articles+ search results

Communication, Public relations, business.industry, business, Publics, Public life, Social media, Architecture, Affordance, Information technology, and Sociology

Social media complicate the very nature of public life. In this article, we consider how technology reconfigures publicness, blurs 'audiences' and publics, and alters what it means to engage in public life. The nature of publicness online is shaped by the architecture and affordances of social media, but also by people's social contexts, identities, and practices. Navigating socially mediated publicness requires new mechanisms of control and new skills. Understanding socially-mediated publicness is an ever-shifting process throughout which people juggle blurred boundaries, multi-layered audiences, individual attributes, the specifics of the systems they use, and the contexts of their use.

The Internet, business.industry, business, User interface management systems, Human–computer interaction, Computer science, Social relation, Salient, Visualization, Data visualization, Social environment, World Wide Web, and Visual language

Although constructed for researchers to share news and information, Usenet quickly developed into a social environment with varied styles of interactions. Unfortunately, the browsers developed to view the shared messages fail to effectively convey the rich social features of a newsgroup, let alone all of Usenet The goal of our research is to use the salient features of social interaction to build a "legible" interactive visual representation of Usenet. We introduce our approach to developing this type of visualization, discussing our theoretical framework, questions considered to access the socially salient features, and a series of design iterations used for exploring the way to develop a visual language that conveys social meaning. Although this paper represents a work in progress, we hope that this approach and our initial iterations help build a framework for future directions.

Health Policy, Mental health, Managed care, Nursing, Health care, business.industry, business, Medicine, Insurability, Health organization, and Descriptive research

Debate continues about the cost and use of mental health services under managed care, as legislators consider various “parity” bills. This descriptive research replicates, broadens, and expands previously published case studies of single employers' data on cost and treatment prevalence in a large, diverse, national sample whose varied point-of-service benefits were provided by thirty employers representing multiple industries. Of those covered, 59,005 received treatment over the seven years studied. Of particular note is the pattern of increased use, increased care within the managed behavioral health organization network, and long-term cost reductions.

Materials Chemistry, Inorganic Chemistry, Polymers and Plastics, Organic Chemistry, Aniline, chemistry.chemical_compound, chemistry, Methylaluminoxane, Pyridine, Ethylene, Ligand, Chromium, chemistry.chemical_element, Schiff base, Polymer chemistry, Ketone, chemistry.chemical_classification, and inorganic chemicals

A family of chromium complexes bearing tridentate pyridine-based ligands are disclosed as highly active precatalysts for the oligomerization of ethylene. The ligands are comprised of two distinct types: Type 1, in which both ketone groups of 2,6-diacetylpyridine are converted to imines to produce pyridine bisimine NNN ligands; and Type 2, in which only one ketone group of 2,6-diacetylpyridine is condensed with an aniline derivative to give monoimine NNO coordination sets. Ligands of either type are coordinated to chromium(II) or chromium(III) chlorides, and activation of the resultant complexes with methylaluminoxane (MAO) produces highly active ethylene oligomerization and polymerization catalysts. Catalysts of Type 1 (NNN set) generally produce 1-butene when only two ortho alkyl substituents are present but switch to making waxes or polyethylene when the size and/or number of ortho substituents are increased. Catalysts of Type 2 (NNO set) produce waxes and polyethylene under all of the substitution pat...

Interpersonal communication, Psychology, Cognitive science, Simulation, Social competence, Social intuitionism, Implementation, and Social perception

We introduce vibration and temperature as visceral modes to aid intuitive social perception in networked interaction. We describe two implementations of these ideas for mediated systems -- VibroBod for interpersonal communication and What's Shaking for newsgroup navigation.

Interpersonal communication, Human–computer interaction, Social network, business.industry, business, Computer science, World Wide Web, and InformationSystems_INFORMATIONSYSTEMSAPPLICATIONS

We present a novel application for interactively visualizing the interpersonal networks that emerge during email interactions. While people have complex email interrelationships, no previous tools allow examining one's overall network.

Interview, World Wide Web, Social network, business.industry, business, Personal narrative, Electronic mail, Computer science, Digital artifact, Storytelling, Data visualization, and Recall

As part of a long-term investigation into visualizing email, we have created two visualizations of email archives. One highlights social networks while the other depicts the temporal rhythms of interactions with individuals. While interviewing users of these systems, it became clear that the applications triggered recall of many personal events. One of the most striking and not entirely expected outcomes was that the visualizations motivated retelling stories from the users' pasts to others. In this paper, we discuss the motivation and design of these projects and analyze their use as catalysts for personal narrative and recall.

