to use the IWB for classroom instruction, and to further
describe the ways in which they used them. Through surveying 155 teachers
and 40 administrators of the Lutheran Church Missouri Synod (LCMS) schools,
the researcher used multiple regression and moderator analyses to examine
whether the TAM model helped explain teachers’ reported teacher-centered and
student-centered instructional IWB usage. The researcher followed this by oneon-
one interviews with 5 of the teachers surveyed. With the data gathered from
the interviews and open-ended items from the original surveys, an analysis using qualitative methods was performed. The results from the qualitative analysis
were then used to help refine and explain the quantitative findings.
The results of the study’s quantitative phase indicated two variables
adapted from the TAM, teachers’ perceived usefulness and perceived ease of
use of the IWB, contributed to the prediction of teacher-centered instructional
usage of the device. Further it was found that the perceived usefulness variable
contributed to the prediction of student-centered instructional usage. Moderator
analysis indicated the variable for teachers’ IWB technological pedagogical
content knowledge, adapted from Mishra and Koehler’s (2006) technological
pedagogical content knowledge framework, moderated the relationships between
the variable perceived ease of use of the IWB and teacher and student-centered
instructional usage respectively, as well as between the variable perceived
usefulness of the IWB and teacher-centered instructional usage.
The qualitative phase results revealed those teachers surveyed used their IWBs
in a variety of ways for both teacher-centered and student-centered instruction.
Teachers frequently reported they were motivated to use the device by its overall
user-friendliness and its utility as an instructional tool. Central to the teachers’
discussion of its utility were ways in which the tool positively impacted the
students during instruction. Specifically how it engaged students by attracting
their attention, keeping them focused, and offering them a better way to learn.

This thesis emerges from the realization of the paradox that lies beneath online technology which promises to change the way we think, yet penetrates our lives by employing a systematic simulation of our most basic cognitive skills. In order to understand this paradox in terms of space and time, the research examines the ways in which time and space are communicated on two disparate Internet websites. The assembled data are analyzed using an interdisciplinary approach that leads to a textual analysis based in theories of semiotics. The study finds that the Internet is fundamentally framed in spatial terms. The space bias is ideologically significant; commercial websites use it to produce a textual environment that assimilates the user and, thus, enables the promotion of conspicuous consumption.

This qualitative research study explores the relationship between reducing uncertainty and assigning source credibility in the context of social media sites (SMS) and examines the effect of uncertainty reduction within the social media environment on the development of relationships between journalists and their sources. For this study, interviews were conducted with professional journalists to determine whether uncertainty was reduced and credibility was established with sources via SMS (i.e., Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) and what theoretical strategies journalists used to reduce their uncertainty. The study also aims to determine if correlations exist between a reporter's age, beat, and/or personal adoption of SMS and the reporter's usage of SMS for source development. The interviews were conducted with 15 journalists of The Palm Beach Post (West Palm Beach, Florida), using a standardized interview protocol. Subjects were asked to voluntarily participate in a face-to-face interview with the researcher. Reporters were selected based upon their gender and cultural ethnicity, which was representative of the newsroom demographics of The Palm Beach Post at that time. This research aims to contribute to the uncertainty reduction theory in the realm of computer-mediated communications, specifically with regard to the use of SMS in forming and maintaining journalist-source relationships.

The field of Video Transcoding has been evolving throughout the past ten years. The need for transcoding of video files has greatly increased because of the new upcoming standards which are incompatible with old ones. This thesis takes the method of using machine learning for video transcoding mode decisions and discusses ways to improve the process of generating the algorithm for implementation in different video transcoders. The transcoding methods used decrease the complexity in the mode decision inside the video encoder. Also methods which automate and improve results are discussed and implemented in two different sets of transcoders: H.263 to VP6 , and MPEG-2 to H.264. Both of these transcoders have shown a complexity loss of almost 50%. Video transcoding is important because the quantity of video standards have been increasing while devices usually can only decode one specific codec.

H.264/AVC encoder complexity is mainly due to variable size in Intra and Inter frames. This makes H.264/AVC very difficult to implement, especially for real time applications and mobile devices. The current technological challenge is to conserve the compression capacity and quality that H.264 offers but reduce the encoding time and, therefore, the processing complexity. This thesis applies machine learning technique for video encoding mode decisions and investigates ways to improve the process of generating more general low complexity H.264/AVC video encoders. The proposed H.264 encoding method decreases the complexity in the mode decision inside the Inter frames. Results show, at least, a 150% average reduction of complexity and, at most, 0.6 average increases in PSNR for different kinds of videos and formats.