Social Information Processing in Social News Aggregation

The rise of the social media sites, such as blogs, wikis, Digg and Flickr among others, underscores the transformation of the Web to a participatory medium in which users are collaboratively creating, evaluating and distributing information. The innovations introduced by social media has lead to a new paradigm for interacting with information, what we call 'social information processing'. In this paper, we study how social news aggregator Digg exploits social information processing to solve the problems of document recommendation and rating. First, we show, by tracking stories over time, that social networks play an important role in document recommendation. The second contribution of this paper consists of two mathematical models. The first model describes how collaborative rating and promotion of stories emerges from the independent decisions made by many users. The second model describes how a user's influence, the number of promoted stories and the user's social network, changes in time. We find qualitative agreement between predictions of the model and user data gathered from Digg.Comment: Extended version of the paper submitted to IEEE Internet Computing's special issue on Social Searc

Bounded Rationality and Learning in Complex Markets

This chapter reviews some work on bounded rationality, expectation formation and learning in complex markets, using the familiar demand-supply cobweb model. We emphasize two stories of bounded rationality, one story of adaptive learning and another story of evolutionary selection. According to the adaptive learning story agents are identical, and can be represented by an ``average agent'', who adapts his behavior trying to learn an optimal rule within a class of simple (e.g. linear) rules. The second story is concerned with heterogeneous, interacting agents and evolutionary selection of different forecasting rules. Agents can choose between costly sophisticated forecasting strategies, such as rational expectations, and freely available simple strategies, such as naive expectations, based upon their past performance. We also confront both stories to laboratory experiments on expectation formation. At the end of the chapter, we integrate both stories and consider an economy with evolutionary selection between a costly sophisticated adaptive learning rule and a cheap simple forecasting rule such as naive expectations.

On the writing, reading and publishing of digital stories

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to describe a study set up to investigate and map the landscape of digital writing today. A holistic perspective has been adopted involving writers, readers and publishers alike. Design/methodology/approach – The research uses a qualitative approach and combines interviews and direct observations. In in-depth interviews 13 participants (four writers, four publishers, three readers and two on-line readers) were questioned for their opinions on issues related to writing, publishing and reading digital fiction. The three readers were also observed while interacting, for the first time, with three digital stories. Findings – Results show that the area is still unsettled though much excitement surrounds experimentations and freedom of publishing online. Readers seem uneasy with the role of co-creators that writers want to assign them and prefer linear stories to more deconstructed ones. Writers like to experiment and combine multiple media and readers like to interact with multimedia stories; this seems to open interesting perspectives over interactive narrative. Publishers are not yet involved in digital writing and this is seen simultaneously as a blessing (unfiltering of innovative ideas) and a curse (lack of economical support, lack of quality selection). Despite disagreement and ambiguity all interviewees agree that digital fiction will come, likely prompted by new reading technology. Originality/value – This paper is the first attempt to understand the phenomena of digital writing taking into consideration the perspectives of writers, readers and publishers simultaneously and comparing their different views

Interact: A Mixed Reality Virtual Survivor for Holocaust Testimonies

In this paper we present Interact---a mixed reality virtual survivor for Holocaust education. It was created to preserve the powerful and engaging experience of listening to, and interacting with, Holocaust survivors, allowing future generations of audience access to their unique stories. Interact demonstrates how advanced filming techniques, 3D graphics and natural language processing can be integrated and applied to specially-recorded testimonies to enable users to ask questions and receive answers from that virtualised individuals. This provides a new and rich interactive narratives of remembrance to engage with primary testimony. We discuss the design and development of Interact, and argue that this new form of mixed reality is promising media to overcome the uncanny valley

Learning from Viral Content

We study learning on social media with an equilibrium model of users interacting with shared news stories. Rational users arrive sequentially and each observes an original story (i.e., a private signal) and a sample of predecessors' stories in a news feed, then decides which stories to share. The observed sample of stories depends on what predecessors share as well as the sampling algorithm, which represents a design choice of the platform. We focus on how much the algorithm relies on virality (how many times a story has been previously shared) when generating news feeds. Showing users more viral stories can increase information aggregation, but it can also generate steady states where most shared stories are wrong. Such misleading steady states self-perpetuate, as users who observe these wrong stories develop wrong beliefs, and thus rationally continue to share them. We find that these bad steady states appear discontinuously, and even a benevolent platform designer either accepts these misleading steady states or induces fragile learning outcomes in the optimal design

