Academic literature on the topic 'Smart music player'

<p>In day to day stressful environment of IT Industry, there is a truancy for the appropriate relaxation time for all working professionals. To keep a person stress free, various technical or non-technical stress releasing methods are now being adopted. We can categorize the people working on computers as administrators, programmers, etc. each of whom require varied ways in order to ease themselves. The work pressure and the vexation of any kind for a person can be depicted by their emotions. Facial expressions are the key to analyze the current psychology of the person. In this paper, we discuss a user intuitive smart music player. This player will capture the facial expressions of a person working on the computer and identify the current emotion. Intuitively the music will be played for the user to relax them. The music player will take into account the foreground processes which the person is executing on the computer. Since various sort of music is available to boost one's enthusiasm, taking into consideration the tasks executed on the system by the user and the current emotions they carry, an ideal playlist of songs will be created and played for the person. The person can browse the playlist and modify it to make the system more flexible. This music player will thus allow the working professionals to stay relaxed in spite of their workloads.</p>

Humans tend to connect the music they hear, to the emotion they are feeling. The song playlists though are, at periods too large to sort out automatically. It would be accommodating if the music player was “smart enough” to sort out the music based on the current state of emotion the individual is feeling. The main idea of this project is to automatically play songs based upon the emotions of the adherent. Based on the emotion, the music will be played from the predefined playlist. It aims to deliver user-preferred music with emotional attentiveness. In the existing system user want to manually select the songs, randomly played songs may not accede to the feel of the adherent, user has to classify the songs into various emotions and for playing the songs user has to manually choose a particular emotion. These difficulties can be avoided by using our project. This is a novel way that helps the handler to automatically play songs based on the emotions of the handler. It recognizes the facial emotions of the adherent and plays the songs based on their emotion. The emotions are recognized using a machine learning method Support Vector Machine (SVM) algorithm. The human twist is an important organ of an individual's body and it especially plays an important role in the heritage of an individual's behaviours and emotional appearance.

<p>The project aim is to design a smart earplug system integrated with non-invasive bone conduction technique which is capable of doing some advanced audio processing to provide voice enhancing, noise filtered audio for the hearing impaired people [2]. The system is also designed to work as an embedded music player, a life activity tracker and a Smartphone companion. It can even read the SMS that is just received on your smartphone into your ear. This project needs a very low power microcontroller but with high-performance signal processing requirements. STM32L476 from STMicroelectronics meets this needs and thus chosen as the main MCU. It is an ultra-low power ARM Cortex-M4 based microcontroller that can run up to 80MHz. It has got 1MB of Flash memory and 128 KB RAM.</p>

Music interconnection with society can be seen throughout history. Every known culture on the earth has music. Music seems to be one of the basic actions of humans. However, early music was not handed down from generation to generation or recorded. Hence, there is no official record of "prehistoric" music. Even so, there is evidence of prehistoric music from the findings of flutes carved from bones.The influence of music on society can be clearly seen from modern history. Albert Einstein is recognized as one of the greatest sciencetics who has ever lived. A little known fact about Einstein is that when he was young he did extremely poor in school. His grade school teachers told his parents to take him out of school because he was "too stupid to learn" and it would be a waste of resources for the school to invest time and energy in his education. The school suggested that his parents get Albert an easy, manual labor job as soon as they could. His mother did not think that Albert was "stupid". Instead of following the school's advice, Albert's parents bought him a violin. Albert became good at the violin. Music was the key that helped Albert Einstein become one of the smartest men who has ever lived. Einstein himself says that the reason he was so smart is because he played the violin.

Undoubtedly, mobile technology has started to be visible in the field of education, as can be seen by the increasing number of publications that have appeared in recent years. This can also be proven with the existence of the new term in education – M-learning. Several types of mobile devices are accessible, such as wireless laptops, portable MP3 players, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and electronic dictionaries, although smart phones and iPads are the devices that have started to attract particular attention from educators. It is also noticeable that listening to music is one of the most important features in the aforementioned mobile devices. Against this backdrop, this study explores the benefits of integrating music and mobile devices in English vocabulary learning among tertiary students in a private university in Malaysia. As this study uses quantitative approach, a pre-test and a post-test were used to obtain data to analyse whether there was a gain in students’ vocabulary knowledge after vocabulary lessons using English songs and mobile devices were conducted. In addition, a survey was used to show if students had a positive outlook in learning vocabulary through music and mobile devices. The findings of this study indicated that there was an increase in the students’ vocabulary knowledge and students were enthusiastic to learn vocabulary. Integration of music and mobile devices provide more opportunities to enhance English vocabulary learning and act as a suitable tool for learning anytime and anywhere. Therefore, educators should find innovative ways to use mobile devices to teach the future students.

