The 2021 German Federal Election on Social Media: Analysing Electoral Risks Created by Twitter and Facebook

Safeguarding democratic elections is hard. Social media plays a vital role in the discourse around elections and during electoral campaigns. The following article provides an analysis of the ‘systemic electoral risks’ created by Twitter and Facebook and the mitigation strategies employed by the platforms. It is based on the 2020 proposal by the European Commission for the new Digital Services Act (DSA) in the context of the 2021 German federal elections. This article focuses on Twitter and Facebook and their roles during the German federal elections that took place on 26 September 2021. We analysed three systemic electoral risk categories: 1) the dissemination of illegal content, 2) negative effects on electoral rights, and 3) the influence of disinformation and developed systematic categories for this purpose. In conclusion, we discuss how to respond to these challenges as well as avenues for future research

2016 Annual report Bedford NH.

This is an annual report containing vital statistics for a town/city in the state of New Hampshire

Comments, Gifts and Kudos: Community and Gift Economy in Harry Potter Fanfiction

This research explores the Harry Potter fanfiction community and how fanfiction readers and authors interact in a virtual space. The primary interest is how the virtual community partakes in gift economy and how they motivate each other to produce fanworks in the form of fanfiction, as well as personal motivations that authors carry. Fanfiction participants from multiple social media groups dedicated to Harry Potter fanfiction volunteered to participate in a survey. The survey consisted of qualitative and quantitative questions, and the data was collected, and qualitative responses coded to determine commonalities and differences. The findings of this research show that the Harry Potter fanfiction community is motivated to provide feedback and gifts to authors in the form of kudos, comments and fanworks. Further, fanfiction authors provide gifts of their own to specific followers or editors in the form of dedicated fanfictions

Consumers\u27 Perceptions of Voluntary and Involuntary Deconsumption: An Exploratory Sequential Scale Development Study

This exploratory sequential mixed methods study of scale development was conducted among baby boomers in the United States to render conceptual clarity to the concepts of voluntary and involuntary deconsumption, to explore deconsumption behavior under the tenets of the attribution theory of motivation, and to examine the components, structures, uses, and measurement properties of scales of voluntary and involuntary deconsumption. It was also an attempt to reiterate the importance of the baby boomer segment(s) for marketing practitioners based on growth, economic viability, and the power of influence, and to establish a deep understanding of the deconsumption processes, which could enable marketers to devise strategies to pre-emptively avoid, pro-actively influence, and/or reactively mitigate deconsumption outcomes. The critical incident in a relationship context (CIRC) technique was used in conjunction with grounded theory approach in the qualitative phase (study 1); and survey research, principal components analysis, and Rasch analysis were used in the quantitative phase (study 2). Behavioral process theories of the experience of voluntary and involuntary deconsumption were posited; and motivations and consequences of both types of deconsumption were discussed. The differences in the experience of deconsumption based on variables such as deconsumption type (voluntary and involuntary), gender (male and female), and baby boomer type (trailing- and leading-edge) were explained as well. Subscales of voluntary deconsumption included four components, i.e., elevated state of purpose, social agency and activism, non-materialism, and acceptance of life circumstances. Subscales of involuntary deconsumption included three components, i.e., victim mentality, materialism, and non-acceptance of life circumstances. Finally, the unidimensionality, appropriate scale use, invariance, and levels of validity and reliability of all the subscales of voluntary and involuntary deconsumption were tested, and reported as acceptable and appropriate. In conclusion, the implications of the results for theory, research methodology, and practice were discussed, and recommendations for future research inquiry were made

E-Learner Recommendation Model Based on Level of Learning Outcomes Achievement

Students in any learning environment differ in their level of knowledge, achieved learning outcomes, learning style, preferences, misunderstand and attempts in solving and addressing problems when their expectations are not met. When a student searches the web as an attempt to solve a problem, he suffers from the large number of resources which are, in most cases, not related to his “needs”, or may be related but complex and advance. The result of his search might make him more confused, scattered, depressed and finally result in wasting his time which – in some cases -may have negative effects on his achievements. From here comes the need for an intelligent learning system that can guide studentsbased on their needs. This research attempts to design and build an educational recommender system for a web-based learning environment in order to generate meaningful recommendations of the most interested and relevant learning materials that suit students’ needs based on their profiles1 . This can be achieved by accessing students’ history, exploring their learning navigation patterns and making use of similar students’ experiences and their success stories. The study proposed a design for a hybrid recommender system architecture which consists of two recommendation approaches: the content and collaborative filtering. The study concentrates on the collaborative recommender engine which will recommend learning materials based on students’ level of knowledge, looking at active students' profiles, and achievements in both learning outcomes and learning outcomes levels making use of similar students’ success stories and reflecting their good experience on active student who are in the same level of knowledge. The design of the collaborative recommender engine includes the “learning” module from which the engine learns past students’ access pattern and the “advising” module from which the engine reflects the experience of similar success stories on active students. The content base recommender engine with its suggested stages is considered as future work, the research used the k-mean cluster algorithm to find out similar students where five distance function are used: Euclidean, Correlation. Jaccard,cosine and Manhattan. The cosine function shows to be the most accurate distance function with the minimum SSE but the highest processing time that doesn’t differ a lot when compared the rest functions. The best number of clusters for the selected dataset was determined using three methods Elbow, Gap-statistic and average Silhouette approach where the best number of cluster shows to be three. The research used the two result rating matrices of similar good and good students with Learnings material in order to calculate learning material weights and rank them based on highest weights which results in a final recommendation list

