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The purpose of this study is to determine the development of the study of political theory. This research is very important to be studied to see the tendency of previous researchers in studying political theory. The method used in this research is descriptive qualitative. In this study, the data used is data that has been downloaded from the Scopus database with some limitations to limit and be more specific on the results of the discussion. After the documents to be reviewed and analyzed bibliographically using VOSViewer and NVivo 12 Plus software, the data is exported in .CSV and .RIS formats. the findings in this study can map the study of political theory and provide an overview of the dominant topics being discussed so as to bring up newness in further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Web sites are important components of Internet strategy for organizations. This paper develops a theoretical model for understanding the effect of Web site design elements on customer loyalty to a Web site. We show the relevance of the business domain of a Web site to gain a contextual understanding of relative importance of Web site design elements. We use a hierarchical linear modeling approach to model multilevel and cross-level interactions that have not been explicitly considered in previous research. By analyzing data on more than 12,000 online customer surveys for 43 Web sites in several business domains, we find that the relative importance of different Web site features (e.g., content, functionality) in affecting customer loyalty to a Web site varies depending on the Web site's domain. For example, we find that the relationship between Web site content and customer loyalty is stronger for information-oriented Web sites than for transaction-oriented Web sites. However, the relationship between functionality and customer loyalty is stronger for transaction-oriented Web sites than for information-oriented Web sites. We also find that government Web sites enjoy greater word-of-mouth effect than commercial Web sites. Finally, transaction-oriented Web sites tend to score higher on mean customer loyalty than do information-oriented Web sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines how consumers process the information available, and what their experiences are, when exposed to an interactive Web site as compared with a noninteractive Web site. The experiment developed analyzes two versions of a Web site in which the capacity to interact with the message has been manipulated. The results show that the interactive Web site leads to more information processing, higher favorability toward the product and the Web site, and greater flow state intensity. In addition, the findings confirm the hypothesized moderating effect of need for cognition on information processing. Implications for new media researchers and practitioners are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines personal Web sites as a conspicuous form of consumer self-presentation. Using theories of self-presentation, possessions, and computer-mediated environments (CMEs), we investigate the ways in which consumers construct identities by digitally associating themselves with signs, symbols, material objects, and places. Specifically, the issues of interest include why consumers create personal Web sites, what consumers want to communicate, what strategies they devise to achieve their goal of self-presentation, and how those Web space strategies compare to the self-presentation strategies of real life (RL). The data reveal insights into the strategies behind constructing a digital self, projecting a digital likeness, digitally associating as a new form of possession, and reorganizing linear narrative structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The authors suggest that learning is an important factor in electronic environments and that efficiency resulting from learning can be modeled with the power law of practice. They show that most Web sites can be characterized by decreasing visit times and that generally those sites with the fastest learning curves show the highest rates of purchasing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research helps Web developers apply knowledge on information search costs to the design of Web sites that sell consumer products or services. The goal of the research is to predict how subtle changes in the user interface design influence information search costs. With an empirical study, the authors compare 1411 choices subjects made regarding a business to patronize using paper and electronic telephone directories. The choices were contingent on information search costs imposed by the different media. By providing a theoretical basis for predicting differences in information search costs, the authors help designers create more effective Web sites for achieving their marketing objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The term 'webometrics' was coined for the quantitative analysis of web - related phenomena, content analysis, including links, search engine performances and web technology analysis from an information science perspective. This paper explored into the webometric study of web sites of Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR) institutions in India. There are 41 CSIR research institutions in India. The study aimed at to establish a kind of ranking of websites of CSIR institutions in India by measuring their WIF. The study of the ranking will help the reader to compare and identify CSIR institutions websites in India by their WIF. The objectives of the study includes, To identify and classify the domain of CSIR institutes' websites in India; To calculate the Number of WebPages, Number of link pages, Number of self link pages and external link pages of CSIR institutes' websites in India; To calculate the Simple Web Impact Factor (WIF), Self link Web Impact Factor, External Web Impact factor and Revised