Planning formalisms and authoring in interactive storytelling

Interacting Storytelling systems integrate AI techniques such as planning with narrative representations to generate stories. In this paper, we discuss the use of planning formalisms in Interactive Storytelling from the perspective of story generation and authoring. We compare two different planning formalisms, Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planning and Heuristic Search Planning (HSP). While HTN provide a strong basis for narrative coherence in the context of interactivity, HSP offer additional flexibility and the generation of stories and the mechanisms for generating comic situations

Early career teacher resilience:a narrative inquiry into first year teaching experiences of high school teachers in Indonesia

Abstract. Based on the teachers’ stories, this study focuses on lived experiences of early career teachers who teach at the high school level in Indonesia. It aims to understand what the teachers tell about their first-year teaching experiences, and to identify how resilience appears in their stories. Teacher resilience is related to the capacity to live through and surmount the inevitable challenges in the realities of teaching. It is understood that the development of teacher resilience is not only about the internal process, but also the teachers’ interaction with their social environment. The methodology of this study employs the principles of narrative inquiry with four early career teachers from Indonesia as the participants. When this study was conducted, all of them were in their second year of teaching, and the stories of their first-year experiences were the subject of inquiry. The data collection methods included the line drawing to depict teachers’ chronological lived experiences, and the narrative interviews to get teachers’ stories. Afterward, the analysis of narrative was applied to the four stories which yielded themes that appeared across the stories. The findings of this study consist of seven themes discussing the teachers’ stories that lead them to resilience. Those themes are: encountering inevitable circumstances; enduring physical and emotional pressure; interacting with empathetic and supportive relationships; undergoing self-reflection that uncovers value and purpose for being a teacher; formulating strategy to overcome adversity; experiencing stronger self after going through adversity; and receiving acknowledgement from students who conceded experiencing positive transformation upon interacting with the teachers. Also, the resilience of the teachers appeared in their stories as a process. This process was demonstrated in expressing emotions, self-reflection and formulating a strategy to overcome adversity. By going through this process, outcomes such as high self-efficacy, and a capacity to manage emotions and alternate their thoughts about adversity were seen in the teachers’ stories. Teachers’ resilience is not static and fixed at a point. It develops over time as teachers surmount challenges. Thus, it is recommendable that teachers are aware of their values, thoughts, purpose, and connections with others, especially when they are in the face of adversities

Launching Language and Literacy Development Through Listening

To promote language development and literacy for my special needs students, I will audio record books so my students can listen to stories before they are used for whole group or small group instruction. The audio books will pre-teach vocabulary, model fluent and expressive reading, and guide comprehension. It is my hypothesis and my hope that by giving students the opportunity to interact with stories individually prior to interacting with them in a group setting; it will increase comprehension, vocabulary, language development, participation in group lessons, self-confidence and overall literacy development

EFFECT OF USING INSTAGRAM STORIES ON PHUBBING BEHAVIOR IN THE GENERATION Z OF SALATIGA

Instagram Stories is one of the main features of Instagram. Indonesia becomes one of the most active countries in using and creating Instagram Stories content compared to other countries.  However, the use of the Instagram Stories feature has raised concerns because of the daily activities, such as food consumed, holiday activities, and emotions that become the public consumptions by sharing moments using photos or videos through the Instagram Stories feature. When people use the feature on Instagram Stories to take moments and daily activities, this behavior triggers the ignorance of social interactions surrounding them because they only focus on creating Instagram Stories. The phenomenon of the moments’ preservation through Instagram Stories feature can create phubbing behavior as a definition that describes someone’s indifferent behavior in an environment. They tend to focus on their smartphones rather than interacting with their surroundings. This study was conducted to explore the influence of using Instagram Stories on Generation Z’s phubbing behavior in Salatiga city. It used quantitative methods with the linear regression technique. It used a purposive random sampling technique with 397 respondents as the samples. The result of this study showed that the use of Instagram Stories affects the phubbing behavior in Generation Z in Salatiga, as for the percentage of the influence of the variable use in Instagram Stories toward phubbing behavior is 31.1%. The rest, which is 68.9%, is affected by other factors outside of the use of Instagram Stories that were not conducted by the researcher

The Return to the Past in Williams & Eliade

Compares the use of displacement in time in the plots of Charles Williams’s Descent Into Hell and Mircea Eliade’s novella Nights at Serampore. Both stories involve protagonists interacting with violent events taking place in the past of their presentday location. Williams’s principle of exchange makes Pauline’s experience a joyful and numinous one; Eliade’s story ends more ambiguously, with the participants deriving no spiritual meaning from their experience other than a sense of the illusory nature of what is experienced through the senses. Ellwood goes on to examine real -world stories of similar retrocognitive events and finds recorded examples of both spiritually numinous and ambiguous experiences