Internet privacy, business.industry, business, Ethnography, Social theory, World Wide Web, Social community, Sociology, and Social network

This paper presents ethnographic fieldwork on Friendster, an online dating site utilizing social networks to encourage friend-of-friend connections. I discuss how Friendster applies social theory, how users react to the site, and the tensions that emerge between creator and users when the latter fails to conform to the expectations of the former. By offering this ethnographic piece as an example, I suggest how the HCI community should consider the co-evolution of the social community and the underlying technology.

Computer-mediated communication, Interview data, Computer science, Physical space, Social computing, Voluntary participation, World Wide Web, Multimedia, computer.software_genre, computer, Instant messaging, Collaborative software, business.industry, business, and Wireless internet access

There are a variety of digital tools for enabling people who are physically separated by time and space to communicate and collaborate. Widespread use of some of these tools, such as instant messaging and group chat, coupled with the increasingly availability of wireless Internet access, have created new opportunities for using these collaboration tools by people sharing physical spaces in real time. Such 'digital backchannels' affect interactions and experiences in a variety of ways, depending on the spaces, the participants, and the relationships among them. We focus on the space of an academic conference, a physical space designed for voluntary participation by people with shared interests, seeking to share knowledge and connect with others. We present and analyze system logs and interview data from a recent conference, highlight some of the advantages and disadvantages experienced both by those who used the tools and by those who did not, and discuss implications and considerations for future use and research.

Psychology and Engineering ethics

Artificial Intelligence, Philosophy, Quantum dissipation, Quantum dynamics, Open quantum system, Quantum mechanics, Consciousness, media_common.quotation_subject, media_common, Quantum system, Quantum discord, Theoretical physics, Quantum process, and Quantum entanglement

There have been suggestions that the unity of consciousness may be related to the kind of holism depicted only in quantum physics. This argument will be clarified and strengthened. It requires the brain to contain a quantum system with the right properties — a “Bose-Einstein condensate”. It probably does contain one such system, as both theory and experiment have indicated. In fact, we cannot pay full attention to a quantum whole and its parts simultaneously, though we may oscillate between the two. In a quantum theory of consciousness, emergent meanings arise as an inevitable consequence of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle.

Sociology and Political Science, Communication, Sociology, and World Wide Web

Computer-mediated communication, Human multitasking, Computer science, World Wide Web, Multimedia, computer.software_genre, computer, The Internet, business.industry, business, Wireless, Informal communication, Instant messaging, and Collaborative software

There are a variety of digital tools for enabling people who are separated by time and space to communicate and collaborate on shared interests and tasks. The widespread use of some of these tools, such as instant messaging and group chat, coupled with the increasingly widespread availability of wireless access to the Internet (WiFi), have created new opportunities for using these collaboration tools by people sharing physical spaces in real time. The use of these tools to augment face-to-face meetings has created benefits for some participants and distractions-and detractions-for others. Our panelists will discuss some of the advantages and disadvantages of these emerging uses of collaborative tools.

municipality, Crowsnest Pass, bisecting, Rocky Mountains, Southwestern Alberta, British Columbia, and Highway 3

