Mirroring the videos of Anonymous:cloud activism, living networks, and political mimesis

Mirrors describe the multiplication of data across a network. In this article, I examine the politics of mirroring as practiced on videos by the hacktivist network Anonymous. Mirrors are designed to retain visibility on social media platforms and motivate viewers towards activism. They emerge from a particular social structure and propagate a specific symbolic system. Furthermore, mirrors are not exact replicas nor postmodern representations. Rather, mirroring maps a contestation over visibility that entangles both cloud activists and platform firms

Social Media And Health: Implications For Primary Health Care Providers

This report is the second deliverable of the ?Digital Inclusion and Social Knowledge Media for Health: Frameworks and Roadmaps? project. The first discussed the concept of social and digital exclusion whilst this report focuses on the emerging phenomenon of social media. The report outlines current knowledge on the users and usages of social media for health and goes on to discuss social media in the context of a continuing focus (ref. D1.1) on the areas of mental health, smoking cessation and teenage lifestyles. The report concludes with an outline of an approach to a ?social media strategy? and with suggestions for directions for future research

A Framework For Efficient Data Distribution In Peer-to-peer Networks.

Peer to Peer (P2P) models are based on user altruism, wherein a user shares its content with other users in the pool and it also has an interest in the content of the other nodes. Most P2P systems in their current form are not fair in terms of the content served by a peer and the service obtained from swarm. Most systems suffer from free rider\u27s problem where many high uplink capacity peers contribute much more than they should while many others get a free ride for downloading the content. This leaves high capacity nodes with very little or no motivation to contribute. Many times such resourceful nodes exit the swarm or don\u27t even participate. The whole scenario is unfavorable and disappointing for P2P networks in general, where participation is a must and a very important feature. As the number of users increases in the swarm, the swarm becomes robust and scalable. Other important issues in the present day P2P system are below optimal Quality of Service (QoS) in terms of download time, end-to-end latency and jitter rate, uplink utilization, excessive cross ISP traffic, security and cheating threats etc. These current day problems in P2P networks serve as a motivation for present work. To this end, we present an efficient data distribution framework in Peer-to-Peer (P2P) networks for media streaming and file sharing domain. The experiments with our model, an alliance based peering scheme for media streaming, show that such a scheme distributes data to the swarm members in a near-optimal way. Alliances are small groups of nodes that share data and other vital information for symbiotic association. We show that alliance formation is a loosely coupled and an effective way to organize the peers and our model maps to a small world network, which form efficient overlay structures and are robust to network perturbations such as churn. We present a comparative simulation based study of our model with CoolStreaming/DONet (a popular model) and present a quantitative performance evaluation. Simulation results show that our model scales well under varying workloads and conditions, delivers near optimal levels of QoS, reduces cross ISP traffic considerably and for most cases, performs at par or even better than Cool-Streaming/DONet. In the next phase of our work, we focussed on BitTorrent P2P model as it the most widely used file sharing protocol. Many studies in academia and industry have shown that though BitTorrent scales very well but is far from optimal in terms of fairness to end users, download time and uplink utilization. Furthermore, random peering and data distribution in such model lead to suboptimal performance. Lately, new breed of BitTorrent clients like BitTyrant have shown successful strategic attacks against BitTorrent. Strategic peers configure the BitTorrent client software such that for very less or no contribution, they can obtain good download speeds. Such strategic nodes exploit the altruism in the swarm and consume resources at the expense of other honest nodes and create an unfair swarm. More unfairness is generated in the swarm with the presence of heterogeneous bandwidth nodes. We investigate and propose a new token-based anti-strategic policy that could be used in BitTorrent to minimize the free-riding by strategic clients. We also proposed other policies against strategic attacks that include using a smart tracker that denies the request of strategic clients for peer listmultiple times, and black listing the non-behaving nodes that do not follow the protocol policies. These policies help to stop the strategic behavior of peers to a large extent and improve overall system performance. We also quantify and validate the benefits of using bandwidth peer matching policy. Our simulations results show that with the above proposed changes, uplink utilization and mean download time in BitTorrent network improves considerably. It leaves strategic clients with little or no incentive to behave greedily. This reduces free riding and creates fairer swarm with very little computational overhead. Finally, we show that our model is self healing model where user behavior changes from selfish to altruistic in the presence of the aforementioned policies

