Real-world Interactions Research Articles

How Relations are Built within a SNS World -- Social Network Analysis on Mixi --

Our purpose here is to (1) investigate the structure of the personal networks developed on mixi, a Japanese social networking service (SNS), and (2) to consider the governing mechanism which guides participants of a SNS to form an aggregate network. Our findings are as follows:the clustering coefficient of the network is as high as 0.33 while the characteristic path lenght is as low as 5.5. A network among central users (over 300 edges) consist of two cliques, which seems to be very fragile. Community-affiliation network suggests there are several easy-entry communities which later lead users to more high-entry, unique-theme communities. The analysis on connectedness within a community reveals the importance of real-world interaction. Lastly, we depict a probable image of the entire ecology on {\\em mixi} among users and communities, which contributes broadly to social systems on the Web.

Hidden persuasions in soap operas: damaged heroines and negative consumer effects

The purpose of our study is to investigate the negative influence of textual images of damaged women characters in soap operas on the female consumers who constitute the majority of viewers. We begin with an analysis of the television soap genre in terms of print and radio antecedents to examine the specific attributes that make it a marketable item designed to appeal to women audiences. In a cross-sectional study of long-time viewers of four soap operas, we investigate negative consumer influences identified in prior research indicating that long exposure to negative role models is detrimental to personal life satisfaction, realistic assessment of what the world is like and achievement of reasonable goals. These influences are considered negative in that viewers who seek emotional satisfaction in parasocial attachments to characters accept images of passively subordinate women characters in attractive settings as ‘real’. Findings indicate the presence of negative response themes such as distorted views of television reality as the norm, aspiration to the possessions and lives seen on screen, disappointment at the viewers’ own lives in comparison, and substitution of soap relationships for real-world interactions. Additional research directions on soaps as a source of hidden persuasion are suggested on the part of advertising academics, practitioners and public policy makers.

An Analysis of the Determinants of Tipping Behavior: A Laboratory Experiment and Evidence from Restaurant Tipping

[Author Affiliation]Matt Parrett, Deloitte Tax LLP, 136 Peachtree Memorial Dr. GA6, Atlanta, GA 30309, USA; mparrett@vt.edu; corresponding authorFunding for this research was provided by the National Science Foundation (SBE-0241935).[Acknowledgment]I want to first thank Catherine Eckel for her numerous comments and suggestions, as well as for her guidance throughout the writing of this paper. I also want to thank both my discussants and the participants at the 2003 ESA meetings in Tucson, the 2003 SEA meetings in San Antonio, and the 2004 ASSA meetings in San Diego for their helpful comments. I am also grateful to Selhan Garip for help with the experiment. Finally, I want to thank the two anonymous referees, as well as the Editor, Laura Razzolini, for their insightful comments and suggestions. I would like to dedicate this paper to my late uncle, Joe Bland, whose thirst for knowledge was unquenchable and contagious.1. IntroductionRestaurant tipping is a significant part of the economy. In 2003, sales at full-service restaurants totaled approximately $151 billion (U.S. Census Bureau 2005). Assuming a tipping norm of 15%, waiters and waitresses in the country earned roughly $22.7 billion in tip income in 2003. Restaurant tipping is also puzzling, at least from the point of view of standard neoclassical economic theory. Why do consumers voluntarily give money to their server after the service has been rendered? Interestingly, consumers still leave their server a tip even when they plan never to visit the restaurant again (Kahneman, Knetsch, and Thaler 1986).In this paper, I explore several determinants of tipping behavior using survey and laboratory experimental data. First, I examine social norms related to reciprocity and letdown (guilt) aversion. Reciprocity refers to the idea that people reward kind actions and punish unkind actions, and implies a positive relationship between the size of the tip and service quality. According to Fehr and Gachter (2000), there is considerable evidence that suggests a strong role for reciprocity in motivating human behavior.1 The theory of letdown (guilt) aversion asserts that decision-makers avoid letting others down. Charness and Dufwenberg (2002) show that letdown aversion implies that a consumer's tip depends positively on what the consumer believes the server thinks the consumer will tip.Although the relationship between service quality and tip size has been studied by several authors (Lynn and McCall 2000a provide a survey and meta-analysis), it is typically explained using either a buyer monitoring story (Bodvarsson and Gibson 1992; Lynn and Graves 1996) or equity theory (Lynn and Grassman 1990; Lynn and Graves 1996).2 Both Conlin, Lynn, and O'Donoghue (2003) and Azar (2004) mention norms in their recent work on tipping. However, the work by Conlin et al. makes assumptions regarding, rather than trying to determine as I do here, norms that operate in a tipping environment. Azar, on the other hand, is interested in how norms evolve, a topic that I do not address in this paper.I also examine three aspects of the tipping situation that influence how much consumers tip in restaurants: table size, the sex of the customer, and method of bill payment (cash or credit card). Looking first at table size, at least two factors are at issue, and they work in opposite directions. First, tippers may tip a higher amount in the presence of others at the table in order to assert social status. Status considerations play a nontrivial role in real-world interactions (Ball et al. 2001), and thus might induce consumers to tip more as a form of status acquisition or display. Alternatively, tippers may "free ride" on the tips of others at the table, and thus tip less. However, the common restaurant practice of adding an automatic service charge onto bills at large table sizes (usually six or more customers) suggests that incentives to free ride may dominate. …