AbstractSome media forms we primarily take in with our senses, like movies, music or text. Other media forms are more like activities that we have to carry out with our body such as digital games on the PC, console, smart phone or tablet. Here, we are not allowed to sit still and take media in with our senses. In order to grasp this otherness and uniqueness of digital games it is not sufficient to re-use adapted media theories, concepts, methods and ways of writing. This article is written on the realization that the theories and methods we approach a research area, activity or experience with will set the boundaries of our understanding. And the ways we represent our understanding in writing to others will subsequently set the boundaries of their understanding. In this way, the article is an attempt of erecting boundaries in new ways and placing them in unfamiliar places through the use of alternative and alien methods, theories and styles of writing. This is done in order to let new formations of studying, thinking and talking about activities and experiences in highly interactive media emerge.

Nowadays in the era of smart phones world needs a smart applications that are easy to use and very effective in the end. Android is the one of the popular mobile application platform these days which we have used. SMART music player is the android application which can be operated on menu driven commands as well as voice commands. All the basic functionalities of music player can be operated via voice inputs. SMART music player can also be used for the promotions of movies, songs etc. It can be a good advertising media. It also provides the facilities which can synchronize with social media like facebook, twitter etc.

Nowadays in the era of smart phones world needs a smart applications that are easy to use and very effective in the end. Android is the one of the popular mobile application platform these days which we have used. SMART music player is the android application which can be operated on menu driven commands as well as voice commands. All the basic functionalities of music player can be operated via voice inputs. SMART music player can also be used for the promotions of movies, songs etc. It can be a good advertising media. It also provides the facilities which can synchronize with social media like facebook, twitter etc.

Every individual human might have completely different faces; however, their expressions tell us the same story and it notably plays a significant role in extraction of an individual’s emotions and behavior. Music is the purest form of art and a medium of expression, which is known to have a greater connection with a person’s emotions. It has a novel ability to lift one’s mood. This project system focuses on building an efficient music player which works on emotion of user using facial recognition techniques. The facial features extracted will generate a system thereby reducing the effort and time involved in doing it manually. Facial data is captured by employing a camera. The emotion module makes use of deep learning techniques to spot the exact mood relative to that expression. The accuracy of mood detection module in the system for real time footage is above 80%; while for static pictures it is 95 to one hundred percent. Therefore, it brings out higher accuracy relating to time and performance.

The goal of this thesis is to create a music player for smartphones as well as PCs that works with local music files in the user's device and which can learn which songs does the user like based on their actions during listening to music. The music player can, among other things, remember which songs were skipped by the user, when was volume turned up, or how many times was a certain song played. Each song has a score that is calculated based on these actions. With a higher score, there is also a higher chance of playing the song in the future. The results of my thesis are two full-featured versions of music player, which are capable of communication with each other to ensure synchronization of song scores. The main benefit of this thesis is an improvement of user experience during listening to music, which is achieved by the application's algorithm for song selection and minimalistic user interface.

