Mechanisms of Controlled Sharing for Social Networking Users.

Social networking sites are attracting hundreds of millions of users to share information online. One critical task for all of these users is to decided the right audience with which to share. The decision about the audience can be at a coarse level (e.g., deciding to share with everyone, friends of friends, or friends), or at a fine level (e.g., deciding to share with only some of the friends). Performing such controlled sharing tasks can be tedious and error-prone to most users. An active social networking user can have hundreds of contacts. Therefore, it can be difficult to pick the right subset of them to share with. Also, a user can create a lot of content, and each piece of it can be shared to a different audience. In this dissertation, I perform an extensive study of the controlled sharing problem and propose and implement a series of novel tools that help social networking users better perform controlled sharing. I propose algorithms that automatically generate a recommended audience for both static profile items as well as real-time generated content. To help users better understand the recommendations, I propose a relationship explanation tool that helps users understand the relationship between a pair of friends. I perform extensive evaluations to demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of our tools. With our tools, social networking users can control sharing more accurately with less effort. Finally, I also study an existing controlled-sharing tool, namely the circle sharing tool for Google+. I perform extensive data analyses and examine the impact of friend groups sharing behaviors on the development of the social network.PHDComputer Science & EngineeringUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/97999/1/ljfang_1.pd

On Musical Self-Similarity : Intersemiosis as Synecdoche and Analogy

Self-similarity, a concept borrowed from mathematics, is gradually becoming a keyword in musicology. Although a polysemic term, self-similarity often refers to the multi-scalar feature repetition in a set of relationships, and it is commonly valued as an indication for musical ‘coherence’ and ‘consistency’. In this study, Gabriel Pareyon presents a theory of musical meaning formation in the context of intersemiosis, that is, the translation of meaning from one cognitive domain to another cognitive domain (e.g. from mathematics to music, or to speech or graphic forms). From this perspective, the degree of coherence of a musical system relies on a synecdochic intersemiosis: a system of related signs within other comparable and correlated systems. The author analyzes the modalities of such correlations, exploring their general and particular traits, and their operational bounds. Accordingly, the notion of analogy is used as a rich concept through its two definitions quoted by the Classical literature—proportion and paradigm, enormously valuable in establishing measurement, likeness and affinity criteria. At the same time, original arguments by Benoît B. Mandelbrot (1924–2010) are revised, alongside a systematic critique of the literature on the subject. In fact, connecting Charles S. Peirce’s ‘synechism’ with Mandelbrot’s ‘fractality’ is one of the main developments of the present study

Developing understanding of triangle

As children develop concepts of shape they move from a visual understanding to a property based approach to classification. In this study two cohorts, one a longitudinal study from grade 1 to 4 and the other a sample across a school from pre-school to grade 8, were asked to identify triangles. The resulting data shows errors of inclusion are greater than errors of exclusion and suggests an order in which particular properties are attended to as children learn