Shared Online Research Articles

HeapCraft: Quantifying and Predicting Collaboration in Minecraft

We present Heapcraft: an open-source suite of tools for monitoring and improving collaboration in Minecraft. At the core of our system is a data collection and analysis framework for recording gameplay. We collected over 3451 player-hours of game behavior from 908 different players, and performed a general study of online collaboration. To make our game analytics easily accessible, we developed interactive information visualization tools and an analysis framework for players, administrators, and researchers to explore graphs, maps and timelines of live server activity. As part of our research, we introduce the collaboration index, a metric which allows server administrators and researchers to quantify, predict, and improve collaboration on Minecraft servers. Our analysis reveals several possible predictors of collaboration which can be used to improve collaboration on Minecraft servers. Heapcraft is designed to be general, and has the potential to be used for other shared online virtual worlds.

Introduction.

Introduction.

“Enemies of the people”? Diverging discourses on sovereignty in media coverage of Brexit

In November 2016, The Daily Mail ran a cover story with the now infamous title “Enemies of the People” attacking the three judges of the High Court of England and Wales who had ruled that the UK Government needed Parliament’s consent to give notice of Brexit. Debates on sovereignty were not only reflected on the pages of the print media but were often also steered by them as political players with their own agenda. This paper explores how the topic of sovereignty was represented by the British media using a qualitative content analysis of the most shared online articles on Brexit and a narrower subset of editorials in right-wing and left-wing newspapers. The paper shows that the left–right divide mattered greatly for how sovereignty was portrayed in pro-Leave media, but not at all in the pro-Remain media. While in the period before the referendum coverage of Brexit was marked by a conflict between national and supranational sovereignty, after the referendum the conflict between popular and parliamentary sovereignty became more prominent. Changes in the frames deployed over time suggest that newspapers instrumentalized some concepts of sovereignty to promote their agenda. Finally, the fact that some positions (such as the left-wing pro-Leave defence of democratic sovereignty) were almost absent in media discourse had important consequences for the public debate on the topic.

Status and Performance Appraisal of Electronic National Agricultural Markets (e-NAM) in Punjab

The Electronic National Agricultural Market (e-NAM), a shared online market platform for agricultural commodities on a one nation one market basis, was launched on April 14, 2016. Since this scheme has been in practice for the last four years in the country, but the state of Punjab opted for it two years later, the present study was designed to appraise the adoption of the portal in the selected markets of the state and to throw light on constraints and prospects of e-NAM in Punjab. The results showed that most farmers benefitted from remunerative prices and found the e-NAM system transparent as every step of trading was digitally recorded. The farmers enjoyed the liberty to sell the produce anywhere at a comparatively higher price. The majority of the farmers expressed that e-NAM was better in price realization, which was the most lucrative aspect. At the same time, the farmers wanted to have a separate gate entry for trading through e-NAM, increased awareness, and uninterrupted and low-cost internet connectivity in markets.

Protocol for a Coordinated Approach for Building Capacity of Mental Health Researchers in India.

Introduction:India’s National Mental Health Programme (NMHP) was initiated in 1982. In 2016, the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) organized a Brainstorming Meeting on Prioritization of Mental Health Research. Recognizing the need for improving mental healthcare by building a cadre of mental health researchers based on focus areas of the NMHP, the ICMR organized a research training cum capacity building workshop in collaboration with the Cross-Fertilized Research Training Programme (funded by Fogarty International Centre, NIH, USA) in 2016. The workshop successfully prepared and reviewed 12 single and multicenter research proposals in priority areas of mental health research, which were awarded by the ICMR to middle- and junior-level research faculty and NGO.Methods:A National Coordination Unit (NCU) was set up to mentor investigators and to coordinate, train, and monitor the progress of their projects. Investigators were paired with senior mentors and also participated in four capacity building workshops focusing on proposal-writing, evaluation, and process tracking.Results:Following discussions with ICMR program officers, the NCU formulated standard operating procedures for ethical conduct, data collection, data sharing, progress reporting procedures, and manuscript preparation for all research projects. Regularly scheduled long-distance communications with investigators using social media and group communications were planned. NCU partnered with the ICMR Database Management Unit to build a shared online platform for real-time data entry and storage, and organized two project review meetings where it also coordinated with US faculty to organize public workshops on manuscript writing and qualitative research.Conclusions:The NCU will ensure timely completion of research projects, data entry and analysis, and reports and project publications. It is feasible to evaluate progress with the NMHP through coordinated multisite research that also enables research capacity building. Results from these projects will help in formulating policies by the Ministry of Health Government of India for achieving objectives of the NMHP.

