The present historical moment may seem a particularly inopportune time to review Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam's latest exploration of civic decline in America. After all, the outpouring of volunteerism, solidarity, patriotism, and self-sacrifice displayed by Americans in the wake of the September 11 terrorist attacks appears to fly in the face of Putnam's central argument: that \"social capital\" -defined as \"social networks and the norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness that arise from them\" (p. 19)'has declined to dangerously low levels in America over the last three decades. However, Putnam is not fazed in the least by the recent effusion of solidarity. Quite the contrary, he sees in it the potential to \"reverse what has been a 30to 40-year steady decline in most measures of connectedness or community.\"' As an example of how the current \"war on terrorism\" could generate a durable civic renewal, Putnam points to the burst in civic practices that occurred during and after World War II, which he says \"permanently marked\" the generation that lived through it and had a \"terrific effect on American public life over the last half-century.\" 3 If Americans can follow this example and channel their current civic

Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of American community

From the Publisher: 
A Question of Identity 
Life on the Screen is a fascinating and wide-ranging investigation of the impact of computers and networking on society, peoples' perceptions of themselves, and the individual's relationship to machines. Sherry Turkle, a Professor of the Sociology of Science at MIT and a licensed psychologist, uses Internet MUDs (multi-user domains, or in older gaming parlance multi-user dungeons) as a launching pad for explorations of software design, user interfaces, simulation, artificial intelligence, artificial life, agents, "bots," virtual reality, and "the on-line way of life." 
Turkle's discussion of postmodernism is particularly enlightening. She shows how postmodern concepts in art, architecture, and ethics are related to concrete topics much closer to home, for example AI research (Minsky's "Society of Mind") and even MUDs (exemplified by students with X-window terminals who are doing homework in one window and simultaneously playing out several different roles in the same MUD in other windows). Those of you who have (like me) been turned off by the shallow, pretentious, meaningless paintings and sculptures that litter our museums of modern art may have a different perspective after hearing what Turkle has to say. 
This is a psychoanalytical book, not a technical one. However, software developers and engineers will find it highly accessible because of the depth of the author's technical understanding and credibility. Unlike most other authors in this genre, Turkle does not constantly jar the technically-literate reader with blatant errors or bogus assertions about how things work. Although I personally don't have time or patience for MUDs,view most of AI as snake-oil, and abhor postmodern architecture, I thought the time spent reading this book was an extremely good investment.

스크린 위의 삶 = Life on the screen : identity in the age of the internet

Twitter is a microblogging website where users read and write millions of short messages on a variety of topics every day This study uses the context of the German federal election to investigate whether Twitter is used as a forum for political deliberation and whether online messages on Twitter validly mirror offline political sentiment Using LIWC text analysis software, we conducted a content-analysis of over 100,000 messages containing a reference to either a political party or a politician Our results show that Twitter is indeed used extensively for political deliberation We find that the mere number of messages mentioning a party reflects the election result Moreover, joint mentions of two parties are in line with real world political ties and coalitions An analysis of the tweets’ political sentiment demonstrates close correspondence to the parties' and politicians’ political positions indicating that the content of Twitter messages plausibly reflects the offline political landscape We discuss the use of microblogging message content as a valid indicator of political sentiment and derive suggestions for further research

/pdf/predicting-elections-with-twitter-what-140-characters-reveal-5bagzv2skv.pdf

Predicting Elections with Twitter: What 140 Characters Reveal about Political Sentiment

Thank you for reading experimental and quasi experimental designs for research. Maybe you have knowledge that, people have search numerous times for their favorite readings like this experimental and quasi experimental designs for research, but end up in malicious downloads. Rather than reading a good book with a cup of tea in the afternoon, instead they cope with some infectious virus inside their laptop.

Experimental And Quasi Experimental Designs For Research

Giant strides in information technology at the turn of the century may have unleashed unreachable goals. With the invention of groupware, people expect to communicate easily with each other and accomplish difficult work even though they are remotely located or rarely overlap in time. Major corporations launch global teams, expecting that technology will make "virtual collocation" possible. Federal research money encourages global science through the establishment of "collaboratories." We review over 10 years of field and laboratory investigations of collocated and noncollocated synchronous group collaborations. In particular, we compare collocated work with remote work as it is possible today and comment on the promise of remote work tomorrow. We focus on the sociotechnical conditions required for effective distance work and bring together the results with four key concepts: common ground, coupling of work, collaboration readiness, and collaboration technology readiness. Groups with high common ground and loosely coupled work, with readiness both for collaboration and collaboration technology, have a chance at succeeding with remote work. Deviations from each of these create strain on the relationships among teammates and require changes in the work or processes of collaboration to succeed. Often they do not succeed because distance still matters.

