Inferring attributes of discourse participants has been treated as a batch-processing task: data such as all tweets from a given author are gathered in bulk, processed, analyzed for a particular feature, then reported as a result of academic interest. Given the sources and scale of material used in these efforts, along with potential use cases of such analytic tools, discourse analysis should b...

Faculty: Y.H. Chen, Associate Professor, School of Mechanical Engineering (COE) R.F. Fox, Regents’ Professor, Chair of School of Physics (COS) R. Grigoriev, Assistant Professor, School of Physics (COS) E.M. Harrell, Professor, School of Mathematics(COS) C.A. Klausmeier, Assistant Professor, School of Biology (COS) P.J. Mucha, Assistant Professor, School of Mathematics (COS) G.P. Neitzel, Profes...

During the last couple of decades e-learning has become an important way of education. In comparison to traditional, face-to-face learning, where all participants are collocated (same place/same time), e-learning represent a radical change in education process, because participants in e-learning process are at physical distance. Due to the physical separation of participants in e-learning proce...

BACKGROUND Participation in sport has many health benefits, and is popular amongst children. However participation decreases with age. While the membership records of peak sports organisations have improved markedly in recent years, there has been little research into sport participation trends across the lifespan. This study investigates age profiles of participation in sport and compares thes...

As online communities become increasingly popular, researchers have tried to examine participating activities in online communities as well as how to sustain online communities. However, relatively few studies have tried to understand what kinds of participants constitute online communities. In this study, we try to contribute online community research by developing “common language” to classif...

OBJECTIVE To explore the opinions of unpaid healthy volunteers on the payment of research subjects. DESIGN Prospective cohort. SETTING Southern Alberta, Canada. PARTICIPANTS Medically eligible persons responding to recruiting advertisements for a randomised vaccine trial were invited to take part in a study of informed consent at the point at which they formally consented or refused trial...

How well do program participants assess program performance ex-post? In this paper we compare participant evaluations based on survey responses to econometric impact estimates obtained using data from the experimental evaluation of the U.S. Job Training Partnership Act. We have two main findings: First, the participant evaluations are unrelated to the econometric impact estimates. Second, the p...

We consider the polling problem in a social network where participants care about their reputation: they do not want their vote to be disclosed nor their misbehaving, if any, to be publicly exposed. Assuming this reputation concern, we show that a simple secret sharing scheme, combined with verification procedures, can efficiently enable polling without the need for any central authority or hea...