Assessing Researcher Interdisciplinarity: A Case Study of the University of Hawaii NASA Astrobiology Institute

In this study, we combine bibliometric techniques with a machine learning algorithm, the sequential Information Bottleneck, to assess the interdisciplinarity of research produced by the University of Hawaii NASA Astrobiology Institute (UHNAI). In particular, we cluster abstract data to evaluate ISI Web of Knowledge subject categories as descriptive labels for astrobiology documents, and to assess individual researcher interdisciplinarity to determine where collabo- ration opportunities might occur. We find that the majority of the UHNAI team is engaged in interdisciplinary research, and suggest that our method could be applied to additional NASA Astrobiology Institute teams to identify and facilitate collaboration opportunities

Can Social News Websites Pay for Content and Curation? The SteemIt Cryptocurrency Model

This is an accepted manuscript of an article published by SAGE Publishing in Journal of Information Science on 15/12/2017, available online: https://doi.org/10.1177/0165551517748290 The accepted version of the publication may differ from the final published version.SteemIt is a Reddit-like social news site that pays members for posting and curating content. It uses micropayments backed by a tradeable currency, exploiting the Bitcoin cryptocurrency generation model to finance content provision in conjunction with advertising. If successful, this paradigm might change the way in which volunteer-based sites operate. This paper investigates 925,092 new members’ first posts for insights into what drives financial success in the site. Initial blog posts on average received $0.01, although the maximum accrued was$20,680.83. Longer, more sentiment-rich or more positive comments with personal information received the greatest financial reward in contrast to more informational or topical content. Thus, there is a clear financial value in starting with a friendly introduction rather than immediately attempting to provide useful content, despite the latter being the ultimate site goal. Follow-up posts also tended to be more successful when more personal, suggesting that interpersonal communication rather than quality content provision has driven the site so far. It remains to be seen whether the model of small typical rewards and the possibility that a post might generate substantially more are enough to incentivise long term participation or a greater focus on informational posts in the long term

A workshop on ‘Dietary Sweetness—Is It an Issue?’

This report summarises a workshop convened by ILSI Europe on 3 and 4 April 2017 to discuss the issue of dietary sweetness. The objectives were to understand the roles of sweetness in the diet, establish whether exposure to sweetness affects diet quality and energy intake, and consider whether sweetness per se affects health. Although there may be evidence for tracking of intake of some sweet components of the diet through childhood, evidence for tracking of whole diet sweetness, or through other stages of maturity are lacking. The evidence to date does not support adverse effects of sweetness on diet quality or energy intake, except where sweet food choices increase intake of free sugars. There is some evidence for improvements in diet quality and reduced energy intake where sweetness without calories replaces sweetness with calories. There is a need to understand the physiological and metabolic relevance of sweet taste receptors on the tongue, in the gut and elsewhere in the body, as well as possible differentiation in the effects of sustained consumption of individual sweeteners. Despite a plethora of studies, there is no consistent evidence for an association of sweetness sensitivity/preference with obesity or type 2 diabetes. A multifaceted integrated approach, characterising nutritive and sensory aspects of the whole diet or dietary patterns, may be more valuable in providing contextual insight. The outcomes of the workshop could be used as a scientific basis to inform the expert community and create more useful dialogue among health care professionals

Designing an enterprise social questions and answers site to enable scalable user-to-user support

Nowadays, the information technology infrastructure within organizations is getting more and more heterogeneous. Recent trends such as bring-your-own-device or choose-your-own-device satisfy user requests for diverse devices they already know from their private life. On the other hand, following these trends results in an increased complexity of the organizations’ infrastructure and a substantial rise in required effort for supporting users. In order to address this increased support demand, the establishment of a user-to-user support culture seems promising. An established concept to provide user-to-user support is the concept of social questions and answers (SQA) sites. SQA sites have been shown to be successful in the private context. Users can seek and provide knowledge and thereby support each other. This paper presents the design and evaluation of an enterprise SQA platform aiming to support employees in solving problems with processes or technologies. Building on already derived design principles, we discuss the design and implementation of the SQA prototype within an existing Customer Relation Management platform. The resulting system was then evaluated within five focus group sessions with professionals from various industries. The evaluation results show the validity of our design principles and the usefulness of the implemented prototype

Modalities, Motivations, and Materials Investigating Traditional and Social Online Q&A Services

With the advent of ubiquitous connectivity and a constant flux of user-generated content, people’s online information-seeking behaviours are rapidly changing, one o f which includes seeking information from peers through online questioning. Ways to understand this new behaviour can be broken down into three aspects, also referred to as the three M’s – the modalities (sources and strategies) that people use when asking their questions online, their motivations behind asking these questions and choosing specific services, and the types and quality of the materials (content) generated in such an online Q&A environment. This article will provide a new framework – three M’s – based on the synthesis of relevant literature. It will then identify some of the gaps in our knowledge about online Q&A based on this framework. These gaps will be transformed into six research questions, stemming from the three M’s, and