Exploring the Relationship between Energy Use and Economic Growth with Simple Models: Evidence from Five OECD Countries

There is a rapidly growing literature on the interaction between energy use and economic development, with many analysts drawing policy conclusions on the basis of Granger causality tests that involve only an energy and an economic variable. This paper attempts to demonstrate empirically that such studies, although useful for certain applications, may be of limited use for policy purposes. After outlining theoretical and methodological issues associated with such approaches, I apply bivariate energy-economy causality tests for France, Germany, Japan, the United Kingdom and the United States, using aggregate and sectoral data and three different modern econometric methods. The results, which are often contradictory or economically implausible, illustrate explicitly that one should be cautious when drawing policy implications with the aid of bivariate causality tests on small samples. I therefore underline the importance of using multivariate models, which are closer to economic theory, accommodate several mechanisms and causality channels and provide a better representation of real-world interactions between energy use and economic growth.

A General Model of Strategic Reciprocation

There remains a discrepancy between experimental conceptualizations of reciprocity and evidence of reciprocity in real-world negotiation interactions. This paper outlines these discrepancies and proposes a general model of reciprocity that gives a single account of the discrepancies found in research findings. Drawing on social interactionist theory and social identity theory, the model proposes that an individual's decision to reciprocate is governed by a contextual appraisal consisting of three strands: individual's attitudinal response to the situation, their evaluation of the other's likely objectives, and the situational constraints in which they find themselves. The strands constitute an individual's internal response to the situation, which combine to form their overall intention to and subsequent action to reciprocate or otherwise. The various components of the model, and the relationships among these components, is supported with research from a range of negotiation settings.

Appearance models for occlusion handling

Objects in the world exhibit complex interactions. When captured in a video sequence, some interactions manifest themselves as occlusions. A visual tracking system must be able to track objects, which are partially or even fully occluded. In this paper we present a method of tracking objects through occlusions using appearance models. These models are used to localize objects during partial occlusions, detect complete occlusions and resolve depth ordering of objects during occlusions. This paper presents a tracking system which successfully deals with complex real world interactions, as demonstrated on the PETS 2001 dataset.

Designing trust with software agents: A case study

In this paper, we will address privacy and trust issues that arise in more advanced software systems. Though a lot of information is currently available in electronic form, not all of it should widely be accessible to everybody. The involved parties need full control on how their data are used and who has access. If the system consists of autonomous software agents, this problem requires extra attention and new working principles. We illustrate this in the case of a communication platform for multimodal transport. The major aim of the communication platform is to enhance exchanging information and to ultimately improve organisation/collaboration within the transport sector. A better informed view of the transport sector will facilitate better considered decisions for users of the communication platform. The software system merits credibility by accurately modelling all the relevant real world interactions of potential users of the system. We opted for a connectivity solution in which software agents act as representatives of the parties involved. All agents can be equipped with human‐like skills and qualities such as intelligence, autonomy, and the ability to cooperate, coordinate and negotiate. We demonstrate how cooperation between parties can be achieved while respecting their sensitivity concerning information.