The municipality of Crowsnest Pass is situated in a rare east-west corridor bisecting the Rocky Mountains in Southwestern Alberta and Southeastern British Columbia. Highway 3, which runs the length of the Pass, is a major transportation route supporting over 13,000 vehicles per day. Wildlife mortality, due to collisions with vehicles, has been identified as a major human-safety and wildlife-conservation issue on this stretch of highway with approximately 109 large mammal deaths per year. Another immediate threat to wildlife populations in the region is the proposed expansion and realignment of Highway 3. The expanded highway footprint and increased traffic will likely affect wildlife use in the area. It is therefore important that decision makers acquire information on where wildlife are most likely to cross the road to ensure effective mitigation measures. Currently, information pertaining to wildlife movement in the Pass is limited. Road Watch in the Pass is an innovative, community-based research project that engages local citizenry in reporting wildlife observations along Highway 3 through the Crowsnest Pass in southwestern Alberta, Canada. Through the use of a Web-based GIS, interested citizens can participate in data collection that will be instrumental to decision makers in reducing wildlife-vehicle collisions and for developing mitigation measures for highway expansion. Road Watch was designed to test and profile the use of local knowledge and volunteer data collection in the Crowsnest Pass by providing land managers and the community with valuable baseline information related to wildlife highway crossings. The goals of the project are to collect, analyze, and communicate information highlighting crossing locations of wildlife along the highway based on local knowledge and observations, as well as to engage the citizenry of the pass in local issues relating to wildlife movement and safety. The project was launched in November 2004 after considerable communication with decision makers in the Pass and the hiring of a local project coordinator. There are currently 51 active participants using the website and interactive mapping tool. The 51 participants have recorded over 581 large mammal sightings. These results are provided to the community on a regular basis through the local media, project website, and email messages. Although the project is still new in inception, preliminary results indicate that the community is successfully engaged with an average of five new volunteers joining Road Watch each month. Each volunteer has contributed an average of 12 observations, with 59 percent of the participants submitting observations on more than one occasion. The number of individual observations ranges from one to 167. Participants have recorded the full compliment of large mammals that occur in the pass, including: 243 mule deer (Odocoileus hemionus), 106 big horn sheep (Ovis canadensis), 66 white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus), 64 unidentified deer species (Odocoileus spp.), 35 elk (Cervus elaphus), 30 moose (Alces alces), 11 coyotes (Canis latrans), seven black bears (Ursus americanus), three wolves (Canis lupus), three mountain goats (Oreamnos americanus), three grizzly bears (Ursus arctos horribilis) and two cougars (Puma concolor), with the exception of wolverine (Gulo gulo) and lynx (Lynx canadensis). Road Watch observations provide a valuable supplement to mortality data and have the potential to greatly enhance the existing information base. For example, the percentages of species observations from Road Watch correlate to the recorded levels of wildlife mortality, with mule deer as the highest recorded species from both data sources. From preliminary comparisons of these two data sources, we have identified zones with high Road Watch observations corresponding with low mortality records. This may indicate that there are areas where wildlife are successfully crossing, which has important implications for highway mitigation. Road Watch is an innovative initiative that will generate a unique dataset resulting from a comparative anlysis of knowledge sources. Preliminary results demonstrate that this approach increases the knowledge base by providing new emerging knowledge that would not have been explicit from a single source. This initiative also provides the opportunity for the Crowsnest Pass community to actively engage in an important wildlife-conservation issue. This information will be important to citizens in the community and local decisionmakers in relation to human safety and wildlife conservation around Highway 3.

Computer science, Online participation, Visual search, Visualization, World Wide Web, Data science, Friendship, media_common.quotation_subject, media_common, Data visualization, business.industry, business, Social network, Usability, and Popularity

Recent years have witnessed the dramatic popularity of online social networking services, in which millions of members publicly articulate mutual "friendship" relations. Guided by ethnographic research of these online communities, we have designed and implemented a visualization system for playful end-user exploration and navigation of large scale online social networks. Our design builds upon familiar node link network layouts to contribute customized techniques for exploring connectivity in large graph structures, supporting visual search and analysis, and automatically identifying and visualizing community structures. Both public installation and controlled studies of the system provide evidence of the system's usability, capacity for facilitating discovery, and potential for fun and engaged social activity

citizen science, Crowsnest Pass, highways, road ecology, transportation, web-based GIS, wildlife-vehicle collisions, Biology (General), QH301-705.5, Ecology, QH540-549.5, Web application, business.industry, business, Road ecology, Wildlife, Environmental protection, Wildlife conservation, Kappa index, Citizen science, Human safety, Mortality data, Environmental planning, and Geography

Road Watch in the Pass is a citizen-science project that engages local citizens in reporting wildlife observations along a 44-km stretch of Highway 3 through Crowsnest Pass in southwestern Alberta, Canada. The numbers of wildlife vehicle collisions and a recent proposal to expand the highway have raised concerns from both human safety and wildlife conservation perspectives. Through the use of a web-based GIS, interested citizens can contribute information that will be instrumental in making final decisions concerning measures to mitigate the effects of highway expansion. Currently, 58 people have contributed over 713 observations to Road Watch. We performed a preliminary comparison of 11 months of Road Watch observations and wildlife mortality data for the same time period to demonstrate that the use of citizen science not only augments more conventional approaches, but also results in the emergence of new knowledge and insights. A Kappa index of agreement of 14% indicates poor agreement between the data sets, highlighting that wildlife successfully cross the highway in areas not identified by the wildlife mortality data. This has important implications for design and mitigation efforts for Highway 3 and other roadways.

