Third-party services form an integral part of the mobile ecosystem: they allow app developers to add features such as performance analytics and social network integration, and to monetize their apps by enabling user tracking and targeted ad delivery. At present users, researchers, and regulators all have at best limited understanding of this third-party ecosystem. In this paper we seek to shrin...

Today’s web has a huge, diverse ecosystem of thirdparty websites collecting information about users and providing them with content such as targeted advertisements. In this paper we study this ecosystem of third-party websites. We sample every continent, targeting the 500 most popular websites in the US, UK, Australia, China, Egypt, Iran and Syria. This allows us to contrast the commonplace, we...

The importance of biodiversity for the integrated functioning of ecosystems remains unclear because most evidence comes from analyses of biodiversity's effect on individual functions. Here we show that the effects of biodiversity on ecosystem function become more important as more functions are considered. We present the first systematic investigation of biodiversity's effect on ecosystem multi...

This paper investigates the structure and dynamics of the Web 2.0 software ecosystem by analyzing empirical data on web service APIs and mashups. Using network analysis tools to visualize the growth of the ecosystem from December 2005 to 2007, we find that the APIs are organized into three tiers, and that mashups are often formed by combining APIs across tiers. Plotting the cumulative distribut...

There is increasing evidence that species extinctions jeopardize the functioning of ecosystems. Overfishing and other human influences are reducing the diversity and abundance of fish worldwide, but the ecosystem-level consequences of these changes have not been assessed quantitatively. Recycling of nutrients is one important ecosystem process that is directly influenced by fish. Fish species v...

It is widely held that herbivore growth and production is limited by dietary nitrogen (N) that in turn constrains ecosystem elemental cycling. Yet, emerging evidence suggests that this conception of limitation may be incomplete, because chronic predation risk heightens herbivore metabolic rate and shifts demand from N-rich proteins to soluble carbohydrate-carbon (C). Because soluble C can be li...

Abstract Data-enabled design (DED) is a promising new methodology for designing with users from within their own context in an iterative and hands-on fashion. However, the agile flexible qualities of do not directly translate to every context. In this article, we reflect on process intelligent ecosystem, called ORBIT, proposed evaluative study planned it. This was part DED project collaboration...