Social Media Adoption Among University Communicators

Long interviews were conducted with university communicators at 2 distant universities with distinct social systems. Participants were drawn to adopt social media mainly by relative advantage, compatibility, and trialability attributes of the innovation. Inductive themes that emerged from the interviews included an emphasis on publics, information sharing, cost, and convenience. A believer–nonbeliever distinction among adopters is introduced. Believers are driven by the same characteristics of social media that public relations researchers have found to be essential to the practice of public relations itself: 2-way communication, interactivity, dialogue, and engagement.     

Dog-park soils: Concentration and distribution of urine-borne constituents

Off-leash dog parks are very popular locations that allow pets to freely exercise and eliminate wastes in a controlled environment. Although dog park rules require that solid waste be removed by the pet’s owner, urine-borne constituents in dog-park soils have received little attention. This study focused on the soils within two small-dog, off-leash dog parks in Fargo, North Dakota (USA) with the objective to better understand the concentration and distribution of extractable NH₄-N, NO₃-N, PO₄, soluble salts, and pH values in surface soils (0–10 cm) within these two dog parks. Concentrations of soil variables varied widely within each park and were distributed as both gradient and ‘hot-spots.’ The geospatial model types for each soil parameter were more dependent on park than on the constituents themselves. Flow accumulation was correlated with both nitrate-N and P but due to the lack of topography at these parks the flow accumulation was not helpful in describing most of the soil constituents. The results from this project indicate that location of parks, daily/annual use of parks, flow accumulation, and location of park entries may all influence the concentration and distribution of urine-borne constituents.     

An intellectual history of NUD*IST and NVivo

Since the rise of qualitative computing in the mid-1980s, the field of qualitative data analysis has changed in a number of ways, which remarkably have been ignored in the methodological literature, to the detriment of the area's self-understanding. This paper provides for the record an account of the intellectual development of the two qualitative data analysis programs that I have designed, together with Lyn Richards. The theme behind the history is: (1) computing has enabled new, previously unavailable qualitative techniques; (2) some important pre-computer techniques and methods were not supported by computerization of the field, at least until recently; and hence (3) computerization encouraged some biases in qualitative techniques. I hope that this paper will act as a source for a revitalized and up-to-date debate on methods and techniques that recognizes computer use as an agent of change in the field.     

Like Water in Water

In this paper I examine the anthropocentrism evident in key texts by Bataille and Heidegger. Starting with Bataille’s treatment of animality in his Theory of Religion I show how a contrast is drawn between animal experience, which is immediate and immanent (“like water in water”), and human experience, which cannot help but transcend its environment by imposing distinctions. According to Bataille the animal therefore remains unfathomably closed to us. Heidegger, meanwhile, suggests that it is the hand which denotes the crucial difference between human and animal. By means of the disclosive demarcation that the hand makes possible humanity enters a unique and privileged relationship to Being. I argue that both authors assume, without demonstrating, a qualitative difference between human and animal. This starting point might thus usefully be described as an “anthropocentric assumption” in the sense that, although neither author considers human experience to be superior to that of animals, each considers it first‐and‐foremost.     

Volunteers Managing Volunteers: The Role of Volunteer Board Members’ Motivating and Demotivating Style in Relation to Volunteers’ Motives to Stay Volunteer

VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations - Against the background of declining volunteering rates in nonprofit and voluntary organizations, this study examined the...     

New information communication technologies and the development of a children's 'community of interest'

This paper is concerned with the potential of new InformationCommunication Technologies as a means of furthering a children’s‘community of interest’. A ‘community of interest’is taken from Raymond Williams’ concept of people formingcommunities not around place but around specific ‘interests’.I wish in this paper to explore the forms and tensions of achildren’s ‘community of interest’ that mightbe facilitated around ICTs in general and the Internet in particular.The paper draws on community development literature around thepotentials and use of ICTs as a means of developing communities.The paper highlights these potentials but also investigatesthe obstacles that a children’s online ‘communityof interest’ may confront.     

Verbal Behavior and Initial Exposure to Delayed Reinforcement

The Analysis of Verbal Behavior - Ten subjects responded under a tandem fixed-ratio 1 not-responding-greater-than-t schedule of point delivery during one 75-min session in which the delay was...     

Deterministic approximate inference techniques for conditionally Gaussian state space models

We describe a novel deterministic approximate inference technique for conditionally Gaussian state space models, i.e. state space models where the latent state consists of both multinomial and Gaussian distributed variables. The method can be interpreted as a smoothing pass and iteration scheme symmetric to an assumed density filter. It improves upon previously proposed smoothing passes by not making more approximations than implied by the projection onto the chosen parametric form, the assumed density. Experimental results show that the novel scheme outperforms these alternative deterministic smoothing passes. Comparisons with sampling methods suggest that the performance does not degrade with longer sequences.