Towards a global participatory platform: Democratising open data, complexity science and collective intelligence

The FuturICT project seeks to use the power of big data, analytic models grounded in complexity science, and the collective intelligence they yield for societal benefit. Accordingly, this paper argues that these new tools should not remain the preserve of restricted government, scientific or corporate élites, but be opened up for societal engagement and critique. To democratise such assets as a public good, requires a sustainable ecosystem enabling different kinds of stakeholder in society, including but not limited to, citizens and advocacy groups, school and university students, policy analysts, scientists, software developers, journalists and politicians. Our working name for envisioning a sociotechnical infrastructure capable of engaging such a wide constituency is the Global Participatory Platform (GPP). We consider what it means to develop a GPP at the different levels of data, models and deliberation, motivating a framework for different stakeholders to find their ecological niches at different levels within the system, serving the functions of (i) sensing the environment in order to pool data, (ii) mining the resulting data for patterns in order to model the past/present/future, and (iii) sharing and contesting possible interpretations of what those models might mean, and in a policy context, possible decisions. A research objective is also to apply the concepts and tools of complexity science and social science to the project's own work. We therefore conceive the global participatory platform as a resilient, epistemic ecosystem, whose design will make it capable of self-organization and adaptation to a dynamic environment, and whose structure and contributions are themselves networks of stakeholders, challenges, issues, ideas and arguments whose structure and dynamics can be modelled and analysed. Graphical abstrac

Noise mapping based on participative measurements

The high temporal and spatial granularities recommended by the European regulation for the purpose of environmental noise mapping leads to consider new alternatives to simulations for reaching such information. While more and more European cities deploy urban environmental observatories, the ceaseless rising number of citizens equipped with both a geographical positioning system and environmental sensors through their smartphones legitimates the design of outsourced systems that promote citizen participatory sensing. In this context, the OnoM@p system aims at offering a framework for capitalizing on crowd noise data recorded by inexperienced individuals by means of an especially designed mobile phone application. The system fully rests upon open source tools and interoperability standards defined by the Open Geospatial Consortium. Moreover, the implementation of the Spatial Data Infrastructure principle enables to break up as services the various business modules for acquiring, analysing and mapping sound levels. The proposed architecture rests on outsourced processes able to filter outlier sensors and untrustworthy data, to cross- reference geolocalised noise measurements with both geographical and statistical data in order to provide higher level indicators, and to map the collected and processed data based on web services

Spatial and Temporal Sentiment Analysis of Twitter data

The public have used Twitter world wide for expressing opinions. This study focuses on spatio-temporal variation of georeferenced Tweets’ sentiment polarity, with a view to understanding how opinions evolve on Twitter over space and time and across communities of users. More specifically, the question this study tested is whether sentiment polarity on Twitter exhibits specific time-location patterns. The aim of the study is to investigate the spatial and temporal distribution of georeferenced Twitter sentiment polarity within the area of 1 km buffer around the Curtin Bentley campus boundary in Perth, Western Australia. Tweets posted in campus were assigned into six spatial zones and four time zones. A sentiment analysis was then conducted for each zone using the sentiment analyser tool in the Starlight Visual Information System software. The Feature Manipulation Engine was employed to convert non-spatial files into spatial and temporal feature class. The spatial and temporal distribution of Twitter sentiment polarity patterns over space and time was mapped using Geographic Information Systems (GIS). Some interesting results were identified. For example, the highest percentage of positive Tweets occurred in the social science area, while science and engineering and dormitory areas had the highest percentage of negative postings. The number of negative Tweets increases in the library and science and engineering areas as the end of the semester approaches, reaching a peak around an exam period, while the percentage of negative Tweets drops at the end of the semester in the entertainment and sport and dormitory area. This study will provide some insights into understanding students and staff ’s sentiment variation on Twitter, which could be useful for university teaching and learning management

Value implications of open source software : an empirical outlook to the open innovation model