Web Impact Factor of CSIR institutes'' websites in India and rank them as per the WIF and To analyse the link network of the CSIR websites in India. Four types of links and Web Impact Factors are formulated as The Simple WIF, the ratio of all links to the number of pages; The Self Link WIF, the ratio of self links within the site to number of pages; The external WIF, the ratio of links made from external sites to the target site, to the number of pages at the site ;The Revised WIF, and the ratio of links made incoming from other sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of webpages in the Internet has increased tremendously over the last two decades however only a part of it is indexed by various search engines. This small portion is the indexable web of the Internet and can be usually reachable from a Search Engine. Search engines play a big role in making the World Wide Web accessible to the end user, and how much of the World WideWeb is accessible on the size of the search engine's index. Researchers have proposed several ways to estimate this size of the indexable web using search engines with and without privileged access to the search engine's database. Our report provides a summary of methods used in the last two decades to estimate the size of the World Wide Web, as well as describe how this knowledge can be used in other aspects/tasks concerning the World Wide Web. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spamdexing is the art of black hat SEO. Features which are more influential for high rank and visibility are manipulated for the SEO task. The motivation behind the work is utilizing the state of the art Website optimization features to enhance the performance of spamdexing detection. Features which play a focal role in current SEO strategies show a significant deviation for spam and non-spam samples. This paper proposes 44 features named as NLSDF (New Link Spamdexing Detection Features). Social media creates an impact in search engine results ranking. Features pertaining to the social media were incorporated with the NLSDF features to boost the recital of the spamdexing classification. The NLSDF features with 44 attributes along with 5 social media features boost the classification performance of the WEBSPAM-UK 2007 dataset. The one tailed paired t-test with 95% confidence, performed on the AUC values of the learning models shows significance of the NLSDF. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the digital age, many corporations communicate with their publics via online channels. Among many channels, a corporation’s official Web site is often used for informing publics of its performance and other corporate-related information and for shaping a positive corporate image. This study quantitatively analyzed corporate Web sites, particularly the “About us” Web pages of Fortune 500 corporations based on symbolic convergence theory (SCT), which describes the formation of symbolic reality and the shared meaning of that symbolic reality among the public. A content analysis revealed that economic corporate management was the dominant rhetorical vision, and the fantasy, in the context of SCT, of being a superior company was emphasized by the 500 examined corporations. Such symbolic reality was constructed using corresponding structural tools of Web content, such as dramatis personae, plot line, and scene. In addition, the rhetorical vision and fantasy themes created by the Web sites turned out to be contingent on business classifications (retailer/distributor, manufacturers, and financial/informational/recreational services). Companies that pursued other types of fantasy themes (such as admirable, futuristic, and competent/stable) and rhetorical visions (such as socially responsible corporate management) were also identified. Some suggestions for corporate communicators are provided based on the results of this analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many websites offering Location Based Services (LBS) provide a $k$ NN search interface that returns the top-$k$ nearest-neighbor objects (e.g., nearest restaurants) for a given query location. This paper addresses the problem of crawling all objects efficiently from an LBS website, through the public $k$ NN web search interface it provides. Specifically, we develop crawling algorithm for 2D and higher-dimensional spaces, respectively, and demonstrate through theoretical analysis that the overhead of our algorithms can be bounded by a function of the number of dimensions and the number of crawled objects, regardless of the underlying distributions of the objects. We also extend the algorithms to leverage scenarios where certain auxiliary information about the underlying data distribution, e.g., the population density of an area which is often positively correlated with the density of LBS objects, is available. Extensive experiments on real-world datasets demonstrate the superiority of our algorithms over the state-of-the-art competitors in the literature. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This note evaluates the applicability of copyright to web design. Web design affects the appearance and user experience of a website, but excludes content such as the text or images. Web designers have an incentive to standardize websites to ease the learning curve of users who are new to a given website, which is strongly counterbalanced by internal and external pressures to perform creatively. Copyright law has been ambiguously applied to web design. Problems with copyrightability stem from the hurdles to determining what design is original, as well as the exclusion of functional elements. Even if a web design is copyrightable subject matter, successfully proving infringement is difficult. In several contexts where copyright protection might be an issue, this note finds that copyright is unnecessary to resolve disputes. The copyright symbol in the footer of websites can serve as a notice that socially pressures and