NGO online disclosures index in the presence of auxiliary information.

This study highlights the need for analysis of online disclosure practices followed by non-governmental organizations; furthermore, it justifies the crucial role of potential correlates of online disclosure practices followed by non-governmental organizations. We propose a novel index for analyzing the extent of online disclosure of non-governmental organizations (NGO). Using the information stored in an auxiliary variable, we propose a new estimator for gauging the average value of the proposed index. Our approach relies on the use of two factors: imperfect ranked-set sampling procedure to link the auxiliary variable with the study variable, and an NGO disclosure index under simple random sampling that uses information only about the study variable. Relative efficiency of the proposed index is compared with the conventional estimator for the population average under the imperfect ranked-set sampling scheme. Mathematical conditions required for retaining the efficiency of the proposed index, in comparison to the imperfect ranked set sampling estimator, are derived. Numerical scrutiny of the relative efficiency, in response to the input variables, indicates; if the variance of the NGO disclosure index is less than the variance of the estimator under imperfect ranked set sampling, then the proposed index is universally efficient compared to the estimator under imperfect ranked set sampling. If the condition on variances is unmet, even then the proposed estimator remains efficient if majority of the NGO share online data on the auxiliary variable. This work can facilitate nonprofit regulation in the countries where most of the non-governmental organizations maintain their websites.

Music and Learning: Does Music Make You Smarter?

What is music and why do people think it is important for learning? Musical sounds fill our lives: from the music you share online to the songs playing in shops and restaurants, we are rarely far from music. Playing music gives the brain a multisensory “workout” that can strengthen memory, help us pay attention, and perhaps even improve reading ability. In this article, we highlight how various brain functions, including hearing, sight, movement, and social awareness, are impacted by music training. You do not have to be a Mozart to get the brain benefit of playing music, because music is so accessible and is more than just songs. Whenever you communicate without words (the way you say something instead of what you say) you are engaging in musical behavior. In this article, we explore research on learning and music to help us understand why music promotes brain development and how music can be a central part of our lives, in and out of the classroom.

Semantic and Sentiment Dissonant Framing Effects on Online News Sharing

Information artifacts incorporate cognitive elements in their design to inform users about and entice them to consume relevant content. Sparse research has examined how to design cognitive elements in information artifacts in the digital news platforms context. This study investigates how information artifacts’ semantic and sentiment elements convey meaning and emotion to elicit users to share online news. We propose a dissonant framework and hypothesize that three dissonance dimensions (namely, semantic dissonance, textual sentiment dissonance, and visual sentiment dissonance) influence news sharing. We tested the hypotheses using real-world data from 2013 to 2015 from Mashable—a popular digital news platform. We used novel machine-learning techniques to extract topics and sentiments from text and photos in news articles. Findings from our econometric analysis support that textual sentiment and visual sentiment dissonance positively affect news sharing.

Patient Portals as Highly Acceptable Tools to Support HIV Preventative Behaviors Among Adolescent and Young Sexual Minority Men

PurposeThe purpose of this study was to present perceptions about using patient portals to manage HIV and sexually transmitted infection (STI) test results and to communicate with sexual partners among a 2018 nationwide sample of adolescent and young sexual minority men (YSMM) aged 15–25 years. MethodsUnivariate and bivariate analyses were conducted on cross-sectional online survey data. ResultsParticipants gave high or moderate value to portals that provide tips for sexual health (95.1% [1,168/1,228]), ability to locate HIV/STI testing centers (96.9% [1,190/1,228]), and ability to order home-based HIV/STI testing (96% [1,179/1,228]). Perceived health engagement and dyadic communication benefits of use were sustained at or above 94%. YSMM with a history of HIV/STI diagnosis were less willing to share online results with main (93% vs. 97%; Χ2 = 5.13; p = .02) and nonmain (70% vs. 77%; Χ2 = 5.17; p = .02) sexual partners. ConclusionsPatient portals represent highly acceptable spaces to deliver comprehensive sexual health services and could support communication on HIV/STI testing with sex partners among YSMM.

