Usenet Newsgroups Research Articles

Surf's Up for Health Fraud Investigators

ON NOVEMBER 5, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced the results of the North American Health Claims Surf Day. In just a few hours of surfing the Internet on September 29 and 30, representatives of government agencies, health care organizations, and consumer protection groups from Canada, Mexico, and the United States netted more than 400 World Wide Web sites and numerous Usenet newsgroups that contain promotions of health products or services with dubious claims, the FTC reported. The purpose of FTC's Health Claims Surf Day was to identify potentially false or deceptive advertising claims for products or services purported to help cure, treat, or prevent 6 diseases: AIDS, arthritis, cancer, diabetes, heart disease, and multiple sclerosis. "In the few hours we surfed the Internet, we found numerous Web sites promoting a wide variety of unproven 'cures' for arthritis," said Doyt Conn, MD, senior vice president, medical affairs, for the Arthritis

Compiling Internet expert resources: a case study towards a meta-index of subject experts in business information

Describes the construction and coverage of the Cybrarian’s Guide to Cyber-Marketing, an annotated and structured subject guide to Internet resources in the field of interactive marketing, online advertising and electronic commerce. The Guide monitors new Internet resources, especially Web sites and review articles, in terms of Internet marketing (pre-sales), electronic commerce (sales) and related information resources and enabling technologies. The Guide exists as a Web site (URL: http://www.iocom.be/pilot/cybermarketing/) and highlights only those resources judged to be significant in terms of emerging business. Focuses on the use of secondary services as the means of generating input to the Guide, including: electronic mail-based formal newsletters and alerting services; offline browsers; notifiers; and ‘Push’ services. Usenet newsgroups are not used due to their low signal-to-noise ratio. Notes briefly the techniques used to process the data and special attention paid to output information presentation and search interface. Users can search the database in six ways, using: a hierarchical subject tree specially adapted to the emerging field of Internet business developments; an ‘interactive outliner’; the Hot-Sauce interface; a relative site map; a ‘what’s new’ section; and the PERSonal Update Notification Agent (PERSUNA).

Content Analysis of Pornographic Images Available on the Internet

We examined the nature and content of 150 randomly selected pornographic images available in Usenet newsgroups on the Internet in April 1994. Using content analysis, we identified themes that appear most frequently and explored differences in the type of material posted by commercial and noncommercial users. Results suggest that commercial vendors are more likely to post explicit pornographic material in public access newsgroups to attract new customers to their private, pay-per-use bulletin board services.

Strange Bedfellows: Homosexuality, Gay Liberation, and the Internet

Given the Internet's origins in the Department of Defense's research efforts, it may seem strange that the gay community has taken to the Internet as if the two had originally been designed for each other. But this partnership is not as odd as it first seems. In part, this is because there is an overrepresentation of lesbians and gay men in the computer industry. Most informants interviewed hypothesized that this results from the proximity of Silicon Valley to San Francisco's liberal attitudes toward homosexuality. Some also suggested that social introversion in adolescence tends to draw teens to computers and might have promoted this association. The Internet has functioned as a way for the gay minority to become a majority in a “virtual community” available to anyone, no matter how far away—a process accelerated by the freedom provided by gay Usenet newsgroups, especially net.motss in the early years. Finally, gay personals-ad contacts can take place on the Internet freed from many of the problems of di...

The “mad cow disease”, Usenet Newsgroups and bibliometric laws

In this paper the reactions of Usenet News users' to “mad cow disease” is examined. Thousands of newsgroups on an extremely wide variety of subjects exist, and anyone, having access to the Internet, can express his/her thoughts freely on this medium. We collected information on the news items relevant to “mad cow disease” for a period of one hundred days starting very close to the eruption of the crisis. The analysis of the collected information reveals some similarities between the bibliometric characteristics of news items on an electronic medium and the physically printed scientific literature. As far as we know, this is one of the first attempts to systematically apply bibliometric methods to the Internet.

