Quantifying crowd size with mobile phone and Twitter data

Being able to infer the number of people in a specific area is of extreme importance for the avoidance of crowd disasters and to facilitate emergency evacuations. Here, using a football stadium and an airport as case studies, we present evidence of a strong relationship between the number of people in restricted areas and activity recorded by mobile phone providers and the online service Twitter. Our findings suggest that data generated through our interactions with mobile phone networks and the Internet may allow us to gain valuable measurements of the current state of society

The Effectiveness of PDAs for Enhancing Collaboration in M-Learning

University students live in an increasingly mobile society and they carry increasingly sophisticated mobile devices, including wireless personal digital assistants (PDAs). For the first time, mobile technology and student lifestyle choices are converging to allow mobile learning (m-learning) to be a viable choice for delivery and execution of coursework material. This study addresses the question: In what ways do mobile devices change student interactions in an e-learning, collaborative education exercise? An experimental design methodology is used with control (desktop users) and experimental (PDA users) groups. The study finds that students who use PDAs tend to write shorter messages than desktop users and mobile learners tend to go online more often. The results are inconclusive regards time online per session. The study concludes with implications for instruction and instructors

The Effects of the Mobile Phone on Social Etiquette: A Study Pertaining to the Guyanese Baby Boom Generation

This thesis explores the relationship between technology and society in North America through an ethnographic case-study study of six participants between the ages of 45 and 60, all of whom are of Guyanese ethnicity, and a number of whom are members of my own extended family network. My research took place between August 2014 and October 2014 in Toronto, Ontario, Canada. My position in this ethnographic study was that of insider anthropologist. I was able to conduct a series of semi-structured interviews. My ethnography focuses on how mobile phones are affecting my interlocutors’ everyday human social interactions and the extent to which their mobile phone use is refashioning their social etiquette. The key themes identified are absence-presence, convenience, connection, tendency, anthropology of interaction, addiction, and family time. This study supports the interconnection between technology and society, as there is a clear need to be connected with others through the mobile phone

iDisconnect: smartphones, social media and mobile mediation

This thesis examines the evolution of mobile phones, social media and their impacts on self and society. Key elements include how the use of mobile phones blurs fundamental aspects of social organization such as the distinction between public and private life, understandings of time and space and social norms of behavior in face to face interaction. Additionally, social media further blurs these fundamental aspects of social organization of daily life, and offers sites for self-expression to a mass audience. The primary data source was focused interviews with 11 smartphone owners and social media users, whether past or present. The study's key findings provide a nuanced understanding of people's relationships with smartphones, each other and their perceptions of mobile mediated interactions

Quantifying crowd size with mobile phone and Twitter data

This is the final published version, also available from The Royal Society via the DOI in this record.Being able to infer the number of people in a specific area is of extreme importance for the avoidance of crowd disasters and to facilitate emergency evacuations. Here, using a football stadium and an airport as case studies, we present evidence of a strong relationship between the number of people in restricted areas and activity recorded by mobile phone providers and the online service Twitter. Our findings suggest that data generated through our interactions with mobile phone networks and the Internet may allow us to gain valuable measurements of the current state of society.Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC

Exploring the User Experiences of a Bird ID Mobile App Among College Students in Western India

This study explores user experiences of a sample of college age young adults from western India, with a bird ID mobile app. Mobile apps provide an attractive and interactive access to information and their reach and versatility can often bypass challenges of poor infrastructure and lack of access to sources for information. Studies that examine the influence of mobile apps on users’ knowledge and awareness are still in their infancy. Mobile phones and mobile applications have become increasingly prevalent in the educational setting, not only as technology for instructional delivery, but also as a means of improving user experience when accessing information. Researchers have been studying the usability features and end- user experiences from mobile applications for innovative design improvements (Tang, Abraham, Stamp & Greaves, 2015). Despite its potential to impact learning and user attitude, very limited research exists on how passive interactions with certain content specific mobile applications may increase users’ knowledge and awareness on issues of contemporary importance to our society. Therefore, given the ever-growing reach of mobile devices and applications, the researcher is interested in exploring if a mobile app that allows users to identify the birds of western India, influences their knowledge and awareness of birds around them. This study will provide insight on how mobile apps may be designed to provide unique experiences leading to awareness and change in conservation knowledge and perception

Bodily Orientations around Mobiles: Lessons learnt in Vanuatu

Since we started carrying mobile phones, they have altered the ways in which we orient our bodies in the world. Many of those changes are invisible to us - they have become habits, deeply ingrained in our society. To make us more aware of our bodily ways of living with mobiles and open the design space for novel ways of designing mobiles and their interactions, we decided to study one of the last groups of users on earth who had not been exposed to mobiles: the people of Vanuatu. As they had so recently started using mobiles, their use was still in flux: the fragility of the mobile was unusual to them as was the need to move in order to find coverage. They were still getting used to carrying their mobiles and keeping them safe. Their encounters with mobile use exposed the need to consider somaesthetic practices when designing mobiles as they profoundly affect our bodily ways of being in the world

The Welfare Effects of Social Mobility: An Analysis for OECD countries.

The question whether a socially mobile society is conducive to subjective well-being (SWB) has rarely been investigated. This paper fills this gap by analyzing the SWB effects of intergenerational earnings mobility and equality in educational attainment at the societal level. Using socio-demographic information on 44’000 individuals in 30 OECD countries obtained from the World Values Survey 1997-2001, this study shows that living in a socially mobile society is conducive to individual life satisfaction. Differentiating between perceived and actual social mobility, we find that both exert rather independent effects, particularly in their interplay with income inequality. We identify a positive interaction of perceived social mobility that mitigates the overall SWB lowering effect of income inequality. In contrast to expectations, a high degree of actual social mobility yields an overall impact of income inequality that is SWB lowering, while for low social mobility the effect of inequality is positive. Thus, people bear income inequality more easily when they perceive their society as mobile, but also - surprisingly - when their society is actually rather immobile. These interactions hold stronger for pre-transfer than post-transfer income inequality suggesting that government redistribution disentangles the effect of income inequality from that of social mobility. Robustness using a world sample is tested.Social mobility; Happiness; Well-Being; Life satisfaction; Inequality; Voting; Equal opportunities; Fairness; Justice