Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

Multimedia Use In Small News Organizations, Robyn K. Keriazes

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.

To Internet Or Not To Internet: Ethics Opinions On Internet Usage, Sharon Bradley

Continuing Legal Education Presentations

Considers the ethical implications of using email to communicate with clients, using cloud storage for legal files, and tracking people related to a case via the Internet . Highlights recent state bar ethics committee decisions.

Mobile Learning: Designing A Socio-Technical Model To Empower Learning In Higher Education, Pimpaka Prasertsilp

LUX: A Journal of Transdisciplinary Writing and Research from Claremont Graduate University

Mobile learning is a rapidly developing mode for teaching and learning to deliver content to learners. Additionally, mobile learning can aid both formal learning in traditional classrooms and informal settings outside classes. This paper explains how the mobility of learners can contribute to the process of acquiring knowledge, skills, and experiences, and further investigates how to design an effective model. This study also explores activities in which students can use mobile devices to facilitate their learning. Additionally, there are many factors that affect students’ learning outcomes. In this paper, researcher investigates how to design an effective socio-technical model by integrating …

Facetime: Employers--And The Occasional Student--Are Finding Facebook Can Provide A Glimpse Of The Reality Beyond The Interview, Gerry Boyle

Colby Magazine

More and more companies are turning to Facebook.com to reveal what applicants are really like. And some students are learning to turn the tables.

Predicting Parkinson's Disease Progression With Smartphone Data, Pramod Anantharam, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Vahid Taslimi, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Most of the existing approaches for detecting diseases/risk score form observations (sensor and textual) ignore the presence of any prior knowledge of the disease. In this work, we start top-down by enumerating the symptoms of Parkinson's Disease (PD) and map the symptoms to its possible manifestations in sensor observations (bottom-up). We show such manifestations and further use these manifestations as features to build classifiers to differentiate between the PD patients and the control group.

The Best Social Media Practices For An Individual Franchisee In The Restaurant Industry, Stephanie Francesca Ronca

Journalism

No abstract provided.

Building Collaboration Within The Quarter Horse Community: The Obstacles And Hurdles, Allison Grayson

Journalism

The following study investigates how to increase collaboration within the Quarter Horse community through Twitter. Twitter is increasingly one of the top social media tools for many organizations, including organizations within the Quarter Horse community. Twitter is an important tool in creating a dialogue between community members, and the organizations to which they are members. Research shows, “Users believe that using Twitter can improve their performance or their ability to achieve specific goals and, thus, they are more extrinsically motivated to continue to use it” (Agrifoglio, Black, Ferrara & Metallo, 2012, p. 38). That being said, it is important that …

Point Of View: The Digital Revolution Hits Home--Or Does It?, G. Calvin Mackenzie

Colby Magazine

G. Calvin Mackenzie (government) on the ways technology is changing our lives—and education.

Water, Water Everywhere Nor Any Drop To Drink: Activists Use Social Networks And Digital Video In Pleas For Rivers And Groundwater, Lauren Pongan

Colby Magazine

A new generation of activists, including Colbians in India and Mexico, is using video skills and social media to alert the world to environmental crises.

Packaging Inspiration: Al Qaeda's Digital Magazine Inspire And Self-Radicalization, Susan Currie Sivek

Faculty Presentations

Inspire magazine, a digital publication of Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula, seeks to motivate potential terrorists to carry out attacks in the West. The magazine has seemed to be effective, resulting in its connection to a number of recent plots. This presentation discusses the magazine’s potential for aiding prospective terrorists through the self-radicalization process.

A More-Radical Online Revolution, Edward L. Ayers

History Faculty Publications

Whatever the discipline, the new online world must find ways to help create new knowledge. Online education cannot run indefinitely, as it does now, on borrowed intellectual capital, disseminating what we already know. Higher education takes its energy, its purpose, from a charged circuit between teaching and research, between sharing knowledge and making knowledge. New forms of teaching must be able to generate new ideas.

