Comparing online opportunities and risks among Israeli children and youth Hebrew and Arabic speakers

This study explores the relationships between application usage, online communication patterns, problematic Internet use (PIU) of online applications, and online self-disclosure among children from culturally different groups. An online survey was administered in Hebrew and Arabic among 3867 Israeli 7–17 year old, including Jews, Arabs, and Bedouins. The level of PIU was relatively low—only 9.5% scored “very high” in the PIU index. For all the groups the highest level of communication was reported for safe interactions with family and friends, lower level for purely virtual communication with online acquaintances, and the lowest level for meeting online acquaintances face-to-face. However, various forms of the online communication patterns and use of applications differed across the groups, suggesting cultural diversity in Internet usage among children in the same country. PIU and self-disclosure explained 47.3% of variance in risky e-communication activities (e.g. sending ones' photos to online acquaintances, providing them with a school or home address, and meeting them face-to-face), as well as 34.4% of variance in exposure to unpleasant online experiences (e.g. receiving messages, pictures, or videos that make the children feel uncomfortable). However, both PIU and self-disclosure were unrelated to educational activities and to the use of educational applications.     

Analyzing terror campaigns on the internet: Technical sophistication,content richness,and Web interactivity

Terrorists and extremists are increasingly utilizing Internet technology to enhance their ability to influence the outside world. Due to the lack of multi-lingual and multimedia terrorist/extremist collections and advanced analytical methodologies, our empirical understanding of their Internet usage is still very limited. To address this research gap, we explore an integrated approach for identifying and collecting terrorist/extremist Web contents. We also propose a Dark Web Attribute System (DWAS) to enable quantitative Dark Web content analysis from three perspectives: technical sophistication, content richness, and Web interactivity. Using the proposed methodology, we identified and examined the Internet usage of major Middle Eastern terrorist/extremist groups. More than 200,000 multimedia Web documents were collected from 86 Middle Eastern multi-lingual terrorist/extremist Web sites. In our comparison of terrorist/extremist Web sites to US government Web sites, we found that terrorists/extremist groups exhibited similar levels of Web knowledge as US government agencies. Moreover, terrorists/extremists had a strong emphasis on multimedia usage and their Web sites employed significantly more sophisticated multimedia technologies than government Web sites. We also found that the terrorists/extremist groups are as effective as the US government agencies in terms of supporting communications and interaction using Web technologies. Advanced Internet-based communication tools such as online forums and chat rooms are used much more frequently in terrorist/extremist Web sites than government Web sites. Based on our case study results, we believe that the DWAS is an effective tool to analyse the technical sophistication of terrorist/extremist groups’ Internet usage and could contribute to an evidence-based understanding of the applications of Web technologies in the global terrorism phenomena.     

Today's WWW-tomorrow's MMM? The specter of multi-media mediocrity

The WWW system has reached a crossroads. Since its inception in 1991, it has evolved rapidly from a tool for congenial information-sharing among CERN's high-energy-particle physicists to a channel of communication for anyone with access to the Internet. Web-based information, tracked by dozens of Web crawlers and harvesters, continues to grow exponentially without much thought for guidelines, safeguards, and standards concerning the quality, precision, trustworthiness, durability, currency, and authorship of this information. The situation is untenable. Unless serious and energetic remedial steps are taken at once by managers of the most prestigious and resourceful Web sites, and by as many of the organizations dealing with Web and Internet standards as possible, the system currently known as the WWW may come to be known as the MMM (multimedia mediocrity)     

Fuzzy Web ad selector based on Web usage mining

Internet and Web technologies are widely available, making it easier for companies to conduct business and transfer information to customers. Moreover, they speed up financial transactions efficiently, reducing the transaction costs of commercial activities that businesses would normally incur. So, Internet business has created a competitive environment, a successful company wanting to survive and gain a competitive advantage must provide an acceptable bundle of customized services that satisfy customers' needs. Despite the Internet's obvious benefits as a new communication medium its advertising gives the same advertising messages to all customers and so has suffered from poor responses. To raise a Web ad's effectiveness, we propose a Web ad selector that personalizes advertising messages for customers based on their preferences and interests. The Web ad selection system divides Web site customers with similar preferences into several segments through Web usage mining. It uses fuzzy rules that express customer segments' surfing patterns on the basis of expert advice, and recommends appropriate ads by fuzzy inference.     