E-SERVQUAL, PROMOSI DAN LOYALITAS PELANGGAN MARKETPLACE

Penelitian ini bertujuan untuk untuk menguji pengaruh E-ServQual dan promosi terhadap loyalitas pelanggan Marketplace. Kedua faktor ini dapat menjadi pertimbangan seseorang dalam keputusan berbelanja di marketplace. Pengalaman berbelanja sebelumnya menjadi dasar keputusan pembelian ulang yang berujung pada loyalitas sebuah marketplace.
 Penelitian dilakukan pada 100 orang mahasiswa Sekolah Tinggi Ilmu Ekonomi Pancasetia Kampus Banjarmasin dengan menyebar kuesioner secara daring. Dengan menggunakan analisis regresi linear berganda didapatkan hasil bahwa baik E-ServQual maupun promosi berpengaruh signifikan terhadap loyalitas pelanggan marketplace.
 E-ServQual yang baik menunjukkan bahwa marketplace mampu menjamin keamanan pelanggan dalam bertransaksi. Selain itu, marketplace juga memungkinkan pelanggan untuk berkomunikasi langsung dengan penjual, mengetahui status transaksi dan menyediakan fitur-fitur yang memudahkan pelanggan untuk berbelanja. Faktor promosi menjadi bagian penting yang tidak dapat diabaikan oleh marketplace. Promosi berupa kupon, potongan harga, bonus produk maupun program loyalitas terbukti menjadi faktor yang dipertimbangkan oleh konsumen untuk melakukan pembelian ulang yang bertujuan untuk menciptakan loyalitas.

Online presence, visibility and reputation: a systematic literature review in management studies

PurposeThe purpose of this 22-year paper is to synthetize business and management literature in the context of online presence, online visibility and online reputation concepts. In particular, this paper aims to generalize the analysis by investigating the level of interest of the Internet, digital and interactive marketing-focused literature, as well as the more general business and management one towards these topics.Design/methodology/approachTo identify the existence or otherwise of an online presence, visibility and reputation definition, as well as an index for measuring them, a systematic review and a content analysis process were performed on 199 articles categorized over 1997-2018.FindingsThe findings highlight the absence of clear and shared online presence, visibility and reputation definitions; the absence of unanimously accepted indexes for measuring them; and the identification of a sequence relationship between the three investigated constructs.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper underlines the need for both theoretical and empirical contributions to reduce the complexity characterizing the business and management literature focused on these topics.Originality/valueThe current study brings out interesting directions for future research studies by systematizing all the articles devoted to the online presence, visibility and reputation concepts from a business and management perspective.

Digital Making in Educational Projects

Digital Making as an Educational Project is an innovative educational experience that has been carried out with students of the Primary Education and Social Education degrees for three consecutive years. The experience introduces digital making as an activity in which students create an object using digital technology. In the process, they not only gain an insight into how the technology works, but also learn the content and competences of the curriculum. This innovative teaching practice was carried out as action research in order to improve traditional higher education practices. In this sense, the proposal puts the student at the centre of the process as the author and protagonist of their own learning process. The experience is based on their own interests: they decide what to make based on a given context. The students work in groups and look for what they need to learn to overcome a particular challenge, while the teacher supports the process as a facilitator, offering guidance and resources when necessary. The evaluation of the whole process is regulated via a group diary (a shared online document) and an individual diary (a blog) that the students produce. The final evaluation is not only of the printed product; the students also produce a video in the form of storytelling, in which they explain how the process evolved from the initial idea to the final impression of the object. They also reflect on what they have learned, how teamwork has worked and what possibilities they believe digital making offers in the primary and non-formal educational contexts in which they will work. All of the processes are compiled in the students’ blogs, as well as in the teachers’ field notebooks. The experience was executed in collaboration with the Digital Fabrication Centres of Barcelona. The results were organised to highlight the strengths and weaknesses of using technologies to improve higher education offering an approach in which students are at the centre of the whole process. Strengths: strong student motivation, promotion of self-directed and collaborative learning and learning by doing, and familiarisation with a transforming integration of technology as protagonists. Weaknesses: hesitance and resistance to facing the challenge, management of scarce time, large time investment by the teachers, and the difficulty of achieving in-depth reflection on how digital fabrication could be introduced in educational contexts such as primary school and non-formal contexts.

