Incentive-Centered Design for User-Contributed Content

We review incentive-centered design for user-contributed content (UCC) on the Internet. UCC systems, produced (in part) through voluntary contributions made by non-employees, face fundamental incentives problems. In particular, to succeed, users need to be motivated to contribute in the first place ("getting stuff in"). Further, given heterogeneity in content quality and variety, the degree of success will depend on incentives to contribute a desirable mix of quality and variety ("getting \emph{good} stuff in"). Third, because UCC systems generally function as open-access publishing platforms, there is a need to prevent or reduce the amount of negative value (polluting or manipulating) content. The work to date on incentives problems facing UCC is limited and uneven in coverage. Much of the empirical research concerns specific settings and does not provide readily generalizable results. And, although there are well-developed theoretical literatures on, for example, the private provision of public goods (the "getting stuff in" problem), this literature is only applicable to UCC in a limited way because it focuses on contributions of (homogeneous) money, and thus does not address the many problems associated with heterogeneous information content contributions (the "getting \emph{good} stuff in" problem). We believe that our review of the literature has identified more open questions for research than it has pointed to known results.http://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/100229/1/icd4ucc.pdf7

Connecting health concepts and health behavior : the construction of health identity.

This thesis is an historical, theoretical and empirical examination of women\u27s health concepts and health behavior in contemporary consumer-oriented American society. It begins with an historical overview of social health movements to illustrate how health concepts are shaped by cultural, social, political, and moral beliefs and practices. It then traces the socio-cultural construction of health to understand how this concept is shaped by various social and individual factors. The qualitative methodology of grounded theory was used to examine empirically how a sample of women defines health and what behaviors they engage in related to health. Non-random convenience sampling was employed to recruit twenty-five women who self-identified as healthy. Data are derived from semi-structured interviews and verbatim transcriptions. Findings suggest that dominant cultural images associated with heath were important in how the participants talked about health, but when talking about their behavior, health was presented as an alternative choice to consumer, aesthetic body ideals that are expressed as oppressive, unhealthy and unattainable. Study participants discussed health as having positive moral connotations of being an achievement, which was, in part, expressed as contingent upon an appropriate level of self-surveillance and self-responsibility. While study participants expressed recognition of culturally available messages of health, they also exhibited a certain amount of resistance to these messages. Additionally, findings suggest that health concepts and health-related behaviors are negotiated based on habitus. The theoretical concept of habitus is useful in understanding how individuals negotiate health concepts and health behaviors within class-constrained circumstances. The concept of health identity – described as the translation from cultural and social messages of health to individual\u27s health conceptions and health behaviors on a daily, conscious level – may be useful in creating future health promotion, health intervention, and health education programs

Where and When Things Fall Apart: Relating narratives of post-election violence from Nairobi

The violence that followed the 2007 elections in Kenya caught many people by surprise, including me. Given some familiarity with, and personal connections to, Kenya, this dissertation began first with shock and concern, and later with suspicion of the way the post election violence was presented in the Western media as yet another example of sudden, prolific, and nonsensical outbreaks of violence in Africa. It seemed notable that the violence occurred around political elections and important to explore the stakes therein. A review of available literature on the topic revealed that historical injustices and ethnic inequality seemed to be contributing factors in the post-election violence. A review of the psychological literature pertaining to collective violence raised questions about identity and power, obedience and conformity, and the breakdown of law and order. To the extent to which these factors and principles shed some light on what happened in Kenya, the question remained: what might all of this mean, concretely, in people\u27s lives? Beyond the stories of Western journalists and behavioral scientists, I wanted to know how Kenyans narrated the post-election violence. I turn to multisited ethnography, a method of research and writing that affords the procedural flexibility to follow the traces of such a complex phenomenon and to reflexively document the process of finding and understanding. If what both the Western press and conventional psychology provide tend to be general, abstract, ahistorical explanations of violence, I present a situated account involving a diversity of descriptions and explanations given by Kenyans from various tribes, classes, and political affiliations about the post-election violence and prospects of sustained peace. This includes detailed first person accounts of how things unfolded, or, fell apart. The Kenyans I spoke with narrate the post- election violence by both contextualizing it in (post)colonial history and by personalizing it in a manner that shows ethnicity in Kenya to be highly nuanced and complex. What results from this dissertation is a rearticulation of the post-election violence through revealing relations that have been obscured by the dominant discourse. Finally, with regard to studying violence and peace, it is assumed that total understanding is impossible; I have been attendant to the challenges associated with understanding and writing about others as subjects of violence. To my project it has been essential to show the places and ways in which discourse on violence necessarily breaks down