Frequency of stuttering during challenging and supportive virtual reality job interviews

This paper seeks to demonstrate the possibility of manipulating the frequency of stuttering using virtual reality environments (VREs). If stuttering manifests itself in VREs similarly to the way it manifests itself in real world interactions, then VREs can provide a controlled, safe, and confidential method for treatment practice and generalization. Though many researchers and clinicians recognize the need for generalization activities in the treatment of stuttering, achieving generalization in a clinical setting poses challenges to client confidentiality, safety, and the efficient use of a professionals’ time. Virtual reality (VR) technology may allow professionals the opportunity to enhance and assess treatment generalization while protecting the safety and confidentiality of their clients. In this study, we developed a VR job interview environment which allowed experimental control over communication style and gender of interviewers. In this first trial, persons who stutter (PWS) experienced both challenging and supportive VR job interview conditions. The percentage of stuttered syllables was calculated for both interviews for each participant. Self-reported ratings of communication apprehension and confidence were also obtained, and were not significantly correlated with stuttering severity. Results indicated that interviewer communication style affected the amount of stuttering produced by participants, with more stuttering observed during challenging virtual interviews. Additionally, the amount of stuttering observed during the VR job interviews was significantly, positively correlated with the amount of stuttering observed during an interview with the investigator prior to VR exposure. Participants’ subjective reports of the VR experience indicate reactions similar to those they report experiencing in the real world. Possible implications for the use of VR in the assessment and treatment of stuttering are discussed.Educational objectives: After reading this article, the reader will be able to—(1) list some of the challenges to treatment generalization; (2) describe how virtual reality technology can assist in alleviating some of these challenges; (3) describe how the frequency of stuttering varies across two different virtual environments.

Evoking Affordances in Virtual Environments via Sensory-Stimuli Substitution

Artifacts in an environment afford to their observers utility and function directly through specific object characteristics (e.g., mediums, surfaces, substances). Virtual environments (VEs) similarly seek to afford specific utility to their users, whether it is for training, education, or entertainment, thus it seems natural to consider basing VE designs on affordances. Such affordance-based design should yield significant benefits by providing designs that behave in more understandable and intuitive manners. These designs should be easier to learn, adapt better to user tasks, and frustrate users less by allowing use of the same skills acquired via real-world interactions. In order to realize affordance-based VE designs, the types of appropriate affordances and means of realizing these affordances must be identified. Currently, however, affordances lack a theoretical and operational basis for such application. The present paper suggests functions that affordances should support and provides a conceptual model for realizing affordances based on sensory-stimuli-substitution schemes.

Consistency models for distributed interactive multimedia applications

Distributed Interactive Multimedia Applications (DIMA) are "human in the loop" applications. Their aim is to support real-world like interactions through a virtual world in a broader sense. However, propagation delays, jitter and losses due to network communications naturally lead to inconsistencies, when local and remote actions performed by users/clients are played out. This constraint makes the management of replicated multimedia shared data a real challenge. In the literature, various consistency models are proposed and each of them brings their own complexity and distortion among interactions. In this paper, we provide hints to help DIMA designers to choose appropriate consistency models by first presenting meaningful psycho-perceptive characteristics of the real-world interactions and then discussing various consistency models according to them.