Aspect Extraction from Bangla Reviews Through Stacked Auto-Encoders

Interactions between online users are growing more and more in recent years, due to the latest developments of the web. People share online comments, opinions, and reviews about many topics. Aspect extraction is the automatic process of understanding the topic (the aspect) of such comments, which has obtained huge interest from commercial and academic points of view. For instance, reviews available in webshops (like eBay, Amazon, Aliexpress, etc.) can help the customers in purchasing products and automatic analysis of reviews would be useful, as sometimes it is almost impossible to read all the available ones. In recent years, aspect extraction in the Bangla language has been regarded more and more as a task of growing importance. In the previous literature, a few methods have been introduced to classify Bangla texts according to the aspect they were focused on. This kind of research is limited mainly due to the lack of publicly available datasets for aspect extraction in the Bangla language. We take into account the only two publicly available datasets, recently published, collected for the task of aspect extraction in the Bangla language. Then, we introduce several classification methods based on stacked auto-encoders, as far as we know never exploited in the task of aspect extraction in Bangla, and we achieve better aspect classification performance with respect to the state-of-the-art: the experiments show an average improvement of 0.17 , 0.31 and 0.30 (across the two datasets), respectively in precision, recall and F1-score, reported in the state-of-the-art works that tackled the problem.

#EndMaleGuardianship: Women’s rights, social media and the Arab public sphere

This study examines the online communicative dynamics between women and men during the Saudi women’s rights campaign to end male guardianship, which unfolded on Twitter. We analysed 2.7 million tweets with the #EndMaleGuardianship hashtag over a 7-month period quantitatively and 150,245 of these qualitatively to examine the extent to which Twitter shapes and facilitates cross-gender communication, and how this helped engender new spaces for expression of dissent. Our study shows that Twitter provided shared online communicative spaces that had several characteristics commonly associated with public sphere(s). There is also evidence that using these alternatives spaces, women transcended to an extent the gender segregation that exists in traditional public discourses and spaces of Saudi society. The anonymity of Twitter offered women a safe place to deliberate their concerns about male guardianship. We suggest that these deliberations created a counterpublic sphere of sorts, which helped Saudi women legitimise the #EndMaleGuardianship campaign.

How Topographic Maps Affect: Experiencing Washington, DC through the Maps of the “Other”

Does the type of map we use affect how we engage with a place in situ? This paper describes a creative activity that aimed to explore how the use of different topographic maps affects our engagement with an urban environment. Three groups of participants explored the neighbourhood surrounding the Gelman Library at George Washington University, each using an extract from a different map (all with street-level detail of the area) as a guide: (1) a contemporary selection from OpenStreetMap; (2) a United States Geological Survey (USGS) map from 1965; and (3) a Soviet military plan from 1975. The 32 participants recorded their experiences by taking photographs and uploading them to a shared online bulletin board (Padlet). After gaining feedback via group discussion, the resulting 108 images were classified, interpreted and mapped. The findings indicate that the groups’ engagement with their environment varied with the specific map used, and was possibly influenced by their interpretation of its function, although differences in individual perceptions and responses were more pronounced than between-map differences. The activity provides a starting point for understanding the role topographic maps play in the relationship between emotions and environment and offers some avenues for further research.

Contested affordances: teachers and students negotiating the classroom integration of mobile technology

ABSTRACTThis paper extends an emerging approach emphasizing contextual variation in the affordances of digital technologies and new media through an empirical application focused on relational dynamics of power and resistance. Specifically, I focus on the case of student and teacher negotiations over smartphones and social media in the classroom ‒ a case where actors on either side of a power relationship assign conflicting meanings to the same technology. Interviews were conducted with 37 students and 19 teachers at a public high school with a technology policy designating students’ personally-owned smartphones as educational devices. As the affordance of contextual mobility allowed students to access shared online social spaces within the classroom, smartphones threatened the cultural logic of separation bounding the social from the educational. With their sense of control threatened, teachers sought to re-constitute separation through strategies of restriction and differentiation. Viewing online-offline integration as a taken-for-granted part of social life, students used strategies of adaptive resistance to combat school policies and maximize technology use. However, students also worked to re-constitute separation through peer cultural norms limiting the in-school consequences of online peer social interactions. Underneath the contestation between restriction and resistance, both teachers and students worked to set conditions on the affordance of contextual mobility.

