This is a submission to the "Interrogating the social realities of information and communications systems pre-conference workshop, ASIST AM2006 ==> This project investigates how, why and with what effects children and young people are using mobile telephony in Australia. The aim of the project is to work closely with young users on a longitudinal basis to describe accurately the impact of mobile phones, without either over-determining or underestimating the social effects of this powerful technology. We also have a desire to assist our policy partner to respond to concerns and fears raised by young people about mobile communication. The project also responds to the current state of academic research in media and communication technologies, where aspects of media use theory suggest productive ways forward for conceptualising social activity with respect to contemporary technological superstructures of communication. With pilot testing complete, we are about to embark on the main study. It will involve young people and pre-teens from a variety of socio-political backgrounds as co-researchers in a 3-year review of the role of mobile communications in the development of social structures and friendship networks. We plan to pay particular attention to the impact of communicative mobility on disadvantaged sectors of the community, and on the ways in which social and educational information is deployed and used through mobile phones to support social cohesion and to pursue group advantage. Our project integrates information systems, cultural research and media inquiry to ask questions about the impacts of the mobile phone in relation to the social experience of young people. In particular it seeks to describe and model the ways in which social behaviours are informed and/ or supported by the presence and availability of mobile phones in young lives. The project hypothesises that such behaviours may be characterised as both positive and negative; with phones operating as tools for personal security management, for friendship building, but also for bullying and intimidation. There are several influential trends in thinking about mobility and technology in social contexts, all of which need to be noted in pursuing the current project. Briefly, these can be summed up through four trajectories: a) networks; b) the management of knowledge [through computational power]; c) the compression of time and space through ubiquity of contact; and d) the commercial imperative in application design. These factors have contributed to a communications paradigm where telecommunications has transformed from one-to-one, voice-to-voice, and point-to-point to one in which many people may be involved in a number of a variety of communication acts from a number of (known or unknown) locations. Moreover, the purpose of the telecommunications device is changing to include new practices including surveillance, security, demonstrations of status or belonging or community, entertainment, direct marketing, and forms of web-based mass communication such as broadcast media and blogging. The project methodology will test and reinforce child-centred, participatory research practices and outcomes. It is designed to elicit and interpret young peopleâ s and pre-teenâ s views on their communicative environment and to understand the mechanisms through which social relationships, information conduits, and knowledge networks are built and sustained. It is our intention, through the dissemination of our findings, to bring young people, educators and interested government agencies into a productive dialogue on the benefits and dangers of this pervasive technology.

"This is a submission to the 3rd Annual Social Informatics SIG Research Symposium: The Social Web, Social Computing and the Social Analysis of Computing" This paper follows Wellmanâ s (2002) typology and aims at identifying new module of virtual communities. How does sense of community that used to mark virtual community differ from the concept of networked individualism? Who are those with high sense of community and/or networked individualism? Does the type of networked individualism supplant or supplement sense of community in community identity building? This case study indicated networked individualism did not supplant sense of community. In the contrary, they coexist in virtual community. Web 2.0 related social community has gradually gained its popularity in nowadays, this study implies that accessibility of these kinds of community resources is no more depends on sense of belonging and community consensus, in alternative, building instrumental networks, maintaining autonomous relationship with certain community members and shifting roles across networks become the key to mobilize network resources.