At Zero Point: Discourse, Culture, and Satire in Restoration England

At Zero Point presents an entirely new way of looking at Restoration culture, discourse, and satire. The book locates a rupture in English culture and epistemology not at the end of the eighteenth century (when it occurred in France) but at the end of the seventeenth century. Rose Zimbardo’s hypothesis is based on Hans Blumenberg’s concept of “zero point”—the moment when an epistemology collapses under the weight of questions it has itself raised and simultaneously a new epistemology begins to construct itself. Zimbardo demonstrates that the Restoration marked both the collapse of the Renaissance order and the birth of modernism (with its new conceptions of self, nation, gender, language, logic, subjectivity, and reality). Using satire as the site for her investigation, Zimbardo examines works by Rochester, Oldham, Wycherley, and the early Swift for examples of Restoration deconstructive satire that, she argues, measure the collapse of Renaissance epistemology. Constructive satire, as exemplified in works by Dryden, has at its discursive center the “I” from which all order arises to be projected to the external world. No other book treats Restoration culture or satire in this way. Rose A. Zimbardo is SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor Emerita whose previous books include A Mirror to Nature: Transformations in Drama and Aesthetics, 1660-1732. Zimbardo invites readers to examine concepts of gender, nation, self, and language in the literature of the Restoration period and be persuaded that its satire is both deconstructive and constructive. —Choice Stimulating and persuasive. —In-Between Effectively challenges easy assumptions of the referentiality of Restoration satire and drama and stresses the literary context. —Journal of English and Germanic Philology Only rarely does such a radical reexamination of culture occur, and Zimbardo\u27s At Zero Point brings new insights into both Renaissance and Restoration scholarship. —Rocky Mountain Review Zimbardo\u27s point is that we, like Wycherley\u27s generation, are at zero point, caught between a \u27deconstructive\u27 period—the 1960s, with their attack on \u27the strangling social fictions of the establishment\u27—and a reactionary one—the 1990s, era of \u27the new holy nationalism, conservatism, and racism.\u27 —Seventeenth-Century News An important and provocative book, with rewarding turns to authorship, gender, and nationalism. —Studies in English Literature One of the most ambitious books this year. . . . Stimulating and innovative, bringing an interesting mix of neglected and canonical texts to our attention. —Year’s Work in English Studieshttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_english_language_and_literature_british_isles/1078/thumbnail.jp

Debt-Based Justice: Systematizing Human Valuation Through the Lens of Criminal Justice

Senior Project submitted to The Division of Social Studies of Bard College

The Public School Washroom as Heterotopia: Gendered Spatiality and Subjectification

This dissertation investigates how secondary school students understand their own gendered subjectivity and the discursive and material processes that contribute to it through visual artifacts (photovoice projects) the students created of school washroom spaces. Drawing primarily on Foucault’s analytics of disciplinary space and the heterotopia (Foucault & Miskowiec, 1986), I view the washroom space as producing and perpetuating gendered power relations that invert, suspect, or neutralize those existing in exterior spaces. Deploying both a Foucauldian and Butlerian analytics, these visual student responses are framed as confessional, queering or (de)subjugating (Stryker, 2006) and cartographic products, and hence, understood in terms of the insights they provide into the complex practices of self-constitution and gender subjectivities. Furthermore, through Britzman’s (1998) queer reading practice and critical readings of voice, the analysis of these queer and cartographic products hopes to offer further insight into how these washroom spaces as sex-segregated and unsupervised are lived and understood by students as highly regulated and inciting self-policing strategies upon all gendered bodies. Through Foucault’s other frameworks of power/knowledge and technologies of self and power, combined with Butler’s work on gender performativity, the abject and gender as bodily matters, I am concerned with how gendered subjects not only are produced in schools, but also how they are capable of resistances to gendered norms through practices of the self, in the interest of pursuing democratic gendered relations that have implications for burgeoning transgender accommodation policies and more nuanced anti-gender violence policies in school boards and Ministries of Education

