How to Ask for Technical Help? Evidence-based Guidelines for Writing Questions on Stack Overflow

Context: The success of Stack Overflow and other community-based question-and-answer (Q&A) sites depends mainly on the will of their members to answer others' questions. In fact, when formulating requests on Q&A sites, we are not simply seeking for information. Instead, we are also asking for other people's help and feedback. Understanding the dynamics of the participation in Q&A communities is essential to improve the value of crowdsourced knowledge. Objective: In this paper, we investigate how information seekers can increase the chance of eliciting a successful answer to their questions on Stack Overflow by focusing on the following actionable factors: affect, presentation quality, and time. Method: We develop a conceptual framework of factors potentially influencing the success of questions in Stack Overflow. We quantitatively analyze a set of over 87K questions from the official Stack Overflow dump to assess the impact of actionable factors on the success of technical requests. The information seeker reputation is included as a control factor. Furthermore, to understand the role played by affective states in the success of questions, we qualitatively analyze questions containing positive and negative emotions. Finally, a survey is conducted to understand how Stack Overflow users perceive the guideline suggestions for writing questions. Results: We found that regardless of user reputation, successful questions are short, contain code snippets, and do not abuse with uppercase characters. As regards affect, successful questions adopt a neutral emotional style. Conclusion: We provide evidence-based guidelines for writing effective questions on Stack Overflow that software engineers can follow to increase the chance of getting technical help. As for the role of affect, we empirically confirmed community guidelines that suggest avoiding rudeness in question writing.Comment: Preprint, to appear in Information and Software Technolog

Environmental Sustainability and the Hospitality Customer Experience: A Study in Tourist Accommodation

Academic research on sustainability in the hospitality industry is scarce and fragmented, and requires a general structure to lend coherence to its approach. There is a need for empirical research to fathom the question of environmental sustainability and customer experience in the hospitality industry and to study the interaction between the two concepts. This paper aims to close these gaps by establishing the nature of the relationship between customers’ perceptions of the environmental practices in tourism accommodation and their customer experiences and levels of satisfaction. The working hypotheses, based on a review of the literature on environmental sustainability and customer experience in the hospitality industry, are tested in an empirical study of 412 Spanish customers who stayed in various types of tourist accommodation. The main conclusion is that the relationship between environmental sustainability and customer experience in the hospitality industry can be demonstrated. This paper also validates a measurement scale based on the most accepted dimensionality of the construct: cognitive (think), affective (feel), behavioral (act), sensory (sense) and social (relate)

Video games as meaningful entertainment experiences

We conducted an experiment to examine individuals’ perceptions of enjoyable and meaningful video games and the game characteristics and dimensions of need satisfaction associated with enjoyment and appreciation. Participants (N = 512) were randomly assigned to 1 of 2 groups that asked them to recall a game that they found either particularly fun or particularly meaningful, and to then rate their perceptions of the game that they recalled. Enjoyment was high for both groups, though appreciation was higher in the meaningful- than fun-game condition. Further, enjoyment was most strongly associated with gameplay characteristics and satisfaction of needs related to competency and autonomy, whereas appreciation was most strongly associated with story characteristics and satisfaction of needs related to insight and relatedness

Appreciating the Beauty of Earth

Categories used by contemporary environmental philosophers to explore esthetic appreciation for the beauty of the physical world have parallels in reflections by patristic and medieval theologians on the beauty of God\u27s creation, A sampling of the theologians\u27 notions yields a promising foundation for ecological ethics from a theistic perspective, especially when understood from their world view at the time the text was written, reformulated to reflect broad scientific findings about the world today, and worked creatively to identify norms for human behavior

Human experience in the natural and built environment : implications for research policy and practice

22nd IAPS conference. Edited book of abstracts. 427 pp. University of Strathclyde, Sheffield and West of Scotland Publication. ISBN: 978-0-94-764988-3

The visual preferences for forest regeneration and field afforestation : four case studies in Finland