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Telehomecare utilizes electronic communication technologies to support care when distance separates home health nurses from their patients. Telehomecare nurses, or Care Coordinators, use text-based technology to monitor chronically ill patients. Successful home health care outcomes depend on social and technical interactions within diverse patient, caregiver and nurse triad groups. No theory or analysis method for evaluating telehomecare service delivery as a multi-level system exists. Therefore, it is not known which characteristics of interpersonal relationships influence outcomes. This research examined trust, interdependence, communication and technology integration influence on outcomes of satisfaction and self-care. The Sociotechnical Systems Theory and Social Relations Model served as guides to explore individual, relational and group effects on patient quality outcomes. The purpose of this research is to examine the relationships among patients', caregivers' and nurses' social and technical characteristics and quality outcomes in telehomecare.Three VHA sites in the western U.S. participated in this descriptive, multi-level, correlational study. Forty-three groups comprised of patient, nurse and caregiver provided survey data on social and technical characteristics. Additionally, patients provided data on outcomes. All scales performed well, except trust. Results show statistically significant bivariate correlations demonstrate associations between characteristics and outcomes at multi-levels: interdependence with satisfaction at individual and dyad levels; communication with satisfaction at all levels of analysis and simple self care at individual levels; technology integration with satisfaction at group levels as wells as simple and complex self care at individual levels. The principle of joint optimization states that service delivery systems function optimally only if the social and technical characteristics of the subsystem groups fit the demands of each other and the environment. A measure of joint optimization is computed for outcome predictability using multiple regressions. Joint optimization for three social and one technical characteristic was shown to have significant influences on the patient's perception of being well cared for.Many implications of this research for nursing practice in telehomecare are discussed. Telehomecare nurses can use the results of this study to guide optimal practice methods to provide quality outcomes for their patients. This study provides a basis for further best practice research in telehomecare.

The presented work discusses and compares these means of learning: the Content Management System and Distant Learning Environment. In the same way the means called MOODLE is studied with great attention in order to discover its opportunities, structure and working principles. http://MOODLE.org/ MOODLE – Modular Object Orentiered Dynamic Learning Environment MOODLE- is based on the theory of Social Constructivism and, from the pedagogical point of view, is considered to be the most flexible means of virtual learning. It approaches both distant learning and a task presentation for those who study in a computer classroom (not exactly Computer Studies). They are such systems as PHP and MySQL (some others, e.g. DB), which are oriented on the main technological standards (for instance, LDAP – users system, SCORM – presentation of learning material). The course is considered to be enough flexible, thus it might be presented in three ways: v Weekly (all the lectures are hold on time, like in the traditional timetable model); v According to the list of topics (topics are taught in consecutive order, it is possible to determine time of learning. However they are not so strict as in a weekly course model); v Social (based on discussions). Also it is worth to mention that there are plenty of various activities. The following ones are used the most often: (a) Lecture; (b) Individual task; (c) Critical estimation of the colleagues (Workshop); (d) Discussions (synchronous and... [to full text]

The game industry is growing by every year but for some reason the research surrounding it hasn't caught up with its rapid expansion. This study aims at expanding the knowledge surrounding one of those areas, player motivations. An empirical model has been used to identify which interaction has the highest impact on player motivation in story-driven roleplaying-games. By conducting semi-structured interviews with eight different game developers using the GameFlow model to explore the use of interactions to sustain the motivation of the player a new criteria has been identified. This additional criteria was: Alive, and it was shown to have a high impact on motivation in story-driven roleplaying-games. This study also shows that this approach can be used to identify other criterias in other genres and by doing so expanding the knowledge surrounding player motivations in other game genres.

Abstract Digital media in general and social media in particular are becoming more and more important to businesses across the globe. It is an effective way to reach out to consumers and establish a good relationship with existing customers. Most companies today use digital media in order to market themselves and to establish good public relations. A lot of those companies have also realized the enormous marketing capabilities that social media provides. However, in spite of the plethora of possibilities that comes with social media it can also, in some cases, hinder the companies ́ success. In this essay I attempt to come up with a framework of strategies for how social media can be used in an effective way for marketing and PR. In order to accomplish this, I perform a quantitative study of how a dinner-kit company called Middagsfrid and their customers use the interactional features of Facebook. Finally, I present a framework of strategies for how social media can be used for marketing and PR. The study conducted in this essay shows that it is important for companies to be active when communicating through social media and to explicitly seek interaction from the customers in order to have some control over the message that is being sent out. Furthermore, it shows that if a company wants to be a part of the social media-scene it is of great importance to do so wholeheartedly and with a plan.