Distance matters

Deliberative and reactive processing are combined to process multi-modal inputs and direct movements and speech of a synthetic character that operates as an interface between a user and a piece of equipment. The synthetic character is constructed as an ally, working with and helping the user learn and operate the equipment. The synthetic character interacts with both a virtual space where the character is displayed, and a physical space (domain) that includes the user. Real-time reactive processing provides lifelike and engaging responses to user queries and conversations. Deliberative processing provides responses to inputs that require more processing time (deep linguistic processing, for example). Knowledge bases are maintained for both dynamic (discourse model, for example) and static (e.g., knowledge about the domain or discourse plans) information types. A rule based system is utilized against the knowledge bases and selected inputs from said user to determine input meanings, and follow a predetermined discourse plan.

Method and apparatus for embodied conversational characters with multimodal input/output in an interface device

We investigate the practice of sharing short messages (microblogging) around live media events. Our focus is on Twitter and its usage during the 2008 Presidential Debates. We find that analysis of Twitter usage patterns around this media event can yield significant insights into the semantic structure and content of the media object. Specifically, we find that the level of Twitter activity serves as a predictor of changes in topics in the media event. Further we find that conversational cues can identify the key players in the media object and that the content of the Twitter posts can somewhat reflect the topics of discussion in the media object, but are mostly evaluative, in that they express the poster's reaction to the media. The key contribution of this work is an analysis of the practice of microblogging live events and the core metrics that can leveraged to evaluate and analyze this activity. Finally, we offer suggestions on how our model of segmentation and node identification could apply towards any live, real-time arbitrary event.

Tweet the debates: understanding community annotation of uncollected sources

Representing achievements as badges or trophies is a standard practice in online gaming. Awarding badges has also become a key ingredient in “gamifying” online social media experiences. Social systems such as Foursquare, StackOverflow, and Wikipedia have popularized badges as a way of engaging and motivating users. In this paper we deconstruct badges and present five social psychological functions for badges in social media contexts: goal setting, instruction, reputation, status/affirmation, and group identification. We argue that future research should further explore these five functions and their application in specific contexts.

Badges in Social Media: A Social Psychological Perspective

Location aware notification service technology operable to provide users with notification of opportunities to complete errands on a personal sharable list is disclosed. The location aware notification service technology provides a means for generating recommendations for users for the successful completion of errands based upon current location, time and travel context.