What's Everybody Talking about?: Message Functions and Topics on Electronic Lists and Newsgroups in Information and Library Science

The use of listserv software and usenet newsgroups to support discussion among professionals in library and information science has become commonplace in the 1990s. The current research was conducted to find out which topics of discussion are dominant and which functions are performed by the messages posted to discussion groups in library and information science. In fall 1994, twenty-one students in an introductory course on communication processes completed analyses of fourteen different electronic lists or newsgroups as their term projects. Messages on each list or newsgroup were captured for approximately one month. Each message or partial message was described, in terms of its topic and its function, and frequencies were calculated. The topics most frequently discussed in each group were reasonably consistent with the group's stated purpose. In addition, technology topics were frequently discussed, as well as topics related to the library's clientele. The most common message functions were announcements, queries, and responses of various types. Comments made in the context of free-wheeling discussions also were common on some of the lists, but were rare on others. In addition to providing some baseline data on the topics and functions of messages in computer-mediated discussions, this study accomplished two pedagogical objectives: to introduce new students to electronic discussion groups as a channel for professional communication, and to introduce them to content analysis as a research method

Editorial: Anesthesia and Cyberspace

By now, millions of individuals daily exchange data and ideas over the information superhighway. Having 4 computing centers connected to the Internet in 1969, the number of connected computers grew to a 100 in 1977, to a 1000 in 1984, to 10,000 in 1987, to 1 million in 1991 and to 10 millions in 1996 1 . An estimated 35 million households will be using the Internet by the year 2000 2 . Including all controlled-access Internets, so-called Intranets this number is expected to grow to over 100 million by the year 2000 3 . What has the Internet to offer for the anesthesiologic community? What impact will this superhighway of information have on the field of Anesthesiology? An increasing number of anesthesia-related netsurfers are visiting anesthesia networks, electronic publications and tutorials or other services offered throughout the Internet. A variety of different services such as E-mail, Gopher, FTP, Telnet , Usenet Newsgroups, and most important the World Wide Web (WWW) are currently available for the anesthesiologist and anesthetist 4, 5, 6, 7 . Imagine a meeting where you could present your research to ten thousands of people from all over the world and you wouldn’t even be restricted to the normally allotted ten minutes time frame! Instead, other members of the international anesthesiology community can study your work at their own convenience, 24 hours a day, every week, for a full month, and even thereafter. And imagine also that you yourself are interested in reading about the newest ongoing research from other important centers around the world how about having access to it whenever you want, in your home, office, a hotel room, the anesthesia lounge or any place else where there is a computer with a connection to the Internet. And best of all, you don’t have to travel or go to the mailbox or search in a library or even pay for it now the newest and best in anesthesia comes to you, whenever you want it, and it is absolutely free, the only thing you need is access to the Internet. The amount of information offered on the net is increasing rapidly. A variety of anesthesia-related resources are available on the Internet. Several anesthesia societies are represented by their Home Page and offer information about meetings or the society itself. A growing number of Anesthesia Departments all over the world go online with information about their programs and Universities. Several sites offer extended services such as tutorials, electronic handouts, news letters, discussion forums, or support in anesthesia-related problems. Anesthesia-related publications such as this electronic Internet Journal of Anesthesiology provide interested readers with abstracts, articles, researchnews, discussion forums, job advertising, and information about new drugs and monitoring devices. With further development of computer technology it will be easier to offer live 3D animation, educational movies, and live video conferencing (8). Well designed anesthesia sites on the Internet such as Keith Ruskin’s GASNet, The Swiss Anesthesia Server, Gasbone, The Virtual Anesthesia Textbook, and many other sites in Europe, Australia and the U.S. represent excellent starting points for anesthesia-surfing on the Internet. Future development of faster Internet access such as connection through cable-TV fibers or satellites and faster personal computers will enhance the ability of efficient netsurfing. New software-technology will increase the attractivity of websites. In summary, the Internet with its World Wide Web represents a new tool for the anesthesiologist or anesthetist to share ideas, experience and knowledge with others around the world.