Coronary artery disease (CAD) is the leading cause of death worldwide. Acute coronary syndromes (ACS), a subset of CAD, account for 1.4 million hospitalizations $165 billion in costs in the United States alone. A major challenge to the physician when diagnosing and treating patients with suspected ACS is that there is significant overlap between patients with and without ACS. There is a high cost to missing a diagnosis of ACS, but also a high cost to inappropriate treatment of patients without ACS. American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association guidelines recommend early risk stratification of patients to determine their likelihood of major adverse events, but many individual tests and prognostic indices lack sufficient performance characteristics for use in clinical practice. Prognostic indices specifically are often not representative of the population on which they are used and rely on complete and accurate data. We explored the use of state-of-the-art machine learning techniques random forest and elastic net on 23,576 records from the Synthetic Derivative to develop models with better performance characteristics than previously established prognostic indices in determining the risk of ACS for patients presenting with suspicious symptoms. We bootstrapped the process of model creation, and found that the random forest significantly outperformed elastic net, L2 regularized regression, and the previously-developed TIMI and GRACE scores. We also assessed the model calibration for the random forest and explored methods of correction. Our preliminary findings suggest that machine learning applied to noisy and largely missing data can still perform as well or better than previously developed scoring metrics.

Lipid identification from data sets produced with high-throughput technologies is essential to discovery in lipidomics experiments. A number of software tools for making lipid identifications from tandem spectra have been developed in recent years, but they lack the robustness and sophistication of their proteomics counterparts. We have developed Greazy, a tool for the automated identification of phospholipids from tandem mass spectra, which utilizes methods developed for proteomics. Greazy builds user-defined a search space of phospholipids and associated theoretical tandem spectra. Experimental spectra are scored against search space lipids with similar precursor masses using two probability-based scores: a peak score that employs the hypergeometric distribution and an intensity score that utilizes the percentage of total ion intensity residing in matching peaks. These results are filtered with LipidLama using a mixture modelling approach and utilizing a density estimation algorithm. We assess the performance of Greazy against the NIST 2014 metabolomics library, observing high accuracy in a search of multiple lipid classes. We compare Greazy/LipidLama against the commercial lipid identification software LipidSearch and show that the two platforms differ considerably in the sets of identified spectra while showing good agreement on those spectra identified by both. Lastly, we demonstrate the utility of Greazy/LipidLama by searching data sets from four biological replicates. These findings substantiate the application of methods developed for proteomics to the identification of lipids.

Electronic Health Records (EHRs) allow for the digital capture of patient information and have proven to be a valuable tool for patient treatment. In this dissertation, I explore reuse of EHR data for clinical and genomic research with a focus on rheumatoid arthritis (RA). RA is a chronic autoimmune disorder that primarily affects joints with swelling, stiffness, and pain, and if left untreated can lead to permanent joint damage. Phenome wide association studies (PheWAS) leverage the breadth of codified diagnostic information about patients in the EHR to find disease associations. A package for the R statistical language is presented here that includes the tools needed to perform EHR-based or observational trial PheWAS, from ICD-9 code translation to association testing and meta-analysis. It includes a versatile plotting system for phenotype related information following the Manhattan plot paradigm. This methodology is applied in conjunction with genetic risk scores (GRS) to assess pleiotropy and shared genetic risk among phenotypes. Investigations of 99 known risk variants for RA and three formulations of GRS show that the GRS is more specific to RA than the individual single nucleotide polymorphisms, but the GRSs had clinically interesting associations with hypothyroidism. Presented next is the development of an algorithm to retrospectively identify drug response to etanercept in the EHR. Using chart reviews and a variety of input data including billing codes, processed free text, and medication entries, a support vector machine and random forest classifier were created that can discriminate between drug responders and non-responders with an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.939 and 0.923, respectively. The drug response algorithm was applied to create a case control cohort. Using these records, the final study identifies phenotypes associated with etanercept response, including fibromyalgia and several axial skeleton disease phenotypes: intervertebral disc disorders, degeneration of intervertebral disc, and spinal stenosis. Taken together, these studies demonstrate that EHR data can be an important tool for clinical and genomic research, and offer particular promise for the study of RA.