Semi-Automated Creation of Converged iTV Services: From Macromedia Director Simulations to Services Ready for Broadcast

While sound and video may capture viewers' attention, interaction can captivate them. This has not been available prior to the advent of Digital Television. In fact, what lies at the heart of the Digital Television revolution is this new type of interactive content, offered in the form of interactive Television (iTV) services. On top of that, the new world of converged networks has created a demand for a new type of converged services on a range of mobile terminals (Tablet PCs, PDAs and mobile phones). This paper aims at presenting a new approach to service creation that allows for the semi-automatic translation of simulations and rapid prototypes created in the accessible desktop multimedia authoring package Macromedia Director into services ready for broadcast. This is achieved by a series of tools that de-skill and speed-up the process of creating digital TV user interfaces (UI) and applications for mobile terminals. The benefits of rapid prototyping are essential for the production of these new types of services, and are therefore discussed in the first section of this paper. In the following sections, an overview of the operation of content, service, creation and management sub-systems is presented, which illustrates why these tools compose an important and integral part of a system responsible of creating, delivering and managing converged broadcast and telecommunications services. The next section examines a number of metadata languages candidates for describing the iTV services user interface and the schema language adopted in this project. A detailed description of the operation of the two tools is provided to offer an insight of how they can be used to de-skill and speed-up the process of creating digital TV user interfaces and applications for mobile terminals. Finally, representative broadcast oriented and telecommunication oriented converged service components are also introduced, demonstrating how these tools have been used to generate different types of services.

News of the European Resource Centre for Social Work Research Data base

The CERTS database is now online! Our efforts bear finally fruit! It is possible to visit our database on the web now in French, in English and in about ten European languages in the forthcoming months. Your turn! Connect you to the following address: www.certs-europe.com/database

Post-9/11 Terrorism Threats, News Coverage, and Public Perceptions in the United States

Terrorists, policy-makers, and terrorism scholars have long assumed that the mere threat of terrorist strikes affects societies that have experienced actual acts of terrorism. For this reason, most definitions of terrorism include the threat of violent political acts against civilians. But so far research has neither validated this conventional wisdom nor demonstrated how actual and mass-mediated threat messages by terrorists and terror alerts and threat assessments by government officials affect the public in targeted states. This paper fills the gap providing evidence that who conveys such messages matters and that mass-mediated threat messages by al Qaeda leaders and announced alerts and threat assessments by U.S. administration officials had a significant impact on the American public’s threat perceptions in the post-9/11 years.

Effects of camera aperture correction on keying and compositing of broadcast video

This contribution discusses the effects of camera aperture correction in broadcast video on colour-based keying. The aperture correction is used to ’sharpen’ an image and is one element that distinguishes the ’TV-look’ from ’film-look’. ’If a very high level of sharpening is applied, as is the case in many TV productions then this significantly shifts the colours around object boundaries with hight contrast. This paper discusses these effects and their impact on keying and describes a simple low-pass filter to compensate for them. Tests with colour-based segmentation algorithms show that the proposed compensation is an effective way of decreasing the keying artefacts on object boundaries.

Autonomic stress responses elicited by watching a live broadcast soccer game: a pilot study

Aim: Increased rates of hospitalization due to cardiovascular events have been reported during phases of World Soccer Championships (WSC). The purpose of this pilot study was to explore acute psychological and physiological effects of watching a live broadcast soccer game during the WSC 2006. Methods: Seven male supporters (age: M=24; SD=2.7) of the Swiss National Soccer Team watched a game of their team in a controlled laboratory setting. Heart rate (HR), heart rate variability (HRV), salivary cortisol, alpha-amylase (sAA), and testosterone concentrations, as well as several mood ratings were captured repeatedly before, during, and after the game. Results: Subjects reported feeling stressed, and HR and sAA activity showed an increase during the game. In contrast, HRV, cortisol and testosterone were unaffected. Conclusion: Watching a sports competition seems to specifically affect the sympathetic nervous system, which can be measured by sensitive electrocardiographic and salivary markers.