The Design, Development and Validation of a Persuasive Content Generator

This paper addresses the automatic generation of persuasive content to influence users’ attitude and behaviour. Our research extends current approaches by leveraging individuals’ social media profiles and activity to personalize the persuasive content. Unlike most other implemented persuasive technology, our system is generic and can be adapted to any domain where collections of electronic text are available. Using the Yale Attitude Change approach, we describe: the multi-layered Pyramid of Individualization model; the design, development, and validation of integrated software that can generate individualized persuasive content based on a user’s social media profile and activity. Results indicate the proposed system can create personalized information that (a) matches readers’ interests, (b) is tailored to their ability to understand the information, and (c) is supported by trustable sources

Industrial Stagecraft: Tooling and Cultural Production

The tooling of theatrical spectacle requires collaboration between stagecraft technicians and designers in an increasingly globalized and standardized manufacturing process. While hand skills are still used and remain useful, digital fabrication and other tools are now incorporated in labour processes in scenery manufacturing workshops, altering collaborative work in complex ways. This thesis is an inquiry into the epistemological role of software and digital fabrication tools in stagecraft practices and explores how the politics of craft labour intersect with material practices in media production labour. The technical aspects of the fabrication of theatrical spectacles and display environments, the way objects are used to think, and the ways tools mediate practices suggest how tacit knowledge is produced and reproduced in scenery manufacturing workshops that build theatrical sets and corporate display environments. The articles in this thesis draw from case study research of a community of craft technicians who work in the industry of theatrical display in southern Ontario, Canada. Each of the four articles focuses on different facets of this case study. The technician’s work in labour processes in scenery workshops is compared to repair and bricolage. Autonomy or self-determination over tasks in the workshop sites is explored in its material and embodied sense. The collaboration between the designer and scenic artist is mediated with digital media and this complicates established occupational roles. A case of collective organizing exemplifies the individualistic/collective dichotomy of craft labour. Using an inductive approach, the empirical research for this community case study was accomplished with participant observation and semistructured interviewing. My analysis of interview transcripts and interpretation of field data utilizes an autoethnographic methodology to reflect on and draw from my past work experience in theatre production labour as a builder and scenic artist. In this integrated article thesis, I consider how material practices constitute culture in media production labour

A libertarian socialist critique of the political sociology of late modernity

This thesis argues that despite the proclamations within the sociological field of 'late modernity', socialism is still of great relevance as both a form of critique, and as an alternative political model. Nevertheless, such an argument requires a refinement of both of the key terms. Firstly, via discussing the work of the three most prominent sociologists of late modernity (Zygmunt Bauman, Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens), this thesis argues that there have been significant changes with the shift to 'late' modernity, most notably the, contested, emergence of 'individualization'. I discuss how the 'disembedded individualization' favoured by Beck and Giddens is flawed empirically. However the 'embedded individualization' developed by Bauman and other researchers is a much more faithful depiction of the continued inequalities and privatisation of previously collective political concerns within late modernity. Using such a distinction can demonstrate the flawed nature of the political alternatives offered by Beck and Giddens and can, potentially, open the door to an alternative socialist conception. This socialist alternative also has to be reconsidered. To do this I draw upon a tradition of 'libertarian' socialism, best elaborated in the work of Emile Durkheim and G.D.H. Cole. This focuses upon the development of internally democratic associational groups as forum for individuals to express their functionally differentiated desires. I argue that this model has great potential for a period of individualized late modernity. It is also my claim that elaboration of such a project can be a criticism against the suggestion that there is a natural 'fit' between neoliberal capitalism and late modernity. In short, socialism, when defined as a libertarian form has the potential to be both a form of critique concerning the role of the state and market under late modernity, as well as providing a possible alternative

The Dialectics of Cyberspace: Communication Ethics as First Response to Cyber Attacks

This project recognizes the need to re-conceptualize cyberspace according to its characteristic dialectical tensions in order to offer lasting, adequate responses to cyber attacks. Scholars across multiple disciplines recognize the ineffectiveness of perimeter defense strategies, or the raising of defensive walls to protect sensitive information as the primary response to cyber attacks (Denning, 2001; Jang-Jaccard & Nepal, 2014; MacKinnon, Bacon, Gan, Loukas, Chadwick, Frangiskatos, 2013). Thus, this project suggests that in addition to a literacy in coding, corporations and policy makers must attend to what Ronald C. Arnett, Janie Harden Fritz, and Leeanne M. Bell McManus (2009/2018) term “communication ethics literacy” to illuminate the goods at stake in cyber attacks. Communication ethics literacy and its emphasis on learning from difference will encourage an examination of the background issues influencing foreground attacks (Arnett, McManus, & McKendree, 2013). The goods that shape cyberspace manifest in the dialectics of cyberspace. After reviewing historic and philosophic approaches to dialectic, this project employs a dialectical framework derived from the work of both Kenneth Burke (1941; 1945/1969) and David Gunkel (2007); Burke recognizes that dialectical terms do not reach a synthesis but rather remain in tension (Tell, 2004), and Gunkel announces the poststructuralist recognition that after their collision, neither term is the same and must be thought of as wholly and radically other. This project examines the dialectics of public/private, anonymity/identity, and national/global and their corresponding attacks of cyberbullying, cyber theft, and cyber terrorism and cyber war. The project concludes with an examination of the goods of public/private, anonymity/identity, and national/global to announce the importance of the maintenance of each pole of the dialectic while engaging cyberspace. This attentiveness yields implications for the continued application of communication ethicists, philosophers of communication, phenomenologists, and philosophers of technology to position communication ethics as a first response to cyber attacks

