626,596 research outputs found
Vote With Your Purse 2.0: Women's Online Giving, Offline Power
Examines trends in women's online political giving; how they use Web 2.0 tools to engage in, donate for, and network for social change; the characteristics of online donors; and the potential impact on women's political clout among donors
Web Conferencing Traffic - An Analysis using DimDim as Example
In this paper, we present an evaluation of the Ethernet traffic for host and
attendees of the popular opensource web conferencing system DimDim. While
traditional Internet-centric approaches such as the MBONE have been used over
the past decades, current trends for web-based conference systems make
exclusive use of application-layer multicast. To allow for network dimensioning
and QoS provisioning, an understanding of the underlying traffic
characteristics is required. We find in our exemplary evaluations that the host
of a web conference session produces a large amount of Ethernet traffic,
largely due to the required control of the conference session, that is
heavily-tailed distributed and exhibits additionally long-range dependence. For
different groups of activities within a web conference session, we find
distinctive characteristics of the generated traffic
Resources and Services for Remote Access: A Content Analysis of Alabama’s Public Four-Year University Library Web Sites
This study examines the web sites of the sixteen Alabama public senior colleges and universities in order to identify the principle characteristics and current trends in web-based services. Because web sites are evolving constantly, the study intends to make a static comparison of web-based resources and services provided by those libraries at a fixed point in time. Besides identifying trends in library web sites, this study will serve as a benchmark for comparisons of future web-based developments and for improving existing services and resources in the subject libraries
Methods for Evaluating Respondent Attrition in Web-Based Surveys
Background: Electronic surveys are convenient, cost effective, and increasingly popular tools for collecting information. While the online platform allows researchers to recruit and enroll more participants, there is an increased risk of participant dropout in Web-based research. Often, these dropout trends are simply reported, adjusted for, or ignored altogether.
Objective: To propose a conceptual framework that analyzes respondent attrition and demonstrates the utility of these methods with existing survey data.
Methods: First, we suggest visualization of attrition trends using bar charts and survival curves. Next, we propose a generalized linear mixed model (GLMM) to detect or confirm significant attrition points. Finally, we suggest applications of existing statistical methods to investigate the effect of internal survey characteristics and patient characteristics on dropout. In order to apply this framework, we conducted a case study; a seventeen-item Informed Decision-Making (IDM) module addressing how and why patients make decisions about cancer screening.
Results: Using the framework, we were able to find significant attrition points at Questions 4, 6, 7, and 9, and were also able to identify participant responses and characteristics associated with dropout at these points and overall.
Conclusions: When these methods were applied to survey data, significant attrition trends were revealed, both visually and empirically, that can inspire researchers to investigate the factors associated with survey dropout, address whether survey completion is associated with health outcomes, and compare attrition patterns between groups. The framework can be used to extract information beyond simple responses, can be useful during survey development, and can help determine the external validity of survey results
The emergent properties of a dolphin social network
Many complex networks, including human societies, the Internet, the World
Wide Web and power grids, have surprising properties that allow vertices
(individuals, nodes, Web pages, etc.) to be in close contact and information to
be transferred quickly between them. Nothing is known of the emerging
properties of animal societies, but it would be expected that similar trends
would emerge from the topology of animal social networks. Despite its small
size (64 individuals), the Doubtful Sound community of bottlenose dolphins has
the same characteristics. The connectivity of individuals follows a complex
distribution that has a scale-free power-law distribution for large k. In
addition, the ability for two individuals to be in contact is unaffected by the
random removal of individuals. The removal of individuals with many links to
others does affect the length of the information path between two individuals,
but, unlike other scale-free networks, it does not fragment the cohesion of the
social network. These self-organizing phenomena allow the network to remain
united, even in the case of catastrophic death events.Comment: 5 pages, 4 figures. Available online from the journal's web-site (See
http://www.pubs.royalsoc.ac.uk/biol_lett/biol_lett.html) as well. To be
printed this yea
Breast cancer incidence and mortality in North Sardinia in the period 1992–2010
The aim of this study was to analyze and describe the epidemiological characteristics and trends of breast cancer in Sassari province (Sardinia, Italy) in the period 1992 2010. Data were obtained from the local tumor registry which makes part of a wider registry web, coordinated today by the Italian Association for Tumor Registries. The overall number of breast cancer cases registered was 5,483 (46 males and 5,437 females). The mean age was 64.8 years for males and 60.4 years for females. The standardized incidence rates were 1/100,000 and 106.2/100,000 and the standardized mortality rates 0.3/100,000 and 23.2/100,000 for males and females respectively. An increasing trend in incidence and mortality rates of breast cancer in Sassari province was evidenced in the years under investigation. Relative survival at 5 years from diagnosis was 78.2% (73.1% for males and 78.3% for females
Corneal alterations associated with pseudoexfoliation syndrome and glaucoma: A literature review
A systematic literature review was performed evaluating articles examining the effects of pseudoexfoliation syndrome (PEX) and glaucoma (PEXG) on the cornea with a focus on the corneal endothelium. We searched for articles relevant to pseudoexfoliation syndrome, pseudoexfoliation glaucoma and corneal endothelial cell counts using Pubmed, Google Scholar Database, Web of Science and cochrane Library databases published prior to September of 2016. We then screened the references of these retrieved papers and performed a Web of Science cited reference search. corneal characteristics analyzed included central corneal thickness (ccT), corneal nerve density, endothelial cell density (EcD), polymegathism, and pleomorphism. These parameters were compared in the following populations: control, PEX, PEXG, and primary open angle glaucoma (POAG). Over 30 observational studies were reviewed. Most studies showed a statistically significant lower EcD in PEX and PEXG populations compared to controls. Overall, PEX eyes had a non-statistically significant trend of lower EcDs compared to PEXG eyes. No consistent trends were found when analyzing differences in ccT amongst control, PEX and PEXG groups. For the few studies that looked at corneal nerve characteristics, the control groups were found to have statistically significantly greater nerve densities than PEX eyes, which had significantly greater densities than PEXG eyes. EcD and corneal nerve densities may be potential metrics for risk-stratifying patients with PEX and PEXG. Our literature review provided further evidence of the significant negative influence PEX has on the cornea, worsening as patients convert to PEXG
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