Continuous Rationale Management

Continuous Software Engineering (CSE) is a software life cycle model open to frequent changes in requirements or technology. During CSE, software developers continuously make decisions on the requirements and design of the software or the development process. They establish essential decision knowledge, which they need to document and share so that it supports the evolution and changes of the software. The management of decision knowledge is called rationale management. Rationale management provides an opportunity to support the change process during CSE. However, rationale management is not well integrated into CSE. The overall goal of this dissertation is to provide workflows and tool support for continuous rationale management. The dissertation contributes an interview study with practitioners from the industry, which investigates rationale management problems, current practices, and features to support continuous rationale management beneficial for practitioners. Problems of rationale management in practice are threefold: First, documenting decision knowledge is intrusive in the development process and an additional effort. Second, the high amount of distributed decision knowledge documentation is difficult to access and use. Third, the documented knowledge can be of low quality, e.g., outdated, which impedes its use. The dissertation contributes a systematic mapping study on recommendation and classification approaches to treat the rationale management problems. The major contribution of this dissertation is a validated approach for continuous rationale management consisting of the ConRat life cycle model extension and the comprehensive ConDec tool support. To reduce intrusiveness and additional effort, ConRat integrates rationale management activities into existing workflows, such as requirements elicitation, development, and meetings. ConDec integrates into standard development tools instead of providing a separate tool. ConDec enables lightweight capturing and use of decision knowledge from various artifacts and reduces the developers' effort through automatic text classification, recommendation, and nudging mechanisms for rationale management. To enable access and use of distributed decision knowledge documentation, ConRat defines a knowledge model of decision knowledge and other artifacts. ConDec instantiates the model as a knowledge graph and offers interactive knowledge views with useful tailoring, e.g., transitive linking. To operationalize high quality, ConRat introduces the rationale backlog, the definition of done for knowledge documentation, and metrics for intra-rationale completeness and decision coverage of requirements and code. ConDec implements these agile concepts for rationale management and a knowledge dashboard. ConDec also supports consistent changes through change impact analysis. The dissertation shows the feasibility, effectiveness, and user acceptance of ConRat and ConDec in six case study projects in an industrial setting. Besides, it comprehensively analyses the rationale documentation created in the projects. The validation indicates that ConRat and ConDec benefit CSE projects. Based on the dissertation, continuous rationale management should become a standard part of CSE, like automated testing or continuous integration

Stigma, fear of compassion and chronic pain

Section one details a thematic synthesis that sought to understand men’s experiences of chronic pain. Systematic searches of CINAHL, MEDLINE, PubMed and PsycINFO identified 14 qualitative studies. Five domains were identified: ‘The effort and unpredictability of being in pain’, ‘Becoming a burden’, ‘Being judged as less of a man’, ‘Trying to hold on to a ‘masculine’ identity’ and ‘Rebuilding and rehabilitating’. Domains were interconnected and represented a process following pain onset. Men initially described a wish to control both the pain and its impact on their daily lives. Reductions in daily functioning and the effect of social judgements led men to feel burdensome and the prevailing Western masculine hegemony shaped men’s responses to these stigmatising experiences. Over time, men built a new understanding of the self, renegotiating their masculinity and sought to rebuild and rehabilitate. Section two describes correlation analyses, hierarchical linear regressions and moderation analyses that sought to understand if: (1) stigma, fear of compassion from others (FOCO) and fear of compassion from self (FOCS) independently predict outcomes of painrelated anxiety, depression or pain interference, and (2) FOCO or FOCS moderate the relationship between pain intensity or stigma and outcomes of psychological distress. FOCO and FOCS significantly correlated with depression, anxiety and pain interference. Pain intensity and stigma were independent predictors of depression, anxiety and pain interference. FOCO significantly predicted depression and anxiety but not pain interference. FOCS predicted depression but not anxiety or pain interference. For the first time in chronic pain, FOCO was demonstrated to moderate the relationship between stigma and depression. This study demonstrates that FOC is an important psychological factor in the experiences of individuals with chronic pain. Section three provides a critical appraisal of the work presented in this thesis, including an exploration of the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the process

Annual Report of Undergraduate Research Fellows, August 2010 to May 2011

Annual Report of Undergraduate Research Fellows from August 2010 to May 2011