Control Video Research Articles

Readability of American Online Patient Education Materials in Urologic Oncology: A Need for Simple Communication

To determine the readability levels of reputable cancer and urologic Web sites addressing bladder, prostate, kidney, and testicular cancers. Online patient education materials (PEMs) for bladder, prostate, kidney, and testicular malignancies were evaluated from the American Cancer Society, American Society of Clinical Oncology, National Cancer Institute, Urology Care Foundation, Bladder Cancer Advocacy Network, Prostate Cancer Foundation, Kidney Cancer Association, and Testicular Cancer Resource Center. Grade level was determined using several readability indices, and analyses were performed on the basis of cancer type, Web site, and content area (general, causes, risk factors and prevention, diagnosis and staging, treatment, and post-treatment). Estimated grade level of online PEMs ranged from 9.2 to 14.2 with an overall mean of 11.7. Web sites for kidney cancer had the least difficult readability (11.3) and prostate cancer had the most difficult readability (12.1). Among specific Web sites, the most difficult readability levels were noted for the Urology Care Foundation Web site for bladder and prostate cancer and the Kidney Cancer Association and Testicular Cancer Resource Center for kidney and testes cancer. Readability levels within content areas varied on the basis of the disease and Web site. Online PEMs in urologic oncology are written at a level above the average American reader. Simplification of these resources is necessary to improve patient understanding of urologic malignancy.

Educational Determinants of Readiness to Practise with LGBTQ Clients: Social Work Students Speak Out

As health and mental health providers are increasingly called to attend to lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) issues, it is critical for social work education to ensure the competency of students to deliver services to these populations. This North American online study investigated the self-assessed readiness of LGBTQ undergraduate and master’s-level social work students (n ¼ 1,018) to practise with LGBT clients, as well as their assessment of their non-LGBTQ peers. Participants were enrolled in Master of Social Work (MSW) (76.0 per cent) or Bachelor of Social Work (BSW) (24.0 per cent) programmes, representing 136 schools in fifty-two states/provinces. Students reported fairly low levels of self-assessed practise readiness with specific subpopulations (gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender), with participants reporting the highest (somewhat prepared) self-assessed readiness with gay populations and the lowest (not well prepared) self-assessed readiness with transgender populations. Regression analyses were conductedseparatelyforeachsubpopulationandrevealedthatacrossallgroupshigherreadiness to practise was positively associated with implicit programme support for LGBTQ students, positive handling of LGBTQ issues in classrooms and explicit inclusion of LGBTQ content in courses. Implications for social work education are discussed.

Commentary

Commentary

Participation in virtual academic communities of practice under the influence of technology acceptance and community factors. A learning analytics application

Participation in virtual communities of practice (vCoP) can be influenced at the same time by technology acceptance and by community factors. To overcome methodological issues connected with the analysis of these influences, learning analytics were applied. Based on a recent vCoP model, the collaborative dialogue comprising 4040 interventions in 1981 messages created by a vCoP located at a US American online university was automatically analyzed. The text-based asynchronous online discussions were scored using a cohesion-based participation and collaboration analysis. Additionally, a sample of N=133 vCoP participants responded a technology acceptance survey. Thus, a combined research model including the vCoP model and an established technology acceptance model was verified. The results confirmed the vCoP model entirely, and the acceptance model only partially. As consequence for educational research, the CoP model was confirmed and extended to vCoP settings, while the acceptance model appears to need reconsideration. For academic practice, the study initiates the development of assessment tools fostering knowledge sharing through dialogue in vCoP. Also, it suggests how virtual classrooms can be extended to open spaces where value creation takes place through social learning. Learning analytics proved thus successful, provides information that impacts both theory and practice of technology-enhanced learning.

