HEP Outreach, Inreach, and Web 2.0

I report on current usage of multimedia and social networking "Web 2.0" tools for Education and Outreach in high-energy physics, and discuss their potential for internal communication within large worldwide collaborations, such as those of the LHC. Following a brief description of the history of Web 2.0 development, I present a survey of the most popular sites and describe their usage in HEP to disseminate information to students and the general public. I then discuss the potential of certain specific tools, such as document and multimedia sharing sites, for boosting the speed and effectiveness of information exchange within the collaborations. I conclude with a brief discussion of the successes and failures of these tools, and make suggestions for improved usage in the future.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/90828/1/1742-6596_331_8_082003.pd

Designing Chatbots for Crises: A Case Study Contrasting Potential and Reality

Chatbots are becoming ubiquitous technologies, and their popularity and adoption are rapidly spreading. The potential of chatbots in engaging people with digital services is fully recognised. However, the reputation of this technology with regards to usefulness and real impact remains rather questionable. Studies that evaluate how people perceive and utilise chatbots are generally lacking. During the last Kenyan elections, we deployed a chatbot on Facebook Messenger to help people submit reports of violence and misconduct experienced in the polling stations. Even though the chatbot was visited by more than 3,000 times, there was a clear mismatch between the users’ perception of the technology and its design. In this paper, we analyse the user interactions and content generated through this application and discuss the challenges and directions for designing more effective chatbots

Girl power and 'selfie humanitarianism'

The aim of this article is to examine the ‘turn to the girl’ and the mobilization of ‘girl power’ in contemporary global humanitarian and development campaigns. The paper argues that the ‘girl powering’ of humanitarianism is connected to the simultaneous depoliticization, corporatization, and neo-liberalization of both humanitarianism and girl power. Located in broad discussions of campaigns around Malala, Chime for Change and the Girl Effect, the paper seeks to understand the construction of girls as both ideal victims and ideal agents of change, and to examine the implications of this. It suggests that this shift is intertwined with what we call ‘selfie humanitarianism’ in which helping others is intimately connected to entrepreneurial projects of the self, and is increasingly figured less in terms of redistribution or justice than in terms of a makeover of subjectivity for all concerned. The structure of the paper is as follows. First we consider the literature about the depoliticization of humanitarian campaigns in the context of neoliberalism and the growing significance of corporate actors in the world of international aid and disaster relief. Next we examine similar processes in the commodification and export of discourses of ‘girl power’. We then argue that these have come together in the emerging ‘girl powering of development’ (Koffman and Gill 2013), a cocktail of celebratory ‘girlafestoes’ and empowerment strategies often spread virally via social media; celebrity endorsements; and corporate branding which stress that ‘I matter and so does she’ and elide the differences between pop stars and CEO of multinational corporations on the one hand, and girls growing up poor in the global South on the other. Our paper focuses on contemporary examples from the Girl Up campaign. The paper argues that far from being ‘post’ girl power, global humanitarian and development discourses constitute a new and instensified focus upon the figure of the girl and a distinctive, neo-colonial, neoliberal and postfeminist articulation of girl power

One Trillion Edges: Graph Processing at Facebook-Scale

ABSTRACT Analyzing large graphs provides valuable insights for social networking and web companies in content ranking and recommendations. While numerous graph processing systems have been developed and evaluated on available benchmark graphs of up to 6.6B edges, they often face significant difficulties in scaling to much larger graphs. Industry graphs can be two orders of magnitude larger -hundreds of billions or up to one trillion edges. In addition to scalability challenges, real world applications often require much more complex graph processing workflows than previously evaluated. In this paper, we describe the usability, performance, and scalability improvements we made to Apache Giraph, an open-source graph processing system, in order to use it on Facebook-scale graphs of up to one trillion edges. We also describe several key extensions to the original Pregel model that make it possible to develop a broader range of production graph applications and workflows as well as improve code reuse. Finally, we report on real-world operations as well as performance characteristics of several large-scale production applications

A survey of current social network and online communication provision policies to support law enforcement identify offenders

Online forms of harassment, stalking and bullying on social network and communication platforms are now arguably wide-spread and subject to regular media coverage. As these provision continue to attract millions of users, generating significant volumes of traffic, regulating abuse and effectively reprimanding those who are involved in it, is a difficult and sometimes impossible task. This article collates information acquired from 22 popular social network and communication platforms in order to identify current regulatory gaps. Terms of service and privacy policies are reviewed to assess existing practices of data retention to evaluate the feasibility of law enforcement officials tracking those whose actions breach the law. For each provision, account sign-up processes are evaluated and policies for retaining Internet Protocol logs and user account information are assessed along with the availability of account preservation orders. Finally, recommendations are offered for improving current approaches to regulating social network crime and online offender tracking.</p

The Story of Indian Head Rock - Presentation

A presentation given prior to the screening of the documentary film Between the Rock and the Commonwealth at Portsmouth, Ohio on August 24, 2017.https://scholarworks.moreheadstate.edu/indian_head_rock/1111/thumbnail.jp

The Curse of Online Friends: The Detrimental Effects of Online Social Network Usage on Well-Being

In the pursuit of happiness, it has been conventionally accepted that more friends would bring us a better quality of life. However, with the advent of social networking sites, unprecedented social influence has pervaded our daily lives. Across two studies we show that even though people feel more satisfied with their lives when they view the friends added on Facebook, reading friends’ posts reduces their well-being. This is because the more friends people have on Facebook, the more ostentatious information they see. The resultant drop in life satisfaction occurs because people fail to draw a connection between the number of friends and the amount of ostentatious information. Moreover, this decrease in life satisfaction is mediated by envy. We contribute to the literature on consumer well-being by identifying a novel and ubiquitous phenomenon of making social comparisons with hundreds of people, a phenomenon that arose with the advent of social networking and was previously outside the scope of social comparison literature

‘What if My Mum Sees It?’:Examination of visible brand interaction in the presence of a wider network

PurposeIt is known that to encourage people to interact (e.g. sharing) with brands through social media, businesses create content in line with the expectations of their target audience. On these sites, however, such interaction by consumers is visible, contributing to their self-presentation, which can be seen by their wider network; some of whom will find it appropriate, others may not. Currently, little is known about the effects of consumers’ own diverse set of audiences on behavioral intention toward brand interaction and emotional effect. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approachSurvey methodology (n=386) was adopted to examine intention to interact with real brand posts.FindingsResults show that the brand interaction is associated with social anxiety when it is felt that visible evidence of such actions is discrepant from the audience expectations. This, then, constrains the behavioral intention to interact with brands online.Practical implicationsFor businesses to maximize brand interactions and minimize social anxiety, they must be mindful of not just the expectations of their target but also consider their target’s own network. For site designers, this research urges for greater refining of privacy tools and suggests the addition of a “Secret Like” option.Originality/valueEncouraging visible brand interaction through social media is paramount for businesses. Managers focus only on their target audience when designing content but neglect to consider the self-presentational implications of interacting with branded content to wider networks. This paper shows that this must be considered to increase success and maintain ethical practice. This is of value for multiple-stakeholders, managers, users, site designers and academics