Marketing, Public Administration, Sociology and Political Science, Chaos theory in organizational development, Management, Government, Social vision, Managing change, Quantum, and Engineering ethics

Social software, computer.software_genre, computer, Computer science, World Wide Web, Social network, business.industry, business, Tag system, Controlled vocabulary, Folksonomy, Reputation, media_common.quotation_subject, media_common, Modalities, and Web page

In recent years, tagging systems have become increasingly popular. These systems enable users to add keywords (i.e., "tags") to Internet resources (e.g., web pages, images, videos) without relying on a controlled vocabulary. Tagging systems have the potential to improve search, spam detection, reputation systems, and personal organization while introducing new modalities of social communication and opportunities for data mining. This potential is largely due to the social structure that underlies many of the current systems.Despite the rapid expansion of applications that support tagging of resources, tagging systems are still not well studied or understood. In this paper, we provide a short description of the academic related work to date. We offer a model of tagging systems, specifically in the context of web-based systems, to help us illustrate the possible benefits of these tools. Since many such systems already exist, we provide a taxonomy of tagging systems to help inform their analysis and design, and thus enable researchers to frame and compare evidence for the sustainability of such systems. We also provide a simple taxonomy of incentives and contribution models to inform potential evaluative frameworks. While this work does not present comprehensive empirical results, we present a preliminary study of the photo-sharing and tagging system Flickr to demonstrate our model and explore some of the issues in one sample system. This analysis helps us outline and motivate possible future directions of research in tagging systems.

Early adopter, Venture capital, Psychology, Social software, computer.software_genre, computer, Marketing, Social life, and Cash flow

Computer Networks and Communications, Human-Computer Interaction, Public relations, business.industry, business, Affordance, Norm (social), Sociology, Social network, Social processes, Socialization, Friendship, media_common.quotation_subject, media_common, and Architecture

“Are you my friend? Yes or no?” This question, while fundamentally odd, is a key component of social network sites. Participants must select who on the system they deem to be ‘Friends.’ Their choice is publicly displayed for all to see and becomes the backbone for networked participation. By examining what different participants groups do on social network sites, this paper investigates what Friendship means and how Friendship affects the culture of the sites. I will argue that Friendship helps people write community into being in social network sites. Through these imagined egocentric communities, participants are able to express who they are and locate themselves culturally. In turn, this provides individuals with a contextual frame through which they can properly socialize with other participants. Friending is deeply affected by both social processes and technological affordances. I will argue that the established Friending norms evolved out of a need to resolve the social tensions that emerged due to technological limitations. At the same time, I will argue that Friending supports pre-existing social norms yet because the architecture of social network sites is fundamentally different than the architecture of unmediated social spaces, these sites introduce an environment that is quite unlike that with which we are accustomed.

Computer Networks and Communications, Computer Science Applications, Scholarship, Social science, Enterprise social software, Psychology, Computer-mediated communication, Social network, business.industry, business, Semiotics of social networking, Cyberpsychology, Engineering ethics, Social media optimization, Poison control, Electrical and Electronic Engineering, Strategy and Management, Management of Technology and Innovation, Affordance, Public relations, Sociology, and Special section

Social network sites (SNSs) are increasingly attracting the attention of academic and industry researchers intrigued by their affordances and reach. This special theme section of the Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication brings together scholarship on these emergent phenomena. In this introductory article, we describe features of SNSs and propose a comprehensive definition. We then present one perspective on the history of such sites, discussing key changes and developments. After briefly summarizing existing scholarship concerning SNSs, we discuss the articles in this special section and conclude with considerations for future research.

Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous), Communication, Business, Convergence (routing), Advertising, Internet privacy, business.industry, and Information privacy

Not all Facebook users appreciated the September 2006 launch of the `News Feeds' feature. Concerned about privacy implications, thousands of users vocalized their discontent through the site itself, forcing the company to implement privacy tools. This essay examines the privacy concerns voiced following these events. Because the data made easily visible were already accessible with effort, what disturbed people was primarily the sense of exposure and invasion. In essence, the `privacy trainwreck' that people experienced was the cost of social convergence.

