Web Based Semantic Communities – Who, How and Why We Might Want Them in the First Place

This paper describes an investigation undertaken as part of the FicNet Human-Computer Interaction project into the online amateur fiction community. By working with the community to determine current practices and areas of concern we consider how future technologies such as the semantic web might be used to design applications to support the community. As a first step in this process we gathered opinions both from members of the community and from those outside the community who had come into contact with it. Taking this information we consider the community as it is and what it might become

Bringing Communities to the Semantic Web and the Semantic Web to Communities

In this paper we consider the types of community networks that are most often codified within the Semantic Web. We propose the recognition of a new structure which fulfils the definition of community used outside the SemanticWeb. We argue that the properties inherent in a community allow additional processing to be done with the described relationships existing between entities within the community network. Taking an existing online community as a case study we describe the ontologies and applications that we developed to support this community in the Semantic Web environment and discuss what lessons can be learnt from this exercise and applied in more general settings

Freedom and Restraint: Tags, Vocabularies and Ontologies

The benefit of metadata is widely recognized. However, the nature of that information and the method of production remains a topic of some debate. This division is most noticeable between those who believe in ’free tagging’, and those who prefer the more formal construction of an ontology to define both the vocabulary of the domain and the relationships between the concepts within it. Looking at the community surrounding online amateur authors and the descriptive metadata they have developed over the last thirty years we consider what we can learn from a mature but amateur tagging community. This paper considers how these two systems might be used together to add the easy usability of free tagging to ontology descriptions and the conceptual richness of ontologies to free tags

Visualizing population dynamics of alaska\u27s arctic communities

Abstract Arctic demography has previously been reviewed on a large scale, across the circumpolar nations. We look instead at some recent population dynamics on sub-regional to community scales, focusing on Arctic Alaska. Detailed graphics depicting yearly population changes from 1990 to 2006 in 43 selected Arctic Alaska towns and villages and all 27 of the state\u27s county-equivalent entities (e.g., boroughs) have been published online in connection with two International Polar Year projects. Seemingly comparable places within the same borough have taken widely divergent paths. Birth rates generally exceed death rates, although both are high. Year-to-year and place-to-place variations are dominated not by natural increase, but by differences in net migration. Population changes influence demand for resources such as water, electricity, fuel, and capital improvements, and probably for subsistence resources as well. Migration rates provide sensitive indicators that integrate diverse internal and external pressures

Physical-World Knowledge and Public Views on Climate Change

Climate change is a formidable topic, challenging the research efforts of countless scientists across many different fields. Surveys find surprisingly high levels of confidence among nonscientists, however, regarding their own understanding of climate change. More than threefourths of the respondents on recent U.S. surveys claimed to understand either a moderate amount or a great deal about climate change. Follow-up questions testing actual knowledge suggest that self-assessments are high relative to physical-world knowledge. For some people, self-assessments reflect confidence in their political views rather than geographical or science knowledge. This paper replicates and extends previous research using new data: an October 2018 survey that included a four-item test of basic, climate-relevant but belief-neutral geographical or physical knowledge, such as locations of the North and South Pole. Mean knowledge scores are higher among younger, male, and college-educated respondents, and also differ significantly across political groups. Relationships between physical/geographical knowledge and selfassessed understanding of climate change, or between knowledge and agreement with the scientific consensus on climate change, are sometimes positive as expected — but in both cases, these relationships depend on political identity

Quadtrees as an Abstract Domain

Quadtrees have proved popular in computer graphics and spatial databases as a way of representing regions in two dimensional space. This hierarchical data-structure is flexible enough to support non-convex and even disconnected regions, therefore it is natural to ask whether this datastructure can form the basis of an abstract domain. This paper explores this question and suggests that quadtrees offer a new approach to weakly relational domains whilst their hierarchical structure naturally lends itself to representation with boolean functions

Design and fabrication of a basic mass analyzer and vacuum system

A two-inch hyperbolic rod quadrupole mass analyzer with a mass range of 400 to 200 amu and a sensitivity exceeding 100 packs per billion has been developed and tested. This analyzer is the basic hardware portion of a microprocessor-controlled quadrupole mass spectrometer for a Gas Analysis and Detection System (GADS). The development and testing of the hyperbolic-rod quadrupole mass spectrometer and associated hardware are described in detail

Above and below the water: Social/ecological transformation in northwest Newfoundland

Marine fisheries and fishing societies develop around the resources provided by a particular ecosystem. As they exploit these resources, fisheries transform the ecosystem, which pushes fishery and society to adapt in turn. This process is illustrated by fisheries, ecological and social data tracking dramatic changes on Newfoundland\u27s Northern Peninsula and its adjacent marine ecosystem, the northern Gulf of St. Lawrence. There a longstanding fishery for cod and other groundfish collapsed in the 1990s, and was replaced by fisheries targeting invertebrates. The new invertebrate fisheries have different socioeconomic characteristics than the former groundfish fisheries. The shift in target species reflects deep ecological changes that were underway at least a decade before official recognition of the crisis. Our analysis of biological data reveals that the main ecological changes occurred during “the glory years” of the 1980s, when Newfoundland\u27s domestic fisheries were at their peak. Overfishing and interactions with adverse climatic conditions drove the changes. As the ecosystem transformed, human population declined due to outmigration, and social indicators show signs of distress. Accounts by outport residents paint a generational picture of social change

Place effects on environmental views

How people respond to questions involving the environment depends partly on individual characteristics. Characteristics such as age, gender, education, and ideology constitute the well-studied social bases of environmental concern, which have been explained in terms of cohort effects or of cognitive and cultural factors related to social position. It seems likely that people\u27s environmental views depend not only on personal characteristics but also on their social and physical environments. This hypothesis has been more difficult to test, however. Using data from surveys in 19 rural U.S. counties, we apply mixed-effects modeling to investigate simple place effects with respect to locally focused environmental views. We find evidence for two kinds of place effects. Net of individual characteristics, specific place characteristics have the expected effect on related environmental views. Local changes are related to attitudes about regulation and growth. For example, respondents more often perceive rapid development as a problem, and favor environmental rules that restrict development, in rural counties with growing populations. Moreover, they favor conserving resources for the future rather than using them now to create jobs in counties that have low unemployment. After we controlled for county growth, unemployment and jobs in resource based industries, and individual social-position and ideological factors, there remains significant place-to-place variation in mean levels of environmental concern. Even with both kinds of place effects in the models, the individual level predictors of environmental concern follow patterns expected from previous research. Concern increases with education among Democrats, whereas among Republicans, the relationship is attenuated or reversed. The interaction marks reframing of environmental questions as political wedge issues, through nominally scientific counterarguments aimed at educated, ideologically receptive audiences. © 2010, by the Rural Sociological Society

Mach-Zehnder optical configuration with Brewster window and two quarter-wave plates

Configuration is improvement because of the following: It provides higher efficiency. It reduces or eliminates feedthrough of untranslated local oscillator, which would produce a beat signal at shifted frequency of translator. When used without translator and with low-power detector, telescope secondary mirror reflects portion of output to local oscillator