Understanding user participation in Australian Government tourism Facebook page

With Facebook being the largest social network site (SNS), can government use Facebook (FB) to increase citizen participation in delivering and promoting their services? This paper presents the case of government use of social media for tourism to provide a general understanding online government and user participation in the Tourism government FB page. This is a case study research into the government FB page of Tourism Australia. FB page wall posts and comments are analysed quantitatively using content analysis to determine what type of online participation is visible in these sites and what the agencies are trying to achieve. Further, the paper employed a spectrum of online engagement matrix to identify the type of engagement being attained by the page. Findings show that the page has successfully served as a platform for its audience to share their Australian experience and it is being used for the purpose of announcing, informing and involving type of online engagement. This is an example of a crowdsourcing endeavour where tourism experiences and stories and pictures are being sourced from public. The research contributes to gaining a better understanding of government FB phenomenon, in particular for Australian context.

A model for enhancing empowerment in farmers using mobile based information system

Farmers living in rural villages of Sri Lanka do not have proper access to information to make informed decisions about their livelihoods and as a result they face constant hardships in their lives. They use mobile phones to communicate but these are not currently connected to the Internet. We are investigating how to provide personalized information to farmers with the aim of empowering them to make informed decisions and take appropriate actions. In this paper we propose an empowerment model that has been designed to achieve their goals which have been identified using a scenario-based approach. The model examines several empowerment processes and supporting tools that would help them to achieve their goals with the hope that they would have an increased sense of control, self-efficacy, knowledge and competency. This empowerment model is applied to the development of a mobile based information system that is being developed by an international collaborative research group to address the issues of the farmers.

Community perception of mobile payment in e-Government services

Mobile payment and e-Government are emerging topics in the research area of Information Systems. This research addresses the preferred e-Government services for mobile payment, the suitable payment methods of mobile payment, and adoption factors of e-Government services. The research derives the notion of technology adoption and related constructs, however, as no particular Information Systems adoption theory was adequate to study emerging systems of electronic payment, the research did not utilise any specific theory. Rather, the research uses the characteristics of mobile payment as revealed in the contemporary research to develop an adoption model based on user perceptions regarding mobile payments in the context of e-Government services. A survey study on the use of mobile devices to pay for e-Government services was conducted in Western Australia. The findings of this research contribute conceptually and practically by recommending suitable services and mobile payment methods. This paper also addresses the positive and negative factors impacting the adoption of mobile payment for e-Government services.

Analysis of malicious and benign Android applications

Since its establishment, the Android applications market has been infected by a proliferation of malicious applications. Recent studies show that rogue developers are injecting malware into legitimate market applications which are then installed on open source sites for consumer uptake. Often, applications are infected several times. In this paper, we investigate the behavior of malicious Android applications, we present a simple and effective way to safely execute and analyze them. As part of this analysis, we use the Android application sandbox Droidbox to generate behavioral graphs for each sample and these provide the basis of the development of patterns to aid in identifying it. As a result, we are able to determine if family names have been correctly assigned by current anti-virus vendors. Our results indicate that the traditional anti-virus mechanisms are not able to correctly identify malicious Android applications.

Virtual design studio within a blended social network

Online interactions, multimedia, mobile computing and face-to-face learning create blended learning environments to which some Virtual Design Studios (VDS) have reacted. Social Networks (SN), as instruments for communication, have provided a potentially fruitful operative base for VDS. These technologies transfer communication, leadership, democratic interaction, teamwork, social engagement and responsibility away from the design tutors to the participants. The implementation of a Social Network VDS (SNVDS) moved the VDS beyond its conventional realm and enabled students to develop architectural design that is embedded into a community of learners and their expertise both online and offline. Problem-based learning (PBL) becomes an iterative and reflexive process facilitating deep learning. The paper discusses details of the SNVDS, its pedagogical implications to PBL, and presents how the SNVDS is successful in empowering architectural students to collaborate and communicate design proposals that integrate a variety of skills, deep learning, knowledge and construction with a rich learning experience.

Zero permission android applications - attacks and defenses

Google advertises the Android permission framework as one of the core security features present on its innovative and flexible mobile platform. The permissions are a means to control access to restricted AP/s and system resources. However, there are Android applications which do not request permissions at all.In this paper, we analyze the repercussions of installing an Android application that does not include any permission and the types of sensitive information that can be accessed by such an application. We found that even app/icaaons with no permissions are able to access sensitive information (such the device ID) and transmit it to third-parties.