A Corpus-Based Study on the Differences of Chinese and American Online English Sports News Headlines from the Perspective of Cross-Cultural Communication

The present study generalizes the features of online American sports news headlines through the corpus and compares them with the English sports news headlines written by Chinese journalists, aiming to provide some references for the Chinese official websites to help reader better understand the content and therefore improve English skills. The present study first reviews the relevant theories on news headlines and then establishes a corpus with 248 headlines by collecting 10 days’ (1 Feb. 2013 ~ 10 Feb. 2013) sports news headlines from the Xinhua and Yahoo website. After finding the Yahoo online English sports news headlines’ characteristics in lexicology, grammar and rhetoric, the author at last searches the disparities in English headlines written by Chinese due to the different thinking models, language skills and culture of sports, and provides some suggestions for improvement from the perspective of cross-cultural communication.

Price Comparison, Price Competition, And The Effects Of ShopBots

Two ShopBots were used to determine high-to-low price dispersion for identical models of 25 consumer durables, in 2007 and again in 2011, revealing substantial but declining price dispersion ratios. A survey of 1,135 American online shoppers revealed their dependence on ShopBots and frequency of other online shopping actions. Typical respondent reported they "very often" used search sites to locate what they wanted. Nearly 30 percent used the most often named price comparison site, Yahoo! Shopping, in the past year, suggesting substantial potential for future price rationalization. Several customer relationship management tools online merchants might use to avoid the resulting direct price competition are discussed. Finally, the impact of m-commerce, tablets, and apps on online price comparison behavior is explored.

The Internet is a Packet-Switched Telecommunications Network

For the second time in five years, the D.C. Circuit in Verizon v. FCC has struck down the jurisdictional theory relied upon by the FCC in creating its Open Internet rules, because the Commission still classifies Internet connections as information rather than telecommunications services. Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Brand X, most legal scholars have considered the question of whether the FCC may choose to regulate Internet access as an information service to be settled law. Drawing on a detailed analysis of the regulatory treatment of protocol processing in the Computer Inquiries and the technical structure of Internet Protocol networks themselves, this essay argues that conventional wisdom is mistaken. The view of ISPs as intermediaries that necessarily store or transform user data is anachronistic, likely taken from the operation of ISPs’ most visible predecessors, online services like CompuServe and America Online. Further, the issue in Brand X was the unbundling of last-mile cable modem transmission facilities, not an end-to-end Internet Protocol service. The factual assumptions underlying the former decision do not hold in the Internet context, a conclusion this paper demonstrates in a way easily replicated by any network engineer. Because of this faulty premise, Internet governance in the U.S. is again dealing with classic telecommunications issues — interconnection, non-discrimination, and vertical integration, but disconnected from existing law and historical precedent.

Compressions in Ironic Headlines Referring to Politicians of the USA and Lithuania

In the article the scientific model of conceptual blending (developed by Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier) is applied to the analysis of ironic headlines. It is argued that irony’s ability to make use of this mechanism partially accounts for the use of ironic references in news discourse. Irony is used as a means to reveal the compressions created via blending. An ironist employs the rules of blending to present a variety of eye-catching and brief headlines that contain compressions of Time, Space, Part-Whole, Role-Value, Intentionality, and Analogy/Disanalogy that are compressed into Uniqueness. The multiple compressions of an ironic reference do not only enable the ironist to communicate complex ideas and implications at the scale of human understanding but also facilitate the economy of space (i.e. the complex conceptual integration networks operate in a way that brings elements from a variety of mental input spaces into one blend). An overview of the Vital Relations and their compressions is supported by a number of ironic news headlines collected from popular Lithuanian and American online news websites.

Partisan asymmetries in online political activity

We examine partisan differences in the behavior, communication patterns and social interactions of more than 18,000 politically-active Twitter users to produce evidence that points to changing levels of partisan engagement with the American online political landscape. Analysis of a network defined by the communication activity of these users in proximity to the 2010 midterm congressional elections reveals a highly segregated, well clustered partisan community structure. Using cluster membership as a high-fidelity (87% accuracy) proxy for political affiliation, we characterize a wide range of differences in the behavior, communication and social connectivity of left- and right-leaning Twitter users. We find that in contrast to the online political dynamics of the 2008 campaign, right-leaning Twitter users exhibit greater levels of political activity, a more tightly interconnected social structure, and a communication network topology that facilitates the rapid and broad dissemination of political information.

