Modeling usage of an online research community

Although online communities have been thought of as a new way for collaboration across geographic boundaries in the scientific world, they have a problem attracting people to keep visiting. The main purpose of this study is to understand how people behave in such communities, and to build and evaluate tools to stimulate engagement in a research community. These tools were designed based on a research framework of factors that influence online participation and relationship development. There are two main objectives for people to join an online community, information sharing and interpersonal relationship development, such as friends or colleagues. The tools designed in this study are to serve both information sharing and interpersonal relationship development needs. The awareness tool is designed to increase the sense of a community and increase the degree of social presence of members in the community. The recommender system is designed to help provide higher quality and personalized information to community members. It also helps to match community members into subgroups based on their interests. The designed tools were implemented in a field site - the Asynchronous Learning Networks (ALN) Research community. A longitudinal field study was used to evaluate the effectiveness of the designed tools. This research explored people\u27s behavior inside a research community by analyzing web server logs. The results show that although there are not many interactions in the community space, the WebCenter has been visited extensively by its members. There are over 2,000 hits per day on average and over 5,000 article accesses during the observation period. This research also provided a framework to identify factors that affect people\u27s engagement in an online community. The research framework was tested using the PLS modeling method with online survey responses. The results show that perceived usefulness performs a very significant role in members\u27 intention to continue using the system and their perceived preliminary networking. The results also show that the quality of the content of the system is a strong indicator for both perceived usefulness of the community space and perceived ease of use of the community system. Perceived ease of use did not show a strong correlation with intention to continue use which was consistent with other studies of Technology Acceptance Model (TAM). For the ALN research community, this online community helps its members to broaden their contacts, improve the quality and quantity of their research, and increase the dissemination of knowledge among community members

On the Virtues of a Philosophically Pragmatic Reorientation in Environmental Ethics: Adaptive Co-management as a Laboratory

abstract: With global environmental systems under increasing Anthropogenic influence, conservationists and environmental managers are under immense pressure to protect and recover the world’s imperiled species and ecosystems. This effort is often motivated by a sense of moral responsibility, either to nature itself, or to the end of promoting human wellbeing over the long run. In other words, it is the purview of environmental ethics, a branch of applied philosophy that emerged in the 1970s and that for decades has been devoted to understanding and defending an attitude of respect for nature, usually for its own sake. Yet from the very start, environmental ethics has promoted itself as contributing to the resolution of real-world management and policy problems. By most accounts, however, the field has historically failed to deliver on this original promise, and environmental ethicists continue to miss opportunities to make intellectual inroads with key environmental decisionmakers. Inspired by classical and contemporary American philosophers such as Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, John Dewey, and Richard Rorty, I defend in this dissertation the virtues of a more explicitly pragmatic approach to environmental ethics. Specifically, I argue that environmental pragmatism is not only commensurate with pro-environmental attitudes but that it is more likely to lead to viable and sustainable outcomes, particularly in the context of eco-social resilience-building activities (e.g., local experimentation, adaptation, cooperation). In doing so, I call for a recasting of environmental ethics, a project that entails: 1) a conceptual reorientation involving the application of pragmatism applied to environmental problems; 2) a methodological approach linking a pragmatist environmentalism to the tradition and process of adaptive co-management; and 3) an empirical study of stakeholder values and perspectives in conservation collaboratives in Arizona. I conclude that a more pragmatic environmental ethics has the potential to bring a powerful set of ethical and methodological tools to bear in real-world management contexts and, where appropriate, can ground and justify coordinated conservation efforts. Finally, this research responds to critics who suggest that, because it strays too far from the ideological purity of traditional environmental ethics, the pragmatic decision-making process will, in the long run, weaken rather than bolster our commitment to conservation and environmental protection.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Biology 201

Networks and roles of Pro-Vice Chancellors: a study of the connectedness of PVCs in the 1994 group of universities

Faced with a turbulent higher education environment senior management teams in universities seek to secure the future of their university by accessing as much information about the environment as possible, often through networks. Pro-Vice Chancellors (PVCs) are members of these teams, normally with significant responsibility for activities that are integral to the university, but very little is known about their role and the importance that connections to others might play in it. Taking a social network perspective, this thesis investigates this gap using a two stage research design. First an electronically distributed questionnaire was used to determine the connectivity between PVCs either with responsibility for research or with responsibility for teaching from the original 16 UK universities of the 1994 Group. Secondly, semistructured interviews were conducted with eight PVCs from four of these universities, to examine similarities and differences in the roles of different PVCs and the importance of connectivity for them. Network maps showed that research PVCs were cohesively linked; most were connected to at least two others, and often to many more. Conversely, PVCs with responsibility for teaching were almost wholly unconnected. Connections to other PVCs served three purposes. Occasionally they were important for personal development, otherwise they either enabled PVCs to perform her/his duties by providing information, or enhanced the performance of the university by allowing access to additional resources. It is concluded that PVCs play a boundary spanning role both internally and externally to the University. Moreover, enduring connections to other PVCs formed where opportunities existed to pursue additional resources collaboratively or when it was necessary to lobby government to protect the existing resource base from others. It was argued that these circumstances commonly occurred in the research environment but not in the teaching environment and so the observed pattern of connectivity amongst PVCs was explained.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo

