The Uncertain Web

What’s the best way to develop for a Web gone wild? That’s easy. Simply scrap the rules you’ve relied on all these years and embrace uncertainty as a core tenet of design. In this practical book, veteran developer Rob Larsen outlines the principles out what he calls The Uncertain Web, and shows you techniques necessary to successfully make the transition. By combining web standards, progressive enhancement, an iterative approach to design and development, and a desire to question the status quo, your team can create sites and applications that will perform well in a wide range of present and future devices. This guide points the way. Topics include: Navigating thousands of browser/device/OS combinations Focusing on optimal, not absolute solutions Feature detection, Modernizr, and polyfills RWD, mobile first, and progressive enhancement UIs that work with multiple user input modes Image optimization, SVG, and server-side options The horribly complex world of web video The Web we want to see in the future

Scholars from a range of disciplines interrogate terms relevant to critical studies of big data, from abuse and aggregate to visualization and vulnerability. This pathbreaking work offers an interdisciplinary perspective on big data, interrogating key terms. Scholars from a range of disciplines interrogate concepts relevant to critical studies of big data--arranged glossary style, from from abuse and aggregate to visualization and vulnerability--both challenging conventional usage of such often-used terms as prediction and objectivity and introducing such unfamiliar ones as overfitting and copynorm. The contributors include both leading researchers, including N. Katherine Hayles, Johanna Drucker and Lisa Gitelman, and such emerging agenda-setting scholars as Safiya Noble, Sarah T. Roberts and Nicole Starosielski.

At first sight, the concept of web personalization looks deceivingly simple. A web personalization system is a software component that collects information on visitors to a web site and leverages this knowledge to deliver them the right content, tailoring presentation to the user's needs. All over the world, web designers and web content managers rely on web personalization solutions to improve the effectiveness and - ability of their web-based applications. Still, the scientific foundation of web personalization remains a controversial issue. Practitioners know very well that when properly implemented, personalization del- ers a much better user experience; but when it is poorly implemented, personalization may backfire and even distract the user's attention away from some useful (and co- ly-to-develop) enriched content. In other words, tailoring content, and varying it routinely, may make a site more attractive; but an unstable site look can have a negative impact on the overall m- sage. Everybody seems to agree that this is a real danger; but there are specific qu- tions that are much harder to answer convincingly.

This two-volume set (CCIS 134 and CCIS 135) constitutes the refereed proceedings of the International Conference on Intelligent Computing and Information Science, ICICIS2011, held in Chongqing, China, in January 2011. The 226 revised full papers presented in both volumes, CCIS 134 and CCIS 135, were carefully reviewed and selected from over 600 initial submissions. The papers provide the reader with a broad overview of the latest advances in the field of intelligent computing and information science.

Citizens of networked societies are almost incessantly accompanied by ecologies of images. These ecologies of still and moving images present a paradox of uncertainties emerging along with certainties. Images appear more certain as the technical capacities that render them visible increase. At the same time, images are touched by more uncertainty as their numbers, manipulabilities, and contingencies multiply. With the emergence of big data, the image is becoming a dominant vehicle for the construction and presentation of the truth of data. Images present themselves as so many promises of the certainty, predictability, and intelligibility offered by data. The focus of this book is twofold. It analyses the kinds of images appearing today, showing how they are marked by a return to modern photographic emphases on high resolution, clarity, and realistic representation. Secondly, it discusses the ways in which the uncertainty of images is increasingly underscored within such reiterated emphases on allegedly certain visual truths. This often involves renewed encounters with noise, grain, glitch, blur, vagueness, and indistinctness. This book provides the reader with an intriguing transdisciplinary investigation of the uncertainly certain relation between the cultural imagination and the techno-aesthetic regime of big data and ubiquitous computing. This book was originally published as a special issue of Digital Creativity.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Web-Age Information Management, WAIM 2011, held in Wuhan, China in September 2011. The 53 revised full papers presented together with two abstracts and one full paper of the keynote talks were carefully reviewed and selected from a total of 181 submissions. The papers are organized in topical sections on query processing, uncertain data, social media, semantics, data mining, cloud data, multimedia data, user models, data management, graph data, name disambiguation, performance, temporal data, XML, spatial data and event detection.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th IFIP WG 5.5/SOCOLNET Doctoral Conference on Computing, Electrical and Industrial Systems, DoCEIS 2013, held in Costa de Caparica, Portugal, in April 2013. The 69 revised full papers were carefully reviewed and selected from numerous submissions. They cover a wide spectrum of topics ranging from collaborative enterprise networks to microelectronics. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: collaborative enterprise networks; service orientation; intelligent computational systems; computational systems; computational systems applications; perceptional systems; robotics and manufacturing; embedded systems and Petri nets; control and decision; integration of power electronics systems with ICT; energy generation; energy distribution; energy transformation; optimization techniques in energy; telecommunications; electronics: devices design; electronics: amplifiers; electronics: RF applications; and electronics: applications.

A call for a new form of democracy in which “hybrid forums” composed of experts and laypeople address such sociotechnical controversies as hazardous waste, genetically modified organisms, and nanotechnology. Controversies over such issues as nuclear waste, genetically modified organisms, asbestos, tobacco, gene therapy, avian flu, and cell phone towers arise almost daily as rapid scientific and technological advances create uncertainty and bring about unforeseen concerns. The authors of Acting in an Uncertain World argue that political institutions must be expanded and improved to manage these controversies, to transform them into productive conversations, and to bring about “technical democracy.” They show how “hybrid forums”—in which experts, non-experts, ordinary citizens, and politicians come together—reveal the limits of traditional delegative democracies, in which decisions are made by quasi-professional politicians and techno-scientific information is the domain of specialists in laboratories. The division between professionals and laypeople, the authors claim, is simply outmoded. The authors argue that laboratory research should be complemented by everyday experimentation pursued in the real world, and they describe various modes of cooperation between the two. They explore a range of concrete examples of hybrid forums that have dealt with sociotechnical controversies including nuclear waste disposal in France, industrial waste and birth defects in Japan, a childhood leukemia cluster in Woburn, Massachusetts, and mad cow disease in the United Kingdom. The authors discuss the implications for political decision making in general and describe a “dialogic” democracy that enriches traditional representative democracy. To invent new procedures for consultation and representation, they suggest, is to contribute to an endless process that is necessary for the ongoing democratization of democracy.

Search computing, which has evolved from service computing, focuses on building the answers to complex search queries by interacting with a constellation of cooperating search services, using the ranking and joining of results as the dominant factors for service composition. The field is multi-disciplinary in nature and takes advantage of contributions from other research areas such as knowledge representation, human-computer interfaces, psychology, sociology, economics, and legal sciences. This book is the third in the Search Computing series and contains a collection of 16 papers, which in most cases were contributed to several workshops during 2011 organized by members of the Search Computing project in the context of major international conferences: ExploreWeb at ICWE 2011, Very Large Data Search and DBRank at VLDB 2011, DATAVIEW at ECOWS 2011, and OrdRing at ISWC 2011. The papers provide very useful insights on search computing problems and issues. The book has been divided into four parts focussing on: extraction and integration; query and visualization paradigms; exploring linked data; and games, social search and economics.