Multimedia Feedback Systems for Engineering

Abstract

TheWorld Wide Web has become a key tool for information sharing. Engineers and scientists are finding that the web is especially suited to publishing the graphical, multi-layered information that is typical of their work. Web pages are easier to distribute than hardcopy. Web movies have become more accessible, in many offices, than videos. Good VRML viewing software, bundled with most new PCs, has sufllcient power to support many engineering needs.In addition to publishing information science and engineering has an important tradition of peer and customer review. Reports, drawings and graphs are typically printed, distributed, reviewed, marked up, and returned to the author. Adding review comments to paper is easy. When, however, the information is in electronic form, this ease of review goes away. It's hard to write on videos. It's even harder to write comments on animated 3D models. These feedback limitations reduce the value of the information overall.Fortunately, the web can also be a useful tool for collecting peer and customer review information. When properly formed, web reports, movies, and 3D animations can be readily linked to review notes. This paper describes three multimedia feedback systems that Sandia National Laboratories has developed to tap that potential. Each system allows people to make context-sensitive comments about specific web content and electronically ties the comments back to the web content being referenced. The fust system ties comments to specific web pages, the second system ties the comments to specific ftames of digital movies, and the third ties the comments to specific times and viewpoints within 3D animations. In addition to the technologies, this paper describes how they are being used to support intelligent machine systems design at Sandia.

Attitudes of Botswana Citizens toward Immigrants: Signs of Xenophobia?

“…For similar reasons, almost one-and-ahalf decades later (1983) the Nigerian Government expelled 1.5 million illegal immigrants, mostly Ghanaians (Adepoju, 1995;Makinwa-Adebusoye, 1995). Since the late 1960s a passion for national identity has led Gabonese (and, in the 1990s, South Africans) to exhibit some of the worst incidences of xenophobic stereotyping and recurring violence against immigrants (Gray, 1998;McDonald et al, 1998;Crush, 2000;McDonald, 2000). The perception of immigrants as minority objects of intellectual and physical exploitation sets the stage for stereotyping.…”