Filipino and American online communication and linguistic variation

ABSTRACT: This paper investigatescross‐culturalandcross‐registervariation from four corpora of internet blogs and online opinion columns written in English by Filipino and American authors. A multi‐dimensional analysis following established linguistic dimensions from Grieve, Biber, Friginal, and Nekrasova was used to compare the relative distribution of frequently co‐occurring linguistic features, with the goal of describing the statistical relationships and variations among the two selected internet‐based registers of these two varieties of English. Parallel corpora of Filipino and American blogs and opinion columns (N total texts = 5,320), with approximately 13 million words, and collected across a wide range of topics, were analyzed for this purpose. The texts were tagged for grammatical and semantic markers to match the resultant dimensions from Grieveet al.(as the main basis for comparison. Results show significant variations in the linguistic composition of Filipino and American texts along four functional dimensions: (1) informational vs. personal focus; (2) addressee focus; (3) thematic variation; and (4) narrative style.

Application of Gender Difference and Topic Preference to Promote Students’ Motivation for Online EFL Learning

The focus of this paper is to apply the analysis of gender difference and topic preference to enhance and motivate online EFL learning shown by Taiwanese students enrolled in Freshman English Aural Training courses for English majors in a university in central Taiwan. Online learning for EFL students has been a worldwide trend. Hundreds of websites are accessible for EFL students to learn English linguistically and culturally. Many websites are free for users to learn autonomously; however, in order for EFL students to learn English effectively, it is essential for EFL teachers to create a pedagogical design to increase students’ motivation to learn. Gender difference has been a controversial issue. Scientists have found that the brain structure of men and women are different (Rogers, 1999, Sax, 2005). While this is true, the influence of culture on EFL students’ preference for different topics to learn online cannot be underestimated. This paper will present the preferences shown by both male and female Aural Training students’ choices toward Voice of America (http://www.voanews.com/learningenglish/home/) online listening articles in the following topics: Science, Technology, Education, Entertainment and Economy. The analysis of the data shows that gender difference in choosing topics online for EFL learning is applicable to EFL pedagogical design and thus suggests that EFL teachers take these two factors in consideration when planning materials for the male and female students in their EFL classes.

Assessing structure in American online purchase of travel products

The Internet has become the primary channel for the purchase of a number of travel-related products including airline tickets, hotel reservations, car rental, tickets to events and attractions, etc. This study examines the pattern of travel-related products purchased online by American travelers. The results of this study indicate that there is a strong hierarchical structure in the purchasing of eight travel-related products. In addition, it appears that American travelers can be roughly classified into three travel product groups, ranging from the ‘Core Internet Traveler’ and ‘Advanced Internet Traveler’ to the ‘Comprehensive Internet (or Complete) Traveler.’ Finally, an analysis of the travelers indicates that they differ significantly in terms of demographic characteristics, information search behavior, and travel planning activities. These findings offer a number of important implications for destination marketing.

Zoning Laws: Facebook and Google+

Zoning Laws: Facebook and Google+

Young, Black, and Connected

This article examines the extent and intensity of Facebook usage among African American college students and investigates their reasons for using Facebook. As expected, 98% of students in the survey had a Facebook account, and a large number of Facebook “friends.” Younger users spent significantly more time on Facebook than older ones. Our findings underscore the importance of cultural influence for African American online users. Displaying photographs and personal interests on Facebook signals racial identity among African American college students. Personality traits, such as self-esteem, trust in people, satisfaction with university life, and racial identity, were not significant predictors on the time spent on Facebook.

