Zipf's law and the diversity of biology newsgroups

Usenet newsgroups provide a popular means of scientific communication. We demonstrate striking order in the diversity of biology newsgroups: Submissions to newsgroups obey a form of Zipf's law, a simple power law for the frequency of posts as a function of the rank, by posting, of contributors. We show that a simple stochastic process, due to Günther et al. (1992, 1996), Levitin and Schapiro (1993), and Schapiro (1994), accounts for this pattern and reproduces many of the properties of newsgroups. This model successfully predicts the relative contribution from each poster in terms of the size, the number of posters and total posts, of the newsgroup.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/43673/1/11192_2004_Article_5116106.pd

Diversity measurement for the email content of information workers

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 89-90).Since the introduction of computers and the Internet, information processing has evolved to be a major part of many businesses, but factors that contribute to the productivity of information workers are still understudied. Some social network studies claim that diverse information that passes through workers in the positions with diverse sources of information drives performance. However, such claims are rarely verified by empirical data. This study develops a measurement methodology for the diversity of the email content processed by information workers. The diversity values will be used for future productivity studies along with the results from social network analysis. Erik Brynjolfsson George and Sandi Schussel Professor of Management and Director, Center for Digital Business, MIT Sloan School of Managementby Petch Manoharn.M.Eng

FLOCK THEORY: COOPERATION AND DECENTRALIZATION IN COMMUNICATION NETWORKS

Research has shown that decentralized organizations and groups perform better and have more satisfied members than centralized ones. Further, decentralized self-organizing groups are particularly superior when solving complex problems. Despite mounting research in support of decentralization, the means of how to foster and maintain a decentralized, coordinated group remains a particular problem for organizations. The current line of research proposes a theory of decentralized organizational communication, flock theory, and conducts preliminary tests of the theory. Grounded in literature from social networks, flock theory represents a theoretical model for the decentralized evolution of communicative systems. The flock model is then extended to integrate roadmap based flocking, bipartite networks, and findings from small world research to create a theory of cooperation, coordination, and navigation within decentralized communication networks. Empirical illustrations of flock theory are conducted via two studies on two different research-based organizations, as research organizations focus on complex problem solving and coordination of knowledge. Findings provide initial support for flock theory, confirm parallel research on decentralization, and indicate that research-based organizations may be different from traditional corporate organizations in several ways

New Fundamental Technologies in Data Mining

The progress of data mining technology and large public popularity establish a need for a comprehensive text on the subject. The series of books entitled by "Data Mining" address the need by presenting in-depth description of novel mining algorithms and many useful applications. In addition to understanding each section deeply, the two books present useful hints and strategies to solving problems in the following chapters. The contributing authors have highlighted many future research directions that will foster multi-disciplinary collaborations and hence will lead to significant development in the field of data mining

Social Performances: A Sociotechnical Framework for Understanding Online Prosocial Behavior.

Prosocial behavior describes actions, such as sharing and cooperation, intended to benefit others. In particular, the popular online activity of remixing, is especially dependent upon individuals to willingly share content that they have created for others to reuse and even profit from. However, what motivates these individuals to share their creations with relative strangers when there is no clear benefit to themselves? This dissertation presents an explanatory framework that helps to explain online prosociality through two main observations: 1) That these online content sharing environments afford social transparency by providing a view of all users and activity on the system through visualizations and displays. 2) That this socially transparent space enables the development of social currencies (or group scripts/norms) which encourage prosocial behavior in the system. The overall goal for the social performance framework is to provide an understanding of the prosocial sharing and, at the same time, be used to inform the design of systems that encourage this behavior. I apply this framework to a two-part study of prosocial sharing motivations in an online music remixing community, ccMixter. The first part of the study utilizes social network analysis to characterize and describe the dynamics of music sharing in the community. One of the findings is that a core group of members are responsible for much of the sharing and remixing activity in the community. In the second part of this study, I interview twenty-four members from this core group to investigate their motivations for prosocial behavior in ccMixter. A key finding was that these members were motivated to contribute and share because of the influence of group norms made socially transparent by the website. This study of ccMixter represents a first test of the analytical capability of the social performance framework. In general, the framework performed well, surfacing the joint influence of community norms and the affordance of the website on prosocial sharing. To further strengthen the explanatory power of the framework, future studies will seek to apply the framework to other online content sharing communities.Ph.D.InformationUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/89805/1/jyew_1.pd