deters potential copiers, protecting website design and incentivizing innovation, even in the absence of legal certainty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The internationalization of Web sites requires Web designers to provide effective navigation experience for users from diverse cultural backgrounds. This research investigates the effect of cultural cognitive style on user perception of Web site structure characteristics and performance on the Web site, and the subsequent user satisfaction towards the Web site. More specifically, the authors focus on the breadth versus depth of a Web site's structure. A laboratory experiment involving participants from China and the United States was conducted to test the hypotheses. The results showed that cultural cognitive style and Web site structure indeed interact to affect user perception and performance. People with holistic and analytic cultural cognitive styles displayed different perceived navigability and user performance on "broad" and "deep" Web sites. This study adds a cultural dimension to our knowledge on how Web site structure can affect users' experience. It also suggests pragmatic strategies for Web site design practitioners to improve website design in order to produce compelling navigation experience for users from diverse cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Methis is the property of University of Tartu Press and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study explores scholarly use of social media by PhD students through a mix-method approach of qualitative interviews and a case study of #phdchat conversation. Social media tools, such as blogs, Twitter and Facebook, can be used by PhD students and early career researchers to promote their professional profiles, disseminate their work to a wider audience quickly, and gain feedback and support from peers across the globe. There are also difficulties and potential problems such as the lack of standards and incentives, the risks of ideas being stolen, lack of knowledge of how to start and maintain using social media tool and the potential need to invest significant amount of time and effort. We found that respondents employed various strategies to maximize the impact of their scholarly communication practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Currently most tourists booked their hotel rooms via online mediums. However, hotels are losing control of revenue in online room reservations, due to strong threats from online travel agents. In order to compete, hoteliers are required to have a solid understanding of up-to-date tourists' online buying intentions. Therefore, the main purpose of this research is to examine the antecedents of leisure tourists' online buying intentions via hotel official websites in Malaysia. Three antecedents of buying intentions namely service quality of web site design, tourists' past web experiences, and price have been identified in this research. Survey method was used to carry out the research. Three hypotheses were tested by using multiple regression in this research and findings showed that service quality of web site design and tourists' past web experiences have significant relationship with tourists' online buying intentions. Price on the other hand has no significant influence on tourists' online buying intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research problem: Most of the previous research into corporate websites has focused on the users' point of view and their perception of usability and interactivity as the two predominant website characteristics, and has shown that interactivity plays an important role in consumers' perceptions of, and responses to, these sites. This study explores corporate websites from a different view—that of the company—and investigates the organizational motivation to adopt new interactive features on corporate websites. Research question: What are the critical factors influencing the firm's adoption of online innovations related to interactivity on their websites? Literature review: Many dominant theories in information technology (IT) that guide most research on IT adoption at the firm level include the diffusion of innovations theory (which seeks to explain how, why, and at what rate new ideas and technology spread through cultures) and the technology, organization, and environment framework (which identifies three aspects of an enterprise's context that influence the process by which it adopts and implements a technological innovation). But other research streams can contribute to the Theory of Technology Adoption at the firm level, including Institutional Theory (which is a widely accepted theoretical posture that emphasizes rational myths, isomorphism, and legitimacy) and the model of Iacovou et al.(which analyzes interorganizational systems' characteristics that influence firms to adopt IT innovations). Methodology: A conceptual model with supporting propositions was tested using an online questionnaire. Data were collected from 138 firms in Switzerland and Germany and analyzed with multiple regression analysis. Results and conclusions: Complexity, perceived benefits, top management support, and information intensity are the drivers that play important roles in the diffusion of innovation related to interactivity on corporate websites, and support our conceptual model. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Specificity-determining sites (SDS) are the key positions of a protein family that show a specific conservation of amino acids, related to the subfamily members of that family. SDS play crucial role in developing functional variation within the protein family during the course of evolution. Thus, it is important to identify SDS to understand the evolutionary process of diversification of biological functions within a protein family. A wide range of computational tools have been designed to detect such SDS. In this review, we intend to examine the concept of SDS in more details along with the advancements and drawbacks of different computational approaches designed towards successful prediction of SDS. Further, we discussed the algorithms behind the computational approaches developed till date and provide an exhaustive comparison of performance of each method. We also introduce a new ensemble approach, SubSite as another tool to predict SDS through a user-friendly webserver available at www.hpppi.iicb.res.in/subsite. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The people who have physical or mental disabilities which limit their movements, senses, activities or both of them are one of the groups in society. Those people have various problems in social life directly or indirectly in turkey. Nowadays, they face many problems in accessibility on many fields such as education, healthcare, justice, social security, etc. Those individuals are willing to draw attention and resolve their problems. The level of development of countries is directly related with the solution of the aforementined problems. In this study we focused on the common terms about the people who have limited movements, senses, activities or both; and focused on the awereness of disabled people and we investigated the the accessibility of the web sites about the justice by disabled people. Making accessible of web pages will allow the disabled people to have the equal rights with the others and will also provide diversity about information and communication sources [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using data from an exclusive file-sharing Web site that allows users to share music files using the BitTorrent protocol, I exploit exogenous variation in the availability of sound recordings in file-sharing networks to isolate the causal effect of file sharing of an album on its sales. Using within-album variation in illegal downloads and sales, I find that the effect is essentially zero: The elasticity of sales with respect to illegal downloads is one-tenth of one percentage point. However, the finding that file sharing is not harmful to individual artists is not inconsistent with the well-documented fact that file sharing is harmful to the music industry (the fallacy of composition). More important, I find that file sharing benefits more established and popular artists who are signed to major labels, which is consistent with recent industry trends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduction. Digital information environments such as Websites and search engines have the potential to support serendipity: to spark and nurture positive, unexpected interactions with information and ideas with valuable outcomes. But we have few tools to measure how well they support serendipity and thus no data-driven way to guide their development. Method. Grounded in prior research, facets of a serendipitous digital environment were identified together with a pool of items that could be used in the creation of a self-report scale. To assess the content validity of the preliminary scale or the extent to which a measurement reflects the content domain it is intended to capture, we conducted two successive studies: an expert review by eight experts; and an analysis of variance approach involving a Web-based study of 107 university students. Analysis. Qualitative and quantitative approaches were used to analyse the data. Results. The items of the serendipitous digital environment scale were revised and the scale's content validity confirmed. Conclusion. Five facets of a serendipitous digital environment were identified and defined and a 37-item scale was developed in preparation for future studies that will reduce and refine the scale and test its construct validity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

After observing and developing online reference websites for 20 plus years, it's clear the biggest hurdle to reliability still hasn't been overcome. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This study aimed to analyse the quantitative similarities between traditional citations coverage (Web of Science and Scopus) and citations taken from the Web (Google Scholar), specifically targeting articles from 23 Open Access ISI-indexed journals within the field of General and Internal Medical Science published in 2007. This method enables us to comprehend the number of citations that exist on the Web and their efficiency as an important source for Medical Science research evaluation. More specifically, the correlation tests are used as an indirect approach to assess the extent of the relationship between traditional and Web-based citation coverage. It also investigates the percentage of overlap between conventional and Web citations databases in the selected journals. The findings show that the Web incorporates more citation data targeting general and internal medical journal articles that cannot be traced by traditional citation databases. The significant association between both conventional citations databases and Google Scholar found in this study, suggest that both the traditional and Web-based citation database are possible tools for measuring identical aspects, however, Web-based citations have the capability to be used for effective and accurate evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study makes an attempt to explore and analyze the growth and decay rate of URL citations cited in one of the eminent information web magazine ARIADNE. All the web citations cited in the featured article section of ARIADNE web magazine spanning a period of three years (2010-2012) were identified and downloaded. All the URLs provided in the web citations were checked by W3C link checker (http://validator.w3.org/checklink) to test whether they were accessible or not. Web resources are used more than the printed ones. Though the number of references in web based format is more in use but a significant number of web references lose their identity with the passage of time. The results indicate that