Thomas Chesney

Griefing in virtual worlds: causes, casualties and coping strategies

A virtual world is a computer‐simulated three‐dimensional environment. They are increasingly being used for social and commercial interaction, in addition to their original use for game playing. This paper studies negative behaviour, or ‘griefing’, inside one virtual world through a series of observations and focus groups with users. Data were collected to identify griefing behaviours and their impact, examine why griefing happens and who the likely targets and perpetrators are, and suggest strategies for coping with it. Findings show that griefing behaviour is common. It is defined as unacceptable, persistent behaviour and is typically targeted at inexperienced residents by those with more knowledge of the virtual world. Community and individual coping strategies are identified and discussed.

The impact of anonymity on weblog credibility

A blog, or weblog, is an online diary whose writer is known as a blogger. Many bloggers choose to publish anonymously. This paper examines whether a blog by an anonymous blogger will be perceived as being any more or less credible than one by an identifiable blogger. Two studies were conducted in the UK to examine this, with one of the two studies being replicated in Malaysia. The first study presented respondents with a blog entry in one of three conditions: where the blogger was fully identifiable with a photograph, where only the age and sex of the blogger were revealed, and where only an alias was given for the blogger. Multi item constructs were used to measure the credibility of the blog and the blogger. No differences were found. Study 2 examined whether this was due to the presentation of the blog entry. This time respondents were shown one of two blog posts which conveyed exactly the same information and revealed exactly the same information about the blogger. One post introduced a number of spelling/grammar/punctuation errors. Results show that the well presented blogs writer was perceived as being more credible than the writer of the badly presented blog, but there was no difference in the credibility of the blog itself. The implications of the results are discussed with reference to the use of blogs as a knowledge sharing tool.

Griefing in a Virtual Community An Exploratory Survey of Second Life Residents

Building on the research of Chesney, Coyne, Logan, and Madden (2009), this paper examines griefing within the virtual online community of Second Life via an online survey of 86 residents (46% men). Results suggested that griefing was deemed to be an unacceptable, persistent negative behavior which disrupted enjoyment of the environment and which was experienced by 95% of the sample, with 38% classified as frequent victims and 20% classified as perpetrators. No differences emerged in rates between gender (real life and second life), age, and time as a resident in Second Life. A number of self, player- and game-influenced motivations were judged to promote griefing, with respondents overall split on the impact of griefing when compared to traditional bullying. Further, respondents felt that a shared responsibility to control griefing was needed with individuals, residents as a community, and Second Life developers all playing a part. Discussion of the findings in relation to cyber-bullying in general is pre...

“other people benefit. i benefit from their work.” Sharing Guitar Tabs Online

This paper reports the results of a study into a public space Internet portal which publishes guitar tabs (tablature) online, to examine what motivates people to participate in this activity and what benefits they get from doing so. A guitar tab is essentially sheet music for guitarists. The study examines why people contribute when it is easier for them not to publish their tabs and simply use the tabs that other people have posted. Answers to this will have implications for businesses wanting to encourage their employees to share their knowledge. An open ended questionnaire was sent to 183 tab publishers with a usable response rate of 39%, which is considered high for surveys. The questionnaire sought to gather data on motivations, benefits and community interaction. The paper begins with a review of relevant theories of knowledge sharing and publishing, in particular the private-collective model of innovation (von Hippel & von Krogh, 2003) which is used to analyze the results. Motivations are listed as under two categories, self and altruistic, with the most popular motivation being to share the songs with others, which is from the altruistic category. The most common benefit is personal satisfaction. The results show tab publishing fits with the private-collective model of innovation which means that a tab published online can be seen as a public good, as it is available to all, that has significant private elements. These private elements are the benefits that tab publishers get which the people who only use tabs without contributing their own, do not. The implications of the work are as follows. Enjoyment of the domain seems to be an important factor in motivating knowledge sharing. People who feel like they are part of a community and get satisfaction from being part of a community, will be more likely to contribute. The act of sharing knowledge should be as close to effortless as possible to encourage contributions. The act of preparing (collecting, collating etc.) the material to be shared should have meaning in itself for the person who is preparing it. If the act of sharing leads to increased status in the community people will be more likely to contribute. To encourage knowledge sharing, those who make use of the shared knowledge should be encouraged to give positive feedback to the person who shared it. To date, there has been little empirical work examining online posting forums.

Competitive Information in Small Businesses

1. The importance of being small.- 2. Strategic planning.- 3. Strategic information systems.- 4. Business process modelling.- 5. Use cases.- 6. Creativity.- 7. Strategy and IS planning in small businesses.- 8. Evaluation.- Afterword.- Appendix A.- Appendix B.- Appendix C.- Appendix D.- References.

Imputation methods to deal with missing values when data mining trauma injury data

Methods for analysing trauma injury data with missing values, collected at a UK hospital, are reported. One measure of injury severity, the Glasgow coma score, which is known to be associated with patient death, is missing for 12% of patients in the dataset. In order to include these 12% of patients in the analysis, three different data imputation techniques are used to estimate the missing values. The imputed data sets are analysed by an artificial neural network and logistic regression, and their results compared in terms of sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value

The Effect of Communication Medium on Research Participation Decisions

Students are often used in research as research subjects or to validate/pilot questionnaires. It is known that response rates to requests to participate in research projects vary as a function of a number of factors. This research brief examines the effect of the communication medium on response rate by comparing an oral request for participation with an email request. Email and oral communication, specifically public oral communication, are the two easiest and presumably most common approaches faculty members have to access students to request their participation in research. Results show that an impersonal email to a mailing list is the worst way researchers can approach students to request participation, with there being no difference between making the request by personalized email or orally.

Data mining trauma injury data using C5.0 and logistic regression to determine factors associated with death.

Trauma injury data collected over 10 years at a UK hospital are analysed. The data include injury details such as patient age and gender, the mechanism of injury, various measures of injury severity, management interventions, and treatment outcome. Logistic regression modelling was used to determine which factors were independently associated with death during hospital stay. The data mining algorithm C5.0 was also used to determine those factors in the data that can be used to predict whether a patient will live or die. Logistic modelling and C5.0 show that different subsets of injury severity scores, and patient age, are associated with survival. In addition, C5.0 also shows that gender, and whether the patient was referred from another hospital, is important. The two techniques give different insights into those factors associated with death after trauma.

Data Mining Medical Information: Should Artificial Neural Networks Be Used to Analyse Trauma Audit Data?

Trauma audit is intended to develop effective care for injured patients through process and outcome analysis, and dissemination of results. The system records injury details such as the patient’s sex and age, the mechanism of the injury, various measures of the severity of the injury, initial management and subsequent management interventions, and the outcome of the treatment including whether the patient lived or died. Ten years’ worth of trauma audit data from one hospital are modelled as an Artificial Neural Network (ANN) in order to compare the results with a more traditional logistic regression analysis. The output was set to be the probability that a patient will die. The ANN models and the logistic regression model achieve roughly the same predictive accuracy, although the ANNs are more difficult to interpret than the logistic regression model, and neither logistic regression nor the ANNs are particularly good at predicting death. For these reasons, ANNs are not seen as an appropriate tool to analyse trauma audit data. Results do suggest, however, the usefulness of using both traditional and non-traditional analysis techniques together and of including as many factors in the analysis as possible.

An investigation of sociability measurements in online communities

This paper reports the results of an investigation into measurements of the sociability of online communities, in other words, how well they support social interaction. The results showed that sociability is best measured by a combination of qualitative and quantitative approaches.