Search results for "Online"

Social network site communities as agents and spaces of pursuing influence in society : forms, stages and attributes of building communicative power

2018

Before the emergence and high popularity of social media, individuals or even collectives of individual citizens rarely had strong voice in public discourse. Social media, and its social network sites (SNS), have allowed individual people to form communities to create discourse around issues they find meaningful, and even unite their power to fight for a common cause and potentially influence changes in society. The objectives of the thesis were to investigate what types of ‘societal influence (SI) oriented SNS communities’ the Internet and social media arena consists of and how their potential communicative power is formed, even to the extent that they can challenge news media and business…

Do social networks bridge political divides? The analysis of VKontakte social network communication in Ukraine

2014

New electronic forms of political communication have become increasingly popular in countries with weak democratic institutions. The effectiveness of these new forms of association in altering political behavior, however, remains uncertain even in developed democratic regimes. This paper investigates connections between regional variation in electoral behavior and regional distribution of electronic social networks in the case of Ukraine's polarized and institutionally unstable democracy. Our analysis of online networks shows that, somewhat contrary to conventional wisdom, electronic communication does not bridge political divides. This finding casts doubt on the effectiveness of online for…

The social significance of the Facebook Like button

2015

In this paper we study social aspects of using the Like button for purposes of impression management, identity construction, and maintenance of social ties online. On the theoretical level our investigation combines Goffman’s notion of face-work with concepts of social network analysis, shedding light on what we dub ‘nano-level’ interaction and sociality on social networking sites. Our data come from a 2013 classroom survey in which 26 Finnish university students were asked about their motives for and ways of using the Like button. Our results show that though the Like button was designed to allow users to express their positive evaluations of the contents of Facebook posts, comments, and p…

On the Stability of the Soft Pendulum With Affine Curvature: Open-Loop, Collocated Closed-Loop, and Switching Control

2022

This letter investigates the stability properties of the soft inverted pendulum with affine curvature - a template model for nonlinear control of underactuated soft robots. We look at how changes in physical parameters affect stability and equilibrium. We give conditions under which zero dynamics corresponding to a collocated choice of the output is (locally or globally) stable or unstable. We leverage these results to design a switching controller that stabilizes a class of nonlinear equilibria of the pendulum, which can drive the system from one equilibrium to another.

Numerical methods for a nonlinear impact model: A comparative study with closed-form corrections

2011

A physically based impact model-already known and exploited in the field of sound synthesis-is studied using both analytical tools and numerical simulations. It is shown that the Hamiltonian of a physical system composed of a mass impacting on a wall can be expressed analytically as a function of the mass velocity during contact. Moreover, an efficient and accurate approximation for the mass outbound velocity is presented, which allows to estimate the Hamiltonian at the end of the contact. Analytical results are then compared to numerical simulations obtained by discretizing the system with several numerical methods. It is shown that, for some regions of the parameter space, the trajectorie…

Argument graph as a tool for promoting collaborative online reading

2013

This study explored how the construction of an argument graph promotes students' collaborative online reading compared to note-taking. Upper secondary school students (n = 76) worked in pairs. The pairs were asked to search for and read source material on the Web for a joint essay and either construct an argument graph or take notes during online reading. The data consist of transcription protocols of student pairs' discussions and joint essays. The study indicated that argument graphs may be useful tools when teachers want students to pay attention to the argumentative content of online sources and to consider relations between arguments. Additionally, with argument graphs, teachers can su…

The game of developing a game : hobbyist game developers as playful entrepreneurs in the Apple App Store

2015

Behind screens : challenges and opportunities of participatory online peace education in Finland

2022

This article discusses the challenges and opportunities of participatory online teaching and learning in higher education. It analyses an online peace education course taught during the Covid-19 pandemic in three Finnish universities between 2020–2021. The course explored fundamental mediation skills and practices of positive peace through participatory methods and applied drama. We show how the online setting affected students and teachers, by focusing on the challenges and opportunities for participatory pedagogy in an online environment. The course feedback from students (N = 23) was studied by content analysis and conjoined with the ethnographic observations of the authors. Our findings…

Multimode Representation of the Magnetic Field for the Analysis of the Nonlinear Behavior of Solar Activity as a Driver of Space Weather

2022

ISSP UL as the Center of Excellence is supported through the Framework Program for European universities Union Horizon 2020, H2020-WIDESPREAD-01-2016-2017-TeamingPhase2 under Grant Agreement No. 739508, CAMART2 project; Internal Foundation of University of Maryland.

SparseHC: A Memory-efficient Online Hierarchical Clustering Algorithm

2014

Computing a hierarchical clustering of objects from a pairwise distance matrix is an important algorithmic kernel in computational science. Since the storage of this matrix requires quadratic space with respect to the number of objects, the design of memory-efficient approaches is of high importance to this research area. In this paper, we address this problem by presenting a memory-efficient online hierarchical clustering algorithm called SparseHC. SparseHC scans a sorted and possibly sparse distance matrix chunk-by-chunk. Meanwhile, a dendrogram is built by merging cluster pairs as and when the distance between them is determined to be the smallest among all remaining cluster pairs. The k…