Wearable computers: a new paradigm in computer systems and their applications

THE convergence of a variety of technologies makes possible an entirely new way of using information processing. Continued advances in semiconductor technology produce high performance microprocessors requiring less power and less space. Decades of research in computer science have provided the technology for hands-free computing using speech and gesturing for input. Miniature heads-up displays weighing less than a few ounces have been introduced. Combined with mobile communication technology, it is possible for users to access information anywhere and anytime. Body-worn computers providing hands-free operation offer compelling advantages in many applications. Wearable computers deal in information rather than programs, becoming tools in the user’s environment much like a pencil or a reference book. The wearable computer provides portable access to information. Furthermore, the information can be automatically accumulated by the system as the user interacts with and modifies the environment, thereby eliminating the costly and errorprone process of information acquisition. Much as personal computers allow accountants and bookkeepers to merge their information space with their workspace (i.e., a sheet of paper), wearable computers allow mobile processing and the superposition of information on the users workspace. When combined with pervasive computing, wearable computers will provide access to the right information at the right place and at the right time. Distractions are even more of a problem when they occur in mobile environments than desktop environments since the user is often preoccupied with walking, driving, or other real-world interactions. A pervasive computing environment that minimizes distraction has to be context aware. Context-aware computing describes the situation where a mobile computer is aware of its user’s state and surroundings and modifies its behavior based on this information. A user’s context can be quite rich, consisting of attributes such as physical location, physiological state (such as body temperature, heart rate, and skin resistance), emotional state (such as angry, distraught, or calm), personal history, daily behavioral patterns, etc. If a human assistant were given such context, he or she would make decisions in a proactive fashion, anticipating user needs. In making these decisions, the assistant would typically not disturb the user at inopportune moments except in an emergency. The goal is to enable mobile computers to play an analogous role, exploiting context information to significantly reduce demands on human attention. Combined with inferences about users’ intentions, context-aware computing would allow improvement in user-perceived network and application performance and reliability. Context-aware intelligent agents can deliver relevant information when a user needs that information. These data make possible many exciting new applications, such as augmented reality, context aware collaboration, wearable assisted living, augmented manufacturing, and maintenance. Wearable computing brings the power of a pervasive computing environment to a person by placing computing and sensory resources on the user in an unobtrusive way. These computers can be specialized and modular, like items of clothing. Unlike laptops or handheld computers, wearable computers offer many new models to interact beyond keyboards and touch screens, in a natural, intuitive way, such as sound and tactile feedback. Also, wearables can be easily reconfigured to meet specific needs of applications. Every wearable computer system must be viewed from three different axes: the human, the computer, and the application. Within each of these axes there are difficult problems that must be solved and there are problems that arise from the fact that there are three axes. The human axis emphasizes wearability, which is defined as the interaction between the human body and the wearable object. Dynamic wearability includes the human body in motion. Design for wearability considers the physical shape of objects and their active relationship with the human form. Researchers explored history and cultures, including topics such as clothing, costumes, protective wearables, and carried devices. These studies of physiology, biomechanics, and movement were codified into guidelines for designing wearable systems. User comfort is a critical design consideration in many applications. New technologies such as smart textiles will significantly improve the functionality and ergonomics of wearable computers. The computer axis deals with the problems related to construction of a system with particular fabrics, size, power consumption, and user interface software. The application axis emphasizes mobile application design challenges and efficient mapping of problem solving capabilities to application requirements. Wearable computers have established their first foothold in several application domains, such as vehicle and aircraft maintenance and manufacturing, inspection procedures, augmented reality, context aware collaboration, language translation, etc. IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON COMPUTERS, VOL. 52, NO. 8, AUGUST 2003 977

MOTIVATING STRUGGLING READERS IN MIDDLE SCHOOL THROUGH AN ENGAGEMENT MODEL OF CLASSROOM PRACTICE

Many struggling readers in middle school are disengaged from reading. In addition to low achievement, these students can have low motivation for reading. Many factors contribute to disengagement in middle school. Reading instruction is often disconnected from content, making reading tedious. Textbooks are formidable, and students are expected to respond to text with formal criticism or outlining rather than personal reactions. Middle school often shows an increase teacher control and a curtailment of student freedom, as compared to elementary school. Finally, students are too often removed from the social support of teachers and are expected to compete rather than cooperate with each other in reading. To provide support for engaged reading, middle school teachers can use six classroom practices: they can (1) construct rich knowledge goals as the basis of reading instruction, (2) use real-world interactions to connect reading to student experiences, (3) afford students an abundance of interesting books and materials, (4) provide some choice among material to read, (5) give direct instruction for important reading strategies, and (6) encourage collaboration in many aspects of learning. Using these practices creates a context for engagement in literacy learning.

