Consume, Modify, Share (CMS): The Interplay between Individual Decisions and Structural Network Properties in the Diffusion of Information

Widely used information diffusion models such as Independent Cascade Model, Susceptible Infected Recovered (SIR) and others fail to acknowledge that information is constantly subject to modification. Some aspects of information diffusion are best explained by network structural characteristics while in some cases strong influence comes from individual decisions. We introduce reinvention, the ability to modify information, as an individual level decision that affects the diffusion process as a whole. Based on a combination of constructs from the Diffusion of Innovations and the Critical Mass Theories, the present study advances the CMS (consume, modify, share) model which accounts for the interplay between network structure and human behavior and interactions. The model's building blocks include processes leading up to and following the formation of a critical mass of information adopters and disseminators. We examine the formation of an inflection point, information reach, sustainability of the diffusion process and collective value creation. The CMS model is tested on two directed networks and one undirected network, assuming weak or strong ties and applying constant and relative modification schemes. While all three networks are designed for disseminating new knowledge they differ in structural properties. Our findings suggest that modification enhances the diffusion of information in networks that support undirected connections and carries the biggest effect when information is shared via weak ties. Rogers' diffusion model and traditional information contagion models are fine tuned. Our results show that modifications not only contribute to a sustainable diffusion process, but also aid information in reaching remote areas of the network. The results point to the importance of cultivating weak ties, allowing reciprocal interaction among nodes and supporting the modification of information in promoting diffusion processes. These results have theoretical and practical implications for designing networks aimed at accelerating the creation and diffusion of information

Investigating climate information services through a gendered lens

This paper explores access to climate change-related information through a gendered lens. Climate change is rapidly affecting the lives of farmers throughout the world, producing a need for adaptive agricultural livelihoods strategies. A central mechanism in the development of adaptive strategies to climate change is the strengthening and effective utilization of information channels. The more relevant and useful the information is to the user, the better the user may be able to adapt to changes in climate. Despite this critical need for accessing climate-related information, many of the people who are most vulnerable to climate change and environmental shocks are often on the periphery of receiving practical information. In this paper, we show that women farmers are overwhelmingly left out of many forms of communication channels. Thus, the purpose of this study is to identify instances in which methods of communication are missing women and how to overcome these gaps. What we propose is a context-dependent hybridization of traditional methods of communication, which are familiar to communities, and modern technologies, which can be expedient in sharing new scientific climate knowledge with farmers

State policy innovation and transfer: The role of bureaucratic professional communication networks

The central question of this research is, what is the role of state administrative agencies in the innovation and transfer of public policy? One of the theoretical perspectives of the study of public policy examines the borrowing of one nation or U.S. state\u27s policy by another followed by adaptation to the new jurisdiction. The past focus of most of this research has been on legislative policy adoptions. This study draws upon a different perspective, bureaucratic adoptions of public policy.;A two-fold approach is employed, using both quantitative and qualitative research techniques. Information was gathered on both state agencies and their lead officials by telephone, in person, and through written survey instruments. Further documentary data were drawn from a variety of sources on state public health agencies and other political and economic characteristics of individual U.S. states. This information was used in two ways.;First, a detailed depiction describes the professional communication networks of state public health agency officials. The literature on policy transfer assumes the use of such a network, but past research has neither described the network and its mechanisms of communication nor substantiated its existence. The primary finding of this section is that such a communication network exists but that it occurs on an ad hoc rather than systematic basis. This research also demonstrates the importance of various specific communication mechanisms to state public health officials for the transfer of policy and programmatic information.;Secondly, this research addresses the possible differences between legislative and bureaucratic policy adoption. Using OLS regression, two different models of the determinants of policy innovation are tested. A comparison is made between legislative adoption of policy and bureaucratic adoption of policy. The central finding is that the determinants of legislative policy adoption do different from the determinants of bureaucratic policy adoption.;This research demonstrates the importance of examining policy innovation and transfer from the perspective of multiple political and policymaking institutions, in particular, the bureaucracy. It also broadens our understanding of the coalitions of policymakers that exist that create U.S. state public policy

Investigating the main implementation factors of M-commerce: A case study in Saderat Bank, Iran