Nhetoric: Rhetorical power in cyberspace

The Alpha group is a faction of the white supremacy movement that has established a virtual presence in cyberspace. Rhetorical strategies of agitation are practiced by the Alpha group on the World Wide Web in an effort to encourage visiting avatars to join the white supremacy movement. This study explores the rhetorical strategies of power and promulgation which Alpha uses in cyberspace. Analysis of Alpha\u27s digital discourse provide an opportunity to understand and evaluate the unique potentials that information technologies such as the World Wide Web bring to the rhetorical environment

Restrained Eating : The Effects Of Privacy And Perception Of Having Overeaten On Subsequent Food Consumption

Herman & Mack (1975) theorized that restrained eaters, conflicted between social pressure to be thin and biological pressure to be fat, tend to alternately eat very little or a great deal, as they respond to one or the other constraint. According to restraint theory, restrained eaters\u27 chronic dieting induces physiological and psychological states that make them highly susceptible to external disruption of eating controls. Research has shown that when led to believe they have already overeaten (i.e., when they are preloaded ), restrained eaters will loosen restraints and counterregulate (i.e., binge-eat). In contrast, unrestrained eaters (i.e., normal eaters) will compensate by subsequently eating less under such conditions. However, while this effect has been shown in normal weight restrained subjects, overweight restrained subjects have not reliably counterregulated. Consequently, questions can be raised as to restraint theory\u27s ability to predict eating behavior of overweight individuals. One study utilizing a private setting found counterregulation in preloaded normal weight and overweight restrained eaters. However, because a no-preload group was not included in this study, it could not be determined whether the preload or the private setting was responsible for the counterregulatory eating. In the present study, 113 female subjects were told they were participating in a sensory experiment. Normal weight and overweight subjects, who were low restraint or high restraint, either consumed a high calorie milkshake as a preload or received no preload. Subjects were subsequently asked to taste-test ice cream flavors. Using subtle situational cues, subjects were led to believe the amount of their ice cream consumption would not be easily detected by experimenters. As expected, low restraint-normal weight subjects compensated for a preload by eating less ice cream; and low restraint-overweight subjects ate the same amount regardless of preloading. However, both normal weight- and overweight-high restraint subjects failed to counterregulate after preloading. The author discusses implications of this and previous findings. It is argued that the restraint dimension may reflect more a cognitive style than a behavioral style. It is suggested that disordered eating may be more productively studied under naturalistic conditions, or longitudinally, than by taking a single measurement in a laboratory situation

Disulfiram, Self Efficacy and the Cue Exposure Hypothesis and Research Portfolio

Classical conditioning has been the predominat discourse in cue exposure research in the addictions. It would be wrong, however, to restrict the definition of cue exposure exclusively to a conditioning theory based mechanism since there are many other possible explanations for the effects of exposure to cues. This paper proposes that cue exposure is a valuable investigative technique that can be studied from a variety of different perspectives that include social learning theory and other cognitive models. A potential of cue exposure is that it provides a means of developing an understanding of addictive behaviour that is firmly rooted in widely studied general theories of behaviour. Furthermore, it provides a methodology to test hypotheses and to study mechanisms of cue reactivity and the effects of cues on problem drinking. In the clinical area in particular, cue exposure affords a more precise method to study the phenomenon of relapse and ultimately, the effects of cue exposure on clinical outcome

How do sensemaking processes with minimal sharing relate to the reproduction of organised action?

The thesis examines an underexplored area in sensemaking theory. The theme for the thesis is to examine the relation between sensemaking and the reproduction of organised action. Existing sensemaking theory focusses on how shared organising processes support the reproduction of organised action (Smircich & Morgan, 1986; Smircich & Stubbart, 1985; Weick, 2004; Maitlis, 2005; Donnellon et al, 1986). This thesis' contribution is to examine sensemaking processes which do not spring from shared articulation within the formal organisation and these processes' relation to the reproduction of organised action. In the thesis the phenomenon is illustrated with a case consisting of a younger voluntary organisation (called the Network Group) whose purpose is to provide tuition for children with another ethnic background than Danish. The organisation survives and meets its purpose. This, however, takes place largely without the voluntary tutors talking with each other to make sense of their shared action. This falls outside the expectations produced in the greater part of existing sensemaking theory. Apart from the relevancy for organisation theory, the interest in the phenomenon organised action with limited shared sensemaking and limited shared articulation – comes from a hypothesis that actors in latemodernity will be less inclined to invest in shared sensemaking because they zap between organisational contexts (Bauman 2000, Beck 1986, Beck & BeckGernsheim 2002 and Bellah et al 1985). This is a phenomenon which has drawn particular attention within the Danish voluntary sector in the last 10 years (Isen1, 1999; Goul Andersen et al, 2000; Hermansen & Stavnsager, 2000; Stavnsager & Jantzen, 2000; Christensen & Isen, 2001; Børch & Israelsen, 2001; Wollebæk & Selle, 2002; Nielsen et al 2004; Murphy 2004). Similar concerns in the U. S. are most notably expressed by Putnam (1990) in the book “Bowling Alone”. In Denmark the phenomenon is linked to perceived difficulties with filling positions at boards of voluntary organisations with younger volunteers