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To develop a method for classifying information sender of web documents, which constitutes an important part of information credibility analysis.

Machine learning approach was employed. About 2,000 human‐annotated web documents were prepared for training and evaluation. The classification model was based on support vector machine, and the features used for the classification included the title and URL of documents, as well as information of the top page.

With relatively small set of features, the proposed method achieved over 50 per cent accuracy.

Some of the information sender categories were found to be more difficult to classify. This is due to the subjective nature of the categories, and further refinement of the categories is needed.

When combined with opinion/sentiment analysis techniques, information sender classification allows more profound analysis based on interactions between opinions and senders. Such analysis forms a basis of information credibility analysis.

This study formulated the problem of information sender classification. It proposed a method which achieves moderate performance. It also identified some of the issues related to information sender classification.

The purpose of this paper is to study the nature and concept of emoticons/emojis. Instead of taking for granted that these user-generated formats are necessarily emotional, we empirically assessed in what extent are they and the specificity of each one. Drawing on congruent mood state, valence core and emotion appraisal theories we expected a compatible statistical association between positive/negative/neutral emotional valence expressions and emoticons of similar valence. The positive emoticons were consistently associated with positive valence posts. Added to that analysis, 21 emotional categories were identified in posts and correlated with eight emoticons.

Two studies were used to address this question. The first study defined emoticon concept and interpreted their meaning highlighting their communication goals and anticipated effects. The link between emojis and emoticons was also obtained. Some emoticons types present more ambiguity than others. In the second study, three years of real and private (Facebook) posts from 82 adolescents were content analyzed and coded.

Only the neutral emoticons always matched neutral emotional categories found in the written interaction. Although the emoticon valence and emotional category congruence pattern was the rule, we also detected a combination of different valence emoticons types and emotion categories valence expressions. Apparently the connection between emoticon and emotion are not so obviously straightforward as the literature used to assume. The created objects designed to communicate emotions (emoticons) have their specific corresponding logic with the emotional tone of the message.

Theoretically, we discussed the emotional content of emoticons/emojis. Although this king of signals have an Asian origin and later borrowed from the western countries, their ambiguity and differing specificity have never been analyzed.

Although media and research accounts of cyber bullying suggest this misbehavior is localized primarily among middle school students, and that its frequency decreases with age, this chapter presents empirical data showing that cyber bullying occurs with considerable frequency among college students across multiple domains of life, specifically school and work. In Study 1, 28 male and 82 female undergraduate students completed a survey examining their online activities as well as their experiences with cyber bullying. Over 30% of the participants indicated that their first experience with cyber bullying was in college. No gender differences were observed with regard to victimization or perpetration, except with online gaming where males reported a higher rate of victimization than females. With regard to personality differences among victims and perpetrators, victims were lower in agreeableness than non-victims. Study 2 examined the prevalence of cyber bullying among 107 college students at work, as well as the negative outcomes linked to the experience of workplace cyber bullying. Nearly a third of the college student sample reported having been the target of cyber bullying within the past six months. Individuals in jobs in which the Internet is essential and racial minorities reported higher rates of cyber bullying at work. Additionally, cyber bullying was positively linked to several negative emotions, as well as burnout and job search effort. These findings have important implications not only for potential negative outcomes that college students may be facing at school and at work but also for organizational justice issues, as differential treatment at work can lead to lawsuits and other negative work outcomes.

Saroma Lake is the largest lagoon in Japan, situated at latitude 44°05′07″ and 44°11′58″ north and longitude 143°40′06″ and 143°58′14″ east (Fig. 3.1). It is located in the northeast of Hokkaido along the Okhotsk sea. The size and circumference of the lake area is around 151km² and 91km, respectively. The pear-shaped lagoon is around 25.7km long and around 9.5km wide. The lake has semiclosed estuaries with sea mouths between Okhotsk sea and lake. In the lake, two artificial sea mouths have been excavated, where the water exchange can be maintained. These are around 300 and 50m wide. Approximately 90 percent of the total inflow from the sea to the lake passes through the former mouth, which was opened in 1927. The salinity level in Saroma Lake is almost similar to that of the Okhotsk sea due to the active tidal water exchange through the two mouths. An average water depth in Saroma Lake is 14m, approximately 18m deep at the deepest point. The lake receives fresh water from 13 rivers, particularly two principal streams (i.e., River Saromabetsu and Baro), where a large quantity of freshwater and subsequent sediments and nutrients are supplied into the lake.

