Education and training are essential elements of co-operative practice embodied within the co-operative principles. A problem common to many types of co-operative is that the level of commitment shown towards education and training can be weak at best, and often diminishes as they become more established and as the size of the membership and scale of operations grow. This leads to many difficul...

Consumers using online auction websites face the challenge of appraising products at a distance. Sellers and buyers in online auctions navigate this challenge by displaying and evaluating various cues, a critical one being use of photographs. Warranting theory predicts that cues less subject to control and manipulation by the presenter will be more influential in impression formation. Therefore...

In this experiment, participants were presented with a prosocial message modeled from modern public health campaigns. Although the message was kept identical, the context of the message was experimentally manipulated to represent either a viral user-generated video or a government-sponsored public service announcement. The data provided evidence of an indirect relationship between media context...

Social science studies have acknowledged that the social influence of individuals is not identical. Social networks structure and shared text can reveal immense information about users, their interests, and topic-based influence. Although some studies have considered measuring user influence, less has been on measuring and estimating topic-based user influence. In this paper, we propose an appr...

In recent years, news reporting and consumption has made the profound shift from paper-based media to free online publications, while the simultaneous emergence of Web 2.0 has fundamentally changed the way we react to news. In this paper, we argue that the rapid increase in volume of user-generated content now available presents new and exciting opportunities for the furtherment of news search....

Launched in 2005 as a video-sharing website, YouTube has become an emblem of participatory culture. A central feature of this website is the dazzling number of derivative videos, uploaded daily by many thousands. Using the ‘meme’ concept as an analytic tool, this article aims at uncovering the attributes common to ‘memetic videos’ – popular clips that generate extensive user engagement by way o...

The impact of social media on the travel industry is predicted to be tremendous, especially on its holiday travel segment. Although there is a plethora of studies concentrating on the role and impact of social media in travel related decisions, most of them are medium and community specific, or focus on a specific stage of the decision making or the travel planning process. This paper presents ...

We present a parametric method for the variable control of tempo with specification of shape and phase alignment constraints, and its implementation as a graphical interface written in C for the Max/MSP environment. This tool aids in the construction and management of polyphonic streams of independent, fixed or smoothly-varying tempos suitable for live performance or computer-generated scores. ...

With the emergence of Web 2.0, the amount of user-generated web data has sharply increased. Thus, many studies have proposed techniques to extract wisdom from these usergenerated datasets. Some of these works have focused on extracting semantic relationships through the use of search logs or social annotations, but only hierarchical relationships have been considered. The goal of this paper is ...

We propose a novel general technique aimed at pruning and cleansing the Wikipedia category hierarchy, with a tunable level of aggregation. Our approach is endogenous, since it does not use any information coming from Wikipedia articles, but it is based solely on the user-generated (noisy) Wikipedia category folksonomy itself. We show how the proposed techniques can help reduce the level of nois...