Communication, Cultural Studies, Political action, Political science, Public relations, business.industry, business, Social psychology, and Social network

Library and Information Sciences, Information Systems, Persona, Status group, Subculture, Life style, Information science, Social psychology, User studies, and Sociology

Whether we call them “users,” “participants,” or just “actors,” a focus of information science research and practice is invariably human beings. While user studies have grown in scope and volume since the early ARIST chapters in the 1960s, few researchers have approached study populaces from the perspective of social types. A concept with a long and somewhat sordid history in the social sciences, particularly sociology, as Almog (1998) explains referencing the works of Parker, Simmel, Goffman, Klapp, Becker, and other luminaries, social types in essence refer to: A sociological summary of the typical characteristics of a particular group or of a category of human beings usually recognized and typed by the public and often granted a nickname. This group or category may be a secondary group, a community, a profession, a subculture, a status group, a class or a generation unit that is characterized by its look (physical, fashionable or both), life style and philosophy, pattern of interaction (particularly linguistic), attitudes and certain psychological traits.

Library and Information Sciences, Information Systems, Social identity theory, Ethnography, Social computing, Information architecture, business.industry, business, Embodied cognition, Social media optimization, Social network, Sociology, World Wide Web, and Social web

Overview Social network websites have played a key factor in the evolution of the “social web.” Hundreds of millions of individuals from all age-ranges have flocked to sites such as MySpace (http://myspace.com), Facebook (http://facebook.com) and Orkut (http://orkut.com) to create an online representation of identity, to manage their social lives, and to establish deep social relationships with other users of the sites. To this extent, the promise of Web 2.0 is embodied in social network websites. Social networks both implicitly and explicitly connect individuals, enabling the representation of a rich social identity embodied in a virtual presence. In this panel, an exciting young group of researchers will present results of their ongoing work in the analysis of social network websites. This panel will present a number of different research methods, as well as international perspectives on the analysis of social networks. danah boyd will present some of the key challenges she has faced in her multi-year, ongoing ethnographic analysis of social network websites. Raquel Recuero will share results of her mixed-methods international work on Fotolog, a popular photo-based social network site. Scott Golder and Fred Stutzman will present large-network analysis of social behavior in Facebook, the leading college-based social network. Finally, Alla Zollers will present a quantitative and content-analysis of activism in social network sites, analyzing the information architecture of the sites and the role it plays in activism. The research and the varying methods presented in this panel will present viewers with an exciting look at the many ways social network websites can be analyzed. These sites stand at the forefront of the social web, presenting myriad opportunities to future researchers.

Endodontie, NaOCl, RinsEndo and FOS: Medical and Health Sciences

Human-Computer Interaction, Transformative learning, Cyberpsychology, World Wide Web, Internet privacy, business.industry, business, and Sociology

Many of us have had our lives transformed by technology. And many of us are also enamored of the transformative potential of technology, which has led us to develop technology and become advocates of technological practices. As we become more and more enveloped in and by technology, it’s easy to feel excited about what’s going on. Yet we must also be cautious.

Communication, Cultural Studies, Visibility, The Internet, business.industry, business, Social psychology, Sociology, and Internet privacy

The complexities of the Internet continue to be a source of consternation for parents, educators, and policy makers. Some embrace the Internet, evangelizing about its tremendous potential. Others f...

Computer Networks and Communications, Human-Computer Interaction, Computer science, Social network analysis, Spambot, World Wide Web, Social media, Internet privacy, business.industry, business, Spamming, Forum spam, Microblogging, Social spam, social computing, social media, social network analysis, microblogging, spam, ComputingMilieux_LEGALASPECTSOFCOMPUTING, ComputingMilieux_COMPUTERSANDSOCIETY, InformationSystems_INFORMATIONSYSTEMSAPPLICATIONS, and InformationSystems_INFORMATIONSTORAGEANDRETRIEVAL

Spam becomes a problem as soon as an online communication medium becomes popular. Twitter’s behavioral and structural properties make it a fertile breeding ground for spammers to proliferate. In this article we examine spam around a one-time Twitter meme—“robotpickuplines”. We show the existence of structural network differences between spam accounts and legitimate users. We conclude by highlighting challenges in disambiguating spammers from legitimate users.