Increased evidence for the health benefits of probiotics for health restoration coupled with the consumer's inclination towards a safe, natural and cost-effective substitute for drugs have led application of probiotics as a pharmaceutical agent and are rapidly moving in clinical usage. In this context, this article attempts to highlight the potential of probiotics as a pharmaceutical agent.

Endeavor has been made to explore the significance of probiotics for the modulation of gut ecology and their action. Potentiality of probiotics for their exploitation as a pharmaceutical agent has also been justified. Limitations of probiotic therapy and the various considerations for probiotic therapy have also been delineated.

Probiotic organisms influence the physiological and pathological process of the host by modifying the intestinal microbiota, thereby affecting human health. Beneficial effects of probiotics as a pharmaceutical agent seem to be strain and dose dependent and more efficacious with their early introduction. Combination of various probiotics proved to be more efficacious than single strain for exhibiting prophylactic activities.

Reviewed literature indicated that it is difficult to generalize for the beneficial effect of all probiotics for all types of diseases as efficacy of probiotics is strain-dependent and dose-dependent and its clinical application needs long-term investigations.

Clinical trials have displayed that probiotics may alleviate certain disorders or diseases in humans especially those related to gastro-intestinal tract.

Ingestion of fermented dairy products containing probiotic cultures may provide health benefits in certain clinical conditions such as antibiotic-associated diarrhoea, rotavirus-associated diarrhoea, inflammatory bowel disease, inflammatory bowel syndrome, allergenic diseases, cancer, Helicobacter pylori infection and lactose-intolerance. Application of probiotics as a pharmaceutical agent is recommended.

Anthropomorphized brands have been widely used as marketing communication tools to engage consumers on social media, especially on Twitter. Guided by the social exchange theory (SET) and the dialogic theory, this study aims to investigate how anthropomorphized brands leverage different communication strategies on Twitter and how these strategies are related to consumer engagement.

Supervised machine learning was used to identify the communication strategies (i.e. message types and dialogic principles) of 125,887 tweets from 21 brand characters. Some statistical analyses (e.g. frequency analysis, Chi-square analysis and Poisson regression analysis) were performed to explore the relationships between communication strategies and consumer engagement (i.e. retweets and replies).

The majority of anthropomorphized brands’ tweets belonged to the socioemotional category and the most adopted dialogic principles were generation of return visits and conservation of visitors. Consumers engaged more with socioemotional tweets as well as the tweets that adopted the principles of dialogic loop and conservation of visitors. There were clear relationships between message types and dialogic principles in anthropomorphized brands’ tweets, and certain dialogic principles were found to effectively improve consumer engagement with certain message types.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to investigate the communication strategies of anthropomorphized brand characters on Twitter using computational research methods. It not only provides brand managers a systematic review of how current anthropomorphized brands communicate with consumers on Twitter and what strategies work more effectively to trigger consumer engagement but also contributes to theory building in brand management by integrating the SET and the dialogic theory in brand anthropomorphism research.

This chapter is aimed at filling two important gaps in the large literature on high-involvement work system (HIWS). First, the existing literature tends to focus on North America and Western Europe, and detailed information on HIWS outside of the two regions (especially Asia) is still limited. Second, while there is a large body of quantitative evidence, the literature is relatively scant on detailed account of exactly how specific HIWS practices are implemented in the real workplace. This chapter draws on our extensive field research at firms in Japan, the United States, and Korea, and presents real-world examples of HIWS of firms in Japan, Korea, and the United States. Our detailed account of the implementation of HIWS in the three countries points to an intriguing process of transnational diffusion of HIWS. Japanese firms as early experimenters of HIWS posed a challenge to U.S. firms in the global marketplace, resulting in the trans-pacific diffusion of HIWS which is modified to the U.S. corporate culture. Due to its geographical proximity and historical connections to Japan, Korean firms were initially heavily influenced by Japanese HIWS. However, with the rising link to the United States and Europe, Japanese influence appears to have been waning, and interest in U.S. style HIWS and European-style state-mandated works council has risen, suggesting that a hybrid model may be emerging in Korea.

