Social TV: The Future of Television in the Internet Age
Television's influence on culture and society has been widely acknowledged for many years. On the other hand, with the diffusion of the web and of social networks such as Facebook and Twitter, used in concert with television, the TV experience has become much more interactive and it is now impossible not to acknowledge that television has also become a driving force for social interaction. Furthermore, the parallel diffusion of internet videos and user generated content, fostered by YouTube in particular, has provided the population with a different approach to media and television in particular: consumers have also become producers. This work analyzes how the different technological improvements have changed the definition of television. Special attention is given to how Facebook and Twitter have influenced some of TV's fundamental properties such as liveness, character-centric storylines and flow and to what the YouTube phenomena means for television. The thesis concludes with a forecast about television's future, which confirms the main argument of this thesis: television is increasingly social. Thesis Supervisor: Michael Cusumano Title: SMR Distinguished Professor of Management
Composer: meeting non-functional aspects of hypermedia authoring environment
This paper discusses the importance of non-functional requirements in the design of hypermedia authoring tools, which typically provides multiple graphical abstractions (views). It focuses on creating products and services that operate robustly across a broad range of environments, and that take into account the changeable needs of their users over time, as they become more familiar with the tool. In order to meet these non-functional aspects, this paper proposes a microkernel-based architecture for authoring tools, where the microkernel is responsible for instantiating the requested extensions (plugins), maintaining the core data model that represents the hypermedia document under development, and notifying changes in this model to plugins interested in them. Based on the proposed architecture, a new version of Composer (an NCL authoring tool) is presented, rewritten from scratch. Results from experiments show that the discussed non-functional requirements are adequately met.
Thermodynamics on the Carbochlorination of Titanium-bearing Ores
The equilibrium compositions of the multi-component, multi-phase and multi-reaction system of carbochlorination of titanium-bearing ores are calculated with HSC, a computational chemistry software. The thermodynamic equilibrium calculation of the reaction system shows that a complete conversion of titanium-bearing ores is feasible at a temperature near 200oC. At temperatures ranging from 800 to 1600oC, the products of the reaction system are all in gaseous phase. Thermodynamic analysis accords with the industrial practice. The simulated results provide reasonable scientific basis for improving suitable technological conditions of the carbochlorination reduction.