Talking to the crowd: What do people react to in online discussions?

This paper addresses the question of how language use affects community reaction to comments in online discussion forums, and the relative importance of the message vs. the messenger. A new comment ranking task is proposed based on community annotated karma in Reddit discussions, which controls for topic and timing of comments. Experimental work with discussion threads from six subreddits shows that the importance of different types of language features varies with the community of interest

A reply to Gallagher, O'Donnell, Minescu, & Muldoon's commentary on 'The effects of identification with a support group on the mental health of people with multiple sclerosis'

We wish to thank Gallagher and his colleagues for their kind words and insightful comments regarding our recent paper on the effects of identification with a support group on the mental health of people with multiple sclerosis. We too agree that this is an important area of research that is worthy of much future study. Below we provide a brief discussion of each of the three comments that Gallagher and colleagues made about our paper

Comments on ALRC Discussion Paper 79, Copyright and the Digital Economy

We provide these comments in connection with the Australian Law Reform Commission’s ongoing study of copyright and the digital economy, and in particular its request for comments on the recommendations put forth in its Discussion Paper 79 (June 2013). We focus on US law, and how the US experience bears on the possibility of an open-ended uncompensated fair use type exception in Australia, and other related issues. The fair use doctrine in the US provides great flexibility, but that flexibility in many instances comes at the cost of certainty and predictability. We are not suggesting that reasonable judgments cannot be made about whether a particular use is fair; certainly experienced practitioners make such judgments daily. But fair use decisions are often complicated, and advice frequently depends as much on the amount of risk the user is willing to undertake as it does on the evaluation of the substantive law. Our point is not that fair use caselaw absolutely resists synthesis, but rather that the synthesis most successfully occurs at a high level of abstraction; individual actors, by contrast, need to know whether their particular plans will run afoul of the law. Legal literature has seen many attempts over the years to simplify or clarify fair use, both descriptive and prescriptive. But it would be premature to conclude that the law of fair use is or soon will be coherent and predictable. Guidelines could theoretically help in interpreting fair use, but the weight and value of guidelines depends on how they were developed. The ALRC Discussion Paper’s proposals could result in a broader fair use doctrine in Australia than in the US. Notably, fair use in Australia, as in the US, would exempt certain uses without countervailing compensation. But the proposed Australian version may embrace a greater range of commercial actors, thus altering the balance. The proposals include additional illustrative purposes; they would also permit commercial users to stand in the shoes of clients entitled to exceptions. The ALRC also proposes that contracts or contract provisions that attempt to bargain around library exceptions and certain fair use exceptions would be unenforceable. In the US, contracts concerning copyrighted materials are usually upheld. As a general rule, contract preemption does not serve to invalidate contract provisions that limit the exercise of copyright exceptions, and the doctrine of copyright misuse does so only in the most egregious of cases. Finally, in the US there is no exemption from anti-circumvention of technological access controls for such broad purposes as exercising fair use or making noninfringing use. Certain narrow fair uses have been deemed exceptions pursuant to a triennial rulemaking conducted by the Copyright Office, but those exceptions must be revisited every three years

Discussion Analytics: Identifying Conversations and Social Learners in FutureLearn MOOCs

Discussion among learners in MOOCs has been hailed as beneficial for social constructive learning. To understand the pedagogical value of MOOC discussion forums, several researchers have utilized content analysis techniques to associate individual postings with differing levels of cognitive activity. However, this analysis typically ignores the turn taking among discussion postings, such as learners responding to others’ replies to their posts, learners receiving no reply for their posts, or learners just posting without conversing with others. This information is particularly important in understanding patterns of conversations that occur in MOOCs, and learners’ commenting behaviors. Therefore, in this paper we categorize comments in a FutureLearn MOOC based on their nature (post vs. reply to others’ post), classify learners based on their contributions for each type of post-ing, and identify conversations based on the types of comments composing them. This categorization quantifies the dynamics of conversations in the discussion activities, allowing monitoring of on-going discussion activities in FutureLearn and further analysis of identified conversations, social learners, and course steps with an unusually high number of a particular type of comment

Interatomic potentials for condensed matter

This paper forms an introduction to a discussion of interatomic forces. As such, it comments on the basic principles, and on some of the problems which underly present formulations, the ways in which future work should develop, and the classes of physical problem for which difficulties remain

The Kolmogorov-Riesz compactness theorem

We show that the Arzela-Ascoli theorem and Kolmogorov compactness theorem both are consequences of a simple lemma on compactness in metric spaces. Their relation to Helly's theorem is discussed. The paper contains a detailed discussion on the historical background of the Kolmogorov compactness theorem.Comment: This version is lightly revised in response to referee comments. The paper will appear in Expositiones Mathematica

Contributed Discussion to Bayesian Solution Uncertainty Quantification for Differential Equations

We begin by introducing the main ideas of the paper under discussion, and we give a brief description of the method proposed. Next, we discuss an alternative approach based on B-spline expansion, and lastly we make some comments on the method's convergence rate.Comment: 2 page

What was wrong in Michell’s paper of 1904?

The Writers of this paper published a discussion (Vázquez Espí and Cervera Bravo, 2011) on a paper by Sokół and Lewiński (2010). The discussion was replied (Sokół and Lewiński, 2011). Afterwards Rozvany (2011) has written a Discussion with comments on this exchange. Several Rozvany’s comments have to do with “an error in Michell’s (1904) paper”. The Writers analyse herein Rozvany’s statements about such an error