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The purpose of this paper is to reduce the waiting time on webcast for selective contents, by proposing a scheduling method called the “contents prefetched broadcasting considering user participation” (CPB‐CP) method.

The authors analyze and evaluate the performance of the proposed CPB‐CP method.

It is confirmed that the proposed method gives shorter average waiting time than the conventional methods.

A future direction of this study will involve making a scheduling method in the case where the playing time of each content item is different.

In selective contents delivery, users may wait for the next bit of content to start playing after watching the previous one. In quiz programs, users may wait to receive the content data for their selected answer after they select their answer.

In the CPB‐CP method, when a provider node pulls out of the network while delivering contents, waiting time is reduced effectively by reconstructing a delivery schedule that considers the available bandwidth of each provider node.

Due to the autonomous nature of e-learning, learner control options should be provided to allow students to be more selective of content based on learning needs. Maintaining students’ situational interest should also be a goal in e-learning, as research shows that doing so leads to a greater chance of success. The purpose of this paper is to investigate the relationship between learner control and maintained situational interest in hopes of promoting better engagement through content selection based on learning needs.

This study analyzed survey responses from university students (n = 2,173) participating in a variety of massive online courses in South Korea to investigate the correlation between system-provided learner control and maintained situational interest. Additionally, the correlation between learner control and maintained situational interest was examined among demographic subsets including gender, age and grade level.

Results show a positive relationship between learner control and maintained situational interest, as well as a positive relationship between learner control and maintained situational interest among each demographic subset.

These results add to the current literature by promoting a practical way of maintaining students’ situational interest by providing them with the ability to control aspects of their own learning processes.

Urban green spaces including parks and gardens are an essential part of a network of physical and social well-being. They provide spaces to socialize and opportunities to connect with nature. They are restorative enclaves. When it comes to scaling down spaces in general, they form important constituent parts of what we call the setting in which we behave. Barker elaborated the notion of behavior setting by describing how our behavior is influenced and constrained by settings. A setting consists of the space, its contents, its surroundings, the people and their activities. As Norberg-Schulz puts it, this is a microcosmos that wraps people and the space. The paper aims to discuss this issue.

In this study a behavior setting with different spatial attributes in an urban green space, namely, Kriton Curi Park on the Asian side of Istanbul is observed. Landscapes used by both men and women may be gendered even if men and women use them at the same time. Women’s and men’s experiences of the same setting can be different. The difference is likely to be the outcome of both the physical attributes of the setting and/or the social construction of the society. However, a general attribute of genders’ experience of space is that women are more sensitive to spatial contents and more selective about the use of space. According to previous research, men and women do not have equal control over behavior settings in urban green spaces, in Turkey.

The findings of this study address a social fact that appropriate physical features of urban green spaces like Criton Curi Park and its immediate environment reveal a higher degree of equality in gender roles.

As the literature indicates parks being among urban green spaces are not yet studied enough in the Turkish context. This study is an attempt to study the status of women in open public space. For the sustainability of social relations parks become even more important.

The purpose of this study is to explain cross-cultural differences in online self-disclosure (SD) between Indonesians, who live in a highly collectivist culture, and Poles – a hierarchical individualist culture. Various psychological factors have been taken into consideration, such as the need for popularity (NfP), the need to belong (NtB) and self-esteem (SE).

This study was designed as a quantitative study. First, a one-way ANOVA was performed to compare online SD and specific behaviours online between Indonesians and Poles. Second, correlational analysis between online SD and other psychological factors (NfP, NtB, SE) was conducted.

Indonesians were more likely than Poles to disclose information on Facebook. On the other hand, Poles showed a tendency to disclose more positive content than Indonesians. It was also found that SE was significantly correlated with positive content of online SD for both countries. Furthermore, online SD on Facebook is more closely associated with NfP than NtB.

This study possesses several limitations in regard to the lack of generalization; this is due to the choice in scales and the sampling procedure. Thereby, further studies must take into consideration the proportion of genders, the differences in the construction of the “self” between individualist and collectivist cultures and the interpretation of culture orientation based on the primary data. Furthermore, several results related to the online SD would need to be verified by further studies to get a holistic explanation.

The current research is for all means and purposes original, as it investigates the differences of online behaviours between cultures – Polish and Indonesian – basing on the premise that there are crucial differences between collectivist and individualist cultures. No prior articles attempted the comparison between those nationalities in online behaviour.

Usability tests to improve information accessibility for the blind have rarely been carried out. Recently, the LG Digital Talking Book (LG DTB) Library has developed a ubiquitous service, which provides the blind with library service anytime, anywhere, using mobile phones with the automated library access procedure. The main purpose of this paper is to draw up a better plan to improve information accessibility for the blind through the usability test of the service being made by the LG DTB Library.

An online survey and in‐depth interviews are conducted among the blind, and usage statistics analysis of the Digital Talking Book Library services and web server log analysis are carried out together for the usability test.

The blind respondents answer that late updates of new publications, unbalanced subject areas, and lack of educational contents are the most serious problems in reality. The paper also showed that handy‐to‐carry information terminals like mobile phones are very much favored by the blind.