Cyberbullying Among 9-16 Year Olds In Ireland, Brian O'Neill, Thuy Dinh

Reports

• Almost a quarter (23%) of 9-16 year olds surveyed experienced some form of bullying, online or offline. Bullying online or by mobile is less common (4%) than face to face. Levels of bullying in Ireland are a little above the average reported by the 25 countries (23% vs. 19%) but lower for cyberbullying (4% vs. 6%).
• Bullying face to face is experienced by younger children (under 12) as well as by older teens. Online bullying is much less common among younger 9-12 olds and happens mostly to teenagers.

Heuristics For Broader Assessment Of Effectiveness And Usability In Technology-Mediated Technical Communication, Roger Grice, Audrey G. Bennett, Janice W. Fernheimer, Cheryl Geisler, Robert Krull, Raymond A. Lutzky, Matthew G. J. Rolph, Patricia Search, James P. Zappen

Writing, Rhetoric, and Digital Studies Faculty Publications

Purpose: To offer additional tools for the assessment of effectiveness and usability in technology-mediated communication based in established heuristics.

Method: An interdisciplinary group of researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute selected five disparate examples of technology-mediated communication, formally evaluated each using contemporary heuristics, and then engaged in an iterative design process to arrive at an expanded toolkit for in depth analyses.

Results: A set of heuristics and operationalized metrics for the deeper analysis of a broader scope of contemporary technology-mediated communication.

Conclusions: The continual evolution of communication, including the emergence of new, interactive media, provides a challenging opportunity to identify effective …

What Kind Of #Conversation Is Twitter? Mining #Psycholinguistic Cues For Emergency Coordination, Hemant Purohit, Andrew Hampton, Valerie L. Shalin, Amit P. Sheth, John M. Flach, Shreyansh Bhatt

Kno.e.sis Publications

The information overload created by social media messages in emergency situations challenges response organizations to find targeted content and users. We aim to select useful messages by detecting the presence of conversation as an indicator of coordinated citizen action. Using simple linguistic indicators associated with conversation analysis in social science, we model the presence of conversation in the communication landscape of Twitter in a large corpus of 1.5M tweets for various disaster and non-disaster events spanning different periods, lengths of time and varied social significance. Within Replies, Retweets and tweets that mention other Twitter users, we found that domain-independent, linguistic …

Commentary: Changing The Channel: Public Health Communication In The 21st Century, Anna Goodman Hoover

Frontiers in Public Health Services and Systems Research

This commentary asserts the need for research examining the use and efficacy of social media as a tool for meeting public health stakeholders’ information needs. The author points to several potential research questions for the field, situates studies addressing these questions within the PHSSR Research Agenda, and introduces the work of Harris et al. that is included in this issue of Frontiers. The commentary closes with a call for horizontal stakeholder communication that supports evidence-based decision-making.

A Basic Analysis Of Entry And Exit In The Us Broadband Market, 2005-2008, James Prieger, Michelle Connolly

School of Public Policy Working Papers

We conduct a basic yet thorough analysis of entry and exit in the US broadband market, using a complete FCC census of providers from 2005 to 2008. There is a tremendous amount of (simultaneous) entry and exit in the US broadband market. Most entry is from existing providers expanding into new geographic areas. Entry and exit vary widely across the various modes of provision, which argues against treating broadband as a homogenous service in theoretical or empirical work. The highest entry rates also generally have the highest entrant shares. Entry rates display positive autocorrelation, and the same is true for …

A Basic Analysis Of Entry And Exit In The Us Broadband Market, 2005-2008: More Detail And Additional Results, James Prieger, Michelle Connolly

School of Public Policy Working Papers

We conduct a basic yet thorough analysis of entry and exit in the US broadband market, using a complete FCC census of providers from 2005 to 2008. There is a tremendous amount of (simultaneous) entry and exit in the US broadband market. Most entry is from existing providers expanding into new geographic areas. Entry and exit vary widely across the various modes of provision, which argues against treating broadband as a homogenous service in theoretical or empirical work. The highest entry rates also generally have the highest entrant shares. Entry rates display positive autocorrelation, and the same is true for …

Living In Digital Asia: Better, Faster, Stronger?, Singapore Management University

Perspectives@SMU

The rate at which Asia is embracing technology is simply "amazing", according to Olivier Muehlstein, principal consultant at the Boston Consulting Group. “It's astounding how digitally engaged and active people are in this part of the world. Southeast Asia is extremely connected; it's an anomaly,” he said, and cautioned that an important consequence from all of these changes, is that privacy does not exist anymore.