early published papers have collectively a larger number of missing web citation compared to the recent ones. It was found that majority of errors were due to the missing content (http 404-file not found) representing 52.68% of all http error codes followed by "http 500" (24.73%) and "http 403" (19.35%). The ".com/.co" domain was also found to be the most stable and persistent domain with 95 per cent accessibility. The greatest number of web resources cited in the articles, were found to be of "html" and "htmls" formats and "ppt" files were found to be most stable with 100% accessibility. Finally, the study confirms that continued availability of web resources is not guaranteed because of the dying phenomenon of web based references, but there can be certain solutions (WebCite, LOCKSS etc) that can prevent the decay or disappearance of web citations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The reporting of business information on websites, hereafter referred to as electronic business reporting (e-BR), continues to gain widespread acceptance as the Internet provides an inexpensive channel for delivering timely financial and nonfinancial information to investors. The online environment facilitates both the delivery of traditional text-based reporting content and the use of enhanced multimedia for displaying nonfinancial content, including elements such as images, presentations, video, and social media features. Signaling theory and research on trust was applied to develop a signaling research model and investigate how the reporting of nonfinancial content in e-BR can serve as a signal, specifically with nonprofessional investors. An experimental study was conducted in which the quality of e-BR and company performance was varied to investigate how e-BR influences perceptions of investment quality and intentions. The findings suggest that the nonfinancial content in e-BR influences perceptions of trustworthiness and perceived investment quality. When financial performance is low, high-quality e-BR enhances investors' perceptions of investment quality, which in return influences investment intentions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper we development a hybrid algorithm of machine learning for the automatic locking of web pages that incite to violence through content snuff. We describe of the current situation of the problem to be solved, and we give to know the selection process of the techniques for the development of the hybrid algorithm. Also, we show the mathematical model and results analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the present article is to discuss the semantic loan ciasteczko ('cookie') used in Polish. The new meaning of the word, modelled on English, is connected with computers and the Internet. The new legal regulations in Poland require all Polish websites to inform the Internet users about the fact that a given website uses cookies. Quotations from various Polish websites are analyzed; it is clear that the form in question is far from fully assimilated into Polish, as there is a great deal of confusion seen among the authors of texts published on the Internet. Four main solutions are in operation: (1) the use of the English lexical borrowing only, (2) the use of the English semantic borrowing only, (3) the use of both the English semantic and lexical borrowing and (4) the use of the English lexical borrowing followed by a definition of the term in Polish. In addition, new collocations of the word are analyzed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The research on students with disabilities has focused primarily on transition programs and the accessibility of information in the classroom environment. There is a dearth of studies that examine the accessibility of disability services information on community college websites for prospective students with disabilities. A researcher-developed content analysis instrument was used to collect data on 40 community college websites throughout the United States. The community college websites were analyzed on three dimensions including: (1) the accessibility of disability services information on community college websites, (2) the distance of information regarding disability services from the homepage, and (3) the accessibility and availability of disability services information that might be provided to students with disabilities via the website. The findings of this quantitative content-focused synthesis study suggest variations in the accessibility of disability services information on community colleges websites. The authors conclude the article by addressing implications for practice, policy and future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), people with disabilities are guaranteed access to all postsecondary programs and services. The purpose of this study, conducted by the Center for Excellence in Disabilities, was to evaluate the current status of a major university's web accessibility. The results indicated that in 2011 only 51% of 509 web pages (sample) at a large public university in the northeastern United States passed automated web accessibility tests with Cynthia Says for Section 508 compliance (WCAG 1.0). Only 35% passed using the WAVE Accessibility Tool for the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 2.0 Level A) Priority 1 compliance, which is a more rigorous evaluation level. The stricter the level of testing, the more university web pages failed. Stricter web accessibility requirements may be legally imposed instead of Section 508 in the future. Universities will succeed in meeting an important mandate of the ADA by making institutional websites accessible to current and future students and employees with disabilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To fully use the tokamak facility, it is necessary to allow researchers to remotely participate in the tokamak experiments via the Internet. Being able to control the operation of the tokamak is a key point. In