The ETL-Humanoid system—a high-performance full-body humanoid system for versatile real-world interaction

This paper presents the final stage of development of a humanoid system, ETL-Humanoid. It is a full-scale humanoid system with 46 d.o.f., with the height and weight of an average Japanese person. It was designed as an experimental platform to explore the general principle of controls of complex embodied systems. The complete system, the mechanical configuration of the system and the low-level network-based control system will be presented. The final system possesses properties of compactness, modularity and is light in weight. The mechanical system is high in performance, back-drivable and compliant, allowing the possibility of a wide range of motions and capabilities. The strength and power of the system is demonstrated through an experiment of 'chin up'. The humanlike configuration and compliant aspects of the system are demonstrated via a session of physical interaction. A running-like motion was generated to show the speed of the system. Aside from its human-like physical characteristics, the system is also capable of performing higher-level interaction involving perceptions and actions.

Heuristic Mapping of Frontier Processes

The value of analytical cartography and, in particular, of fuzzy set theory is demonstrated with regard to developing a specifiable and repeatable conceptual framework for multicriteria land evaluation. After a review of the distinguishing mathematical attributes of fuzzy set theory, including the derivation of the most useful functions, its application to the assessment of a 170,000-km area of western Paraguay is described. Fuzzy set theory and multicriteria evaluation are shown to provide a robust framework for planning so that real-world interactions of interest at the management scale of conservation units are explicitly recognized. The Appendix gives the syntax for the four-step application procedure in Idrisi32 using an 8% fraction of the total study area and three geographic themes representing a point, a line, and a polygon coverage.

Use of the internet as the only outlet for talking about infertility

Objective: To gather information about demographic characteristics, medical status, mode of Internet participation, and psychological well-being of participants whose only outlets (OOs) for talking about infertility are Internet medical and support forums and to compare them with persons who have additional outlets (AOs). Design: Prospective Internet-based survey. Setting: Website of a nonprofit international infertility organization. Patient(s): Five hundred eighty-nine persons submitting fully completed surveys. Intervention(s): Internet-based survey with 134 items. Main Outcome Measure(s): Survey of types of Internet participation, benefits of participation, self-assessed ability to cope with aspects of infertility, perceived stress, perceived support from relatives and friends, and 21-item Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), which is an instrument designed to measure depressive symptomatology. Result(s): Only-outlet and AO participants were comparable in their medical history and treatments. Only-outlet participants had less formal education, were less wealthy, and more likely to be homemakers. Compared with AO participants, OO participants were more depressed and got less real-world support while feeling more supported on the Internet. Conclusion(s): Used properly, the Internet can help people facing infertility by educating, empowering, and diminishing their feelings of depression. But the Internet can also be used inappropriately to withdraw from real-world interactions.

Social Capital and the Equalizing Potential of the Internet

Internet communication tends to complement real-world interaction; it does not destroy (public good) social capital. The Internet can support and enhance communities that to some extent depend on face-to-face interaction. Taking the online communication of computer professionals as a model, this article seeks to demonstrate the power of virtual communities. Examples are the development of Linux and users’ reactions to a bug in the Pentium processor. Online communication, facilitated by personal home pages and search engines, offers isolated workers opportunities for increasing their private good social capital as well. On the level of infrastructure, key characteristics of the Internet match those of social capital: the network aspect itself, cooperation, voluntary work, giving, standards of social behavior, and the fact that it is not designed. Downsides of the Internet also correspond to downsides of social capital. Realizing the equalizing potential of the Internet in terms of social capital requires action.

Project Aura: toward distraction-free pervasive computing

The most precious resource in a computer system is no longer its processor, memory, disk, or network, but rather human attention. Aura aims to minimize distractions on a user's attention, creating an environment that adapts to the user's context and needs. Aura is specifically intended for pervasive computing environments involving wireless communication, wearable or handheld computers, and smart spaces. Human attention is an especially scarce resource in such environments, because the user is often preoccupied with walking, driving, or other real-world interactions. In addition, mobile computing poses difficult challenges such as intermittent and variable-bandwidth connectivity, concern for battery life, and the client resource constraints that weight and size considerations impose. To accomplish its ambitious goals, research in Aura spans every system level: from the hardware, through the operating system, to applications and end users. Underlying this diversity of concerns, Aura applies two broad concepts. First, it uses proactivity, which is a system layer's ability to anticipate requests from a higher layer. In today's systems, each layer merely reacts to the layer above it. Second, Aura is self-tuning: layers adapt by observing the demands made on them and adjusting their performance and resource usage characteristics accordingly. Currently, system-layer behavior is relatively static. Both of these techniques will help lower demand for human attention.

