Social classification is the process in which a community of users categorizes the resources in that community for their own use. Given enough users and categorization, this will lead to any given resource being represented by a set of labels or descriptors shared throughout the community (Mathes, 2004). Social classification has become an extremely popular way of structuring online communities in recent years. Well-known examples of such communities are the bookmarking websites Furl (http://www.furl.net/) and del.icio.us (http://del.icio.us/), and Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/) where users can post their own photos and tag them. Social classification, however, is not limited to tagging resources: another possibility is to tag people, examples of which are Consumating (http://www.consumating.com/), a collaborative tag-based personals website, and Kevo (http://www.kevo.com/), a website that lets users tag and contribute media and information on celebrities. Another application of people tagging is expertise classification, an emerging subfield of social classification. Here, members of a group or community are classified and ranked based on the expertise they possess on a particular topic. Expertise classification is essentially comprised of two different components: expertise tagging and expert ranking. Expertise tagging focuses on describing one person at a time by assigning tags that capture that person's topical expertise, such as â speech recognition' or â small-world networks'. information request, such as, for instance, a query submitted to a search engine. Methods are developed to combine the information about individual members' expertise (tags), to provide on-the-fly query-driven rankings of community members. Expertise classification can be done in two principal ways. The simplest option follows the principle of social bookmarking websites: members are asked to supply tags that describe their own expertise and to rank the other community members with regard to a specific request for information. Alternatively, automatic expertise classification ideally extracts expertise terms automatically from a user's documents and e-mails by looking for terms that are representative for that user. These terms are then matched on the information request to produce an expert ranking of all community members. In this paper we describe such an automatic method of expertise classification and evaluate it using human expertise classification judgments. In the next section we will describe some of the related work on expertise classification, after which we will describe our automatic method of expertise classification and our evaluation of them in sections 3 and 4. Sections 5.1 and 5.1 describe our findings on expertise tagging and expert rankings, followed by discussion and our conclusions in section 6 and recommendations for future work in section 7.

There is increasing evidence that libraries, traditional and digital, must support learning, especially the acquisition and enhancement of scientific reasoning skills. This paper discusses how classificatory structures, such as a faceted thesaurus, can be enhancedfor novice science learning. Physical geography is used as the domain discipline, and the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype project provides the test bed for instructional materials and user analyses. The use of concept maps and topic maps for developing digital learning spaces is briefly discussed.

The authors use an exploratory project involving Web resources related to Alzheimer’s Disease to explore ways in RDF metadata can more effectively translate the virtues of the traditional vertical file to a Web environment form using Semantic Web descriptive standards. In so doing, they argue against the separation of “bibliographic control” from the socially-embedded institutional practices of reference work, collection development, and the management of information ephemera. Libraries of the future will use specific Web technologies that lend themselves to sophisticated and rigorous knowledge structures, and link them with librarians’ skills in information harvesting and evaluation.

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This dissertation examines competition in the retail gasoline industry. The first chapter highlights the importance of gasoline in modern society, introduces my work, and places it in the context of the existing academic literature.The second chapter details the institutional structure and profitability of the industry. The vast majority of retail gasoline stations are not directly owned and operated by major oil companies. Instead, most stations are set up under other contractual relationships: lessee-dealer, open-dealer, jobber-owned-and-operated, and independent. Gasoline retailers make relatively low profits, as is the case in many other retail industries, and are substantially less profitable than major oil companies. Gas stations also make less money when retail prices are climbing than when they are falling. As prices rise, total station profits are near zero or negative. When retail prices are constant or falling, retailers can make positive profits.The third chapter describes the entry of big-box stores into the retail gasoline industry over the last decade. The growth of such large retailers, in all markets, has led to a great deal of controversy as smaller competitors with long-term ties to the local community have become less common. I estimate the price impact that big-box stores have on traditional gasoline retailers using cross-sectional data in two geographically diverse cities. I also examine changes in pricing following the entry of The Home Depot into a local retail gasoline market. The results show that big-box stores place statistically and economically significant downward pressure on the prices of nearby gas stations, offering a measure of the impact of the entry of a big-box store.Chapter 4 examines the nature of price competition in markets where some competing retailers sell the same brand. The price effect of having more retailers selling the same brand is theoretically unclear. High brand diversity could give individual retailers market power, thereby leading to higher prices. Low brand diversity, though, could act to facilitate collusive behavior, leading to higher prices. I find that prices are higher in markets with high brand diversity.The final chapter of the dissertation summarizes the general findings.

