Given the rapid growth of participatory media content such as blogs, user created videos, and podcasts, there is a need to understand and answer the following kind of questions: What is participatory media good for? Does it improve the effectiveness of news media? If so, then why? What are the underlying processes of human communication that can explain how people perceive and interpret the inf...

Notice: Changes introduced as a result of publishing processes such as copy-editing and formatting may not be reflected in this document. For a definitive version of this work, please refer to the published source: Abstract Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to debate the evolving relationship between libraries and users, justify the idea of participatory library and the use of the " partici...

Diabetes is a serious public health problem in the border region between the United States of America and Mexico, reflecting and by some measures surpassing the extent of national diabetes burden of each country. The U.S.-Mexico Border Diabetes Prevention and Control Project, a two-phase prevalence study on type 2 diabetes and its risk factors, was conceived and developed by culturally diverse ...

Over the last years, geospatial web platforms, social media, and volunteered geographic information (VGI) have opened a window of opportunity for traditional Public Participatory GIS (PPGIS) to usher in a new era. Taking advantage of these technological achievements, this paper presents a new approach for a citizen-orientated framework of spatial planning that aims at integrating participatory ...

Crowdsensing systems can be either participatory or opportunistic, depending on whether the user intentionally contributes data, or she simply acts as the bearer of a sensing device from which data is transparently collected. In this paper, we propose hybrid crowdsensing, a social mediabased paradigm which aims at combining the strengths of both participatory and opportunistic crowdsensing. Wit...

This study aims to improve the health of rural Amazonian communities through the development and application of a participatory ecosystem approach to human health assessment. In the study area marked seasonal fluctuations dictate food availability, water quality and disease outbreak. Determining the causal linkages between ecosystem variables, resource use and health required a variety of forms...

The paper discusses different approaches of watershed management programs implemented in South Asian countries, with special reference to Nepal based on existing literature and field experiences. Watershed degradation, particularly in mountainous areas, is critical problem in South Asian countries. A participatory approach has been adopted in watershed and natural resource management during the...

the current challenge in health services research is disability to present comprehensive and effective intervention plans for community health promotion. there are numerous reasons in this regard, some of which can be overcome through performance-based participatory research methods. the population research center (prc) in tehran university of medical sciences (tums) provides the necessary grou...

despite the existence of a large variety of competency frameworks for medical graduates, there is no agreement on a single set of outcomes. different countries have attempted to define their own set of competencies to respond to their local situations. this article reports the process of developing medical graduates' competency framework as the first step in the curriculum reform in tehran univ...

In this work we study the problem of querier privacy in the Participatory Sensing domain. While prior work has attempted to protect the privacy of people contributing sensing data from their mobile phones, little or no work has focused on the problem of querier privacy. Motivated by a novel communication model in which clients may directly query participatory sensing networks operated by potent...