Nationalism: Past as Prologue began as a single volume being compiled by Ad Akande, a scholar from South Africa, who proposed it to me as co-author about two years ago. The original idea was to examine how the damaging roots of nationalism have been corroding political systems around the world, and creating dangerous obstacles for necessary international cooperation. Since I (Bruce E. Johansen) has written profusely about climate change (global warming, a.k.a. infrared forcing), I suggested a concerted effort in that direction. This is a worldwide existential threat that affects every living thing on Earth. It often compounds upon itself, so delays in reducing emissions of fossil fuels are shortening the amount of time remaining to eliminate the use of fossil fuels to preserve a livable planet. Nationalism often impedes solutions to this problem (among many others), as nations place their singular needs above the common good. Our initial proposal got around, and abstracts on many subjects arrived. Within a few weeks, we had enough good material for a 100,000-word book. The book then fattened to two moderate volumes and then to four two very hefty tomes. We tried several different titles as good submissions swelled. We also discovered that our best contributors were experts in their fields, which ranged the world. We settled on three stand-alone books:” 1/ nationalism and racial justice. Our first volume grew as the growth of Black Lives Matter following the brutal killing of George Floyd ignited protests over police brutality and other issues during 2020, following the police assassination of Floyd in Minneapolis. It is estimated that more people took part in protests of police brutality during the summer of 2020 than any other series of marches in United States history. This includes upheavals during the 1960s over racial issues and against the war in Southeast Asia (notably Vietnam). We choose a volume on racism because it is one of nationalism’s main motive forces. This volume provides a worldwide array of work on nationalism’s growth in various countries, usually by authors residing in them, or in the United States with ethnic ties to the nation being examined, often recent immigrants to the United States from them. Our roster of contributors comprises a small United Nations of insightful, well-written research and commentary from Indonesia, New Zealand, Australia, China, India, South Africa, France, Portugal, Estonia, Hungary, Russia, Poland, Kazakhstan, Georgia, and the United States. Volume 2 (this one) describes and analyzes nationalism, by country, around the world, except for the United States; and 3/material directly related to President Donald Trump, and the United States. The first volume is under consideration at the Texas A & M University Press. The other two are under contract to Nova Science Publishers (which includes social sciences). These three volumes may be used individually or as a set. Environmental material is taken up in appropriate places in each of the three books. * * * * * What became the United States of America has been strongly nationalist since the English of present-day Massachusetts and Jamestown first hit North America’s eastern shores. The country propelled itself across North America with the self-serving ideology of “manifest destiny” for four centuries before Donald Trump came along. Anyone who believes that a Trumpian affection for deportation of “illegals” is a new thing ought to take a look at immigration and deportation statistics in Adam Goodman’s The Deportation Machine: America’s Long History of Deporting Immigrants (Princeton University Press, 2020). Between 1920 and 2018, the United States deported 56.3 million people, compared with 51.7 million who were granted legal immigration status during the same dates. Nearly nine of ten deportees were Mexican (Nolan, 2020, 83). This kind of nationalism, has become an assassin of democracy as well as an impediment to solving global problems. Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times (2019:A-25): that “In their 2018 book, How Democracies Die, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt documented how this process has played out in many countries, from Vladimir Putin’s Russia, to Recep Erdogan’s Turkey, to Viktor Orban’s Hungary. Add to these India’s Narendra Modi, China’s Xi Jinping, and the United States’ Donald Trump, among others. Bit by bit, the guardrails of democracy have been torn down, as institutions meant to serve the public became tools of ruling parties and self-serving ideologies, weaponized to punish and intimidate opposition parties’ opponents. On paper, these countries are still democracies; in practice, they have become one-party regimes….And it’s happening here [the United States] as we speak. If you are not worried about the future of American democracy, you aren’t paying attention” (Krugmam, 2019, A-25). We are reminded continuously that the late Carl Sagan, one of our most insightful scientific public intellectuals, had an interesting theory about highly developed civilizations. Given the number of stars and planets that must exist in the vast reaches of the universe, he said, there must be other highly developed and organized forms of life. Distance may keep us from making physical contact, but Sagan said that another reason we may never be on speaking terms with another intelligent race is (judging from our own example) could be their penchant for destroying themselves in relatively short order after reaching technological complexity. This book’s chapters, introduction, and conclusion examine the worldwide rise of partisan nationalism and the damage it has wrought on the worldwide pursuit of solutions for issues requiring worldwide scope, such scientific co-operation public health and others, mixing analysis of both. We use both historical description and analysis. This analysis concludes with a description of why we must avoid the isolating nature of nationalism that isolates people and encourages separation if we are to deal with issues of world-wide concern, and to maintain a sustainable, survivable Earth, placing the dominant political movement of our time against the Earth’s existential crises. Our contributors, all experts in their fields, each have assumed responsibility for a country, or two if they are related. This work entwines themes of worldwide concern with the political growth of nationalism because leaders with such a worldview are disinclined to co-operate internationally at a time when nations must find ways to solve common problems, such as the climate crisis. Inability to cooperate at this stage may doom everyone, eventually, to an overheated, stormy future plagued by droughts and deluges portending shortages of food and other essential commodities, meanwhile destroying large coastal urban areas because of rising sea levels. Future historians may look back at our time and wonder why as well as how our world succumbed to isolating nationalism at a time when time was so short for cooperative intervention which is crucial for survival of a sustainable earth. Pride in language and culture is salubrious