<p> The purpose of this study was to determine whether viewing the Facebook profiles of women differing in levels of attractiveness and thinness would influence the viewer's self-esteem, eating patterns, and body image. Specifically, it was hypothesized that viewing the profile of an attractive, thin woman would result in the reduction of self-esteem and body image with an increase in eating disorder-related thoughts and behaviors, while viewing the Facebook profile of a heavier and less attractive woman would bolster self-esteem and body image while reducing disordered eating thoughts and behaviors in a college-aged, female population. Contrary to the hypotheses, none of the analyses revealed a significant interaction. However, there was a significant main effect for time on eating attitudes and behaviors, suggesting that participants' attitudes toward eating became significantly worse over time. This study is unique in that it is the first to experimentally test whether the attractiveness level of the viewed Facebook profile would affect body image, self-esteem, and/or eating attitudes.</p>

<p> This study was influenced by the researcher's personal interest in the topic as well as a pilot study he conducted; it produced results that inspired him to do further research. The Saudi Arabian Cultural Mission assisted in distributing the Qualtrics survey through their Facebook page and Twitter account. Thus, the researcher utilized a non-probability convenience and volunteer sample of 789 Saudi Arabian students studying in the United States. </p><p> This study was guided by the Uses and Gratification Theory to examine the use of smartphones as a news resource and the potential gratifications students experienced with this type of use. The findings showed reliance upon using smartphones for accessing news with several experienced gratifications. An emergent habit of checking news frequently among respondents was revealed by the data analysis. Additionally, the findings indicated that respondents have feelings of being overwhelmed by the large amount of news as well as feeling isolated without their smartphones. The findings point to a noticeable amount of sharing news via social networking sites while using smartphones. Overall, an argument of a cultural impact of using smartphones exists, contrary to respondents' perceptions.</p>

<p> The purpose of this study was to determine if getting personal information from a social media page, specifically Facebook, affects the final selection decision. This study aimed to examine the effect personal information, specifically race and sexual orientation, has on ratings of hirability and salary offers for male candidates. The study used the data of 105 Mechanical Turk participants who participated in a survey for a monetary incentive. It was hypothesized that homosexual candidates would receive lower hirability ratings and salary offers than heterosexual candidates. Additionally, it was hypothesized that African American candidates would receive lower hirability ratings and salary offers than Caucasian candidates. Finally, it was hypothesized that African American homosexual candidates would receive lower hirability ratings and salary offers than their counterparts. No significant main effects or interactions were found. Additional findings are discussed.</p><p>

The Internet presents a wide variety of capacity-building opportunities for the nonprofit sector, especially grassroots-based organizations with geographically dispersed members. These opportunities have become more accessible and practical for laypeople with emergence of Web 2.0 and the prevalence of social network sites like Facebook and MySpace in contemporary life, theoretically making it easier even for under-resourced organizations to leverage the Internet to increase outreach, fundraising and recruitment capacity. This report details the participatory action research basis and findings of the accompanying practical component of the thesis project which entailed the development of a new Web 2.0-enabled website for Sierra Club Canada, the country's foremost grassroots environmental nonprofit organization. With no other organizations in the sector taking full strategic advantage of the Internet to improve campaign capacity, this new website will establish Sierra Club Canada as a premiere online presence and a resource for a growing number of grassroots activists and supporters of environmental causes.

<p> Digital media have made it possible for people with disabilities to have better access to information and mainstream publications. New and improved guidelines by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) have helped millions of users with various types of disabilities to utilize the web to its full potential. The Web Content Accessibility Guideline (WCAG) 2.0 has pushed for several reforms to ensure that web pages are equally accessible for people with disabilities. How- ever, there are some limitations with the WCAG 2.0 when it comes to accommodating people with Low Vision. The W3C agrees and is currently working to draft a new set of guidelines that will address this specific problem. In the push to accommodate people with low vision, a team at California State University Long Beach, led by Dr. Wayne E Dick, proposed a software so- lution called Typometric Prescriptions or TRx which generates a user based custom stylesheet. The purpose of this thesis was to build on top of the working framework of TRx and shape it to be a completely functional stylesheet generator for people with low vision. The research and technical work put into this study have led to the development of a keyboard accessible color picker that makes it possible to pick a color from the possible 16 million choices, with less than 48 keystrokes.</p><p>

<p> The aim of this multiple and independent quantitative and qualitative methods study was to investigate the relevance of Facebook groups for doctoral students during their dissertation process. A&nbsp;convenience sampling approach was used to survey quantitatively the Texas A&amp;M Ed.D. online doctoral students who met the inclusion criteria. The participants completed a valid, web-based survey using the Doctoral Student Connectedness Scale (DSCS, Terrell et al., 2009). Purposeful sampling was used to recruit a sub-sample of participants who subsequently responded to semi-structured interview questions via web conferencing. Quantitative data analysis involved descriptive statistics using SPSS for Mac. Content analysis of the qualitative data was performed using QSR NVivo 11 software. Ethnographic and Thematic analysis used Salda&ntilde;a&rsquo;s (2013) two-stage eclectic coding, where emergent themes helped explain the quantitative analysis results. These results revealed that student-to-student regular communications was the only DSCS indicator proven to be statistically/practically significant. While the quantitative results of this study were inconsistent with the results of previous studies, the qualitative data provided additional understanding of the indicators regarding the student-to-student connectedness factor and the CoP by offering their theoretical themes and their emerging themes described as alternate communications. These preferred forms of communication added perspective to low-quality relationships by further explaining that students abandoned the cohort Facebook group due to an institutional procedure designed to divide the cohort into smaller thematic groups. Because the success expressed by the doctoral student cohort group failed to be reproduced in the smaller thematic groups, it is recommended that newly structured thematic constructs incorporate the student input presented in this study.</p><p>