Features of English in CMC and their implications for language learning

The similarities and differences between written and spoken forms of language have\ud been a focus of interest of many scholars. There is agreement that instead of being a\ud dichotomy or one single continuum, the differences between spoken and written forms\ud can be measured along several dimensions. The coming into existence of computermediated\ud communication (CMC) has made the line of distinction even less obvious. It is\ud technically a writing (key-pressing) behaviour but may be used to carry out spontaneous\ud communication.\ud This study is intended to investigate the special linguistic features of CMC versus\ud non-CMC texts. The study adopts a corpus linguistic approach to analyse a host of 67\ud linguistic features in synchronous and asynchronous CMC genres and finds interesting\ud differences in the use of these features when used in different temporalities of CMC\ud contexts. A comparison of these features in CMC genres with those in non-CMC texts\ud also reveals some special characteristics of language developed through the use of CMC.\ud The study suggests that, within the general development of CMC, there are\ud emerging genres reflecting particular contexts. As CMC may soon become a major\ud means of communication, and corpus linguistics is an innovative linguistic approach,\ud awareness of CMC is likely to be of increasing importance for language learning. Some\ud pedagogical suggestions are proposed from the experience and findings that have been\ud gained

You don\u27t know what you don\u27t know: Investigating the information needs of clients of web based public sector information services

This research grew from two frustrations. The first was the personal frustration experienced when attempting to find information on websites; especially government websites. Often the sites were loaded down with all sorts of information such as corporate organisation charts and press releases but lacked the information which would allow clients to interact effectively with the agency or meet their information needs and move on. The second frustration was that of Edith Cowan University students who battled with a diverse, overlapping and incomplete set of both online and paper based resources as they sought to make decisions about their selections of supporting studies. Both frustrations arose from a lack of user centeredness in the design and construction of the information services provided. A solution would be to establish an effective and efficient method to find out what information users of online information services really needed in order to solve the problems which brought them to the sites in the first place. The sense-making metatheoretic approach of Brenda Dervin with its accompanying timeline interview methodology suggested itself as an in-depth way to elicit the information needs of potential users of online information services. However, timeline interview protocols require long, complex and highly structured interviews. This study, as a result, developed as a critical review of sense-making in the context of the timeline interview by comparing the insights into information needs obtained from timeline interviews with those of three, more widely used, information gathering methods; survey, semi-structured interview and focus group. Students, mainly from the Edith Cowan University Schools of Communication and Multimedia and Computer and Information Science, were asked about their information needs in relation to choosing supporting studies as required by their course structures. All data collection methods were analysed using the same qualitative content analysis techniques. The outcome showed a high degree of consistency between the information needs elicited by all four data collection methods. In addition, the timeline interviews did not identify any major information needs not found by the alternative methods. Another notable finding was that respondents to all four data collection methods expressed a strong preference for speaking to a real live person as a way of meeting their information needs. This goes against conventional view of the technology preferences of younger people. The time and resources required to carry out and analyse the timeline interviews were also much greater than for any of the other data collection methods. The implications for the designers of online information services are that many people are perfectly capable of explicating their information needs regardless of the way in which those needs are elicited. That being the case, the cheapest and quickest method chosen is likely to provide useful insight into information needs. A final implication is that online services which provide links to real people via technologies such as social networking , voice or video contact are the most likely to give users a feeling of assurance about the information they obtai