to individuals’ sense of history and identity. Excess nationalism that prevents international co-operation on harmful worldwide maladies is quite another. As Pope Francis has pointed out: For all of our connectivity due to expansion of social media, ability to communicate can breed contempt as well as mutual trust. “For all our hyper-connectivity,” said Francis, “We witnessed a fragmentation that made it more difficult to resolve problems that affect us all” (Horowitz, 2020, A-12). The pope’s encyclical, titled “Brothers All,” also said: “The forces of myopic, extremist, resentful, and aggressive nationalism are on the rise.” The pope’s document also advocates support for migrants, as well as resistance to nationalist and tribal populism. Francis broadened his critique to the role of market capitalism, as well as nationalism has failed the peoples of the world when they need co-operation and solidarity in the face of the world-wide corona virus pandemic. Humankind needs to unite into “a new sense of the human family [Fratelli Tutti, “Brothers All”], that rejects war at all costs” (Pope, 2020, 6-A). Our journey takes us first to Russia, with the able eye and honed expertise of Richard D. Anderson, Jr. who teaches as UCLA and publishes on the subject of his chapter: “Putin, Russian identity, and Russia’s conduct at home and abroad.” Readers should find Dr. Anderson’s analysis fascinating because Vladimir Putin, the singular leader of Russian foreign and domestic policy these days (and perhaps for the rest of his life, given how malleable Russia’s Constitution has become) may be a short man physically, but has high ambitions. One of these involves restoring the old Russian (and Soviet) empire, which would involve re-subjugating a number of nations that broke off as the old order dissolved about 30 years ago. President (shall we say czar?) Putin also has international ambitions, notably by destabilizing the United States, where election meddling has become a specialty. The sight of Putin and U.S. president Donald Trump, two very rich men (Putin $70-$200 billion; Trump $2.5 billion), nuzzling in friendship would probably set Thomas Jefferson and Vladimir Lenin spinning in their graves. The road of history can take some unanticipated twists and turns. Consider Poland, from which we have an expert native analysis in chapter 2, Bartosz Hlebowicz, who is a Polish anthropologist and journalist. His piece is titled “Lawless and Unjust: How to Quickly Make Your Own Country a Puppet State Run by a Group of Hoodlums – the Hopeless Case of Poland (2015–2020).” When I visited Poland to teach and lecture twice between 2006 and 2008, most people seemed to be walking on air induced by freedom to conduct their own affairs to an unusual degree for a state usually squeezed between nationalists in Germany and Russia. What did the Poles then do in a couple of decades? Read Hlebowicz’ chapter and decide. It certainly isn’t soft-bellied liberalism. In Chapter 3, with Bruce E. Johansen, we visit China’s western provinces, the lands of Tibet as well as the Uighurs and other Muslims in the Xinjiang region, who would most assuredly resent being characterized as being possessed by the Chinese of the Han to the east. As a student of Native American history, I had never before thought of the Tibetans and Uighurs as Native peoples struggling against the Independence-minded peoples of a land that is called an adjunct of China on most of our maps. The random act of sitting next to a young woman on an Air India flight out of Hyderabad, bound for New Delhi taught me that the Tibetans had something to share with the Lakota, the Iroquois, and hundreds of other Native American states and nations in North America. Active resistance to Chinese rule lasted into the mid-nineteenth century, and continues today in a subversive manner, even in song, as I learned in 2018 when I acted as a foreign adjudicator on a Ph.D. dissertation by a Tibetan student at the University of Madras (in what is now in a city called Chennai), in southwestern India on resistance in song during Tibet’s recent history. Tibet is one of very few places on Earth where a young dissident can get shot to death for singing a song that troubles China’s Quest for Lebensraum. The situation in Xinjiang region, where close to a million Muslims have been interned in “reeducation” camps surrounded with brick walls and barbed wire. They sing, too. Come with us and hear the music. Back to Europe now, in Chapter 4, to Portugal and Spain, we find a break in the general pattern of nationalism. Portugal has been more progressive governmentally than most. Spain varies from a liberal majority to military coups, a pattern which has been exported to Latin America. A situation such as this can make use of the term “populism” problematic, because general usage in our time usually ties the word into a right-wing connotative straightjacket. “Populism” can be used to describe progressive (left-wing) insurgencies as well. José Pinto, who is native to Portugal and also researches and writes in Spanish as well as English, in “Populism in Portugal and Spain: a Real Neighbourhood?” provides insight into these historical paradoxes. Hungary shares some historical inclinations with Poland (above). Both emerged from Soviet dominance in an air of developing freedom and multicultural diversity after the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed. Then, gradually at first, right wing-forces began to tighten up, stripping structures supporting popular freedom, from the courts, mass media, and other institutions. In Chapter 5, Bernard Tamas, in “From Youth Movement to Right-Liberal Wing Authoritarianism: The Rise of Fidesz and the Decline of Hungarian Democracy” puts the renewed growth of political and social repression into a context of worldwide nationalism. Tamas, an associate professor of political science at Valdosta State University, has been a postdoctoral fellow at Harvard University and a Fulbright scholar at the Central European University in Budapest, Hungary. His books include From Dissident to Party Politics: The Struggle for Democracy in Post-Communist Hungary (2007). Bear in mind that not everyone shares Orbán’s vision of what will make this nation great, again. On graffiti-covered walls in Budapest, Runes (traditional Hungarian script) has been found that read “Orbán is a motherfucker” (Mikanowski, 2019, 58). Also in Europe, in Chapter 6, Professor Ronan Le Coadic, of the University of Rennes, Rennes, France, in “Is There a Revival of French Nationalism?” Stating this title in the form of a question is quite appropriate because France’s nationalistic shift has built and ebbed several times during the last few decades. For a time after 2000, it came close to assuming the role of a substantial minority, only to ebb after that. In 2017, the candidate of the National Front reached the second round of the French presidential election. This was the second time this nationalist party reached the second round of the presidential election in the history of the Fifth Republic. In 2002, however, Jean-Marie Le Pen had only obtained 17.79% of the