RETURNS TO INVESTORS IN STOCKS IN NEW INDUSTRIES

I. INTRODUCTION One thousand dollars invested in America Online's initial public offering (IPO) in March 1992 became $295,545 by the end of 2000 when AOL was purchased by Time-Warner. This is an extraordinary payoff for shareholders: over 5% per month. While this investment has an outstanding return, new industries have high risk and their stocks are likely to have high expected returns. On the other hand, the extraordinary behavior of dot-corn stocks makes this conclusion less than obvious. The stratospheric prices of dot-corn stocks and returns to some shareholders suggest that expected returns in a new industry may well be dominated by forces not common in more mature industries. One possibility is euphoria or craziness, an explanation given more plausibility by the boom and bust in dot-corn stock prices. Another explanation is that such stocks are similar to options and lottery tickets. This possibility has occurred to many observers, among them Alan Greenspan who observed that When you are dealing with stock the possibilities of which are either it's going to be valued at zero or some huge number--you get a premium in that stock price which is exactly the same sort of price evaluation process that goes on in the lottery. --(Blumberg Capital 1999) Perhaps stocks in new industries have a distribution of returns that includes the possibility of large gains and small losses? If so, then investors may buy stocks for the same reasons that people are willing to pay for lottery tickets. This explanation could be consistent with high valuations and even negative-expected returns because investors are willing to pay on average to have a small probability of a large gain. (1) Indeed, the limited history of dot-corns suggests realization of substantial negative returns. The geometric return to shareholders averaged across dot-coms is --4.3% per month. Even so, the history of dot-coms probably is too short to deliver very reliable evidence on the expected return in new industries. This average return to stockholders is based on the same firms as in the study by Hand (2001), but there are only five firms in the Center for Research in Security Prices (CRSP) data for these firms as recently as 1995 and the financial crisis of 2007 and 2008 would suggest ending the data in 2006. We estimate expected returns in new industries by examining new industries with longer experiences than dot-coms. Many analogies have been drawn between dot-coms and earlier industries as far back as railroads and telegraphs, for example, in Business Week (Mandel 1999; Hof and Hamm 2002), the Economist (2000), Nairn (2002), and Perez (2002). (2) Among these analogies is the importance of network effects. Network effects are important for dot-coms and they are important for some of the industries examined in this paper. Industries examined in this paper include network industries if a network industry is defined as one in which a standard for the product or the availability of complementary inputs has high marginal value for the industry. One such industry is the automobile industry, which standardized on gasoline engines instead of electricity or steam. Another is the telegraph industry, for which interconnection is as crucial as for the Internet. While it is less obvious, interconnection is an important issue for railroads as well. When differences in track width--gauge--are large enough, connections across lines can require unloading and reloading railroad cars. Gauge was not standardized in the United States until the 1880s and even today, gauge in Spain and Portugal is different than in the rest of Europe. In this paper, we examine the returns in major, new industries in the United States and summarize the distribution of returns over the period of the industry's development. Our paper is related to papers by Fama and French (2001) and Gompers and Lerner (2003). Fama and French (2001) examine the returns on newly listed firms in the CRSP data set from 1926 to 2000 and find that these firms' returns are similar to their benchmark returns. …

An approximate microaggregation approach for microdata protection

Microdata protection is a hot topic in the field of Statistical Disclosure Control, which has gained special interest after the disclosure of 658,000 queries by the America Online (AOL) search engine in August 2006. Many algorithms, methods and properties have been proposed to deal with microdata disclosure. One of the emerging concepts in microdata protection is k-anonymity, introduced by Samarati and Sweeney. k-Anonymity provides a simple and efficient approach to protect private individual information and is gaining increasing popularity. k-Anonymity requires that every record in the microdata table released be indistinguishably related to no fewer than k respondents. In this paper, we apply the concept of entropy to propose a distance metric to evaluate the amount of mutual information among records in microdata, and propose a method of constructing dependency tree to find the key attributes, which we then use to process approximate microaggregation. Further, we adopt this new microaggregation technique to study k-anonymity problem, and an efficient algorithm is developed. Experimental results show that the proposed microaggregation technique is efficient and effective in the terms of running time and information loss.