This paper has a unique value in that the real effect and usability of the ubiquitous library service for the blind is investigated for the first time.

The purpose of this paper is to propose a scheduling method called the “Asynchronous Harmonic Broadcasting Considering Commercial (AHB‐CC)” method, to reduce waiting time for continuous media data broadcasting.

The authors analyze and evaluate the performance of the proposed AHB‐CC method.

The authors confirm that the proposed method gives shorter average waiting times than the conventional methods.

A future direction of this study will involve making a scheduling method where the server concurrently broadcasts data and commercial contents. Also, maximum buffer size needs to be considered.

In general broadcasting systems, the server broadcasts the same data repetitively and clients wait until the first portion of the data is broadcast. Although the server can deliver the data to many clients concurrently, clients have to wait until their desired data are broadcast.

The AHB‐CC method presented in the paper further reduces waiting time by scheduling an effective broadcast that considers the playing time of commercial contents.

The purpose of this paper is to present the second part of three inter‐related studies investigating the use and usability of e‐books in higher education based on experiments conducted at the University of Strathclyde.

The research discussed here involved two analyses: an analysis of two e‐book collections in the libraries of the University of Strathclyde and the University of Glasgow and an analysis of a follow‐up study to a web survey into user interactions with e‐books in one of the library's collections.

The follow‐up study found that in general students found that interacting with e‐books in the library collection was easy. Students indicated that their preferred book formats varied depending on the context of their information need. Despite their positive reaction and attitudes towards e‐books, students commented that e‐books needed to be promoted more strongly and that there were limitations with respect to their use.

The study presented here was a small‐scale study based only on e‐book collections from one supplier (NetLibrary) and involved only 18 respondents. While this is considered sufficient based on the discount usability testing concept, generalisation of the results should be made with caution.

The findings should be of value to academic libraries in terms of improving e‐book collection management. This study highlights current attitudes of students towards e‐book in terms of how they interact with them, the features they value and their preferences between e‐books and paper books in a university library.

This paper provides useful information on students’ attitudes towards e‐books.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the understanding of mission statement contents and its function in guiding employee's behaviour from the organisational culture (OC) perspective.

The research is based on a mixed method approach. The quantitative content analysis of mission statements was performed on a sample of 222 Slovenian companies. Mission statement's keywords were analysed with exploratory factor analysis. Advanced network analytic approaches such as PathFinder algorithm were utilised to obtain better understanding of interrelatedness of underlying mission components. Three interviews with the top managers were performed as well.

The mission statement content analysis identified five associated organisations’ orientations: concern for stakeholders, orientation towards stability, orientation towards cooperation and innovation, and development and growth. The interviews confirm missions’ role in communicating the espoused or declared OC, although different approaches to achieve employees’ commitment to the organisation's mission can be identified in regard to the size of the organisation.

The cultural approach to the analysis of mission statements confirms that the mission statements incorporate basic contents of OC. The methodology applied gives new possibilities in the research of OC perspective of strategic statements.

Now that the World Wide Web has changed previously arcane electronic publishing into a popular everyday phenomenon, fulfilling the exciting promises of many years, a global electronic resource for the health sciences becomes technically feasible. Though recent evolutions have inspired prophecies on the imminent death of printed biomedical journals, the latter have now themselves joined the electronic platform. Since 1995, a respectable portion of the traditional top journals have started offering new channels of access that do not differ essentially from their paper formats. These electronic versions feature attractive additional value such as extra (multimedia) contents and improved retrieval and (hyper)linking capabilities. While many were originally partial versions, mainly figuring as eye‐catchers, increasingly more full‐text editions are appearing on the Worldwide Web. Compared to exclusively electronic journals or reprint archives, traditional journals migrating to the Internet have certain strategic advantages such as an aura of intellectual trust‐worthiness (based on peer review) and considerable social acclaim (based on citation records, amongst other things). As such, their impact is now increasingly being extended into cyberspace and the rumours of the death of the biomedical journal appear to be greatly exaggerated— or at least premature.

The aim of the text is to reflect on the formation of the so-called digital echo chambers or filter bubbles, which are environments formed around particular topics whose objective is to promote a given political-ideological position. The argument the author puts forward is that echo chambers are social systems of interaction created to deal with the process of informational overload brought about by the consolidation of digital media in people’s daily lives.

The author used Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems to explain what the author is calling social systems of interaction. Furthermore, the author made clarifications about: (1) the current debate regarding echo chambers; (2) what is the concept of “information” that the author is using to formulate the proposition and (3) what is the specificity that digital media bring when the author talks about informational overload and about the formation of echo chambers.

The author concluded that echo chambers can be seen as digital interaction systems, but the concept of “interaction” must be adapted. The author also concluded that echo chambers help society to deal with the phenomenon of informational overload.

There are few works which try to make a detailed analysis of echo chambers from a Luhmannian perspective. With the propositions presented in this text, along with other writings of the own, the author gives an important step in that direction by introducing the topic in the social systems researchers community.