The overall aim of this dissertation was to study the public's preferences for forest regeneration fellings and field afforestations, as well as to find out the relations of these preferences to landscape management instructions, to ecological healthiness, and to the contemporary theories for predicting landscape preferences. This dissertation includes four case studies in Finland, each based on the visualization of management options and surveys. Guidelines for improving the visual quality of forest regeneration and field afforestation are given based on the case studies. The results show that forest regeneration can be connected to positive images and memories when the regeneration area is small and some time has passed since the felling. Preferences may not depend only on the management alternative itself but also on the viewing distance, viewing point, and the scene in which the management options are implemented. The current Finnish forest landscape management guidelines as well as the ecological healthiness of the studied options are to a large extent compatible with the public's preferences. However, there are some discrepancies. For example, the landscape management instructions as well as ecological hypotheses suggest that the retention trees need to be left in groups, whereas people usually prefer individually located retention trees to those trees in groups. Information and psycho-evolutionary theories provide some possible explanations for people's preferences for forest regeneration and field afforestation, but the results cannot be consistently explained by these theories. The preferences of the different stakeholder groups were very similar. However, the preference ratings of the groups that make their living from forest - forest owners and forest professionals - slightly differed from those of the others. These results provide support for the assumptions that preferences are largely consistent at least within one nation, but that knowledge and a reference group may also influence preferences.Väitöskirjassa tutkittiin ihmisten maisemapreferenssejä (maisemallisia arvostuksia) metsänuudistamishakkuiden ja pellonmetsitysten suhteen sekä analysoitiin näiden preferenssien yhteyksiä maisemanhoito-ohjeisiin, vaihtoehtojen ekologiseen terveyteen ja preferenssejä ennustaviin teorioihin. Väitöskirja sisältää neljä tapaustutkimusta, jotka perustuvat hoitovaihtoehtojen visualisointiin ja kyselytutkimuksiin. Tapaustutkimusten pohjalta annetaan ohjeita siitä, kuinka uudistushakkuiden ja pellonmetsitysten visuaalista laatua voidaan parantaa. Väitöskirjan tulokset osoittavat, että uudistamishakkuut voivat herättää myös myönteisiä mielikuvia ja muistoja, jos uudistusala on pieni ja hakkuun välittömät jäljet ovat jo peittyneet. Preferensseihin vaikuttaa hoitovaihtoehdon lisäksi mm. katseluetäisyys, katselupiste ja ympäristö, jossa vaihtoehto on toteutettu. Eri viiteryhmien (metsäammattilaiset, pääkaupunkiseudun asukkaat, ympäristönsuojelijat, tutkimusalueiden matkailijat, paikalliset asukkaat sekä metsänomistajat) maisemapreferenssit olivat hyvin samankaltaisia. Kuitenkin ne ryhmät, jotka saavat ainakin osan elannostaan metsästä - metsänomistajat ja metsäammattilaiset - pitivät metsänhakkuita esittävistä kuvista hieman enemmän kuin muut ryhmät. Nämä tulokset tukevat oletusta, että maisemapreferenssit ovat laajalti yhteneväisiä ainakin yhden kansan tai kulttuurin keskuudessa, vaikka myös viiteryhmä saattaa vaikuttaa preferensseihin jonkin verran. Nykyiset metsämaisemanhoito-ohjeet ovat pitkälti samankaltaisia tässä väitöskirjassa havaittujen maisemapreferenssien kanssa. Myöskään tutkittujen vaihtoehtoisten hoitotapojen ekologisen paremmuuden ja niihin kohdistuvien maisemallisten arvostusten välillä ei ollut suurta ristiriitaa. Kuitenkin joitakin eroavaisuuksia oli; esimerkiksi sekä maisemanhoito-ohjeiden että ekologisten hypoteesien mukaan säästöpuut tulisi jättää ryhmiin, kun taas ihmiset pitivät eniten yksittäin jätetyistä puista. Informaatiomalli ja psyko-evolutionaarinen teoria tarjoavat mahdollisia selityksiä uudistushakkuisiin ja pellonmetsitykseen kohdistuville preferensseille, vaikkakaan tutkimuksen tuloksia ei voida täysin selittää näillä teorioilla

Social enterprise as a socially rational business

What is the goal of social enterprise policy? Is it the creation of a ‘not-for-profit’ or ‘more-than-profit’ business movement? In institutional policy circles, arguments are shaped by the desire to protect assets for the community, while entrepreneurial discourses favour a mixture of investment sources, surplus sharing and inclusive systems of governance. This article uses data from a critical ethnography to offer a third perspective. Human behaviour is a product of, and support system for, our socio-sexual choices. A grounded theory of social and economic capital is developed that integrates sexuality into organisation development. This constructs business organisations as complex centres of community-building replete with economic and social goals. By viewing corporate governance from this perspective social enterprise is reconceived as a business movement guided by social rationality with the long-term goal of distributing social and economic capital across stakeholder groups to satisfy individual and collective needs.</p

Critical review of the e-loyalty literature: a purchase-centred framework

Over the last few years, the concept of online loyalty has been examined extensively in the literature, and it remains a topic of constant inquiry for both academics and marketing managers. The tremendous development of the Internet for both marketing and e-commerce settings, in conjunction with the growing desire of consumers to purchase online, has promoted two main outcomes: (a) increasing numbers of Business-to-Customer companies running businesses online and (b) the development of a variety of different e-loyalty research models. However, current research lacks a systematic review of the literature that provides a general conceptual framework on e-loyalty, which would help managers to understand their customers better, to take advantage of industry-related factors, and to improve their service quality. The present study is an attempt to critically synthesize results from multiple empirical studies on e-loyalty. Our findings illustrate that 62 instruments for measuring e-loyalty are currently in use, influenced predominantly by Zeithaml et al. (J Marketing. 1996;60(2):31-46) and Oliver (1997; Satisfaction: a behavioral perspective on the consumer. New York: McGraw Hill). Additionally, we propose a new general conceptual framework, which leads to antecedents dividing e-loyalty on the basis of the action of purchase into pre-purchase, during-purchase and after-purchase factors. To conclude, a number of managerial implementations are suggested in order to help marketing managers increase their customers’ e-loyalty by making crucial changes in each purchase stage