Keeping Promises: Municipal communities struggle to fulfill promises to narrow the digital divide with Municipal Community Wireless Networks

Some public elites assert that the digital divide is a serious social problem and that governments must intervene by affording wireless solutions to improve this social ill.  Few studies, however, examine the relationship between the claims-making activities around such interventions, specifically in reference to closing the digital divide, and the perceptions of the actual impact of those initiatives on this divide.  We bring together two data sets.  The first dataset is from a previous study examining the public rhetoric surrounding these initiatives vis-à-vis the digital divide.  The latter is part of a much larger study on the network’s impact on the divide.  We conclude that these networks are necessary but insufficient in bridging the gap

When Protests go Virtual: How Organizing Social Protest in Virtual Worlds Changes the Nature of Organizing

In this paper, we introduce a case study of social protest that has occurred in the virtual world Second Life. This case is a labor strike that occurred against IBM by Italian employees and a large European labor union. We begin with identifying the four key elements in the protest organizing process: Identifying Supporters, Organizing and Establishing Hierarchy, Getting the Word Out, and Building Solidarity/Establishing Social Networks. Next, we briefly examine how non-virtual technologies have changed the protest organizing process. Finally, we present our case data and illustrate how moving a protest to a fully virtual environment changes the organizing process. We conclude by asserting that three aspects fundamentally change protest organizing: entertainment, costs, and culture

Crossing Borders, Organizations, Levels and Technologies: IS Collaboration in Humanitarian Relief

Humanitarian non-governmental organizations (NGOs) are increasingly facing complex challenges due to the high frequency of natural disasters and the growing number of actors in the humanitarian relief sector. One of these complex challenges is the management of information. In an attempt to mitigate these challenges, NGOs are increasingly collaborating through inter-organizational structures such as collaboration bodies to find mechanisms to coordinate information technologies. These collaboration bodies facilitate four kinds of “cross” collaboration; 1) cross organization, 2) cross border, 3) cross levels, and 4) cross technology. Within each collaboration body the role and function of a project also takes on special significance as much of the cross collaboration activities are channeled through projects that cross all four types of collaboration. In this paper we examine four case studies set in two collaboration bodies focused on IT in the humanitarian sector

Beyond the Trustworthy Tweet: A Deeper Understanding of Microblogged Data Use by Disaster Response and Humanitarian Relief Organizations.”

ABSTRACT In this paper we present findings from interviews conducted with representatives from large international disaster response organizations concerning their use of social media data in crisis response. We present findings in which the barriers to use by responding organizations have gone beyond simple discussions of trustworthiness to that of more operational issues rather than mere data quality. We argue that the landscape of the use of microblogged data in crisis response is varied, with pockets of use and acceptance among organizations. We found that microblogged data is useful to responders in situations where information is limited, such as at the beginning of an emergency response effort, and when the risks of ignoring an accurate response outweigh the risks of acting on an incorrect one. In some situations, such as search and rescue operations, microblogged data may never meet the standards of quality required. In others, such as resource and supply management, microblogging data could be useful as long as it is appropriately verified and classified

Event Tracker: a Text Analytics Platform for Use During Disasters

Emergency management organisations currently rely on a wide range of disparate tools and technologies to support the monitoring and management of events during crisis situations. This has a number of disadvantages, in terms of training time for new staff members, reliance on external services, and a lack of integration (and hence poor transfer of information) between those services. On the other hand, Event Tracker is a new solution that aims to provide a unified view of an event, integrating information from emergency response officers, the public (via social media) and also volunteers from around the world. In particular, Event Tracker provides a series of novel functionalities to realise this unified view of the event, namely: real-time identification of critical information, automatic grouping of content by the information needs of response officers, as well as real-time volunteers management and communication. This is supported by an efficient and scalable back-end infrastructure designed to ingest and process high-volumes of real-time streaming data with low latency

Scaling 911 Messaging for Emergency Operation Centers 300 Long Paper -Practitioner Cases and Practitioner

ABSTRACT In this paper we imagine that one day soon, mass crisis events will result in thousands of people trying to get emergency help multiple via multiple mediums. Public Access Service Points and 911 Centers will not be able to meet the demand of text-message calls for help during a large scale disaster. While 911 dispatchers will need to respond directly to each individual text message, we present the development and testing of a system that aims to provide this data, in real-time, directly to emergency managers during a large-scale crisis. The system is designed to accept, sort, triage and deliver hundreds of direct text messages from the PSAP and provide them directly to emergency management staff, who can leverage their content. In the hands of the emergency manager, these data can be used to inform resource allocation decisions, enhance their operational situational awareness, and potentially improve the response to the crisis

Simulating inter-organizational collaboration network: a multi- relational and event-based approach

Abstract In this research, we study inter-organizational collaboration from the perspective of multi-relational networks. We develop an agent-based model to simulate how a collaboration network among organizations emerges from organizations' interactions through another network: the inter-organizational communication network. Our model adds links (or edges) into the collaboration network on the basis of events, which correspond to organizations' formation of collaborative teams for joint projects. The proposed approach also models the competitive yet non-exclusive dissemination of information among organizations, organizations' dynamic prioritization of candidate projects, and network-based influence. Applying the model to a case study of the humanitarian sector, we configure and validate the agent-based simulation, and use it to analyze how to promote inter-organizational humanitarian collaboration by encouraging communication. The simulation results suggest that encouraging communication between peripheral organizations can better promote collaboration than other strategies

Introduction to Integral Discriminants

The simplest partition function, associated with homogeneous symmetric forms S of degree r in n variables, is integral discriminant J_{n|r}(S) = \int e^{-S(x_1 ... x_n)} dx_1 ... dx_n. Actually, S-dependence remains the same if e^{-S} in the integrand is substituted by arbitrary function f(S), i.e. integral discriminant is a characteristic of the form S itself, and not of the averaging procedure. The aim of the present paper is to calculate J_{n|r} in a number of non-Gaussian cases. Using Ward identities -- linear differential equations, satisfied by integral discriminants -- we calculate J_{2|3}, J_{2|4}, J_{2|5} and J_{3|3}. In all these examples, integral discriminant appears to be a generalized hypergeometric function. It depends on several SL(n) invariants of S, with essential singularities controlled by the ordinary algebraic discriminant of S.Comment: 36 pages, 19 figure

Elliptic flow of charged particles in Pb-Pb collisions at 2.76 TeV

We report the first measurement of charged particle elliptic flow in Pb-Pb collisions at 2.76 TeV with the ALICE detector at the CERN Large Hadron Collider. The measurement is performed in the central pseudorapidity region (|$\eta$|<0.8) and transverse momentum range 0.2< $p_{\rm T}$< 5.0 GeV/$c$. The elliptic flow signal v$_2$, measured using the 4-particle correlation method, averaged over transverse momentum and pseudorapidity is 0.087 $\pm$ 0.002 (stat) $\pm$ 0.004 (syst) in the 40-50% centrality class. The differential elliptic flow v$_2(p_{\rm T})$ reaches a maximum of 0.2 near $p_{\rm T}$ = 3 GeV/$c$. Compared to RHIC Au-Au collisions at 200 GeV, the elliptic flow increases by about 30%. Some hydrodynamic model predictions which include viscous corrections are in agreement with the observed increase.Comment: 10 pages, 4 captioned figures, published version, figures at http://aliceinfo.cern.ch/ArtSubmission/node/389