An automatic English-Arabic HTML page translation system

The Internet and the World Wide Web have become an integral part of everyday life, an important source of information and a communication medium. One of the main problems confronting non-English speakers in using the Internet is that it is heavily dominated by the English language. Knowledge of English is a prerequisite for using the Web efficiently and benefiting from the multitude of services it offers. This paper introduces the approach underlying a prototype system that translates Web pages from English to Arabic automatically. The system uses a commercial machine translation system to translate the textual part of a Web page. It then displays a Web page containing the Arabic translation with all tags inserted in the right places so that the layout and content of the original (English) page are preserved.     

Characterizing communication networks in a web-based classroom: Cognitive styles and linguistic behavior of self-organizing groups in online discussions

In this study, we explore the cognitive style profiles and linguistic patterns of self-organizing groups within a web-based graduate education course to determine how cognitive preferences and individual behaviors influence the patterns of information exchange and the formation of communication hierarchies in an online classroom. Network analysis was performed on communication data collected from 1131 student messages posted in 19 asynchronous online discussion forums to determine centrality, clique membership, and core-periphery structure in the communication networks. The social network data were examined in relation to the students' cognitive style profiles, which were assessed using the Kirton Adaption-Innovation Inventory (KAI) (32 and 33). The cognitive style composition of small cliques (dyadic and triadic) was found to be highly heterogeneous, often with large cognitive gaps between clique members, which suggests that web-based environments may mask cognitive style differences that have been shown to create conflict in face-to-face interactions. In addition, the cognitive style mean of the students in the core of the network was found to be significantly more adaptive than that of the periphery group. To further characterize the nature of the communicative interactions, automated linguistic analysis was used to analyze the students' writing samples. Interestingly, students in the core of the social network demonstrated a significantly higher usage of several language features associated with individuals who actively promote enhanced group performance and cohesion. For our sample, the linguistic behaviors of students in the core of the social network, coupled with their more adaptive cognitive style preferences, suggest that these students may inherently place greater value on fostering group cohesion than those in the periphery.     

Supervised collaboration for syntactic annotation of Quranic Arabic

The Quranic Arabic Corpus (http://corpus.quran.com) is a collaboratively constructed linguistic resource initiated at the University of Leeds, with multiple layers of annotation including part-of-speech tagging, morphological segmentation (Dukes and Habash 2010) and syntactic analysis using dependency grammar (Dukes and Buckwalter 2010). The motivation behind this work is to produce a resource that enables further analysis of the Quran, the 1,400 year-old central religious text of Islam. This project contrasts with other Arabic treebanks by providing a deep linguistic model based on the historical traditional grammar known as i′rāb (?????). By adapting this well-known canon of Quranic grammar into a familiar tagset, it is possible to encourage online annotation by Arabic linguists and Quranic experts. This article presents a new approach to linguistic annotation of an Arabic corpus: online supervised collaboration using a multi-stage approach. The different stages include automatic rule-based tagging, initial manual verification, and online supervised collaborative proofreading. A popular website attracting thousands of visitors per day, the Quranic Arabic Corpus has approximately 100 unpaid volunteer annotators each suggesting corrections to existing linguistic tagging. To ensure a high-quality resource, a small number of expert annotators are promoted to a supervisory role, allowing them to review or veto suggestions made by other collaborators. The Quran also benefits from a large body of existing historical grammatical analysis, which may be leveraged during this review. In this paper we evaluate and report on the effectiveness of the chosen annotation methodology. We also discuss the unique challenges of annotating Quranic Arabic online and describe the custom linguistic software used to aid collaborative annotation.     

