50 research outputs found
Good Friends, Bad News - Affect and Virality in Twitter
The link between affect, defined as the capacity for sentimental arousal on
the part of a message, and virality, defined as the probability that it be sent
along, is of significant theoretical and practical importance, e.g. for viral
marketing. A quantitative study of emailing of articles from the NY Times finds
a strong link between positive affect and virality, and, based on psychological
theories it is concluded that this relation is universally valid. The
conclusion appears to be in contrast with classic theory of diffusion in news
media emphasizing negative affect as promoting propagation. In this paper we
explore the apparent paradox in a quantitative analysis of information
diffusion on Twitter. Twitter is interesting in this context as it has been
shown to present both the characteristics social and news media. The basic
measure of virality in Twitter is the probability of retweet. Twitter is
different from email in that retweeting does not depend on pre-existing social
relations, but often occur among strangers, thus in this respect Twitter may be
more similar to traditional news media. We therefore hypothesize that negative
news content is more likely to be retweeted, while for non-news tweets positive
sentiments support virality. To test the hypothesis we analyze three corpora: A
complete sample of tweets about the COP15 climate summit, a random sample of
tweets, and a general text corpus including news. The latter allows us to train
a classifier that can distinguish tweets that carry news and non-news
information. We present evidence that negative sentiment enhances virality in
the news segment, but not in the non-news segment. We conclude that the
relation between affect and virality is more complex than expected based on the
findings of Berger and Milkman (2010), in short 'if you want to be cited: Sweet
talk your friends or serve bad news to the public'.Comment: 14 pages, 1 table. Submitted to The 2011 International Workshop on
Social Computing, Network, and Services (SocialComNet 2011
Seeing versus Doing: How Businesses Manage Tensions in Pursuit of Sustainability
Management of organizational tensions can facilitate the simultaneous advancement of economic, social, and environmental priorities. The approach is based on managers identifying and managing tensions between the three priorities, by employing one of the three strategic responses. Although recent work has provided a theoretical basis for such tension acknowledgment and management, there is a dearth of empirical studies. We interviewed 32 corporate sustainability managers across 25 forestry and wood-products organizations in Australia. Study participants were divided into two groups: (1) those considered effective at corporate sustainability and (2) a status-quo group. Contrary to current theory, our findings showed that acknowledgment of organizational tensions was widespread in the Australian forestry and wood-products industry and not limited to those managers who are effective at managing corporate sustainability. What differed was the degree to which managers did something about the perceived tensions—with the effective group more consistently acting to manage and resolve paradoxical scenarios. Our findings suggest that existing theoretical constructs of tension management may not adequately capture the individual-level complexity involved with managing tensions in practice
Development and validation of the Multi-dimensional University Research Workplace Inventory (MDURWI)
WOS:000454839600005This study describes the development and validation of an instrument aimed toward measuring organizational features of an academic research workplace. The question pool was developed based on data from a pilot study (N = 43). The survey was deployed to academic researchers in the field of higher education research worldwide (N = 850). An exploratory factor analysis conducted on 36 questions, followed by confirmatory factor analysis, which lead to a final pool of 27 questions in five subscales, one of which divided into three lower-order factors. The final model exhibited very good fit (X2/df = 2.561; CFI = 0.972; PCFI = 0.784; RMSEA = 0.043; P[rmsea ? 0.05] < 0.001; AIC = 891.018; BCC = 987.839) and psychometric properties, in the form of factorial, convergent, and discriminant validity, as well as reliability and sensitivity. Implications of this instrument for research and policymaking are discussed, as well as future research directions.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio
Plasma–liquid interactions: a review and roadmap
Plasma–liquid interactions represent a growing interdisciplinary area of research involving plasma science, fluid dynamics, heat and mass transfer, photolysis, multiphase chemistry and aerosol science. This review provides an assessment of the state-of-the-art of this multidisciplinary area and identifies the key research challenges. The developments in diagnostics, modeling and further extensions of cross section and reaction rate databases that are necessary to address these challenges are discussed. The review focusses on non-equilibrium plasmas