<p> The internet's original design, guided by the end-to-end design principle, pushed all application-specific logic and complexity to the edges of the network and kept the core of the network focused on the simple task of delivering data. The original end-to-end principle, however, did not explicitly account for trust and security. There are several central points of trust and failure on the traditional internet. These include root servers for the Domain Name System (DNS) and public-key infrastructure like Certificate Authorities (CAs) that publish security certificates. Further, the success of cloud hosted services in the last decade means that most user data is stored on remote servers and end-users need to trust these remote servers for correct execution of their applications. </p><p> In this thesis, we present a new internet architecture that explicitly follows the trust-to-trust design principle, i.e., end-users don't need to trust the core of the network for anything, and end-users can use applications and services in a fully decentralized way. We make the observation that cryptocurrency blockchains, like Bitcoin, can be used to bootstrap trust for new nodes joining a network. We identify the various limitations, like high latency and limited bandwidth, of contemporary blockchains and discuss how our architecture can scale by moving most operations outside of the blockchain layer. </p><p> We detail our experience of running a large production system on top of a cryptocurrency blockchain and how that experience guided our design. We present the implementation of a new decentralized internet, called Blockstack, that takes the trust-to-trust architecture from a theoretical concept to a production system. Deploying new systems by modifying production blockchains is hard because it requires coordination and agreement from several parties. We introduce virtualchains, a virtual blockchain constructed by processing data from underlying blockchains, to enable the seamless introduction of new functionality on top of blockchains without requiring any consensus-breaking changes. Blockstack is already powering several fully decentralized applications, like OpenBazaar; it's released as open-source software and, to date, more than 70,000 domains have been registered on it.</p><p>

<p> What are the effective ways to attract international students to your campus? One approach is to learn how foreign students obtain information that impacts their college choice decision. This need determined the goal of this study to explore the Social Network Site (SNS) component of a foreign student&rsquo;s college decision-making process. This qualitative study was conducted among undergraduate students from Russia State University for Humanities (RSUH). Participant selection was made through a questionnaire aimed to identify students who were in different stages of making a decision regarding transferring to a HEI abroad. The data analysis procedure was informed by the work of Creswell (2002) and Glaser and Strauss (1967). </p><p> Participants reported that language (Russian) and convenience were among the highest motivating factors for membership in specific SNS. The benefits of SNS included opportunities for instantaneous connections with individuals of similar interests; unbiased and multidimensional views presented by SNS members. Respondents searched SNSs for information about majors, culture norms abroad, the cost of education, and careers after graduation. They were applying SNS-specific criteria, such as the number of SNS&rsquo; &ldquo;likes&rdquo;, followers, and the ratio of followers to following, to evaluate HEIs&rsquo; worthiness. One of the emerging study findings was that participants with no connections abroad relied exclusively on SNSs for their college choice decisions. These individuals acknowledged that without SNSs they would not consider an opportunity to transfer to an HEI abroad, as they had no channels for obtaining such information. For participants with connections abroad, the advice of their international contacts played a major role in their college choice and SNSs played a supportive role. </p><p> Limitations related to the use of SNS included a dearth of current research, minimal control over content posted by third parties, time constraints related to mastering SNS features and maintaining a meaningful content. Recommendations for overcoming these obstacles and strengthening HEI professionals&rsquo; connections with international students include developing fluency and expertise in different features of various SNSs or hiring individuals with proven expertise in SNS; creating consistent and meaningful content on various SNS platforms and conducting more research about the use of SNS by international students. </p><p>

<p> Privacy, in the modern connected world, has become a much discussed topic in society ranging from privacy concerns to impacts, attitudes, practices and technologies. In today&rsquo;s environment of vast social media and revelations of government spying, personal privacy is being highlighted as either non-existent or something that can be achieved to different degrees with knowledge or awareness of how our private information is collected and used. This research strives to answer the question <i>Using Alan Westin's privacy categories, what is the general awareness of privacy issues in social media and smartphone usage and how does it change when knowledge is provided over a fixed period of time?</i> A longitudinal study was conducted to collect data from 257 participants. Surprisingly, the percentages in each of the three categories: Privacy Fundamentalist, Privacy Pragmatist, and Privacy Unconcerned, are not significantly different from Westin&rsquo;s last research in 2003. However, the results show, that with knowledge of what type of private information is collected and how it is used, the category of an individual is likely to change over time.</p><p>

<p>Human trafficking affects millions every day, yet scarce research exists that evaluates communication efforts of human trafficking awareness organizations (HTAOs). HTAOs often use social media, and providing the right kind of information to audiences is important in moving publics into more active roles. Grunig?s situational theory suggests that high problem recognition, low constraint recognition, and high level of involvement lead to information seeking and active publics. The purpose of this study was to identify frames used in HTAOs? YouTube videos to determine if human trafficking messages help publics become more active. A qualitative content analysis was conducted on the most popular YouTube videos from twelve HTAOs, looking specifically for frames that fit Grunig?s variables. HTAOs? purposes for using YouTube were also analyzed and the results provided plausibility for a revised situational theory model. Discrepancies emerged between the definition and portrayal of human trafficking. Themes developed regarding the causes, consequences, and remedies of human trafficking, in addition to the portrayals of victims, perpetrators, and rescuers. HTAO public relations practitioners can use the data to revamp their human trafficking awareness campaigns, making it a point to include elements that will motivate publics to take more active roles in the organization.