Does Culturally Adapted Online Communication Work? A Study of American and Chinese Internet Users’ Attitudes and Preferences Toward Culturally Customized Web Design Elements

Various scholars have argued that today's multicultural online marketplace necessitates cultural adaptation of Web communications. This argument has largely been based on the assumption that culture, as a source of acceptable norms and behaviors, influences online expectations, preferences, and experiences. Few, however, have questioned the validity of this assumption. Our study aims to fill that gap. It examines whether Internet users' cultural backgrounds are reflected in the attitudes toward Web design elements. A survey of American and Chinese Internet users and a content analysis revealed that cultural backgrounds play a substantial role in determining Web design preferences and attitudes. The findings of this study represent an important step in developing and validating a framework that international marketers can use to customize Web sites and improve targeting in online environment. The findings also suggest that cultural customization of online communication is particularly effective when users have strong ethnic identities.     

Web聊天室探测系统的网页获取和改进研究

网络聊天以它低成本,高效率的优势给网络用户提供了在线实时通信的功能,从而成为目前互联网使用最广泛的网络服务。以网络聊天室的探测为载体深入研究网页获取和预处理的技术问题。主要探讨网络爬虫的原理和工作流程,在网络爬虫器中引入网络并行多线程处理技术。讨论WebLech的技术特点和实现技术,对WebLech做出了改进。     

Scalable filtering of XML data for Web services

As the Web gains prevalence as an application-to-application communication medium, organizations are deploying more Web service applications to provide standardized, programmatic application functionality over the Internet. The paper considers how scalable content-based routing architectures for Web applications can handle the growing number of XML messages associated with Web services.     

Redundancy-aware SOAP messages compression and aggregation for enhanced performance

Many organizations around the world have started to adopt Web services as well as server farms and clouds hosted by large enterprise and data centers for various applications. Web Services offer several advantages over other communication technologies. However, they have high latency and often suffer from congestion and bottlenecks due to the massive load generated by web service requests from large numbers of end users. SOAP (Simple Object Access Protocol) is the basic XML-based communication protocol of Web services. XML is a verbose encoding language in comparison with other technologies such CORBA and RMI. In this paper, two new redundancy-aware SOAP Web message aggregation models - Two-bit and One-bit XML status tree - are proposed to enable the Web servers to aggregate SOAP responses and send them back as one compact aggregated message in order to reduce the required bandwidth, latency, and improve the overall performance of Web services. XML message compressibility, the Jaccard based clustering technique, and the vector space model are three similarity measurements that are proposed to cluster SOAP messages as groups based on their similarity degree. The clustering based similarity measurements enable the aggregation techniques to potentially reduce the required network traffic by minimizing the overall size of the messages. The experiments show significant performance for both aggregation techniques achieving compression ratios as high as 25 for aggregated SOAP messages.     

“I Have AIDS”: Content analysis of postings in HIV/AIDS support group on a Chinese microblog

With the widespread growth and adoption of new technologies, online platforms such as social network sites (SNSs) have become a channel for health information. Online groups have been set up for communication and interaction, among which many are for people with chronic illnesses, including people with HIV/AIDS (PHA). In the study of online communication behavior, the Social Information Processing Theory (SIPT) predicted people will develop deeper interpersonal relationships in online groups over time (Walther, 1996). However, the author argued that CMC content should be examined more closely to get a dynamic picture of how people interaction and how groups develop over time. Thus this paper attempted to refine SIPT by enriching the framework with detailed components, and used directed content analysis to categorize messages posted on the PHA Support Group on Sina Weibo, a China-based microblog. The results showed that the percentage of socio-emotional messages saw an increase of almost 1/3 over time, taking over informational messages as the major content in all online postings. Medical related informational messages surpassed non-medical related informational messages as time went by. Intimacy relationship messages saw drastic increase in the two time periods. This study refined SIPT by providing increased granularity of its categorization scheme to examine group communication more closely.     