this paper, the design and implementation of the remote operation system for the Joint Texas Experimental Tokamak (J-TEXT) are presented. To make this system flexible, the service-oriented design is applied. Instead of just providing software or website that controls devices and instruments on the tokamak, a series of Application Programming Interfaces are exposed as web services. All the operations of the J-TEXT tokamak are wrapped in these services. The representational state transfer design practice has been adopted to ensure that these services are accessible by various clients. A remote operation website based on these services has been developed. However, users can build their own websites or remote control rooms, which consume these services to operate the J-TEXT tokamak. An authorization and authentication system is included to prevent the users from consuming unauthorized services. The proposed remote operation system is compatible with Experimental Physics and Industrial Control System and has been integrated within the J-TEXT control, data access, and communication system. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The paper studies the trends in acquisition of e-resources vis-a-vis their print counterparts, identifies the e-resources being subscribed by Indian Institute of Technology (IITs) libraries at Kharagpur, Bombay, Madras, Delhi, Kanpur, Guwahati and Roorkee either individually or through a consortium, and analyzes the usage of these resources during 2004-11. The study also compiles a union list of all e-resources accessible at IIT Libraries. Data were collected by personal visits, interviews, and using a questionnaire. Web sites and annual reports of the Ministry of Human Resource Development, IITs and INDEST-AICTE Consortium were also scanned to supplement the above information. COUNTER compliant data as provided by the publishers were used to study the usage. Data analysis revealed that IIT libraries spend a significantly large proportion of their budgets to acquire e-resources. There is a clear shift in the collection development policies of these libraries where e-resources have become a vital part of their core collections. E-resources in all IITs are being heavily used as the number of downloads have increased from 32,33,818 to 76,17,691 articles reflecting a growth of 135% over a period of 8 years. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social bookmarking Websites are popular nowadays for they provide platforms that are easy and clear to browse and organize Web pages. Users can add tags on Web pages to allow easy comprehension and retrieval of Web pages. However, tag spams could also be added to promote the opportunity of being referenced of a Web page, which is troublesome to users for accessing uninterested Web pages. In this work, we proposed a scheme to automatically detect such tag spams using a proposed text mining approach based on self-organizing map (SOM) model. We used SOM to find the associations among Web pages as well as tags. Such associations were then used to discover the relationships between Web pages and tags. Tag spams can then be detected according to such relationships. Experiments were conducted on a set of Web pages collected from a social bookmarking site and obtained promising result. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Users of websites tend to ignore text advertisements, especially when they are on the right side of a web page, even when the advertisements are useful for completing a task. This study explores the impact of web page layout conventions on text advertising blindness and how quickly users adapt to websites that violate layout conventions. Participants performed search tasks on either "standard" or "nonstandard" website layouts. In the nonstandard website, content from the left (i.e., navigation menu) and the right side of the website (i.e., text advertisements) were reversed. Results demonstrated that text advertising blindness was prevalent regardless of the website layout. Users adapted to the reversed layout rapidly, but at a cost of perceived mental effort and task success. Analyses of eye movement data showed that users had a tendency to fixate first in the standard location for the navigation menu when using the nonstandard website, but did not fixate more often in that location after the first few trials. A decrease in text ad blindness over time for the standard, but not the nonstandard, website design also was observed. Practitioners are advised not to violate web layout norms in an attempt to draw more attention to web advertisements. This strategy may be counterproductive where it may actually increase text advertising blindness and decrease the usability of the website. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) is operating four geomagnetic observatories in Japan. Kakioka Magnetic Observatory (KMO), commissioned in 1913, is the oldest. The hourly records at KMO cover over almost 100 years. KMO is JMA's headquarters for geomagnetic and geoelectric observations. Almost all data are available at the KMO website free of charge for researchers. KMO and two other observatories have been certified as INTERMAGNET observatories, and quasi-real-time geomagnetic data from them are available at the INTERMAGNET website. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Website usability reinforces trust in e-government, but at the local level, e-government tends to have usability and accessibility problems. Web portals should be usable, accessible, well coded, and mobile-device-ready. This study applies usability heuristics and automated analyses to assess a state-wide population of county web portals and examines whether population, per capita income, or median household income are related to usability, accessibility, and coding practices. To assess usability, we applied a 14-point usability heuristic to each site's homepage. To study accessibility and coding, we examined each homepage with an accessibility checker and with the World Wide Web Consortium's (W3C) HTML validator. We also examined the HTML and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) of each site to check for mobile-device readiness and to better understand coding problems the automated tools identified. This study found that portal adoption is associated with each of the demographics above and that accessibility has a weak inverse relationship to percapita income. Many of the sites we examined met some basic usability standards, but few met all the standards used, and most sites did not pass a basic accessibility analysis. About 58% of the counties we examined used a centralized county web portal (not including county commission sites), which is better than a 2006 study that found a 56% portal adoption at the national level. Resulting recommendations include best-practice suggestions for design and for using automated tools to identify problems, as well as a call to usability professionals to aid in county web portal development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Small-screen mobile terminals have difficulty accessing existing Web resources designed for large-screen devices. This paper presents an adaptive transformation method based on webpage semantic features to solve this problem. According to the text density and link density features of the webpages, the webpages are divided into two types: index and content. Our method uses an index-based webpage transformation algorithm and a content-based webpage transformation algorithm. Experiment results demonstrate that our adaptive transformation method is not dependent on specific software and webpage templates, and it is capable of enhancing Web content adaptation on small-screen terminals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This bibliometric study conducts an inventory on publications about the topic sustainability and innovation between 2002 and 2012. The data collection occurred in ISI Web of Science. The results showed, beyond the total papers (publications), 6 indexes on the topic and factors related to the citation report, such as the impact factor (h-b index and m index) of the publications. The results show a progressive increase in the number of publications every year, reaching its height in 2011. The English language is predominant. The USA is the country where the largest number of studies is from. Besides, from h-b index and m index is observed that the study of thematic title may be considered "hot-topic", in other words, important in the international scenario in the period from 2002 to 2012. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Icelandic Review on Politics & Administration is the property of Institute of Public Administration & Politics and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The styles and types of Japanese jokes and funny stories are significantly different from ones in multicultural societies. The jokes in low context societies are more universal for people with diverse cultural background, and jokes are told as a tool of ice breaker, as it functions to reduce the distance between strangers. However, Japanese jokes, or more likely funny stories, are told among close friends and family members to gain solidarity. From April 2010 to March 2011, I have conducted a website called "Japan's funniest story project" in order to collect funny stories from all ages and sexes of Japanese. The contributions are carried on the website and readers vote for the funniest story of the week. I have categorized and analyzed the top ten stories of each month. The result of this research showed that many of the funny stories and most of the popular ones are language related ones which include puns and word plays. Another interesting finding was that most stories are written as personal experience in the style of conversation. These findings indicate that Japanese funny stories or humor are used for inner circles. At the end of this paper I attempt to explain those above in terms of social contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Weibo is a Chinese microblogging website; it is one of the most popular sites in China. According to Oz Entertainment, Sina Weibo's Australian business cooperator, there are around 500,000 Weibo users in Australia. What's more interesting is that politicians across the three levels of government in Australia have also started joining Weibo. Scholars began debating the practical importance of using social media for politics years ago; some of them believe the uniqueness of social media will certainly bring about success for politicians. Others believe that social media hasn't brought significant changes and, additionally, has caused danger to some extent. Grant's research on Australian politicians' use of Twitter has found that those who tweet to converse appear to gain more political benefit from the platform than others. However, no current research examines the usefulness of Weibo by Australian politicians. Therefore, for those Australian politicians who have decided to embark on a Chinese social media platform, are they conversing or simply broadcasting themselves? Is the existence of Australian politicians' Weibo accounts providing a more effective political discussion platform, and encouraging more active political engagement of Chinese communities? What benefits has Weibo brought to politicians in Australia? With these questions in mind, this paper conducts the first analysis on Australian politicians' use of Weibo. Based on the results collected from this research, this paper argues that Chinese Weibo could be beneficial for the development of effective personal public relations by Australian politicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Public transit system web sites have become a tool of choice for many citizens to obtain transit route information and to assist with trip planning. For many of these citizens, the web interface has become the only method of communication with the public service agency and the primary method of obtaining information about transit services. This model-based, multi-method study analyzes data from more than 450 survey respondents and twenty-four focus group participants, seeks to understand the end user citizen trust experience in their interaction with e-government transit web sites. Results of this e-service study provide useful insights into how citizen perceptions of the transit service and transit agencies are affected through web site e-service use. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A study was conducted to examine the persistence and decay of web citations in theses and dissertations available at the Sokoine National Agricultural Library. Specifically, the study assessed the accessibility status of cited URLs, identified error messages and top level domains of inaccessible URLs, and calculated the half-life of web citations. Eighty-three theses and dissertations that were dated between 2007 and 2011 were stratified according to their years of publication and randomly selected for the study. These gave a total of 15,468 citations of which 1,487 (9.6%) were web citations. The findings show that a total of 862 (58%) web citations were inaccessible. The 404 File Not Found error message was the most (92.7%) encountered and the .com domain had the greatest number (28.2%) of missing URLs. The average half-life for the URLs cited in theses and dissertations was 2.5 years. The study findings therefore indicate that many web resources cited in theses and dissertations available at SNAL had disappeared from their original locations. Collaborative efforts are thus required from various stakeholders in order to reduce the problem of URL decay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Online discussions between citizens have been subject to scholarly debate and several empirical studies for a substantial period of time. Scholars have envisioned these as potential venues for citizens' deliberation. Often, however, empirical findings do not support these notions. The quality of discussion is often not up to the standards of truly deliberative discussions. Nonetheless, there are strains of evidence suggesting that online discussion venues applying facilitators, fixed topics and actively enforcing discussion rules, may avoid many of the problems with discussion quality. This article therefore examines whether readers' comments on a Finnish newspaper's website resemble democratic conversations. During the course of three weeks in spring 2010, we content analyze 300 reader comments. Our findings indicate that although there are strains of democratic conversations to be found in online reader comments, there are also many instances in which the opposite holds true. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Internet has created new "dialogical spaces" (Oblak, 2005) where issues of common concern can be discussed, serving to democratize the public sphere. As a potential deliberative section and a civic forum, readers' comments in newspapers' websites constitute a locus for public debate and ideas exchange provided by the mainstream media. As a case study, this article intends to assess the quality of audience participation in online news sites, by analysing the readers' comments in the news about the Brazilian presidential campaign (September-November 2010) in the online versions of two Portuguese newspapers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Usability encompasses how easy something is to use. Usability testing is an integral part of user-centered design. The tests may be performed in a variety of ways including using a usability laboratory, a mixed-method data collection approach, and testing representative and non-representative users. Conducting usability tests on websites allows the site's developers to observe users' interaction with the site. If a website is not usable, users will go somewhere else to find the information they are looking for and the purpose of the site is lost when this happens. The efficiency, error, learnability, and satisfaction of a representative and non-representative user groups were measured during a usability test of the Texas Tech SRI site that employed mixed-method data collection. The users were given a series of tasks to perform that related to the site's navigational scheme, layout, and content. The representative and non-representative groups efficiently navigated the site and were able to repeatedly utilize the site's functions. However, it was concluded that the representative user group committed less errors during their interaction with the site and that their overall satisfaction with the site was higher than the non-representative user group. Representative user groups may find a higher satisfaction level in this website than non-representative groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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A website's homepage is a gate to its content, and accuracy of structure is important. This is especially more important on academic library websites that are places for searching for general and specific information. This is based on a survey-comparative method using researcher-made checklists. The population consists of ten leading global-Asian academic library websites confirmed by webometry site. Findings include three factors: search engine available on the first page (P = 0.000), available page for electronic resources separately (P = 0.003), image attraction (P = 0.002), and the bond between a library webpage and non-academic libraries (P = 0.001). There is a significant difference between ten top global-Asian academic library websites. To constituent differences there is no significant difference between two studied groups of websites. In addition, for constituent classification and referral to electronic resources, there is no significant difference between studied websites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]