Nowadays, M-Commerce influences on organizational and social activities cause to change the nature of performance styles. This research explores how organizations are influenced to adopt the M-commerce. The research employed the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to examine factors affecting organization attitudes toward this emerging mobile technology and applications. In present research the sample size consisted of 79 employees that were selected at random from 42 branches of employees from Saderat Bank in Tabriz-Iran in 2012. Data analyses were carried out by using Factor Analysis, Structural Equation and Freidman Mean Ranking Test. The results of present study illustrated that there was a significant relationship between factors together, and also considering the Ranking Analyses it can be said that the Compatibility of performance factors is more important factor than others for improving M-Commerce in studied place

Investigating the main implementation factors of M-commerce: A case study in Saderat Bank, Iran

Nowadays, M-Commerce influences on organizational and social activities cause to change the nature of performance styles. This research explores how organizations are influenced to adopt the M-commerce. The research employed the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to examine factors affecting organization attitudes toward this emerging mobile technology and applications. In present research the sample size consisted of 79 employees that were selected at random from 42 branches of employees from Saderat Bank in Tabriz-Iran in 2012. Data analyses were carried out by using Factor Analysis, Structural Equation and Freidman Mean Ranking Test. The results of present study illustrated that there was a significant relationship between factors together, and also considering the Ranking Analyses it can be said that the Compatibility of performance factors is more important factor than others for improving M-Commerce in studied place

Investigating the main implementation factors of M-commerce: A case study in Saderat Bank, Iran

Nowadays, M-Commerce influences on organizational and social activities cause to change the nature of performance styles. This research explores how organizations are influenced to adopt the M-commerce. The research employed the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) to examine factors affecting organization attitudes toward this emerging mobile technology and applications. In present research the sample size consisted of 79 employees that were selected at random from 42 branches of employees from Saderat Bank in Tabriz-Iran in 2012. Data analyses were carried out by using Factor Analysis, Structural Equation and Freidman Mean Ranking Test. The results of present study illustrated that there was a significant relationship between factors together, and also considering the Ranking Analyses it can be said that the Compatibility of performance factors is more important factor than others for improving M-Commerce in studied place

Rethinking Invention: Cognition and the Economics of Technological Creativity

Economists have typically not devoted much attention to the act of invention. This paper attempts to redress this situation by exploring a form of cognition, analogical transfer, which is thought by some researchers to lie at the heart of successful creativity. An analogical transfer is said to have occurred when information and experiences from one known situation is retrieved and utilized in the search for the solution to an entirely different situation. This paper shows how such analogical thought can give rise to a theoretical framework, in which disparate factors pertaining to technological creativity can be pieced together to yield an explanation of the level of inventive output experienced.invention, technological change, technological creativity, problem solving, learning.

Northern Sparks

An “episode of light” in Canada sparked by Expo 67 when new art forms, innovative technologies, and novel institutional and policy frameworks emerged together. Understanding how experimental art catalyzes technological innovation is often prized yet typically reduced to the magic formula of “creativity.” In Northern Sparks, Michael Century emphasizes the role of policy and institutions by showing how novel art forms and media technologies in Canada emerged during a period of political and social reinvention, starting in the 1960s with the energies unleashed by Expo 67. Debunking conventional wisdom, Century reclaims innovation from both its present-day devotees and detractors by revealing how experimental artists critically challenge as well as discover and extend the capacities of new technologies. Century offers a series of detailed cross-media case studies that illustrate the cross-fertilization of art, technology, and policy. These cases span animation, music, sound art and acoustic ecology, cybernetic cinema, interactive installation art, virtual reality, telecommunications art, software applications, and the emergent metadiscipline of human-computer interaction. They include Norman McLaren's “proto-computational” film animations; projects in which the computer itself became an agent, as in computer-aided musical composition and choreography; an ill-fated government foray into interactive networking, the videotext system Telidon; and the beginnings of virtual reality at the Banff Centre. Century shows how Canadian artists approached new media technologies as malleable creative materials, while Canada undertook a political reinvention alongside its centennial celebrations. Northern Sparks offers a uniquely nuanced account of innovation in art and technology illuminated by critical policy analysis

Shifting place identities in a post-conflict society : irony and multiculturality in Quemoy, Taiwan