Web服务软件测试技术的研究与实现

基于Web服务的分布式计算模型在Internet环境下具有很多优点。论文分析了该模型的具体实现,提出基于Web服务间标准通讯协议,对Web服务软件间的通讯消息进行控制分析的测试方法,同时给出了该系统的初步实现,并探讨了进一步的研究内容。     

Intercultural Communication on Web sites: A Cross-Cultural Analysis of Web sites from High-Context Cultures and Low-Context Cultures

The aim of this study is to explore and identify the strategies used by high‐context cultures in utilizing the Internet—a largely low‐context medium—for communication and marketing purposes. It is hypothesized that individuals in high‐context cultures are more likely to adopt the visual effects offered by the Internet to convey their messages efficiently than their low‐context counterparts. How might high‐context cultures make the most of the potentials offered by the Internet generation of today? Assuming that visual communication is a high priority in the design of high‐context Web sites, how do the visual methods used on Web sites vary according to the communication styles in different cultures? Using Hall’s high‐ and low‐context dimensions as the main parameters, an exploratory analysis of McDonald’s Web sites identified five different strategies by which visual communication is used to support high‐context communication traits.     

Taking the copyfight online: Comparing the copyright debate in congressional hearings,in newspapers,and on the web

This article examines the rhetoric around copyright and the regulation of digital rights management (DRM) from 2003 to 2006 in congressional hearings, in major newspapers, and on the most prominent relevant websites. The article describes a new combination of methods for identifying a set of online documents to compare with offline documents via content analysis. These three media present very different views of the copyright debate. Hearings present a rough balance of both coalitions' messages. Newspapers lean slightly toward stronger fair use but have little coverage. The online debate features a deluge of strong fair use arguments. These findings highlight different communication strategies and suggest broader lessons about the changing nature of policy advocacy and the policymaking process.     

网络水军识别研究

网络水军识别关键技术已成为当前数据挖掘领域最为活跃的研究之一.如何挖掘海量用户信息中潜藏的网络水军特征与行为模式,从而发现网络水军,以维护良好的网络环境,保障合理的网络秩序,已成为一项十分具有挑战性的工作.对比传统与新型网络水军识别研究,从识别特征角度对近几年内网络水军识别研究进展进行综述,对其关键技术和效用评价进行了前沿概括、比较和分析,并对网络水军识别中有待深入研究的难点和发展趋势进行了展望.     

Web智能研究现状与发展趋势

Web智能是近年出现的一个崭新的研究方向,它是人工智能和高级信息技术在新的Web和Internet环境下相互融合的产物．首先从总体上讨论了Web智能的概念、研究内容和功能技术框架,然后分别就Web智能的几个核心方面的研究现状进行了综述,主要包括语义Web与ontology,Web Agent和Web挖掘等,并进一步给出了它们的研究重点和发展方向,最后是关于Web智能的研究展望和面临的挑战,指出智慧Web是Web智能研究的目标和中长期发展方向．     

Gender,Communication, and Self‐Presentation in Teen Chatrooms Revisited: Have Patterns Changed?

This study evaluates empirically the proposition implicit in much recent gender and CMC research that expressions of gender distinctness among teens in online environments are becoming less frequent and less traditional. Gender preferences were analyzed in linguistic features and communication styles in synchronous text messages, along with self‐presentation in user profile pictures, drawing on data from popular English‐language teen chat sites collected in 2010. Significant differences were found in speech acts, message tone, and in physical stance, dress, and social distance in profile pictures that generally conform to traditional gender stereotypes. These findings are interpreted in light of previous gender and teen CMC research, adolescent development and socialization patterns, mass media representations, and trends towards media convergence in chat platforms.     

Analyzing conversations of Web services

A composite Web service consists of a set of individual services (or peers), which interact with each other via messages. A conversation is a global sequence of messages exchanged among peers participating in a composite Web service. Interestingly, conversation behavior differs significantly for synchronous and asynchronous communication, even if peers' local behaviors remain the same. The authors use synchronizability and realizability analysis techniques to analyze conversations in the presence of asynchronous communication. With these analyses, they can use model checking to automatically verify conversation behavior for bottom-up and top-down Web service specifications.