Detecting SMS-based control commands in a Botnet from infected android devices

An increasing number of Android devices are being infected and at risk of becoming part of a botnet. Among all types of botnets, control and cornmand based botnets are very popular. In this paper we introduce an effective and efficient method to ddect SMS-based control commands ftvm infected Android devices. Specifically, we rely on the important radio activities recorded in Android log files. These radio activities are currently overlooked by researchers. We show the effectiveness of our rnethod by using the examples frorn published literature. Our method requires much less user knowledge but is more generic than traditional approaches.

Web service to deliver filtered RSS items to a mobile application

In the past decade there has been massive growth of data on the internet. Many people rely on XML based RSS feeds to receive updates from websites. In this paper, we propose a method for managing the RSS feeds from various news websites. A web service is developed to deliver filtered news items from RSS feeds to a mobile client. Each news item is indexed, subsequently, the indexes are used for filtering news items. Indexing is done in two steps. First, classical text categorization algorithms are used to assign a category to each news item, second, geoparsing is used to assign geolocation data to each news item. An android application is developed to access filtered news items by consuming the proposed web service. A prototype is implemented using Rapid miner 5.0 as the data mining tool and SVM as the classification algorithm. Geoparsing and geocoding web services, and Android API are used to implement location-based access to news items. Experimental results prove that the proposed approach is effective and saves a significant amount of information overload processing time.

Approaches, challenges, and experience in assessing free nicotine

Delivery of nicotine in the most desirable form is critical in maintaining people's use of tobacco products. Interpretation of results by tobacco industry scientists, studies that measure free-base nicotine directly in tobacco smoke, and the variability of free-base nicotine in smokeless tobacco products all indicate that the form of nicotine delivered to the tobacco user, in addition to the total amount, is an important factor in whether people continue to use the product following their initial exposure. The physiological impact of nicotine varies with the fraction that is in the free-base form and this leads to continued exposure to other toxic tobacco contents and emissions. In addition to evaluating the total nicotine delivered to the user, measuring the fraction of nicotine in the free-base form is critical in understanding and controlling the influence of nicotine on tobacco use.

Telephone survey of service-user experiences of a telephone-based mental health triage service

The participation of service users in all aspects of mental health service delivery including policy development, service planning and evaluation is increasingly an expectation of contemporary mental health care. Although there are a growing number of publications reporting service-user perspectives in the evaluation of mental health services, little attention has been paid to the views of service users about mental health triage services. The purpose of the study reported here was to examine service-users' (consumers and informal carers) experiences of a telephone-based mental health triage service. Using a framework developed from the World Health Organisation's elements of responsiveness, we conducted structured telephone interviews with service users who had contacted a telephone-based mental health triage service in regional Victoria, Australia. The main findings of the study were that consumers experienced more difficulty than carers in accessing the service and that, although most participants were satisfied, only a minority reported being involved in decision-making. Further work is needed to improve accessibility of mental health triage services and to investigate barriers to consumer self-referral. Professional development and practice support systems should be established to support mental health triage nurses in the development of collaborative, consumer-focused care.

Reassessing the theorisation of community experience within the digitally mediated, global context

This paper argues that the changing environment in which community experience occurs requires re-theorisation within the digitally mediated, global context. A range of work has certainly emerged addressing this, but there is more to be done, including tracing a theoretical lineage of community studies.

Beginning with the early Chicago School, community was described as geographically bounded. Decades later, community experience meditated by digital technology has been commonly understood to be about virtual community. Ironically, many virtual community scholars have perpetuated the Chicago School perspective in examinations of online groupings, the only difference being that such ‘boundedness’ now referred to relatively fixed locations in cyberspace.

As an emerging alternative, a parallel range of literature has focused upon the immersion of ICT-mediated social relations into everyday life. It is argued that Wellman’s networked individualism provides a way to integrate the online/offline mediated social experience, however it is not a sufficiently complete metaphor to describe spatially distributed, mediated community experiences. From the work of Robert Park, a member of the early Chicago School, the idea of the social ‘ecology’ of place can be adapted to provide a connecting thread into digitally mediated ecologies of community experience. 