Web Usage Among Hispanics In The South Florida Region

The establishment of LAOL by America Online to cater to the Hispanics in the U.S. attests to the growing importance of the Hispanic consumers to corporations. The Hispanic market in the U.S. offers promising and lucrative online business opportunities. Spain’s Terra Network, one of the biggest online content and access providers in the Latin countries, has teamed up with New Jersey based IDT to provide access to U.S. Hispanics (Folpe, 2000). Sears, Roebuck & Company plans to offer Internet sales on its Spanish language website to take advantage of this growing market. Approximately, 13 million households and 2.3 million Hispanic small businesses are using the Web. Still, little published research exists documenting the evaluation and usage of Web by this growing segment of the US population. Applying the gratification and avoidance approach used in the prior studies of media usage and Korgaonkar and Wolin’s seven-factor Web gratification model, the authors explore the Hispanic Web consumers’ use of the Web. The gratification factors <as well as demographic factors of the Hispanic respondents were studied in three usage contexts of the Web: (1) the number of hours per day spent on the Web, (2) the percent of time spent using the Web for business and personal purposes, and (3) if the subjects in the past 12 months made purchases or not from the Web. Multivariate discriminant analysis suggests that the gratification factors along with age, education, and income levels, are significantly correlated with the three usage contexts of the Web. The study results and implications for managers are discussed.

A Framework of Search Engine Use for Travel Planning

Search engines have become one of the primary tools for travel planning and, as such, have become an important element in the marketing efforts of destination marketing organizations. Recently, it has been demonstrated that because of the dynamic relationships among search engine providers, the tourism industry, and travelers, it is essential that destination marketing organizations understand how search engines are used by travelers within the travel planning process. This study proposed a three-stage model that provides a framework for examining how online travelers use search engines and how different aspects of the travel planning process shape this use. The model was evaluated based on a national survey of American online travel planners, and the findings provide significant insight into the role of search engines for travel planning. The implications of the study for search engine marketing are discussed as well as several challenges for future research.

Cross-Cultural Differences in Online Brand Communities: An Exploratory Study of Indian and American Online Brand Communities

ABSTRACT This study investigated the cultural differences in the motives for participation in, and the community characteristics of, online brand communities in India and the United States. Results show that giving information, social integration, self-discovery, and status-enhancement motives are stronger for members of collectivist cultures. Results also show that members in collectivistic cultures exhibit a stronger consciousness of kind and moral responsibility and are more familiar with shared rituals and traditions. Overall, the results highlight the importance of considering cultural differences while setting up online brand communities.

A case study examination of the impact of lawsuits on website accessibility

Purpose. To evaluate the impact of lawsuits on the accessibility of company websites.Method. Convenience samples of websites for America Online (AOL), Southwest Airlines, Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority (MARTA), Priceline.com, and Claire's were evaluated for years surrounding their respective lawsuits. The results of each website were compared to a random control group of websites and to a reference website (of a similarly sized company that has not been sued and is in the same industry). Where possible, two archived instances of each website were collected per year. Accessibility was measured using the Web Accessibility Barrier (WAB) metric to evaluate the homepage and pages at level 1. Analysis of variance was computed on the common periods between each pairing of sued and reference websites.Results. The case studies demonstrate mixed evidence that lawsuits work. In the cases of MARTA, Southwest and Priceline, there is supporting evidence that lawsuits have been successful. In the cases of AOL and Claire's, the evidence is weaker.Conclusion. This case study examination shows mixed evidence that lawsuits work to force companies to modify their websites to be more accessible to people with disabilities: three cases show evidence for the success and two show weaker supporting evidence.