Why Do Makers Make? Examining Designer Motivations on Thingiverse.com

Technological advancements have made a once fictitious dream into a reality. 3D printing has become a popular manufacturing and design technique used all over the world. As this industry becomes more popular, users of these 3D printers are reaching out across the web to share designs, seek help, and build communities of users with similar interests. This study is meant to look at what motivates 3D printing users to participate in online user innovation communities such as Thingiverse.com. This study will explore motivations such as personal needs, financial gains, approval of peers, skill development, and enjoyment. Moreover, it will assess the impact of each of these motivations on the number of designs created by designers within the observation period (May 2017-May 2018) and on the market response to these designs. To study these elements, we first perused research done in previous studies on motivations in brand communities, transactional communities, and user innovation communities to create a literature review. Following the literature review, a survey was created which asked Thingiverse makers 5 sets of questions related to their specific motivations for creating and sharing designs and asked them to provide demographic data as well. The results obtained from this research indicate that the motivation to satisfy a personal need has a marginally significant, negative impact on the number of designs created by a maker while the desire to gain approval from others in the community has a significant, positive effect on market response to those designs. Additionally, it was found that a desire for financial gain has little to no effect on the number of designs created or on the market response, a result which was surprising considering that 25% of the respondents reported earning money from 3D printing. These results and their implications as well as future research directions are outlined in the concluding discussion section

Stance detection on social media: State of the art and trends

Stance detection on social media is an emerging opinion mining paradigm for various social and political applications in which sentiment analysis may be sub-optimal. There has been a growing research interest for developing effective methods for stance detection methods varying among multiple communities including natural language processing, web science, and social computing. This paper surveys the work on stance detection within those communities and situates its usage within current opinion mining techniques in social media. It presents an exhaustive review of stance detection techniques on social media, including the task definition, different types of targets in stance detection, features set used, and various machine learning approaches applied. The survey reports state-of-the-art results on the existing benchmark datasets on stance detection, and discusses the most effective approaches. In addition, this study explores the emerging trends and different applications of stance detection on social media. The study concludes by discussing the gaps in the current existing research and highlights the possible future directions for stance detection on social media.Comment: We request withdrawal of this article sincerely. We will re-edit this paper. Please withdraw this article before we finish the new versio

A community health support system for the planning of healthy cities

Communities are at the centre of concern for sustainable development, and they are entitled to a healthy and productive life, in harmony with the natural environment. Therefore, assuring equitable and effective health services through community and environmental health planning is an important factor for promoting sustainable development and constructing harmonious societies. Environmental and community health is crucial for the development of sustainable and healthy cities. One of the important pre-requisites of developing a sustainable and healthy city is a sound planning and development mechanism. This paper aims to investigate the challenges and opportunities of planning for healthy cities, and examine the effectiveness of participatory decision making systems in the development of healthy communities. It also introduces a recently developed methodology based on a web-based decision support system. This system contributes to solving environmental and community health problems, supports planning of healthy cities, and provides a powerful and effective platform for stakeholders and interested members of the community to confer with technicians, experts and decision makers. The primary focus is on the prospects and constraints of such a decision support system in improving community health behaviours, health planning, surveillance in urban communities, and environmental planning. The effectiveness of the web-based decision support system is measured by using the following yardsticks: increasing cooperation between stakeholders and the general public; improving the accuracy and quality of the decision-making process; and enhancing healthcare services of the locality. The paper tables the preliminary findings of the initial implementation of the decision support system in a pilot case study of the city of Logan, Australia, and concludes with future research directions

High-throughput sequencing for community analysis: the promise of DNA barcoding to uncover diversity, relatedness, abundances and interactions in spider communities

Large-scale studies on community ecology are highly desirable but often difficult to accomplish due to the considerable investment of time, labor and, money required to characterize richness, abundance, relatedness, and interactions. Nonetheless, such large-scale perspectives are necessary for understanding the composition, dynamics, and resilience of biological communities. Small invertebrates play a central role in ecosystems, occupying critical positions in the food web and performing a broad variety of ecological functions. However, it has been particularly difficult to adequately characterize communities of these animals because of their exceptionally high diversity and abundance. Spiders in particular fulfill key roles as both predator and prey in terrestrial food webs and are hence an important focus of ecological studies. In recent years, large-scale community analyses have benefitted tremendously from advances in DNA barcoding technology. High-throughput sequencing (HTS), particularly DNA metabarcoding, enables community-wide analyses of diversity and interactions at unprecedented scales and at a fraction of the cost that was previously possible. Here, we review the current state of the application of these technologies to the analysis of spider communities. We discuss amplicon-based DNA barcoding and metabarcoding for the analysis of community diversity and molecular gut content analysis for assessing predator-prey relationships. We also highlight applications of the third generation sequencing technology for long read and portable DNA barcoding. We then address the development of theoretical frameworks for community-level studies, and finally highlight critical gaps and future directions for DNA analysis of spider communities