A Basic Guide to Job Search Resources on the Internet

Job searching is often a frustrating experience, due in part to the lack of an organized and convenient method to gather information on careers, career development and job leads. The Internet is quickly becoming an efficient means for gaining access to all of these resources. This paper lists and describes several relatively stable Internet sites containing information and job postings. In addition, monitoring Usenet newsgroups and listsews to look for position announcements is also discussed. Finally, several comprehensive guides to job searching on the Internet are cited and discussed.

Breaking ground on the virtual frontier: Surveying civic life on the internet

The Internet provides a virtual frontier to expand our access to information and to increase our knowledge and understanding of public opinion, political behavior, social trends and lifestyles through survey research. Comparable to other technological advancements, such as the telephone and the computer, the Internet presents opportunities that will impact significantly on the process and quality of survey research now and in the twenty-first century. Cyberspace permits us to move beyond traditional face-to-face, mail and telephone surveys, yet still to examine basic issues regarding the quality of data collection: sampling, questionnaire design, survey distribution, means of response, and database creation. This surveys include those posted on LISTERV mailing lists, USENET newsgroups, and the World Wide Web. A survey on politics and civic life, conducted by the authors, is used as a case study.

An OR/MS Guide to the Internet

How can operations research/management science (OR/MS) professionals take advantage of the Internet, a global network of computers? One avenue is communication forums—e-mail list servers and Usenet news groups—for networking with professionals from OR/MS and other areas. The second avenue is accessing and creating repositories that archive information, such as software, technical papers, and conference programs. Online lists cover both repositories and forums. Tools allow users to access these repositories and to share information with research collaborators around the world. The Internet can be useful, but users should not expect too much.

The SCAM Approach to Copy Detection in Digital Libraries

Scenario 1 Your local publishing company Books'R'Us decides to publish on the Internet its latest book in an effort to cut down on printing costs and book distribution expenses. Customers pay for the digital books using sophisticated electronic payment mechanisms such as DigiCash, First Virtual or InterPay. When the payment is received, the book distribution server at Books'R'Us sends a digital version of the book electronically to the paying customer. Books'R'Us expects to make higher profits on the digital book due to lower production and distribution costs, and larger markets on the Internet. It turns out, however, that very few books are sold since digital copies of the Books'R'Us book had been widely circulated on UseNet newsgroups, bulletin boards, and had been available for free on alternate ftp sites and Web servers. Books'R'Us retract their digital publishing commitment blaming the ease of re-transmission of digital items on the Internet, and return to traditional paper based publishing. Scenario 2 Sheng wants to buy a new Pentium portable, and hence wants to read articles on the different brands available and their reviews before choosing a brand to buy. She searches information services like Dialog, Lycos, Gloss and Webcrawler, and follows UseNet newsgroups to find articles on the different portables available and finds nearly 1500 articles. When she starts reading the articles, she finds that most articles are really duplicates or near-duplicates of one another and did not contribute any new information to her search. She realizes this is because most databases maintain their own local copies of different articles in perhaps different formats (Word, Postscript, HTML), or have perhaps mirror sites that contain the same set of articles. Sheng then trudges through the articles one-by-one wishing that somebody would build a system that can remove exact or near-duplicates automatically so that she only needs to read each distinct article. Around article number 150, Sheng decides not to buy a certain brand since from the articles she learns that that brand had had problems with its color display since its release. But she has to continue looking at articles on that model since they are already a part of the result set. She adds to her wish list a dynamic search system in which she could discard any articles that have more than a certain overlap with some article she had previously discarded. In this article, we will give a brief overview of some proposed mechanisms that address each of the problems illustrated by the above two scenarios.

The use of quoting to preserve context in electronic mail dialogues

This paper reports a survey on how users maintain context in an electronic mail (e-mail) dialogue and, in particular, the use of quoting as a response strategy. The target group belonged to a community of experienced users of computer-mediated communication systems: readers of Usenet newsgroups. The results showed that quoting a message, i.e., including it in a comment or reply, was a widely used technique in e-mail dialogues, but that the majority of respondents used it selectively. Factors that affected the use of quoting were the category of receiver and the length and nature of the message. Contrary to expectations, the results showed that users perceived the use of quoting as contributing to the sense of conversation when communicating in e-mail.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>