This thesis consists of three essays on open source software (OSS) phenomenon, which constitutes a suitable setting for investigating the open innovation paradigm and the benefits of firm-community collaborations for a firm. The first essay examines the impact of firms’ stocks of intellectual property right endowments on the relationship between firms’ OSS product portfolio and its firm value. The results suggest that firms taking more commercial actions in OSS paradigm enhance their firm value in the presence of large stocks of software patents. On the other hand, software trademark stocks have a negative effect on this relationship. Several potential explanations are proposed in the study, which emphasizes the importance of intellectual property right protection mechanisms for those firms that aim at building an OSS-based product portfolio. The second essay investigates the benefits that might accrue to a firm from their code contributions as reflected in stock market prices. The study builds on recent work in the area of community-based innovation and tries to explain why a firm might benefit from contributing to the commons. The hypotheses are tested on a novel data set that captures the stock market responses to 149 press releases made over a thirteen-year period. The findings suggest that open source code contributions generate positive, abnormal returns for the contributing firm. In addition, we find that contributions of new code rather than existing code generate greater value for the firm—and that contributions of new code to software projects targeted at end-users rather than developers systematically generate even greater returns. The third essay focuses on collaborations among firms and communities for obtaining better outcomes from open source projects. In specific, this study aims to disentangle how organizational design may affect the performance of an OSS project. Project’s management model and employee involvement in the project are treated as potential mediators that may have an effect on the aforementioned relationship. The empirical analysis is undertaken on a sample of OSS projects hosted on the platform SourceForge.net from December 2006 to December 2008. The findings of this study are three fold. First, being directly involved in a project with a specific policy on OSS has a positive effect on project’s performance. Second, coordination by firm has a negative effect on performance. Third, admin as an employee on main duty does not have a direct positive effect on performance. However, it positively moderates the aforementioned relationship. The contributions of these essays to the existing literature can be articulated as follows: The first essay contributes to the current debate on commercialization of OSS, mainly, by establishing the intermediary effect of firms’ IPR holdings on the relationship between OSS commercialization and performance. IPR mechanisms in the form of software patents and software trademarks needed to be investigated as they are crucial firm resources in appropriating returns. This study sheds light on how much these mechanisms matter for performance consequences of commercializing OSS. Moreover, the study empirically shows how mismatching strategies may harm a firm’s performance while the firm attempts to move towards a new business model for better outcomes. The second essay contributes to the literature on community-based innovation by enhancing our understanding of the process by which firms can work within communities. Literature on open innovation encapsulates community-based innovation, as well as other mechanisms by which the firm searches its external environment for knowledge. Other mechanisms—alliances, joint ventures, university collaborations— have been the object of much empirical and theoretical attention in the strategy and technology management literatures. In contrast, community-based innovation has been the object of less scholarly work, but has attracted the attention of academics and practitioners alike, and firm engagement with communities appears to be on the rise. It also contributes to the literature on learning, where communities can provide valuable knowledge to firms, by providing systematic empirical documentation. The third essay contributes to knowledge on benefits of collaborations between firms and OSS communities. Firm’s role in the complex coordination mechanism of the project on project’s success has been investigated. Along this line, the paper can also directly inform managers on the strategies they should apply to assure long term sustainability of their external knowledge sourcing activities through communities. Managing the boundaries of collaborations is essential. Written rules and guidelines lead to fruitful joint development of software.Esta tesis está compuesta por tres ensayos sobre el fenómeno de software de código abierto (SCA), lo que constituye un marco adecuado para la investigación del paradigma de la innovación abierta y los beneficios de las colaboraciones entre empresas y comunidades para una empresa. El primer ensayo analiza el efecto de las reservas de derechos de propiedades intelectuales de una empresa sobre la relación entre el portafolio de productos SCA de empresas y el valor de la empresa. Los resultados