Factors Affecting the Behavior of Sharing Online Video: Focusing on Need to Belong, Personal Growth Initiative, and Theory of Planned Behavior

Factors Affecting the Behavior of Sharing Online Video: Focusing on Need to Belong, Personal Growth Initiative, and Theory of Planned Behavior

A Prescription For Enhancing Electronic Prescribing Safety.

While electronic prescribing has been shown to reduce medication errors and improve prescribing safety, it is vulnerable to error-prone processes. We review six intersecting areas in which changes to electronic prescribing systems, particularly in the outpatient setting, could transform medication ordering quality and safety. We recommend incorporating medication indications into electronic prescribing, establishing a single shared online medication list, implementing the transmission of electronic cancellation orders to pharmacies (CancelRx) to ensure that drugs are safely and reliably discontinued, implementing standardized structured and codified prescription instructions, reengineering clinical decision support, and redesigning electronic prescribing to facilitate the ordering of nondrug alternatives.

NSE Is Better Than BSE

Indian Market is an open economy since 1991. Till date many reforms have taken place in the Indian Market. One such Major Change was the coming of the National Stock Exchange (“NSE”) for trading of Shares and Commodities other than the Bombay Stock Exchange (“BSE”). From the emergence of NSE it is always a hot topic as which Exchange is better. Here in this Research Paper I have tried to answer this question in favor of NSE. The two largest and most prominent stock exchanges in India are the BSE and the NSE. While the BSE has the distinction of being the oldest stock exchange in Asia, established in 1875, the NSE has quickly grown to prominence since its creation in 1992. While these two markets dominate in India there are clear differences between the two that can impact your decision to invest. When you open an account to buy or sell shares with a broker, they generally are members of both the exchanges ie BSE and NSE. So, if you have an account at Zerodha when you buy shares you have an option of buying the same at the BSE or the NSE. Is it advantageous to buy and sell shares at BSE or NSE? Well, the only advantage that an investor will have is in terms of price. So, if you are buying a share online you can look at the price on both the exchanges and buy where the price is lower. Again, if you are selling a share you can look at the price on both the exchanges and sell at the exchange where it is higher. For example, if you want to sell Reliance and if you see on the BSE the stock is quoting at Rs 1000 and NSE it is quoting at Rs 1002, you are better off selling shares on the NSE. However, this will make sense only for market orders. If you want to place a limit order to sell Reliance shares at Rs 1006 it does not make a difference on which exchange you want to sell. There is no other difference in buying on either exchange for a limit order. The brokerage charged by the broker, the Securities Transaction Tax are all the same on either of the exchanges. The volumes of shares is generally higher on the NSE, which means if you are selling sizeable quantities the NSE could be a better proposition. It is almost impossible to get similar prices on both the exchanges. There is bound to be some price differential. Also, some shares are not traded on the NSE, which will force you to buy or sell the shares on the BSE. For example, Claris Lifesciences, Spice Jet are examples of stocks that are not traded on the NSE. Interestingly, the largest number of stocks in the world are listed on the BSE.

Critical social media information flows: political trust and protest behaviour among Kazakhstani college students

ABSTRACTIn political regimes where traditional mass media are under state control, social networking sites may be the only place where citizens are exposed to and exchange dissident information. Despite all the attempts, complete control of social media seems to be implausible. We argue that the critical information that people see, read and share online undermines their trust in political institutions. This diminishing trust may threaten the legitimacy of the ruling regime and stimulate protest behaviour. We rely on original survey data of Kazakhstani college students to confirm these expectations. The data are unique in that they directly measure exposure to critical/dissident information, as opposed to simply assuming it. The analysis leverages Coarsened Exact Matching to simulate experimental conditions. This allows us to better identify the consequential mechanism and the attitudinal precursor by which social media influence protest in an authoritarian context.