An Application of Multimedia Services on Transportation: The Use of the World Wide Web (WWW)

INTRODUCTION In recent years, there is an ever-increasing demand and interest in the use of multimedia technology and applications in industry, government and academia. Multimedia is often seen by researchers as the next step forward in interfacing science, technology and community. Yet, the terminology of multimedia bears several meanings. It may refer to Compact Disc (CD), moving pictures or video-conferencing. The multimedia technology referred in this paper is the World Wide Web (WWW) hypertext publishing information system which was developed by and started at the European Laboratory for Particle Physics (CERN) in Geneva, Switzerland. Since the introduction of WWW, its use has increased dramatically within a couple of years in a widely diverse community including government departments, university and research establishments, and commercial organisations. It has significant influence to our communities and our daily lives. Yet, in most cases, applications of WWW services are largely restricted to electronic library referencelcatalogue search facilities, electronic mail systems, electronic conference and discussion systems, electronic news and publishing agents, and remote access to computing resources on the Internet. The primary objective of this paper is to exploit the potential of this multimedia technology as a simple, easy-to-use and effective means of telematics application in transportation research. It is hoped that initiatives are highlighted via this study and hence encourage participations and collaborations from different sectors of industries. In this paper, a brief history of WWW is given in section (2). An overview of the technical aspects in providing a WWW service is presented in section (3) in terms of computer hardware requirements, software installation, network connections, application maintenance and administration, and system security. Compared to most commercially available multimedia software in the market, WWW services are cheap to run, userfriendly and readily available to the public on the Internet. In order to exploit the potential of WWW on transportation research, a study was carried out and results of the findings are reported in section (4). To further substantiate the level of usefulness, two particular WWW applications were chosen amongst other web services and they are reported in section (5) for illustrative purposes. The selected applications are the 'Transportation Resources on the Internet' developed in mid-1994 in the Institute for Transport Studies (ITS) at the University of Leeds in England, and the 'Southern California Real-Time Traffic Report' developed by Maxwell Laboratories, Inc. in collaboration with the California State Department of Transportation in the US. Finally, a set of issues are raised in section (6), highlighting the directions of future development of WWW as an easy-touse, cheap and effective multimedia telematics application on transportation

Open educational resources - new directions for technology-enhanced distance learning in the third millennium

Open Educational Resources (OERs) are an innovation giving new opportunities for learning and distance education. OERs are typically provided as courses but also include smaller units of learning and their components of audio, text or image files made available on the internet free of charge; usually under a Creative Commons License (Creative Commons, 2007). This license takes the approach of 'some rights reserved' for the materials replacing the 'all rights reserved' attitude of standard copyright (Lessig, 2004). Distance education based in OERs removes limits and offers the possibility of widening participation in education. This can include hard-to-reach groups which have little or no access to education or, for example small businesses and individuals who feel they could benefit from professional development and access to current knowledge about a topic of interest. The release of OERs can be a 'public good' for educational inclusion purposes, but they also could mark the first steps towards a revolution on the way people learn. So far, access to knowledge as taught at university level has been restricted to academic institutions. These institutions not only 'create the knowledge' but also have regulated the ways in which it can be accessed. A pattern is in place of establishing course registration procedures, charging fees, conferring grants, assessing performance and awarding degrees, These mechanisms form part of a traditional system of education that can be found all over the world

Virtual EQ – the talent differentiator in 2020?

In an increasingly competitive, globalised world, knowledge-intensive industries/ services are seen as engines for success. Key to this marketplace is a growing army of ‘talent’ i.e. skilled and dedicated knowledge workers. These knowledge workers engage in non-routine problem solving through combining convergent, divergent and creative thinking across organizational and company boundaries - a process often facilitated though the internet and social media, consequently forming networks of expertise. For knowledge workers, sharing their learning with others through communities of practice embedded in new information media becomes an important element of their personal identity and the creation of their individual brand or e-social reputation. Part of the new knowledge/skills needed for this process becomes not only emotional intelligence (being attuned to the emotional needs of others) but being able to do this within and through new media, thus the emergence of virtual emotional intelligence (EQ). Our views of current research found that HRD practitioners in 2020 might need to consider Virtual EQ as part of their talent portfolio. However it seems that new technology has created strategies for capturing and managing knowledge that are readily duplicated and that a talent differentiator in 2020 might simply be the ability and willingness to learn