Steve Jobs' Moment Of Silence, Janet Dooley

SOJMC Faculty Research

Steve Jobs, founder and longtime center of Apple Inc. passed away on October 5, 2011. Tributes to this visionary were spontaneous and abundant. Two students from the School of Visual Arts in New York, Hyui Yong Kim and Bryan Wolff, working with KNARF® Advertising, conceived of a means by which a traditional remembrance, the moment of silence, was upgraded to a modern technological tribute. Users of iPods, iPhones, iPads and other computing devices could download to their iTunes library eight seconds of silence as a remembrance to Jobs’ contributions to technology, to communication and to the impact on their …

Predictors Of The Change In The Expression Of Emotional Support Within An Online Breast Cancer Support Group: A Longitudinal Study, Woohyun Yoo, Ming-Yuan Chih, Min-Woo Kwon, Junghwan Yang, Eunji Cho, Bryan Mclaughlin, Kang Namkoong, Dhavan V. Shah, David H. Gustafson

Community & Leadership Development Faculty Publications

OBJECTIVES: To explore how the expression of emotional support in an online breast cancer support group changes over time, and what factors predict this pattern of change.

METHODS: We conducted growth curve modeling with data collected from 192 participants in an online breast cancer support group within the Comprehensive Health Enhancement Support System (CHESS) during a 24-week intervention period.

RESULTS: Individual expression of emotional support tends to increase over time for the first 12 weeks of the intervention, but then decrease slightly with time after that. In addition, we found that age, living situation, comfort level with computer and the …

Maintaining The Master International Frequency Register, Frans G. Von Der Dunk

Space, Cyber, and Telecommunications Law Program: Faculty Publications

The present paper is the written elaboration of a presentation held under the same title at the workshop “International Regulations of Space Communications” held in Luxembourg on 24 and 25 May 2012. Consequently, the topic of this paper, the maintenance of the Master International Frequency Register as a key tool for allowing satellite communications to be a viable international sector of space activities, is viewed through the looking glass of the session title, “WRC-12 from the Perspective of International Telecommunications Law.”

In other words, it does not purport to deal with the actual details of maintaining the Register …

Digital Storytelling: Empowering Feminist And Womanist Faith Formation With Young Women, Mary E. Hess

Faculty Publications

No abstract provided.

The Internet, Anonymous, And Our Public Identities Recreating Democracy, Leslie Anne Hutchinson

Theses Digitization Project

This study discusses the pursuit of understanding how the discursive construction of the internet affects individuals, identities, and democracy. it also discusses the internet within theoretical positions on its history, the public sphere, and revolutionary politics. Western governments have created legislation regulating the internet for democratic purposes, and this study examines how different and often contrasting views of democracy have shaped the way those of us connected to the internet can speak about it. The Anonymous identity, articulates one such contrast. Anonymous constructs an alternative, Internet identity-one stemming from the identity of the hacker. Policies targeted at stopping hackers and …

A Hybrid Approach To Finding Relevant Social Media Content For Complex Domain Specific Information Needs, Delroy H. Cameron, Amit P. Sheth, Nishita Jaykumar, Gaurish Anand, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Gary Alan Smith

Kno.e.sis Publications

While contemporary semantic search systems offer to improve classical keyword-based search, they are not always adequate for complex, domain specific information needs. Some complex search situations require knowledge of both ontological concepts as well as 'intelligible constructs' not typically modeled in ontologies. Intelligible constructs convey essential information, which may be important to the holistic information needs of information seekers. Such constructs may include notions of intensity, frequency, interval, dosage, emotion, sentiment, equivalence, synonymy, negation, parts-of-speech, etc. However, few search systems utilize both structured background knowledge (ontologies) and the aforementioned knowledge for query interpretation in domain specific searches. Instead, there is …

