Studying web 2.0 interactivity: a research framework and two case studies

With more than one third of the world’s population being online, the Internet has increasingly become part of modern living, giving rise to popular literature that often takes a teleological and celebratory perspective, heralding the Internet and Web 2.0 specifically, as an enabler of participation, democracy, and interactivity. However, one should not take these technological affordances of Web 2.0 for granted. This article applies an interaction framework to the analysis of two Web 2.0 websites viewed as spaces where interaction goes beyond the mere consultation and selection of content, i.e., as spaces supporting the (co)creation of content and value. The authors’ approach to interactivity seeks to describe websites in objective, structural terms as spaces of user, document, and website affordances. The framework also makes it possible to talk about the websites in subjective, functional terms, considering them as spaces of perceived inter-action, intra-action and outer-action affordances. Analysis finds that both websites provide numerous user, document, and website affordances that can serve as inter-action or social affordances

Towards a Technology Enhanced Interaction Framework

This paper focuses on the development and validationof a general interaction framework to help design technology tosupport communication between people and improve interactionsbetween people, technology and objects, particularly in complexsituations. A review of existing interaction frameworks showsthat none of them help technology designers and developers toconsider all of the possible interactions that occur at the sametime and in the same place. The main and sub-components of theframework are described and explained and examples are givenfor each type of interaction. The framework was successfullyvalidated by three designer experts and three accessibilityexperts. The designer experts focused on the main and subcomponentsof the framework while accessibility experts focusedon the accessibility aspects. As a result of the comments from theexperts some changes to the framework components will bemade. Work is now in progress to provide designers with amethod to apply the framework to create technology solutions tocomplex communication and interaction problems and situatio

Effect of questions used by psychiatrists on therapeutic alliance and adherence

Background Psychiatrists' questions are the mechanism for achieving clinical objectives and managing the formation of a therapeutic alliance – consistently associated with patient adherence. No research has examined the nature of this relationship and the different practices used in psychiatry. Questions are typically defined in binary terms (e.g. ‘open’ v. ‘closed’) that may have limited application in practice. Aims To undertake a detailed examination of the types of questions psychiatrists ask patients and explore their association with the therapeutic alliance and patient adherence. Method A coding protocol was developed to classify questions from 134 out-patient consultations, predominantly by syntactic form. Bivariate correlations with measures of patient adherence and the therapeutic alliance (psychiatrist-rated) were examined and assessed using generalised estimating equations, adjusting for patient symptoms, psychiatrist identity and amount of speech. Results Psychiatrists used only four of ten question types regularly: yes/no auxiliary questions, ‘wh-’ questions, declarative questions and tag questions. Only declarative questions predicted better adherence and perceptions of the therapeutic relationship. Conversely, ‘wh-’ questions – associated with positive symptoms – predicted poorer perceptions of the therapeutic relationship. Declarative questions were frequently used to propose an understanding of patients' experiences, in particular their emotional salience for the patient. Conclusions A refined defining of questioning practices is necessary to improve communication in psychiatry. The use of declarative questions may enhance alliance and adherence, or index their manifestation in talk, e.g. better mutual understanding. The function of ‘so’-prefaced declaratives, also used in psychotherapy, is more nuanced than negatively connotated ‘leading’ questions. Hearable as displays of empathy, they attend closely to patient experience, while balancing the tasks of assessment and treatment

Agent-Based Computational Economics

Agent-based computational economics (ACE) is the computational study of economies modeled as evolving systems of autonomous interacting agents. Starting from initial conditions, specified by the modeler, the computational economy evolves over time as its constituent agents repeatedly interact with each other and learn from these interactions. ACE is therefore a bottom-up culture-dish approach to the study of economic systems. This study discusses the key characteristics and goals of the ACE methodology. Eight currently active research areas are highlighted for concrete illustration. Potential advantages and disadvantages of the ACE methodology are considered, along with open questions and possible directions for future research.Agent-based computational economics; Autonomous agents; Interaction networks; Learning; Evolution; Mechanism design; Computational economics; Object-oriented programming.

Evolutionary games on graphs

Game theory is one of the key paradigms behind many scientific disciplines from biology to behavioral sciences to economics. In its evolutionary form and especially when the interacting agents are linked in a specific social network the underlying solution concepts and methods are very similar to those applied in non-equilibrium statistical physics. This review gives a tutorial-type overview of the field for physicists. The first three sections introduce the necessary background in classical and evolutionary game theory from the basic definitions to the most important results. The fourth section surveys the topological complications implied by non-mean-field-type social network structures in general. The last three sections discuss in detail the dynamic behavior of three prominent classes of models: the Prisoner's Dilemma, the Rock-Scissors-Paper game, and Competing Associations. The major theme of the review is in what sense and how the graph structure of interactions can modify and enrich the picture of long term behavioral patterns emerging in evolutionary games.Comment: Review, final version, 133 pages, 65 figure

Semantic discovery and reuse of business process patterns

Patterns currently play an important role in modern information systems (IS) development and their use has mainly been restricted to the design and implementation phases of the development lifecycle. Given the increasing significance of business modelling in IS development, patterns have the potential of providing a viable solution for promoting reusability of recurrent generalized models in the very early stages of development. As a statement of research-in-progress this paper focuses on business process patterns and proposes an initial methodological framework for the discovery and reuse of business process patterns within the IS development lifecycle. The framework borrows ideas from the domain engineering literature and proposes the use of semantics to drive both the discovery of patterns as well as their reuse

Cooperation and punishment

This chapter focuses on questions related to human cooperation, focussing in particular on punishment as a means of enforcing cooperation. We take child development processes as a means to investigate this, drawing on fieldwork material from China and Taiwan. As anthropologists would expect, we find that: (a) cooperation is not only a cultural phenomenon but also a historical and political one; (b) reciprocity is a key feature of human cooperation, but the manifestations of this in particular fieldsites are highly variable and sometimes surprising; and (c) cooperation in one domain of life tends to spill over into other domains of life. As noted, however, we go beyond standard anthropological accounts of cooperation by adding a set of questions regarding punishment and child development – questions that, in turn, may help bring the anthropological study of cooperation into closer dialogue with work being done by scholars in other disciplines on this important topic. The goal is to develop comparative questions about ethical life: ones anchored in species-level understandings of what it is to be human and to engage in human cooperation