Facebook on College Campuses: Usage and Opinions of the Social Networking Site among College Students

Social Networking sites have emerged as college students’ number one source of communication. Facebook, ranked the number one SNS among college students, has gone from a student-only environment to the general public. In addition to exploring how college students are using the sire, I explore if students sex and year in school play a significant role in opinions about the site and how it is being used. Through a sample of 149 undergraduate college students, findings suggest that students seem to be using Facebook in the same ways and for the same reasons with little variation. Furthermore, my research proves that certain opinions of Facebook vary with students’ sex and year in school by older students have strong opinions of who is using the site and negative implications with females being more cautious of their privacy

Second-Order Belief Hidden Markov Models

Hidden Markov Models (HMMs) are learning methods for pattern recognition. The probabilistic HMMs have been one of the most used techniques based on the Bayesian model. First-order probabilistic HMMs were adapted to the theory of belief functions such that Bayesian probabilities were replaced with mass functions. In this paper, we present a second-order Hidden Markov Model using belief functions. Previous works in belief HMMs have been focused on the first-order HMMs. We extend them to the second-order model