Towards understanding the implications of social role manipulation in online tasks

This paper provides an initial discussion of the ethical issues arising when people are asked to assume a role and, from the perspective of that role, asked to carry out an online task. We identify the following considerations: (a) People’s responses when playing a role can reveal personal information about themselves. (b) When people are asked to review the contributions of others who have a particular role, their behavior might indicate how they feel about these roles in their own life. (c) It is difficult to explain to people what they reveal about themselves when reporting their perception of the views of others. (d) People’s own view might change when they play a certain role for an extended period of time

Synthetic events for flood risk calculation by using a nested Copula structure

Risk analysis requires considering the entire frequency domain of flood consequences. Synthetic events were generated for the entire river system of the Scheldt estuary. This estuary contains multiple navigable waterways and is situated in Belgium and the Netherlands. Extreme water levels are influenced by rainfall-runoff discharges, tiding, storm surges, and wind speed and direction. For the generation of hydraulic boundary conditions for flood risk assessment, these influences and their mutual dependencies and correlations are taken into account by means of a nested extreme value copula structure. The variation in time is taken into account by standardized profiles, computed by normalizing all recorded extreme events and fitting a probability distribution to the variation of the standardized events, yielding 5 profile classes through another stratification. Eventually this resulted in a total of 1920 sets of synthetic events. All events were run through the hydrodynamic model of the river system. The frequency distribution of the resulting water levels are calculated by accumulation of the corresponding probabilities of occurrence of the synthetic events at each location. The methodology has the advantage that it determines a statistical distribution of consequences, rather than assigning frequencies to hydrodynamic boundary conditions

La phénoménologie expérimentale d’Albert Michotte : un problème de traduction

Considéré de nos jours comme l’un des principaux représentants de la phénoménologie expérimentale, le psychologue Albert Michotte (1881-1965) n’a adopté que sur le tard le terme de « phénoménologie expérimentale » pour qualifier sa démarche. Dans cet article, j’étudie l’usage qu’il fait de cette dénomination, les implications de ce choix ainsi que l’interprétation qu’il en a donnée. Je montre, notamment, comment une discussion entre Michotte et le traducteur anglais de son livre, Tim R. Miles, a été importante pour déterminer l’orientation de la seule présentation explicite que Michotte a publiée de sa phénoménologie expérimentale. L’étude des différents rôles que ce terme a été amené à jouer dans l’œuvre de Michotte montre également les problèmes soulevés par la communication entre différentes disciplines (la philosophie et la psychologie expérimentale) et écoles psychologiques dans lesquelles ce concept a été à la fois employé et débattu : cette communication demandait un véritable travail de traduction.The experimental psychologist Albert Michotte (1881-1965), now often considered as one of the main advocates of an experimental phenomenology, adopted the term experimental phenomenology as a label for his approach only very late in life. In this paper, I study the evolution of Michotte’s use of this label, the implications of his choice of this controversial term, and his particular interpretation of it. I show, in particular, how a discussion between Michotte and the English translator of his book, Tim R. Miles, would to an important degree determine the focus of Michotte’s only explicit presentation of his experimental phenomenology. Studying furthermore the different roles this label of (experimental) phenomenology was to perform in Michotte’s work makes clear how, also more generally, it was part of difficult translation processes between different languages, disciplines (philosophy and experimental psychology) and psychological schools

Second Screen Interactions for Automatically Web-Enriched Broadcast Video

Including hypermedia in broadcast video combines content formatted for a lean-forward medium (the Web) with a lean-back one (TV) to form a hybrid medium. We identify four challenges for interacting with and experiencing this new medium. We discuss the role a second screen may play in addressing these challenges

Is it a bird or is it a crow? The influence of presented tags on image tagging by non-expert users

Cultural heritage institutes often make use of tags to facilitate searching their collections. While professionals associated with these institutes are able to add high quality descriptions to objects in the collections, both their time and their areas of expertise are limited. As a result, online tagging by non-professional users is more frequently becoming deployed to increase the number of tags. When these users are asked to tag objects in the collection, they can be confronted with tags submitted by other users. These tags may be of varying quality and present in differing numbers, both of which may influence users' tagging behavior. We report on a study on the impact of presenting different types of tags on the quality and quantity of tags added by users. We conclude that there is no difference in the quality and quantity of added tags in all experimental conditions, with the exception of the condition in which incorrect tags were presented. In this condition, the quality of the tags added by users decreased. We discuss the implications of these findings on the design of tagging interfaces

Manipulating social roles in a tagging environment

Social roles structure daily life because people adjust their behavior according to the role that they have in a specific situation. Online social roles are not necessarily the same as those in daily life and, because they are not so strictly assigned, the question arises whether they can be manipulated. We conducted a structured experiment to investigate whether the manipulation of online social roles can affect user behavior in a tagging task