sugieren que las empresas que han adoptado medidas comerciales en el paradigma de SCA aumentan su valor en la presencia de grandes cantidades de patentes de software. Por otra parte, la existencia de marcas de software tiene un efecto negativo en esta relación. Varias explicaciones se proponen en el estudio, que hace hincapié en la importancia de los mecanismos de protección de derechos de propiedad intelectual para las empresas que tienen como objetivo la construcción de una cartera de productos basado en SCA. El segundo ensayo investiga los beneficios que una empresa podría obtener por sus contribuciones de código fuente como se refleja en los precios del mercado de valores. El estudio se centra en la línea de investigación de la innovación basada en la comunidad y trata de explicar cómo una empresa puede beneficiarse por contribuir al bien común. Las hipótesis se prueban con un dato nuevo que captura las reacciones del mercado de valores a 149 notas de prensa realizadas durante un período de trece años. Los resultados sugieren que las contribuciones de código abierto generan retornos anormales positivos para la empresa contribuyente. Además, descubrimos que las contribuciones de código nuevo respecto de aquellas de código existente generan mayor valor para la empresa. Y que las contribuciones de código nuevo a los proyectos de software dirigidos a los usuarios finales respecto de aquellos dirigidos a los desarrolladores, generan sistemáticamente aún mayores retornos. El tercer ensayo se centra en la colaboración entre empresas y comunidades para la obtención de mejores resultados de los proyectos de código abierto. En concreto, este estudio tiene como objetivo desentrañar cómo el diseño organizacional puede afectar al rendimiento de un proyecto de software libre. El modelo de gestión del proyecto y la participación de los empleados en el mismo son tratados como mediadores potenciales que pueden tener un efecto en la relación mencionada. El análisis empírico se realiza sobre una muestra de proyectos de software libre alojados en la plataforma SourceForge.net de diciembre 2006 a diciembre de 2008. Los hallazgos de este estudio son los siguientes. En primer lugar, participar directamente en un proyecto con una política específica en SCA tiene un efecto positivo en el rendimiento del proyecto. En segundo lugar, la empresa como la autoridad principal de coordinación tiene un efecto negativo en el rendimiento del proyecto. En tercer lugar, si el administrador es el empleado de la empresa no tiene un efecto directo sobre el rendimiento del proyecto. Sin embargo, modera positivamente la relación entre la empresa coordinadora y el rendimiento del proyecto. Las contribuciones de estos ensayos a la literatura existente pueden articularse de la siguiente manera: El primer ensayo contribuye al debate actual sobre la comercialización de la SCA, sobre todo, estableciendo el efecto intermediario de derechos de propiedad intelectual sobre la relación entre la comercialización de software libre y el rendimiento. Los mecanismos de derechos de propiedad intelectual en forma de patentes de software y las marcas de software necesitan ser investigados, ya que son recursos cruciales de una empresa para poder capturar retornos. Este estudio arroja luz sobre cuánto estos mecanismos importan para el desempeño de comercialización de SCA. Por otra parte, el estudio muestra empíricamente cómo las estrategias incompatibles pueden dañar el rendimiento de la empresa, mientras la empresa pretende avanzar hacia un nuevo modelo de negocio para mejorar su rendimiento. El segundo ensayo contribuye a la literatura de la innovación basada en la comunidad mediante la mejora de nuestra comprensión sobre el proceso por el que las empresas pueden trabajar con comunidades. La literatura sobre la innovación abierta encapsula la innovación basada en la comunidad, tanto como otros mecanismos por los que la empresa busca conocimiento en su entorno externo. Otros mecanismos- alianzas, empresa conjunta, colaboración con universidades- han sido objeto de atención empírica y teórica en la literatura de estrategia y de la gestión tecnológica. Por el contrario, la innovación basada en la comunidad ha sido objeto de trabajo escolar menos a menudo, pero ha atraído la atención de académicos y profesionales también, y la colaboración de las empresas con las comunidades parece estar en aumento. También contribuimos a la literatura del aprendizaje, donde las comunidades pueden proporcionar valiosos conocimientos a las empresas, aportando documentación empírica sistemática. El tercer ensayo contribuye al conocimiento sobre los beneficios de la colaboración entre las empresas y las comunidades de software libre. El papel de la empresa en el mecanismo complejo de la coordinación sobre el éxito del proyecto ha sido investigado. En esta línea, este trabajo también puede informar directamente a los administradores sobre las estrategias, que se deben aplicar, para asegurar la sostenibilidad de la adquisición de conocimiento desde los recursos externos a largo plazo, a través de las actividades de las comunidades. La gestión de los límites de la colaboración es esencial. Las normas y directrices escritas conducen al proceso beneficioso de creación conjunto de software