Sociology and Political Science

Social network, business.industry, business, Social media, Social information, Microblogging, World Wide Web, Internet privacy, Phone, Broadcasting, Computer-mediated communication, Social computing, and Umbrella term

Microblogging, the act of broadcasting short, real-time messages, is a relatively new communication practice allowing people to share information they are less likely to express using existing technologies (e.g. email, phone, IM or weblogs). We use microblogging as an umbrella term to include the posting of status updates to social network sites such as Facebook, and message-exchange services like Twitter, Jaiku, and Yammer. Microblogging has become popular quickly, catching researchers' interests as both a means of public, social information exchange, and a medium for collaboration and communication in the work context. The goal of this workshop is to provide a forum for researchers and practitioners from academia and industry to exchange insights into microblogging as a communication practice in enterprises, academic and social settings. We aim to develop an agenda for what and how we can learn from and better study this phenomenon.

Library and Information Sciences, Communication, Artificial intelligence, business.industry, business, Knowledge management, and Pace

Even if they do not always keep pace with technological innovation, end-users adapt rapidly. For professionals, it’s more than just recognizing new behavior, we must anticipate or accompany them.

Sociology and Political Science, Anthropology, History, Sociology, Media studies, Social dynamics, and Social connectedness

Turbulence, Flow visualization, Vortex, Lift (force), Flow separation, Physics, Airfoil, Particle image velocimetry, Drag, Mechanics, and Physics::Fluid Dynamics

The jet mixing of a co-flow jet (CFJ) airfoil is investigated to understand the mechanism of lift enhancement, drag reduction, and stall margin increase. Digital Particle Image Velocimetry, flow visualization and aerodynamic forces measurements are used to reveal the insight of the CFJ airfoil mixing process. At low AoA and low momentum coefficient, the mixing between the wall jet and mainflow is dominant with large structure coherent structures for the attached flows. When the momentum coefficient is increased, the large vortex structure disappears. At high AoA with flow separation, the CFJ creates a upstream flow strip between two counter rotating vertical shear layer, i.e., the outer shear layer and inner flow induced by CFJ. The UFS is characterized with large vortex free region. The co-flow wall jet is deflected normal to the airfoil surface characterized with a saddle point. With increased momentum coefficient of the CFJ, the saddle point moves downstream and eventually disappears when the flow is attached. Turbulence plays a key role in mixing the CFJ with mainflow to transport high kinetic energy from the jet to mainflow so that the mainflow can remain attached at high AoA to generate high lift. When the flow is separated, increased CFJ momentum coefficient also increases the turbulence intensity at jet injection mixing region.

Sociology and Political Science, Communication, The Internet, business.industry, business, Personal branding, Conversation, media_common.quotation_subject, media_common, Internet privacy, Social media, and Sociology

Social media technologies collapse multiple audiences into single contexts, making it difficult for people to use the same techniques online that they do to handle multiplicity in face-to-face conversation. This article investigates how content producers navigate ‘imagined audiences’ on Twitter. We talked with participants who have different types of followings to understand their techniques, including targeting different audiences, concealing subjects, and maintaining authenticity. Some techniques of audience management resemble the practices of ‘micro-celebrity’ and personal branding, both strategic self-commodification. Our model of the networked audience assumes a many-to-many communication through which individuals conceptualize an imagined audience evoked through their tweets.

Computer Networks and Communications, Human-Computer Interaction, The Internet, business.industry, business, Psychology, Advertising, Internet privacy, News media, and Default

With over 500 million users, the decisions that Facebook makes about its privacy settings have the potential to influence many people. While its changes in this domain have often prompted privacy advocates and news media to critique the company, Facebook has continued to attract more users to its service. This raises a question about whether or not Facebook's changes in privacy approaches matter and, if so, to whom. This paper examines the attitudes and practices of a cohort of 18- and 19-year-olds surveyed in 2009 and again in 2010 about Facebook's privacy settings. Our results challenge widespread assumptions that youth do not care about and are not engaged with navigating privacy. We find that, while not universal, modifications to privacy settings have increased during a year in which Facebook's approach to privacy was hotly contested. We also find that both frequency and type of Facebook use as well as Internet skill are correlated with making modifications to privacy settings. In contrast, we observe few gender differences in how young adults approach their Facebook privacy settings, which is notable given that gender differences exist in so many other domains online. We discuss the possible reasons for our findings and their implications.