votes, while fifteen years later his daughter, Marine Le Pen, almost doubled her father's record, reaching 33.90% of the votes cast. Moreover, in the 2019 European elections, re-named Rassemblement National obtained the largest number of votes of all French political formations and can therefore boast of being "the leading party in France.” The brutality of oppressive nationalism may be expressed in personal relationships, such as child abuse. While Indonesia and Aotearoa [the Maoris’ name for New Zealand] hold very different ranks in the United Nations Human Development Programme assessments, where Indonesia is classified as a medium development country and Aotearoa New Zealand as a very high development country. In Chapter 7, “Domestic Violence Against Women in Indonesia and Aotearoa New Zealand: Making Sense of Differences and Similarities” co-authors, in Chapter 8, Mandy Morgan and Dr. Elli N. Hayati, from New Zealand and Indonesia respectively, found that despite their socio-economic differences, one in three women in each country experience physical or sexual intimate partner violence over their lifetime. In this chapter ther authors aim to deepen understandings of domestic violence through discussion of the socio-economic and demographic characteristics of theit countries to address domestic violence alongside studies of women’s attitudes to gender norms and experiences of intimate partner violence. One of the most surprising and upsetting scholarly journeys that a North American student may take involves Adolf Hitler’s comments on oppression of American Indians and Blacks as he imagined the construction of the Nazi state, a genesis of nationalism that is all but unknown in the United States of America, traced in this volume (Chapter 8) by co-editor Johansen. Beginning in Mein Kampf, during the 1920s, Hitler explicitly used the westward expansion of the United States across North America as a model and justification for Nazi conquest and anticipated colonization by Germans of what the Nazis called the “wild East” – the Slavic nations of Poland, the Baltic states, Ukraine, and Russia, most of which were under control of the Soviet Union. The Volga River (in Russia) was styled by Hitler as the Germans’ Mississippi, and covered wagons were readied for the German “manifest destiny” of imprisoning, eradicating, and replacing peoples the Nazis deemed inferior, all with direct references to events in North America during the previous century. At the same time, with no sense of contradiction, the Nazis partook of a long-standing German romanticism of Native Americans. One of Goebbels’ less propitious schemes was to confer honorary Aryan status on Native American tribes, in the hope that they would rise up against their oppressors. U.S. racial attitudes were “evidence [to the Nazis] that America was evolving in the right direction, despite its specious rhetoric about equality.” Ming Xie, originally from Beijing, in the People’s Republic of China, in Chapter 9, “News Coverage and Public Perceptions of the Social Credit System in China,” writes that The State Council of China in 2014 announced “that a nationwide social credit system would be established” in China. “Under this system, individuals, private companies, social organizations, and governmental agencies are assigned a score which will be calculated based on their trustworthiness and daily actions such as transaction history, professional conduct, obedience to law, corruption, tax evasion, and academic plagiarism.” The “nationalism” in this case is that of the state over the individual. China has 1.4 billion people; this system takes their measure for the purpose of state control. Once fully operational, control will be more subtle. People who are subject to it, through modern technology (most often smart phones) will prompt many people to self-censor. Orwell, modernized, might write: “Your smart phone is watching you.” Ming Xie holds two Ph.Ds, one in Public Administration from University of Nebraska at Omaha and another in Cultural Anthropology from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, Beijing, where she also worked for more than 10 years at a national think tank in the same institution. While there she summarized news from non-Chinese sources for senior members of the Chinese Communist Party. Ming is presently an assistant professor at the Department of Political Science and Criminal Justice, West Texas A&M University. In Chapter 10, analyzing native peoples and nationhood, Barbara Alice Mann, Professor of Honours at the University of Toledo, in “Divide, et Impera: The Self-Genocide Game” details ways in which European-American invaders deprive the conquered of their sense of nationhood as part of a subjugation system that amounts to genocide, rubbing out their languages and cultures -- and ultimately forcing the native peoples to assimilate on their own, for survival in a culture that is foreign to them. Mann is one of Native American Studies’ most acute critics of conquests’ contradictions, and an author who retrieves Native history with a powerful sense of voice and purpose, having authored roughly a dozen books and numerous book chapters, among many other works, who has traveled around the world lecturing and publishing on many subjects. Nalanda Roy and S. Mae Pedron in Chapter 11, “Understanding the Face of Humanity: The Rohingya Genocide.” describe one of the largest forced migrations in the history of the human race, the removal of 700,000 to 800,000 Muslims from Buddhist Myanmar to Bangladesh, which itself is already one of the most crowded and impoverished nations on Earth. With about 150 million people packed into an area the size of Nebraska and Iowa (population less than a tenth that of Bangladesh, a country that is losing land steadily to rising sea levels and erosion of the Ganges river delta. The Rohingyas’ refugee camp has been squeezed onto a gigantic, eroding, muddy slope that contains nearly no vegetation. However, Bangladesh is majority Muslim, so while the Rohingya may starve, they won’t be shot to death by marauding armies. Both authors of this exquisite (and excruciating) account teach at Georgia Southern University in Savannah, Georgia, Roy as an associate professor of International Studies and Asian politics, and Pedron as a graduate student; Roy originally hails from very eastern India, close to both Myanmar and Bangladesh, so he has special insight into the context of one of the most brutal genocides of our time, or any other. This is our case describing the problems that nationalism has and will pose for the sustainability of the Earth as our little blue-and-green orb becomes more crowded over time. The old ways, in which national arguments often end in devastating wars, are obsolete, given that the Earth and all the people, plants, and other animals that it sustains are faced with the existential threat of a climate crisis that within two centuries, more or less, will flood large parts of coastal cities, and endanger many species of plants and animals. To survive, we must listen to the Earth, and observe her travails, because they are increasingly our own.