<p> The purpose of this study was to investigate the differential effects of the Capitalization vs. Compensation model applied to a brief, group-based intervention that focused on Character Strengths, as defined by Peterson and Seligman (2004). Traditional Character Strengths interventions in Positive Psychology apply a Capitalization model, in which individuals engage their top-ranked strengths of character, and this approach has amassed substantial empirical support. However, it is not known whether a Compensation model, in which individuals engage their bottom-ranked strengths, can offer similar benefits. One hundred and eighty-seven employees from eighteen small organizations were randomized at the group level to receive one of four psychoeducational interventions: Top Strengths, Bottom Strengths, Placebo (behavioral health), or a delayed-treatment Control. Participants completed the VIA Survey of Character Strengths and a pre-treatment battery of outcome measures that assessed both positive psychological variables, such as life satisfaction and psychological well-being, and negative life functioning variables, such as depression and negative affect. Post-treatment outcome measures and a compliance measure were completed approximately one month following the psychoeducational presentations. Results revealed few differences between experimental conditions for most measures; however, participants in the Bottom Strengths condition experienced a decrease in symptom distress and an increase in emotional well-being relative to those in the Placebo and Control conditions. Regression analyses revealed several interesting relationships between Character Strengths and outcome measures, with implications for applications in multiple fields. A discussion of methods to strengthen brief group-based interventions, as well as the future direction of Character Strengths interventions, concludes the paper.</p>

In the recent decade, decreasing number of children in the schools raised the educational institutions’ survival problem. In the conditions of the modern market when the possibility of ample choice of educational institutions prevails, the necessity to create the institutional culture of each school type showed up. The managers realized the importance of the institutional culture formation. More and more primary education institutions realize, that aiming at the successful work and attracting children to the educational institutions and making a positive impression to the parents, it is obligatory to form the institutional culture characterizing the institution and its reputation. The manager whose leadership actions are directed towards formation and development of the strong and high organization culture always rests on the culture of the community members and fosters it. The Research aim is to examine the culture of the primary education institutions as the object of the management. After finishing the Research and analyzing the results achieved it was set, that the most effective impact to the culture of the primary education institutions makes the management based on the following things: · Schoolteachers having trust in manager · Siding the principle of the equal opportunities · The ability of the manager to solve institution’s problems · Motivating schoolteachers · Establishing relations based on democracy The ready recommendation for the managers of the primary... [to full text]

<p> Organizational perception and conception of interactions and relationships vary over time and space. This study focused on the capacity within and between healthcare organizations to collectively make sense of ambivalent and ambiguous environments in the context of social structuring actions (Czarniawska, 2008; Johnson, 2009; Weick, 1995). The purpose was to develop narrative frames from which a deeper understanding could be developed of how collective sensemaking is enacted through reciprocal and reflective interorganizational relationships during the final phases of an intended multiorganizational integration endeavor (Barki &amp; Pinsonneault, 2005; Oliver, 1990). This study explored and described collective sensemaking as recognizable patterned social structuring actions that surfaced during integration efforts within the Military Health System's Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury. </p><p> A narrative approach illustrated emergent social processes. In the process of collaboration, ongoing generative conversations (Taylor &amp; Van Every, 2000; Hardy, Lawrence, &amp; Grant, 2005; Weick, 2004) affected the relationships between collective sensemaking and social structuring. An interpretive constructionist perspective revealed practices involving the interplay of assignment of <i>meaning</i> (signification), reducing equivocality and integration; formation of a sense of community, establishing structures and <i>norms </i> (legitimation); and the effects of collaboration and <i>power </i> (domination) distribution (Giddens, 1984; Weick, Sutcliffe, &amp; Obstfeld, 2005). </p><p> More than 24 months of embedded observation aided the researcher's awareness of ongoing narrative dynamics of collaborative actions setting the conditions for the emergence of interorganizational relationships (Harquail &amp; King, 2010; Hatch, 1997; Hatch &amp; Schultz, 2002) and embodied practices (Varela, Thompson, &amp; Rosch, 1991). Throughout experiences of collective sensemaking, organizations interpose mini-narratives as evidence of reciprocal patterns of social structuring revealing cooperative behaviors interweaving coordinated actions and setting conditions for the structuring of collaborative integrating nets of collective action. This supports both Carniawska's (2008) and Weick's (1995) theory of organizing during collective sensemaking as enacted processes within relational conceptualizations and perceptions. These findings contribute to understanding the dynamics of collective sensemaking and social structuring; moreover, they incorporate the new paradigm of enaction (Kuhn, 1996; Stewart, Gapenne, &amp; Di Paolo, 2010) as embodied sensemaking into organizational theory.</p>