2Loud? Monitoring traffic noise with mobile phones

The World Health Organization has recently focused attention on guidelines for night noise in urban areas, based on significant medical evidence of the adverse impacts of exposure to excessive traffic noise on health, especially caused by sleep disturbance. This includes serious illnesses, such as hypertension, arteriosclerosis and myocardial infarction. 2Loud? is a research project with the aim of developing and testing a mobile phone application to allow a community to monitor traffic noise in their environment, with focus on the night period and indoor measurement. Individuals, using mobile phones, provide data on characteristics of their dwellings and systematically record the level of noise inside their homes overnight. The records from multiple individuals are sent to a server, integrated into indicators and shared through mapping. The 2Loud? application is not designed to replace existing scientific measurements, but to add information which is currently not available. Noise measurements to assist the planning and management of traffic noise are normally carried out by designated technicians, using sophisticated equipment, and following specific guidelines for outdoors locations. This process provides very accurate records, however, for being a time consuming and expensive system, it results in a limited number of locations being surveyed and long time between updates. Moreover, scientific noise measurements do not survey inside dwellings. In this paper we present and discuss the participatory process proposed, and currently under implementation and test, to characterize the levels of exposure to traffic noise of residents living in the vicinity of highways in the City of Boroondara (Victoria, Australia) using the 2Loud? application.

Using mobile media to create a more diverse public sphere in marginalised communities : how to mojo

Mojo is a new mobile journalism project in isolated Indigenous communities providing skills and mobile technologies to empower Indigenous people to create locally produced user-generated stories (UGS), from their own perspective. This paper explores the degree to which these practices and technologies can help create a more diverse cultural voice in remote Indigenous environments. Diversity is a central component of the broader principle of a robust marketplace of ideas and a catalyst for greater democratic representation. A lack of diversity of opinion from and about marginalized communities in Indigenous Australia has led to underrepresentation in a highly mediated Indigenous public sphere. In the mid-1980s the deployment of AUSSAT—the Australian communications satellite—led to an influx of Western media into remote communities, creating even greater marginalization of content at the source. This resulted in an under representation of local views and culture and a lack of exposure. This paper describes the empirical study—the technical practices and outcomes of mojos recording, editing and publishing complete UGS directly from their iPhones to the Internet. This practice has the potential to create more diverse media skills, representation and new job opportunities in local media. A making of NT Mojo video can be viewed at the following URL: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jRmGACFJd Jo. Mojo stories can be viewed at the following URL: http://ntmojos.indigneous.gov.au

Freehand 3D Scanning in a Mobile Environment using Video

This work is motivated by two important trends in consumer computing: (i) the growing pervasiveness of mobile computing devices, and (ii) the users’ desire for increasingly complex but readily acquired and manipulated information content. Specifically, we develop and describe a system for 3D model creation of an object, using only a standard mobile device such as a smart phone. Our approach applies the structured light projection methodology and exploits multiple image input such as frames from a video sequence. In comparison with previous work, a significant further challenge addressed here is that of lower quality input data and limited hardware (processing power and memory, camera and projector quality). Novelties include: (i) a comparison of projection pattern detection approaches in the context of a mobile environment – a robust method combining colour detection and a phase congruency descriptor is evaluated, (ii) a model for single view reconstruction which exploits epipolar, coplanarity and topological constraints, (iii) the use of mobile device sensor data in the iterative closest point algorithm used to register multiple partial 3D reconstructions, and (iv) two heuristics for determining the order in which buffered single view based reconstructions are merged. Our experiments demonstrate that visually appealing results are obtained in a speedy manner which does not require specialist knowledge or expertise from the user.

Security testing in Android networks : a practical case study

Android is a new generation of an open operating system directed at mobile devices that are carried every day. The openness of this architecture is leading to new applications and opportunities including a host of multimedia services, new interfaces and browsers, multitasking including support for wireless local, personal and wide area networking services. Security with mobility and wireless connectivity thus becomes even more important with all these exciting developments. Vital security issues such as leakage of private information, file stealing and spambots abound in networks in practice and Android networks continue to be subject to these same families of vulnerabilities. This paper provides a demonstration of such vulnerabilities in spite of the best efforts of designers and implementers. In particular it describes examples of data leakage and file stealing (address books, contact lists, SMS messages, pictures) as well as demonstrating how Android devices can create spambots. © 2013 IEEE.