The relationship between personal strengths of chief executive officers and their control of labor in non-profit hospitals

The hospital sector reflects a microcosm of the healthcare crisis in the United States; as hospital care costs increase, so does the financial failure rate of hospitals. This dissertation examines the relationship between hospital CEO personal strengths and their success, which for this study was defined as controlling the use of labor. This study covered 2 hospital systems with 14 hospital CEOs participating and providing access to their Solucient database. This study used Clifton StrengthsFinder 2.0 as a survey instrument with those CEOs who participated in the study. The results of the 177 paired question survey gave each CEO his or her top 5 strengths. Using the Solucient database, the researcher used full-time equivalents per adjusted patient discharge for the fiscal year 2008. Each hospital was benchmarked against similar hospitals based on size and case--adjusted to determine if they are in the top quartile (Quartile 1 & 2) using the least amount of labor or bottom quartile (Quartiles 3 & 4) using the most amount of labor for this measurement. Subjects\u27 personnel strengths are compared to their ranking in use of labor. Based on the statistical analyses, CEOs who included Achiever as one of their top 5 themes showed significantly higher quartile scores on the measure FTEs per Adjusted Patient Discharge (Lowest use of labor). That is, differences between CEOs\u27 strengths in the upper and lower quartiles were found. Of the 8 CEOs in the top 2 quartiles, 6 express strengths of learner (statistically significant at 0.03) and achiever (statistically significant at 0.01). Thus, the 2 strengths of learner and achiever could identify a CEO with the ability to control hospital labor

"Live Better Where You Are": Home Improvement And The Rhetoric Of Renewal In The Postwar United States

While sinuous rows of new suburban ramblers remain the predominant symbol of post-World War II housing in the United States, the upgrading of existing homes was an equally essential component of the era's popular and building culture. Businesses, government agencies, academia, mass media, designers, and homeowners promoted postwar home improvement-sometimes in collaboration, often in competition for market share, consumer dollars, and professional authority. Negotiating realignments of expertise, these groups saw renewal as a national imperative, a moral virtue, and social reward. They reinterpreted traditional notions of the home as symbol of stability and security, not through timeless permanence but through perpetual change. This study examines residential architecture as a temporal space, repeatedly reconfigured as a vehicle for self-expression and in response to shifting cultural priorities. It argues that home improvement, marketed and advertised, embraced and co-opted, drew rhetorical potency from established American attitudes toward personal reinvention and a privileging of the new. The dissertation does not attempt to offer a complete history of postwar home improvement. Rather, it identifies specific episodes and interpretive lenses that offer insights into the depth and breadth of postwar remodeling activities and the ways in which a nation's culture can provide a rhetorical foundation for reshaping its built environment

An experimental evaluation of resource materials on leadership/delegation for 4-H youth

Development of leadership skills is a 4-H priority. Therefore, resource materials to help teach delegation of leadership were experimentally evaluated with 106 youth at two Iowa 1983 4-H leadership camps;High-school age campers were randomly assigned to small groups and treatment levels. Trained adults who were either volunteers or Cooperative Extension Service personnel provided over six hours of instruction in leadership using either the experimental materials on leadership delegation or previously developed materials;There were no differences at the .05 significance level between treatment levels in participation of members in small group activities, in leadership styles, or group productivity. In the second camp, there were significant differences in favor of respondents in the experimental group for their tendency toward delegation, drive, cohesiveness, and overall group effectiveness;Hersey and Natemayer\u27s (1982) Problem-Solving Decision-Making Style Inventory was used to assess leadership styles. Although this study involved youth rather than adults, the normal curve distribution of leadership styles approximated the model. Group effectiveness measures of drive, cohesiveness, and productivity correlated positively (.420 to .535) with tendency toward delegation and (.240 to .295) with participation. Drive, cohesiveness, and participation were intercorrelated above .5. Sex of campers was not related to leadership style, except that females were slightly more likely to prefer the participative style. Grade in school and authoritative leadership style were positively correlated at less than .3;Scales measuring group effectiveness should be used in further research on leadership in voluntary groups, both youth and adult. A longitudinal study is needed which would assess other factors as well as resource materials at Iowa\u27s 4-H leadership camps. It might help identify reasons why experimental materials were effective in the second camp but not the first;Reference;Hersey, Paul, and Walter E. Natemeyer. 1982. Problem-solving decision-making style inventory. Learning Resources Corporation, San Diego, California. 4 pp

The individualized worker

Toward the end of the millennium social class became subject to increasingly sustained and forceful claims that it had been wiped from the social landscape. Within this outpouring of anti-class sentiment, however, three writers highlighting similar processes spelling the end of class have been particularly influential yet, surprisingly, only cursorily or inadequately examined by faithful defenders of the much-maligned concept hitherto.EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo