The aim of this paper is to identify the adopters and non-adopters of Broadband within the silver surfer group. This was achieved using the British Household Panel Survey, a large scale survey used to collect data from UK households. The data was analysed using statistical tools, such as, SPSS v. 15. The conclusions drawn are that Broadband will be adopted in nuclear households (no presence of ...

Link analysis algorithms for Web search engines determine the importance and relevance of Web pages. Among the link analysis algorithms, PageRank is the state of the art ranking mechanism that is used in Google search engine today. The PageRank algorithm is modeled as the behavior of a randomized Web surfer; this model can be seen as Markov chain to predict the behavior of a system that travels...

We propose a novel method for Web page grouping based only on hyperlink information. Because of the explosive growth of the World Wide Web, page grouping is expected to provide a general grasp of the Web for effective information search and netsurfing. The Web can be regarded as a gigantic digraph where pages are vertices and links are arcs. Our grouping method is a generalization of decomposit...

The World Wide Web may be viewed as a gigantic market for information. In this market there are producers (authors) and consumers (readers) and the currency for information is attention. In this paper we examine the distribution of attention across the World Wide Web. Through study of the habits of web users, we conclude that the currency of attention is highly concentrated on a relatively smal...

Search facilities are vital for folksonomy (or social tagging mechanism) based systems. Although these systems allow great malleability and adaptability, they also surfer from problems, such as ambiguity in the meaning of tags, flat organisation of tags and some degree of unstabilising factor on consensus about which tags best describe some certain Web resources. It has been argued that folkson...

The PageRank method is used by the Google Web search engine in computing the importance of Web pages. Two different views have been developed for the interpretation of the PageRank method and values: (i) stochastic (random surfer): the PageRank values can be conceived as the steady state distribution of a Markov chain, and (ii) algebraic: the PageRank values form the eigenvector corresponding t...

We examine how three different communication processes operating through social networks are affected by homophily – the tendency of individuals to associate with others similar to themselves. Homophily has no effect if messages are broadcast or sent via shortest paths; only connection density matters. In contrast, homophily substantially slows learning based on repeated averaging of neighbors’...

Modern, off-the-shelf smartphones provide a rich set of possible touchscreen interactions, but knowledge-based authentication schemes still rely on simple digit or character input. Previous studies examined the shortcomings of such schemes based on unlock patterns, PINs, and passcodes. In this paper, we propose to integrate pressure-sensitive touchscreen interactions into knowledge-based authen...