Boarders, Babes and Bad-Asses: Theories of a Female Physical Youth Culture

Young women occupy unprecedented space in contemporary society. Their professional ambitions, educational achievements, practices of cultural consumption, and participation in sport and leisure all offer evidence of a new position for young women. This thesis analyzes female snowboarders as exemplars of young women in contemporary society and popular physical culture. Many young women today play sport and engage in physical activity with a sense of enthusiasm and entitlement unknown to most of their mothers and grandmothers. Against this background the female snowboarder is an excellent barometer of the nature of contemporary youth and popular culture, of the changes in those cultures including the development of niche female cultural industries, and of the emerging opportunities available to middle-class women in Western society. Women's snowboarding, however, is a complicated and multidimensional phenomenon interwoven with numerous political, cultural, social and economic events and processes. In this thesis I set out to capture the complexity of female snowboarding by systematically contextualizing and interrogating the lived experiences of female boarders through drawing upon six critical social theoretical perspectives: Marxist political economy, post-Fordism, feminism, hegemonic masculinity, Pierre Bourdieu's theory of embodiment, and Foucauldian theorizing. In applying these theories, I select key concepts and engage them in conversations with my insider cultural knowledge of snowboarding, numerous periods of fieldwork, and an extensive base of artifacts and sources collected over five years. In this thesis I extend academic understandings of female youth culture via the case study of women in snowboarding, and offer a valuable critique of contemporary social theories used to explain many different social phenomena that involve tensions and power relationships between the genders. While no single theory or concept proved adequate to deal with the multidimensional phenomenon of the female boarder, each having its shortcomings and offering quite different insights, several reveal important commonalities in relation to some key concepts in critical sociology, viz, structure, agency, culture, the body and embodiment, gender and power. These commonalities, I argue, offer future directions for theorizing about, and advancing our understanding of, young women in popular physical culture

Rugby union men: body concerns

Existing research shows that increasing numbers of young men are dissatisfied with the appearance of their bodies. Research has found that men will use sport and health-related sports acts to conceal these concerns from others. Accordingly, men s body dissatisfactions are documented less frequently because the practices drawn upon to conceal them are perceived as routine forms of masculine behaviour. Rugby union is one of the most popular sports played by young men in England. Historically, the male rugby player is culturally perceived as strong, tough and unemotionally articulate. Existing research draws attention to health issues, such as performance stress and injury that arise through participation in this sport. Research also shows that rugby union players are likely to experience concerns about gaining weight, yet these are disguised within the requirements of training for the sport. Although, there are studies that examine the constitution of masculinities, the experience of pain and injury and career transitions among rugby union players there are no studies, as yet, that examine how rugby union men experience body concerns and manage these experiences through their sport. The research discussed in this thesis examines how a group of rugby union men (25) aged 18-25, of varied racial identity, ethnic and social backgrounds, participating in an elite university rugby union 1st XV team, experience concerns about the appearance and performance of their bodies and the ways in which such concerns develop. It also examines if and how these men used the sport and health-related sports acts, to overcome their concerns and conceal them from others. A theoretical framework, which draws on the concepts of the three theorists: Connell (1995, 2008) Goffman (1959; 1961; 1979) and Bourdieu (1978; 1979; 1984), is developed. As part of this, a new concept has been created from Goffman s dramaturgical approach: that of the intimate dimension. In this dimension intimate relationships occur. It is located away from the front region, (the public), and the back region (semi-public spaces) where less formal relationships occur. It includes the research interview, with a woman researcher, and some other women such as girlfriends, sisters or female friends and also one or two other rugby men with whom the rugby men demonstrated a close bond. Within this dimension the rugby men are more forthcoming about the personal elements of their rugby lives. The theoretical framework is used to examine these men s concerns, how they are developed, experienced and managed. Recognising that cultural assumptions of a tough and less expressive masculinity assigned to this sport can potentially make it difficult for men to express these concerns, a combination of visual research methods and ethnography are used to examine these men s body concerns and their management. This includes collaborative collection of photography and photo-elicitation interviews. The research shows that embodied experiences of discomfort, associated with pain, injury, concerns about height, being overweight or out of shape, and social experiences of exclusion led to the development of the rugby men s body concerns. For these rugby men, their rugby masculinities are influential to the management and concealment of their body concerns. They suppress and conceal their body concerns in the front and back regions of the sport and reveal them in more intimate dimensions. The rugby men s relationships with each other, in the back regions of the sport, were the most influential to this identity, but more importantly, to the management and reinforcement of these concerns. This thesis contributes to filling the gap in existing academic research by examining body concerns and its management amongst rugby union men. It also extends existing research that has found men conceal their body concerns in sport, because it looks at how these men manage these concerns differently in different regions of their sport. Furthermore, a theoretical framework that combines interactionism and phenomenology is used to study sociologically men s body concerns in these different contexts. The combination of visual methods and ethnography goes beyond some of the existing methods used in clinical and sociological research that have examined men's body concerns. They can be used to enhance understanding of clinical forms of body concern and other emotional concerns rugby union men and other sportsmen, of all ages, have about performance, pain and injury. The incorporation of visual methods is potentially widely applicable because they have increasing precedence in sportsmen s lives to analyse performance and to represent them.

