Advice to a New Child Services Leader

Offers advice to new leaders of child services agencies in the areas of leadership, administration, communication, and data. Discusses developing a strategy for change, building a management team, working with the media, and measuring workload

Mapping Digital Media Series: New media & news – Measuring the Impact

After nearly 3 years of intensive research across 56 countries the Open Society Foundation has just released the cross cutting, global findings from its Mapping Digital Media Project. OSF’s Marius Dragomir and Mark Thompson introduce our new series covering the report’s findings

Responses of User to New Media Application in Mpu Tantular Museum, East java

The purpose of this paper is to measure user’s responses of the New Media application. An application, called CD Interaktif, is installed to the Museum Mpu Tantular of East Java. In measuring the responses, a survey was conducted to the user of CD Interaktif. The finding shows that user encounter difficulties in accessing the application, user has received acceptable knowledge, and shows expectations from the respected application

Varying the effective refractive index to measure optical transport in random media

We introduce a new approach for measuring both the effective medium and the transport properties of light propagation in heterogeneous media. Our method utilizes the conceptual equivalence of frequency variation with a change in the effective index of refraction. Experimentally, we measure intensity correlations via spectrally resolved refractive index tuning, controlling the latter via changes in the ambient pressure. Our experimental results perfectly match a generalized transport theory that incorporates the effective medium and predicts a precise value for the diffusion constant. Thus, we directly confirm the applicability of the effective medium concept in strongly scattering materials.Comment: 5 pages, 5 figure

New type of ellipsometry in infrared spectroscopy: The double-reference method

We have developed a conceptually new type of ellipsometry which allows the determination of the complex refractive index by simultaneously measuring the unpolarized normal-incidence reflectivity relative to the vacuum and to another reference media. From these two quantities the complex optical response can be directly obtained without Kramers-Kronig transformation. Due to its transparency and large refractive index over a broad range of the spectrum, from the far-infrared to the soft ultraviolet region, diamond can be ideally used as a second reference. The experimental arrangement is rather simple compared to other ellipsometric techniques.Comment: submitted to Appl. Phys. Let

Electronic Mail and New Methods for Measuring Media Richness

Media richness has been defined in the literature in terms of four objective characteristics. A rich medium is one that allows for communication of multiple cues through multiple channels, language variety, immediate feedback and a high degree of personalness (Lengel, 1983; Daft and Lengel, 1986). When this concept is applied to traditional forms of communication, face-to-face interaction is considered to be the richest, followed by the telephone, a letter, a memo and a flyer/bulletin (Lengel, 1983;Trevino, Lengel,Bodensteiner, Gerloff and Muir, 1990). With the acceptance and general use in recent years of electronic forms of communication, such as electronic mail, it is of interest to examine where along this continuum of media richness the new electronic forms lie. This is important to ascertain because the so-called richness imperative suggests that high-rich media are necessary for the effective handling of equivocal situations, while low-rich media are sufficient for situations that are low inequivocality (Trevino et al., 1990). Thus, it is useful to know which media are rich and which are not in determining how to apply the above rule. Electronic mail (E-mail) is a commonly used electronic communication medium. It can be classified as a relatively low-rich, or lean, medium according to the four characteristics of richness. In using E-mail, one is not able to communicate through multiple cues or multiple channels, use of much language variety is limited, immediate feedback may or may not be possible depending on the availability and inclination of the communication partner, and based on the required use of a computer and the written word, it is not generally viewed as a personal mode of communication. However, according to some recent studies in the literature, there is some evidence that E-mail is perceived by its users to be a richer communication medium than its objective characteristics would indicate (Fulk, Schmitz and Ryu, 1995; Kydd and Ferry, 1992; Markus, 1994; Lee, 1994). This suggeststhat there may be subjective factors involved in determining the richness of a medium in addition to the objective characteristics. Thus, we need a way of capturing these subjective factors that will allow us to understand why E-mail (and perhaps other communication media) is perceived to be richer than that dictated by the definition of richness. The purpose of this research is two-fold. First, we suggest that the way in which richness has been measured in the past is not sufficient to allow us to truly understand why E-mail and other electronic media are viewed as either rich or lean. Second, we develop and test an instrument for measuring media richness based on the original definition and description. Lengel (1983) originally used a 100-point scale to measure the richness of traditional communication media such as the telephone, a formal memo and a letter. Trevino et al. (1990) used the same scale to measure the richness of electronic mail and found that it was rated at approximately 75. Unfortunately, this tells us nothing about why respondents evaluated E-mail richness as they did. Is it personalness, feedback, or some other dimension? This research attempts to develop a more robust instrument for measuring richness directly by measuring the four characteristics specified in the definition. There is a precedent for this in Fulk et al. (1995), who took the first step in measuring richness in this way by asking one question per characteristic. We propose a fuller instrument that includes several items percharacteristic which can then be folded into a composite measure of media richness