When the internet is your only outlet for talking about infertility.

Objective: To gather information about the demographic characteristics of participants whose only outlets for talking about infertility are internet medical and support forums and to compare them with persons having other outlets. Design: A 134 item survey was posted on the INCIID website in the Spring of 1998. Items included demographics, medical history, social interaction, website activity, experienced stress and depression. One item asked whether the internet is “my only outlet for talking about infertility.” People for whom the internet was their only outlet for talking about infertility (OO) were compared with people having additional outlets (AO). Materials/Methods: The Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) was used to assess depression. Means, medians, frequencies, and t-tests were calculated for survey items. Results: 589 surveys were received, almost exclusively from women, from people in 47 states and 17 foreign countries: 212 from OOs, 286 from AOs, and 91 from persons not responding to this item. OOs and AOs spent the same number of hours per week using the internet, but OOs devoted more of those hours to infertility (1.6 vs. 1.3 hrs, p = .01) Compared to AOs, OOs have lower median incomes (p = .006), less formal education (p < .001), and poorer insurance coverage (p < .001). Both groups have comparable distributions of diagnoses for infertility except that a greater proportion of patients with PCO are OOs (p = .003). Both groups have undergone comparable treatments and diagnostic procedures, are comparable in age, in the proportion who have been pregnant, given birth, or adopted, and they have spent similar amounts of money on diagnosis and treatment. Fewer OOs have miscarried (p < .001). OOs feel less educated about infertility (p = .028), are less able to identify their feelings about infertility (p = .03), less able to change their negative thinking about infertility(p = .02), less able to work as a team with their spouse (p < .001), less able to be a partner in treatment with their physician (p < .05), and more likely to give up after a failed pregnancy attempt (p < .05). OOs are significantly more depressed (p < .001) and rate infertility as more stressful than AOs (p < .05). They worry more about their relationships with their partner (p < .001), their friends (p = .03), spend less time with their partner (p < .05), and are less happy (p < .001). The most important things OOs report getting from their participation is: “knowing I am not alone” (experienced by 89% of OOs), feeling more educated when dealing with the doctor (77%), learning their feelings are “normal” (75%), having a place to share treatment news (65%), finding a safe place to ask questions (62%), and having an opportunity to help others (59%). Conclusions: Caution is needed in drawing conclusions because the sample was not random nor were subjects assigned randomly to OO or AO conditions. Results suggest that the internet has great potential to help people facing infertility by educating, empowering, and diminishing their feelings of isolation. On the other hand, its value may be diminished if people use it to withdraw from real world interactions, getting all their information and support only from internet forums. So in addition to interacting on-line, infertile people should also interact in face-to-face infertility forums. Supported By: Rutgers University Center for Mathematics, Science and Computer Education.

E-motion: Moving Toward the Utilization of Artificial Emotion

During human-human interaction, emotion plays a vital role in structuring dialogue. Emotional content drives features such as topic shift, lexicalisation change and timing; it affects the delicate balance between goals related to the task at hand and those of social interaction; and it represents one type of feedback on the effect that utterances are having. These various facets are so central to most real-world interaction, that it is reasonable to suppose that emotion should also play an important role in human-computer interaction. To that end, techniques for detecting, modelling, and responding appropriately to emotion are explored, and an architecture for bringing these techniques together into a coherent system is presented.

Taking the third‐person effect outside the laboratory: How an unplanned real world event failed to change the third‐person effect

This study took the form of a pretest posttest nonequivalent natural quasi‐experiment. Despite the fact that previous researchers have indicated that media events are formative in the third‐person effect hypothesis, it was hypothesized that a major media event acting as a secondary stimulus would have no effect on the level of third‐person effect measured in regard to the primary stimulus despite the fact that both pertained to the same topic. This hypothesis was confirmed. This study indicates real world interactions of the third‐person effect hypothesis are complex, and the third‐person effect may operate less in the real world than previous experiments indicate.