Traffic Analytics Using Probabilistic Graphical Models Enhanced With Knowledge Bases, Pramod Anantharam, Krishnaprasad Thirunarayan, Amit P. Sheth

Kno.e.sis Publications

Graphical models have been successfully used to deal with uncertainty, incompleteness, and dynamism within many domains. These models built from data often ignore preexisting declarative knowledge about the domain in the form of ontologies and Linked Open Data (LOD) that is increasingly available on the web. In this paper, we present an approach to leverage such 'top-down' domain knowledge to enhance 'bottom-up' building of graphical models. Specifically, we propose three operations on the graphical model structure to enrich it with nodes, edges, and edge directions. We illustrate the enrichment process using traffic data from 511.org and declarative knowledge from ConceptNet. …

Advancing Data Reuse In Phyloinformatics Using An Ontology-Driven Semantic Web Approach, Maryam Panahiazar, Amit P. Sheth, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu, Rutger Vos, Jim Leebens-Mack

Kno.e.sis Publications

Phylogenetic analyses can resolve historical relationships among genes, organisms or higher taxa. Understanding such relationships can elucidate a wide range of biological phenomena, including, for example, the importance of gene and genome duplications in the evolution of gene function, the role of adaptation as a driver of diversification, or the evolutionary consequences of biogeographic shifts. Phyloinformaticists are developing data standards, databases and communication protocols (e.g. Application Programming Interfaces, APIs) to extend the accessibility of gene trees, species trees, and the metadata necessary to interpret these trees, thus enabling researchers across the life sciences to reuse phylogenetic knowledge. Specifically, Semantic Web …

Twitris: Socially Influenced Browsing, Ashutosh Sopan Jadhav, Wenbo Wang, Raghava Mutharaju, Pramod Anantharam, Vinh Nguyen, Amit P. Sheth, Karthik Gomadam, Meenakshi Nagarajan, Ajith Harshana Ranabahu

Kno.e.sis Publications

In this paper, we present Twitris, a semantic Web application that facilitates browsing for news and information, using social perceptions as the fulcrum. In doing so we address challenges in large scale crawling, processing of real time information, and preserving spatio-temporal-thematic properties central to observations pertaining to real time events. We extract metadata about events from Twitter and bring related news and Wikipedia articles to the user. In developing Twitris, we have used the DBPedia ontology.

Adaptive Semantic Annotation Of Entity And Concept Mentions In Text, Pablo N. Mendes

Kno.e.sis Publications

The recent years have seen an increase in interest for knowledge repositories that are useful across applications, in contrast to the creation of ad hoc or application-specific databases.
These knowledge repositories figure as a central provider of unambiguous identifiers and semantic relationships between entities. As such, these shared entity descriptions serve as a common vocabulary to exchange and organize information in different formats and for different purposes. Therefore, there has been remarkable interest in systems that are able to automatically tag textual documents with identifiers from shared knowledge repositories so that the content in those documents is described in a …

Packaging Inspiration: Al Qaeda’S Digital Magazine Inspire In The Self-Radicalization Process, Susan Currie Sivek

Faculty Publications

Al Qaeda is today a fragmented organization, and its strategic communication efforts now focus largely on recruiting individuals in the West to carry out “individual jihad” in their home countries. One Al Qaeda–affiliated publication, Inspire, represents an unusual use of the digital magazine format and content for recruitment. This study examines the content and design of Inspire to determine how the magazine may advance the self-radicalization that it seeks to induce in its readers. This analysis finds that the magazine weaves together jihadist ideology, a narrow interpretation of Islam, and appropriations of Western popular culture to maximize the publication’s …

City Magazines And Social Media: Moving Beyond The Monthly, Susan Currie Sivek

Faculty Publications

City magazines have long been established in many American locales, but digital media of all types are now offering opportunities and challenges to this genre of magazine. Digital media have also complicated the rapidly changing ecosystems of local information in which urban citizens reside. The resources and popularity of newspapers and broadcast news have shifted, and other forms of print, digital, and mobile media are assuming important roles in informing the public. With all these factors at work, this may be a pivotal moment for city magazines as they explore innovative technology, creative business strategies, and the new possibilities for …