Rugby Union Men: Body Concerns

Existing research shows that increasing numbers of young men are dissatisfied with the appearance of their bodies and that men will use sport and health-related sports acts to conceal these concerns from others. Accordingly, men’s body dissatisfactions are documented less frequently because the practices drawn upon to conceal them are perceived as routine forms of masculine behaviour. Rugby union is one of the most popular sports played by young men in England. Historically, the male rugby player is culturally perceived as strong, tough and unemotionally articulate. Existing research draws attention to health issues, such as performance stress and injury that arise through participation in this sport. Research also shows that rugby union players are likely to experience concerns about gaining weight, yet these are disguised within the requirements of training for the sport. Although, there are studies that examine the constitution of masculinities, the experience of pain and injury and career transitions among rugby union players there are no studies, as yet, that examine how rugby union men experience body concerns and manage these experiences through their sport. The research discussed in this thesis examines how a group of rugby union men (25) aged 18-25, of varied racial identity, ethnic and social backgrounds, participating in university rugby union 1st XV team, experience concerns about the appearance and performance of their bodies and the ways in which such concerns develop. It also examines if and how these men used the sport and health-related sports acts, to overcome their concerns and conceal them from others. A theoretical framework, which draws on the concepts of the three theorists: Connell, Goffman, and Bourdieu is developed. As part of this, a new concept has been created from Goffman’s dramaturgical approach: that of the intimate dimension. In this dimension intimate relationships occur. It is located away from the front region, (the public), and the back region (semi-public spaces) where less formal relationships occur. It includes the research interview, with a woman researcher, and some other women such as girlfriends, sisters or female friends and also one or two other rugby men with whom the rugby men demonstrated a close bond. Within this dimension the rugby men are more forthcoming about the personal elements of their rugby lives. The theoretical framework is used to examine these men’s concerns, how they are developed, experienced and managed. Recognising that cultural assumptions of a tough and less expressive masculinity assigned to this sport can potentially make it difficult for men to express these concerns, a combination of visual research methods and ethnography are used to examine these men’s body concerns and their management. This includes collaborative collection of photography and photo-elicitation interviews. The research shows that embodied experiences of discomfort, associated with pain, injury, concerns about height, being overweight or out of shape, and social experiences of exclusion led to the development of the rugby men’s body concerns. For these rugby men, their rugby masculinities are influential to the management and concealment of their body concerns. They suppress and conceal their body concerns in the front and back regions of the sport and reveal them in more intimate dimensions. The rugby men’s relationships with each other, in the back regions of the sport, were the most influential to this identity, but more importantly, to the management and reinforcement of these concerns. This thesis contributes to filling the gap in existing academic research by examining body concerns and its management amongst rugby union men. It also extends existing research that has found men conceal their body concerns in sport, because it looks at how these men manage these concerns differently in different regions of their sport. Furthermore, a theoretical framework that combines interactionism and phenomenology is used to study sociologically men’s body concerns in these different contexts. The combination of visual methods and ethnography goes beyond some of the existing methods used in clinical and sociological research that have examined men's body concerns. They can be used to enhance understanding of clinical forms of body concern and other emotional concerns rugby union men and other sportsmen, of all ages, have about performance, pain and injury. The incorporation of visual methods is potentially widely applicable because they have increasing precedence in sportsmen’s lives to analyse performance and to represent them

The Nature and Development of Liberal Protestantism in Waterford 1800-42

This thesis examines the development of liberal Protestantism in Waterford between 1800 and 1842. Waterford liberal Protestants had much in common with their British Whig counterparts, but their ideology had been fundamentally altered by the experience of the late eighteenth century. This thesis focuses on the development of liberalism among the Protestant political élite at local level, examining in particular the liberal values among a section of Waterford Corporation and Waterford Chamber of Commerce. The parliamentary activities of Waterford’s Whig representatives are an important theme, and the peculiarly Irish Whiggism of Sir John Newport, an important parliamentary figure in this period, is examined. The most important and defining feature of Irish liberal Protestantism in these years was their support for the removal of political disabilities affecting Irish Catholics. There was a strong tradition of support among Waterford Protestants for Catholic relief, and this support grew in the early decades of the nineteenth century, despite the friction caused by the question of ‘securities’. This support endured into the 1820s, and liberal Protestants played an indispensable role in the famous 1826 election in County Waterford. Despite this, some Waterford liberal Protestants were wary of what they perceived as O’Connell’s demagogic strategies for advancing the Catholic question, and felt marginalised when the political impetus passed into Catholic hands after 1828. Few supported the campaign for a repeal of the union in the 1830s, which left them with few allies on the Catholic side, save for those Catholics who resisted O’Connell’s call for repeal. This greatly reduced the prospects for a non-confessional approach to politics. The 1830s was a difficult decade for Irish liberal Protestants, and this thesis examines the responses of Waterford liberal Protestants to challenges posed by Catholic and pariiamentaiy politics in this decade. Liberal Protestants in Waterford responded to these challenges in a variety of ways, with some maintaining close relations with Irish Catholics and others moving into a closer alliance with a revitalised Irish Toryism, and others retreated from the political scene