ABSTRACT Quemoy is a small island with an area of fifty-eight square miles at the mouth of Xiamen Bay on the southeast coast of China. As a Cold-War front of Taiwan shelled by the Chinese artillery for twenty years, Quemoy is becoming a heritage tourism destination attracting mainland Chinese to sightsee in its military structures. In this study, I examine landscape change in the post-conflict society through the interplay of three social dynamics—reconciliation, demilitarization, and touristification—exploring the cultural mechanism of landscape change and its meaning. Through a review of Quemoy’s history, I identify Quemoy’s geographical characteristics—marginality, cultural hybridity, and islandness—formed and articulated in a repetitive process that I term as the reversal of geographical coordinate system. The reversal coincides with a change of social concerns in the marginal society, whose negotiations with terrestrial and maritime powers direct its engaging front toward the land or the sea, and stimulates distinct human inscriptions in the landscape. Militarization of Quemoy as Chinese Nationalists’ Cold-War front initiated the last reversal, which turned its front toward the mainland China in 1949 and brought forth a military landscape characterized by its rigidity, hierarchy, and pragmatism. Simultaneously, the militarization incurred biopolitical production through militia duty, everyday regulation, combat economy, and battlefield knowledge. As the 1949-reversal is now dissolving under current demilitarization, from reinvention and destruction of military structures I reveal irony in the landscape as a way of cultural demilitarization subverting the significance of the past anticommunist conflicts. Furthermore, by reconstruction of historical landscapes and reinterpretation of symbolic landscapes, Quemoyans (re)localize landscape and jointly engage in a process of homeland construction. The juxtaposition of historical simulacra and reinvented military relics produces heterotopias of a museum island for heritage tourism. Consequently, the production of irony and heterotopias together serves as the cultural mechanism of the current identity reformulation from a battlefield to a heritage tourism destination. Uncovering the mechanism, I then demonstrate that ambiguity and multiculturality emerging from this irony’s multivocality and heterotopia’s multilocality is a cultural strategy of the border island society to negotiate with the post-conflict situation

The Diffusion of Cyber Forces: Military Innovation and the Dynamic Implementation of Cyber Force Structure

What explains the variation in implementation dynamics for cyber forces across militaries? In other words, as cyber forces emerge in states across the international system, why do some militaries undertake wide-ranging implementation efforts with few alterations to cyber force structure, while implementation in other militaries is characterized by a drawn-out, incremental process entailing several changes in cyber force structure? Militaries have been building cyber capabilities since the late 1980s; however, formalized military cyber organizations for these capabilities have only recently emerged. These cyber forces—active-duty military organizations that possess the capability and authority to direct and control computer network operations (CNOs) for strategic ends—have received little attention from scholars. Despite the potential impacts cyber forces might hold for international security dynamics, there exists no comprehensive overview of cyber forces and no analysis on the various ways they have been implemented across militaries. Moreover, current explanations drawn from the diffusion of military innovations remain incomplete in explaining the ways in which cyber force structure change over the course of the implementation process. In this dissertation, I examine the diffusion and implementation of cyber forces and advance a theory of organizational size to account for the varying implementation dynamics across militaries. My dissertation makes two important contributions to the growing literature on cyber conflict. First, I offer a novel typology for categorizing cyber forces and the respective force structures. By classifying cyber forces according to organizational model and scale of command, I identify nine distinct cyber force structures: Subordinated Branch, Subordinated Service, Subordinated Joint, Sub-Unified Branch, Sub-Unified Service, Sub-Unified Joint, Unified Branch, Unified Service, and Unified Joint. The second contribution is empirical: I create the first comprehensive database to catalogue the diffusion of cyber forces and evolution of cyber force structures across state—the Dataset on Cyber Force Structures. This dissertation also makes three broader contributions to the study of the diffusion of military innovations. First, I show how organizational characteristics mitigate diffusion pressures by constraining or enabling innovation and implementation. This dissertation moves past debates that portray militaries as either change-resistant or innovation-seeking organizations by providing a more nuanced claim: organizational characteristics—such as size—can predispose militaries to pursue certain types of changes while creating resistance to others. As such, this dissertation sheds important light on the ways in which the military organizational factors can shape the agency and decisions of those implementing an innovation principle. Second, I advance a stage-based conception of implementation for diffusion frameworks comprised of five stages: pre-adoption, introduction, modification, expansion, and full implementation. This framework can account for both partial and full adoption and provides a way to assess intermediate changes to an innovation prior to its full institutionalization. As a result, I use this framework to showcase the value of stage-based theorizing. Third, this dissertation introduces new methodological tools for testing stage-based hypotheses about adoption and implementation. In conjunction with qualitative analysis, this dissertation utilizes multistate survival modeling to assess variable effects at each stage of the implementation process. Traditional modeling techniques in the military diffusion literature—such as logistic regressions and basic survival modeling—prove both cumbersome and inadequate for assessing stage-based processes. In using multistate survival modeling, I emphasize the importance of matching methods to conceptual and theoretical assumptions