Location-based opportunistic recommendations

1 Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs): Histories, Perspectives and Issues.- 1 Collaborative Virtual Environments: Digital Spaces and Places for CSCW: An Introduction.- 1.1 Introduction.- 1.2 Collaborative Virtual Environments: Some Considerations.- 1.3 Themes Covered in the Book.- 1.4 Summary.- 2 Technical Issues and System Challenges.- 2 Extending the Limits of Collaborative Virtual Environments.- 2.1 Introduction.- 2.2 Support for Awareness of Other People.- 2.3 Support for Multiple Media.- 2.4 Support for Scalability.- 2.5 Summary and Conclusion.- 3 System Challenges for Collaborative Virtual Environments.- 3.1 Introduction.- 3.2 Collaborative Virtual Environments.- 3.3 Structures for Modelling VEs.- 3.4 Conclusion.- 4 Understanding the Network Requirements of Collaborative Virtual Environments.- 4.1 Introduction.- 4.2 User Behaviour.- 4.3 Process Behaviour.- 4.4 Distribution Architecture.- 4.5 Communication Protocol.- 4.6 Network Topology.- 4.7 Conclusions.- 3 Bodies, Presences and Interactions.- 5 "He's Behind You": The Experience of Presence in Shared Virtual Environments.- 5.1 Introduction.- 5.2 The Ethnographic Study.- 5.3 Presence in Electronic Environments.- 5.4 Supporting Presence through Inter subjectivity and Learnability.- 5.5 Developing Engagement Properties.- 5.6 Summary and Conclusions.- 6 All That Is Solid Melts Into Software.- 6.1 Collaborative Virtual Environments Using Symbolic Acting.- 6.2 Symbolic Acting in Action.- 6.3 Results and Re-Design.- 6.4 Conclusions and Future Work.- 7 Virtually Missing the Point: Configuring CVEs for Object-Focused Interaction.- 7.1 Introduction.- 7.2 Objects, Interaction and VR.- 7.3 Approach.- 7.4 Furniture World: An Initial Investigation.- 7.5 Duplication World: Extending Actions and Views.- 7.6 Discussion.- 4 Sharing Context in CVEs - Or "I Know What I See, But What Do You See?".- 8 How Not To Be Objective.- 8.1 Introduction.- 8.2 Populated Information Terrains.- 8.3 Subjectivity.- 8.4 Creating a Subjective Environment.- 8.5 A Subjective Application.- 8.6 Discussion.- 8.7 Summary.- 9 Supporting Flexible Roles in a Shared Space.- 9.1 Introduction.- 9.2 Kansas.- 9.3 Two Examples.- 9.4 Awareness and WYSIWITYS.- 9.5 Capabilities in the User Interface.- 9.6 User Interfaces to Dynamic Capability Acquisition.- 9.7 Conclusions.- 5 So, Now We'1 Collaborative Virtual Environments (CVEs): Histories, Perspectives and Issues.- 1 Collaborative Virtual Environments: Digital Spaces and Places for CSCW: An Introduction.- 1.1 Introduction.- 1.2 Collaborative Virtual Environments: Some Considerations.- 1.3 Themes Covered in the Book.- 1.4 Summary.- 2 Technical Issues and System Challenges.- 2 Extending the Limits of Collaborative Virtual Environments.- 2.1 Introduction.- 2.2 Support for Awareness of Other People.- 2.3 Support for Multiple Media.- 2.4 Support for Scalability.- 2.5 Summary and Conclusion.- 3 System Challenges for Collaborative Virtual Environments.- 3.1 Introduction.- 3.2 Collaborative Virtual Environments.- 3.3 Structures for Modelling VEs.- 3.4 Conclusion.- 4 Understanding the Network Requirements of Collaborative Virtual Environments.- 4.1 Introduction.- 4.2 User Behaviour.- 4.3 Process Behaviour.- 4.4 Distribution Architecture.- 4.5 Communication Protocol.- 4.6 Network Topology.- 4.7 Conclusions.- 3 Bodies, Presences and Interactions.- 5 "He's Behind You": The Experience of Presence in Shared Virtual Environments.- 5.1 Introduction.- 5.2 The Ethnographic Study.- 5.3 Presence in Electronic Environments.- 5.4 Supporting Presence through Inter subjectivity and Learnability.- 5.5 Developing Engagement Properties.- 5.6 Summary and Conclusions.- 6 All That Is Solid Melts Into Software.- 6.1 Collaborative Virtual Environments Using Symbolic Acting.- 6.2 Symbolic Acting in Action.- 6.3 Results and Re-Design.- 6.4 Conclusions and Future Work.- 7 Virtually Missing the Point: Configuring CVEs for Object-Focused Interaction.- 7.1 Introduction.- 7.2 Objects, Interaction and VR.- 7.3 Approach.- 7.4 Furniture World: An Initial Investigation.- 7.5 Duplication World: Extending Actions and Views.- 7.6 Discussion.- 4 Sharing Context in CVEs - Or "I Know What I See, But What Do You See?".- 8 How Not To Be Objective.- 8.1 Introduction.- 8.2 Populated Information Terrains.- 8.3 Subjectivity.- 8.4 Creating a Subjective Environment.- 8.5 A Subjective Application.- 8.6 Discussion.- 8.7 Summary.- 9 Supporting Flexible Roles in a Shared Space.- 9.1 Introduction.- 9.2 Kansas.- 9.3 Two Examples.- 9.4 Awareness and WYSIWITYS.- 9.5 Capabilities in the User Interface.- 9.6 User Interfaces to Dynamic Capability Acquisition.- 9.7 Conclusions.- 5 So, Now We're In A CVE, What Do We Do?.- 10 Designing Interactive Collaborative Environments.- 10.1 Introduction.- 10.2 Electronic Landscapes - The Web Planetarium.- 10.3 A 3D Collaborative Storytelling Tool: From Blob to Klump.- 10.4 Supervisory Robot Control and Mixed Reality.- 10.5 Potential Techniques for Spatial Interaction in Multi-User Surround Display Environments.- 10.6 Summary and Conclusions.- 11 Designing to Support Collaborative Scientific Research Across Distances: The nanoManipulator Environment.- 11.1 Introduction.- 11.2 The Scientific Research Context.- 11.3 Design to Support Collaborative Cognitive Work Across Distances.- 11.4 Design Verification and Refinement: Guidance from Social Awareness Literature.- 11.5 Evaluation.- 11.6 Conclusion.- 12 Tele-Immersive Collaboration in the CAVE Research Network.- 12.1 Introduction.- 12.2 Tele-Immersion.- 12.3 Current Applications.- 12.4 Lessons Learned.- 12.5 New Challenges.- 12.6 Summary.- 6 The Emerging and Existing Cultures of CVE Communities.- 13 Designing an Emergent Culture of Negotiation in Collaborative Virtual Communities: The DomeCityMOO Simulation.- 13.1 Introduction.- 13.2 Communication in Virtual Spaces.- 13.3 Culture and Collaborative Virtual Community Design.- 13.4 The DomeCityMOO.- 13.5 Power Negotiation and Collaboration in DomeCityMOO.- 13.6 Conclusions.- 13.7 Lessons Learned for CVE Designers About Emergent Culture and Negotiation.- 13.8 Next Steps for Culture and Collaborative Virtual Community Design.- 14 Waterfall Glen: Social Virtual Reality at Work.- 14.1 Introduction.- 14.2 The Waterfall Glen Project.- 14.3 Observations.- 14.4 Summary.- 15 The Role of the Personal in Social Workspaces: Reflections on Working in AlphaWorld.- 15.1 Introduction.- 15.2 The AlphaWorld Virtual Office.- 15.3 Beyond Encounters.- 15.4 Conclusions.- References.

Elizabeth F. Churchill

Papers

Method and apparatus for embodied conversational characters with multimodal input/output in an interface device

Tweet the debates: understanding community annotation of uncollected sources

Badges in Social Media: A Social Psychological Perspective

Location-based opportunistic recommendations

Collaborative Virtual Environments: Digital Places and Spaces for Interaction