Predicting the socio-technical future (and other myths)

A snooker ball model implies that simple, linear and predictable social change follows from the introduction of new technologies. Unfortunately technology does not have and has never had simple linear predictable social impacts. In this chapter we show that in most measurable ways, the pervasiveness of modern information and communication technologies has had little discernable ?impact? on most human behaviours of sociological significance. Historians of technology remind us that human society co-evolves with the technology it invents and that the eventual social and economic uses of a technology often turn out to be far removed from those originally envisioned. Rather than using the snooker ball model to attempt to predict future ICT usage and revenue models that are inevitably wrong, we suggest that truly participatory, grounded innovation, open systems and adaptive revenue models can lead us to a more effective, flexible and responsive innovation process

Modeling Interdependent and Periodic Real-World Action Sequences

Mobile health applications, including those that track activities such as exercise, sleep, and diet, are becoming widely used. Accurately predicting human actions is essential for targeted recommendations that could improve our health and for personalization of these applications. However, making such predictions is extremely difficult due to the complexities of human behavior, which consists of a large number of potential actions that vary over time, depend on each other, and are periodic. Previous work has not jointly modeled these dynamics and has largely focused on item consumption patterns instead of broader types of behaviors such as eating, commuting or exercising. In this work, we develop a novel statistical model for Time-varying, Interdependent, and Periodic Action Sequences. Our approach is based on personalized, multivariate temporal point processes that model time-varying action propensities through a mixture of Gaussian intensities. Our model captures short-term and long-term periodic interdependencies between actions through Hawkes process-based self-excitations. We evaluate our approach on two activity logging datasets comprising 12 million actions taken by 20 thousand users over 17 months. We demonstrate that our approach allows us to make successful predictions of future user actions and their timing. Specifically, our model improves predictions of actions, and their timing, over existing methods across multiple datasets by up to 156%, and up to 37%, respectively. Performance improvements are particularly large for relatively rare and periodic actions such as walking and biking, improving over baselines by up to 256%. This demonstrates that explicit modeling of dependencies and periodicities in real-world behavior enables successful predictions of future actions, with implications for modeling human behavior, app personalization, and targeting of health interventions.Comment: Accepted at WWW 201

The Dialectics of Parenting: Changes in the Interplay of Maternal Behaviors during Early and Middle Childhood

Parent and child relationships continuously evolve, part of an ongoing dialectic that derives from developmental changes in both parent and child. The focus of this study is on changes in the strength of association among four types of parenting behaviors considered important for children’s development: supportive presence, respect for autonomy, stimulation, and hostility. Mother–child interaction was observed for 1229 parent–child dyads at 36 months, 54 months, 1st grade, 3rd grade, and 5th grade using similar observational paradigms. The association between respect for autonomy and supportive presence was strong at age three and continued to be strong over time. The association between respect for autonomy and stimulation was modest but also showed little change from age three to 5th grade. Respect for autonomy was negatively associated with maternal hostility, but the relation was complex. It was stronger at 54 months than 36 months but then became weaker through time. Supportive presence showed a moderate relation with stimulation at age 3 but the association became weaker over time. Supportive presence showed an expected negative association with hostility, a relation that changed little over time. The relation between hostility and stimulation also became weaker over time. In effect, there appears to be a shifting pattern of relations between maternal behaviors during early and middle childhood, one that reflects an evolving dialectic in the mother–child relationship

The effects of academic libraries’ resource, expenditure, and service decisions on library use: An analysis of ACRL and NCES data

Academic libraries are key contributors to the instructional and research missions of their parent institutions, but often struggle to demonstrate specifically what they do and how that affects institutional outcomes. High-impact educational practices are one area where libraries make a difference, but where explicit connections between activities and outcomes are not always articulated. Faculty and graduate student research is another area where libraries’ contribution makes logical sense, but specific relationships are not necessarily drawn. Libraries may place different emphasis on these two areas, effectively choosing different business strategies, to support their institutions’ missions. Two national surveys collect data about library expenditures, staffing, services, and use of resources. This study aims to explore the extent to which a library’s business strategy might be visible through patterns in these national data sets. What can the data we already have tell us about differences between libraries and how those differences affect library services and use? To what extent can library use data predict an institution’s external research dollars? By using a variety of statistical techniques, including structural equation modeling, MANCOVA, and multiple regression, the researcher explores these questions. The study also explores ways in which current data falls short in being able to connect library activities with high-impact educational practices and faculty and graduate research productivity, and proposes new ideas for measuring library activities such that they could be connected more clearly with institutional outcomes

Weakening organizational ties? A classification of styles of volunteering in the Flemish red cross

This article presents an initial empirical assessment of a new analytical framework of styles of volunteering (SOV). The framework suggests that volunteering can be categorized in terms of a multidimensional set of cultural and structural indicators that cohere in systematic and varying ways. With data drawn from a survey of 652 Flemish Red Cross volunteers, a multivariate analysis reveals five different SOV categories of volunteers: episodic contributors, established administrators, reliable coworkers, service-oriented core volunteers, and critical key figures. The research findings indicate that the volunteer reality is far more complex than suggested by conventional approaches to the study of volunteering