When mind is at peace, body responds in the same tone. Contrarily, a little anxiety or worry may upset the peace of mind and body, leading to faster heartbeat, taut muscles, high or low blood pressure, abnormal hormone secretion, and over sweating. These are the common symptoms of stress. These may, in turn, lead to serious health issues, as well as psychological disorders, such as insomnia (sleeplessness), anger, and tendency to commit suicide. Nowadays the ratio of suicide is on the increase on a day-to-day scale. To overcome all these problems, and cater to human right to enjoy an environment of peace and quiet for better mental and physical performance, the authors have developed an Android-based offline, multi-functional mobile application: Relax Player App. It panoramically arrays natural sounds, animal sounds, instrumental music, white noise, and brain soothing melodies to relax and freshen up user's ears and mind. It also has in-built mechanism to create one's own melody by mixing these sounds, adding to its appeal.

During the 1980s, North Carolina was a major outpost for that era’s college-radio alternative music. And Ground Zero was Reynolds High School in Winston-Salem, which Mitch Easter and other major players attended. Easter and his friends Chris Stamey had been making recordings since childhood, developing studio smarts they applied to music. Working out of a garage studio in his parents’ home, Easter became one of the key producers of the decade, especially for his work with R.E.M.

A mobile application is a computer program or application developed to run on a small handheld mobile device such as mobile phones, smartphones, PDAs, and so on. Such devices are sold with several apps bundled as pre-installed software, such as a web browser, email client, calendar, mapping program, and an app for buying music or other media or more apps. Apps that are not preinstalled are usually available through distribution platforms called app stores such as the Apple App Store, Google Play, Windows Phone Store, and BlackBerry App World, etc. Usage of mobile apps has become increasingly prevalent across mobile phone users in the world. A recent study reported that during the previous quarter, more mobile subscribers used apps than browsed the web on their devices. Thus, a mobile application can aid in the prosecution of human rights violations, atrocities, human trafficking, and child laboring. In this chapter, authors provide a comprehensive study, design patterns, usage of several mobile applications designed for protecting human rights.