Publics, Social network, business.industry, business, Internet privacy, Affordance, and Sociology

General Engineering, Social Sciences (miscellaneous), Social psychology, Poison control, Homophily, Social engagement, Social group, Social network, business.industry, business, Psychology, Collective identity, Timeline, and Social media

The principle of homophily says that people associate with other groups of people who are mostly like themselves. Many online communities are structured around groups of socially similar individuals. On Twitter, however, people are exposed to multiple, diverse points of view through the public timeline. The authors captured 30,000 tweets about the shooting of George Tiller, a late-term abortion doctor, and the subsequent conversations among pro-life and pro-choice advocates. They found that replies between like-minded individuals strengthen group identity, whereas replies between different-minded individuals reinforce in-group and out-group affiliation. Their results show that people are exposed to broader viewpoints than they were before but are limited in their ability to engage in meaningful discussion. They conclude with implications for different kinds of social participation on Twitter more generally.

Virology, Insect Science, Immunology, Microbiology, Molecular biology, Transmembrane protein, Antibody, biology.protein, biology, Gp41, Transmembrane domain, Biophysics, Lipid bilayer, Heterologous, Membrane protein, HBsAg, Structure and Assembly, virus diseases, and digestive system diseases

Native hepatitis B surface antigen (HBsAg) spontaneously assembles into 22-nm subviral particles. The particles are lipoprotein micelles, in which HBsAg is believed to span the lipid layer four times. The first two transmembrane domains, TM1 and TM2, are required for particle assembly. We have probed the requirements for particle assembly by replacing the entire first or third TM domain of HBsAg with the transmembrane domain of HIV gp41. We found that either TM domain of HBsAg could be replaced, resulting in HBsAg-gp41 chimeras that formed particles efficiently. HBsAg formed particles even when both TM1 and TM3 were replaced with the gp41 domain. The results indicate remarkable flexibility in HBsAg particle formation and provide a novel way to express heterologous membrane proteins that are anchored to a lipid surface by their own membrane-spanning domain. The membrane-proximal exposed region (MPER) of gp41 is an important target of broadly reactive neutralizing antibodies against HIV-1, and HBsAg-MPER particles may provide a good platform for future vaccine development.

Urban Studies, Safety Research, Media studies, Social media, and Sociology

A Response to Colin Bennett's 'In Defence of Privacy'

Technological design, Computer science, Online community, Scratch, computer.programming_language, computer, Qualitative analysis, Attribution, Social media, Reuse, and World Wide Web

In this paper, we explore the role that attribution plays in shaping user reactions to content reuse, or remixing, in a large user-generated content community. We present two studies using data from the Scratch online community -- a social media platform where hundreds of thousands of young people share and remix animations and video games. First, we present a quantitative analysis that examines the effects of a technological design intervention introducing automated attribution of remixes on users' reactions to being remixed. We compare this analysis to a parallel examination of "manual" credit-giving. Second, we present a qualitative analysis of twelve in-depth, semi-structured, interviews with Scratch participants on the subject of remixing and attribution. Results from both studies suggest that automatic attribution done by technological systems (i.e., the listing of names of contributors) plays a role that is distinct from, and less valuable than, credit which may superficially involve identical information but takes on new meaning when it is given by a human remixer. We discuss the implications of these findings for the designers of online communities and social media platforms.

Arts and Humanities (miscellaneous), Communication, Social media, Persona, Personality psychology, Game playing, Instrumental and intrinsic value, Sociology, Gossip, Advertising, Personally identifiable information, and Equalizer

Social media technologies let people connect by creating and sharing content. We examine the use of Twitter by famous people to conceptualize celebrity as a practice. On Twitter, celebrity is practiced through the appearance and performance of ‘backstage’ access. Celebrity practitioners reveal what appears to be personal information to create a sense of intimacy between participant and follower, publicly acknowledge fans, and use language and cultural references to create affiliations with followers. Interactions with other celebrity practitioners and personalities give the impression of candid, uncensored looks at the people behind the personas. But the indeterminate ‘authenticity’ of these performances appeals to some audiences, who enjoy the game playing intrinsic to gossip consumption. While celebrity practice is theoretically open to all, it is not an equalizer or democratizing discourse. Indeed, in order to successfully practice celebrity, fans must recognize the power differentials intrinsic to the relationship.