The purpose of this chapter is to provide fresh evidence and insights on a causal link from product market competition to the nature and scope of employee involvement using a case study of two Japanese manufacturing firms.

The firm’s investment decision on two kinds of innovation activities, discrete innovation and continuous improvement, is likely to be a key driver for the adoption (or lack thereof) of the high-performance work system (HPWS) and employee involvement programs. As product market competitionintensifies (e.g., rising international competition and weakening exclusivesupplier–manufacturer relationships), the firm is likely to shift its innovation strategy from bottom-up continuous improvement activities, which almost always accompany employee involvement, to top-down discrete innovation activities, which downplays employee involvement. Such a shift of the firm’s innovation strategy results in declining employee involvement.

This study will inform policymakers, practitioners of management, and the public about the importance of paying particular attention to the firm’s innovation strategy in understanding the interplay between product market competition and the HPWS and employee involvement.

In spite of the rich body of evidence on the effects of HPWS, there are at least two relatively unexplored yet potentially important questions: (i) The conditions under which the HPWS is best introduced and best sustained; and (ii) in what way the HPWS will need to evolve when external environments change. Our findings fill this important gap in the literature by providing novel evidence and insight on the causal link from product market competition to employee involvement.

This study aims (1) to numerically investigate the characteristics of a human cough jet in a quiescent environment, such as the variation with time of the velocity field, streamwise jet penetration and maximum jet width. Two different turbulence modelling approaches, the unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (URANS) and large eddy simulation (LES), are used for comparison purposes. (2) To validate the numerical results with the experimental data.

Two different approaches, the URANS and LES, are used to simulate a human cough jet flow. The numerical results for the velocity magnitude contours and the spatial average of the two-dimensional velocity magnitude over the corresponding particle image velocimetry (PIV) field of view are compared with the relevant PIV measurements. Similarly, the numerical results for the streamwise velocity component at the hot-wire probe location are compared with the hot-wire anemometry (HWA) measurements. Furthermore, the numerical results for the streamwise jet penetration are compared with the data from the previous experimental work.

Based on the comparison with the URANS approach and the experimental data, the LES approach can predict the temporal development of a human cough jet reasonably well. In addition, the maximum width of the cough jet is found to grow practically linearly with time in the far-field, interrupted-jet stage, while the corresponding axial distance from the mouth of the jet front increases with time in an approximately quadratic manner.

Currently, no numerical study of human cough flow has been conducted using the LES approach due to the following challenges: (1) the computational cost is much higher than that of the URANS approach; (2) it is difficult to specify the turbulent fluctuations at the mouth for the cough jet properly; (3) it is necessary to define the appropriate conditions for the droplets to obtain statistically valid results. Therefore, this work fills this research gap.

To examine perceptions of organizational atmosphere and joint ownership in a firm in which capital ownership is broadly shared among members of its work force.

A questionnaire was administered with a sample of 123 people from a Mondragon cooperative firm, ULMA Architectural Solutions, and responses were analyzed using principal components’ analysis and regression techniques.

Two factors are found to play especially important roles in explaining perceptions: (1) work and management/supervisory practices, especially those relating to communication and participation in decisions in respondents’ immediate work area, and (2) job type (blue collar vs. white collar).

The study confirms earlier research on the broad centrality of participation and related practices to perceptions of work and the organization in employee ownership settings, while findings focus on the immediate work environment and relationships with immediate managers for blue-collar workers.

These are closely related to the research implications, underlining the importance to worker-owners, in manufacturing contexts, of communication and involvement in decisions in their immediate work environment.

Widespread concerns about inequality, poor working conditions, and competitiveness suggest the importance of investigating enterprises with broadly shared capital ownership, enterprises that tend to address these concerns.

The chapter reinforces the fundamental roles of information-sharing and participation in enterprises with shared ownership, while making key distinctions between shopfloor and office workers experiences and perceptions.