This chapter proposes that the convergence of mobile devices and digital game-based learning may have profound implications for educational transformation. Key issues to be addressed in the chapter are: (1) the pervasiveness of mobile and shared technologies, (2) contemporary accounts of learning theory in terms of mobility, (3) unique qualities of mobile learning and technologies, (4) successful applications for mobile learning, and (5) implications for future research and practice. Commuters play Sudoku on smart phones on the subway. High school freshman swap downloaded music across digital media devices in the parking lot. Elementary students debate strategies and “cheats” for handheld consoles on the bus ride home. For educational researchers, practitioners, and administrators, it is critical to examine these identified trends in mobile technology and digital game adoption and use to develop creative strategies and applications, and effective policies that lead to innovative instructional and learning environments.

In recent years, home networking has undergone significant changes due to the proliferation of technologies that support converging consumer electronics, mobile, and computer networks. An increased number of networked appliances may assume a networked home with an always-on Internet connection. Home networks host a proliferation of linked devices and sensors including enhanced or new applications which can be categorized as follows: • Home automation and controls • Networked appliances • Mobile • Home/SOHO Office • Entertainment (audio, video, gaming, IPTV, etc.) • Personal services (banking, shopping, healthcare, learning, etc.) • Storage devices • Social networking • Local and remote management Broadband adoption has marked an increasing number of subscribers worldwide due to several factors such as increasing number of PCs in households, broadband access services, standardization, emerging technologies and applications, government policy, and market players. Japanese manufacturers are attempting to seamlessly interconnect wireless personal area network with mobile phones, whereby home network service could be controlled by remote users. Starting in 2007, ABI Research forecasts that converged intelligent home network services (home automation and networked digital appliances) will take off in the South Korean market (ABI, 2007). Home networking is evolving rapidly to digital home and smart home environments (MIT Project, 2007). Digital Living Network Alliance defines a digital home consisting of “a network of consumer electronics, PCs and mobile devices that co-operate transparently, delivering simple, seamless interoperability” (DLNA, 2007). The rapid developments are in all areas: devices, services, and access. Consumers have gone from using their home network primarily to share broadband connections delivering video and audio over IP around the home. Content management and service provisioning is key to offering entertainment services including personalization, context awareness, and positioning (Kozbe, Roccetti, & Ulema, 2005). Networked consumer systems and devices, including network-centric entertainment systems, have become one of the major focus areas of the communication and entertainment industries (Rocetti, Kozbe, & Ulema, 2005). The introduction of iPod device and of iTunes Music Store service brought digital entertainment into home. Other factors that contributed to this success include: • Advances of multimedia technology such as high-quality video and sound. • Advances in wireless communications and interactive applications taking nomadic entertainment experiences to new dimensions. • Compatibility among devices. • Increased revenue on game software and devices, surpassing the revenues achieved by the movie industry. In this chapter, an update of the chapter of the first edition (Hentea, 2005), we focus on recent advances and trends for broadband access and services. The rest of the chapter is organized in sections as follows: the next section contains recent enhancements of broadband access; then, we provide an overview of emerging services and technologies in one section, followed by a brief review of the standards in the next section. We conclude with a perspective on the future developments.