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Background: Problematic alcohol consumption is associated with a high disease burden for affected individuals and has a detrimental impact on companies and society due to direct and indirect health costs. This protocol describes a study design to evaluate the (cost)-effectiveness of a guided and unguided Internet-based self-help intervention for employees called "GET.ON Clever weniger trinken" (be smart - drink less) compared to a waiting list control group.Methods: In a three-arm randomized controlled trial, 528 German adults who are currently members of the workforce will be recruited by occupational health departments of major health insurance companies. Employees aged 18 and older displaying problematic drinking patterns (>21/14 drinks per week and an AUDIT score > 8/6 for men/women) will be randomly assigned to one of three following study conditions: 1. unguided web-based self-help for problematic drinking, 2. adherence-focused guided self-help, and 3. waiting list control. Self-report data will be collected at baseline (T1), 6 weeks (T2), and 6 months (T3) after randomization. The primary outcome will be the reduction of alcohol standard units during the 7 days prior to T2, using the Timeline Followback method. Cost-effectiveness analyses to determine direct and indirect costs will be conducted from the perspectives of employers and the society. Data will be analyzed on an intention-to-treat basis and per protocol.Discussion: There is a need to identify effective low-threshold solutions to improve ill-health and reduce the negative economic consequences due to problematic alcohol drinking in workforces. If the proposed web-based intervention proves both to be efficacious and cost-effective, it may be a useful tool to increase utilization rates of interventions for problematic drinking in occupational settings.Trial Registration: German Register of Clinical Studies (DRKS): DRKS00006105 , date of registration: 2014-07-07. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Due to the hybrid nature of material and digital spaces, more decisions are being made online that have a direct effect on offline actions. This is increasingly true for the locations where people are choosing to consume goods and services such as restaurants or retail outlets. The growth of the GeoWeb-personal data uploaded to certain Internet sites such as social media platforms-has established large databases showing the locations where people go during their daily lives for the purposes of consumption. One such repository is the social network, Foursquare, which people use to display their physical location to their friends, digitally. In looking more closely at datasets from Foursquare overlaid with information on racial characteristics in census tracts, a pattern emerges: predominantly African-American tracts are increasingly left out of this type of online participation. This paper will compare Foursquare data from several U.S. cities to discuss the implications of being left off of social media platforms tied to economic activity. It is likely that these virtually invisible areas will have a direct impact on the economic vitality of their physical counterparts [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In a country as large as Canada, connectivity-whether by road, rail, radio, or the Internet-plays an important role in economic growth, political and social development, and civic engagement. The importance of communications infrastructure especially is evident in the northern two-thirds of Canada, where radio, television, and the Internet have been instruments of democratic expression and civic participation. As pressures for resource extraction mount, northern communities must respond to economic, social, and political challenges from a position of geographical and, more significantly, "knowledge" isolation. Northern community residents need effective, community-led channels of communication. Addressing these needs will require both social and technological innovation-which can, fortunately, proceed from an existing base of experience and community expertise. In this article, we analyze two moments in northern public policy discourse in which new communications media played a pivotal role in advancing democratic dialogue in northern Canada: the 1975-7 Mackenzie Valley pipeline inquiry, and the 2012-3 hearings into the Mary River iron ore project in Nunavut. Our goal is to advance understanding of the purposeful use of communications infrastructure to support the development of local understanding, citizen engagement, and opportunities for effective community participation in development decisions. We find that technological capacity is foundational, but effective only under specific social and organizational conditions, which include the existence of appropriate institutions at the local level for citizen mobilization and response, dominance of Indigenous language use by northern citizens, appropriate levels of funding, and receptive public institutions to and through which northern citizens can speak. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Built on the ontological foundations of spatial changes due to globalization and the Internet, this article aims to define the electronic frontier. This is a new spatial construction, with an inherently abstract character, that can create more connections with the digital space of a socio-economic nature. Basically, by using the categorization of new types of frontiers put forward by Liam O'Dowd, we argue that this electronic frontier can act in four different directions: as a barrier in the digital space, as a link for individuals, as well as a connection between the real and digital spaces, as a reSource and lastly, as a Source of identity in the digital era. The second aim of the article is to explore possibilities for a new way of integration of the European Union into the digital age by exploring this metamorphosis of frontiers and harnessing its potential for socio-economic gains. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The major objective of this study is to examine the impact of internet usage on economic growth of South Asian countries with particular reference to Pakistan. The annual time series data of four Asian countries from 1995 - 2013 were used. With technology advancement, Internet has becoming an important source to disseminate knowledge. For this purpose ARDL approach was used. The results show that both capital and labor have positive impact on economic growth of Pakistan in the long run. The internet usage has also a positive long run impact on economic growth. However, the use of internet needs to be further effectively made so that it can exert a significant effect on the economic growth of the country. Although, the results of the study may not be generalized as the study is based on not a large sample due to unavailability of time series data on some variables, but the study provides a new avenue for other researcher as this study has got important implications for further research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Diffusion of information and communications technologies (ICT), especially the Internet, introduces crucial changes and enables the growth of all economic sectors as well as tourism industry. The main motivation for this work is to point out some of the insufficiently used opportunities that information society places in front of the countries with significant contribution of tourism to economic well-being. In Montenegro, tourism is an important determinant of overall economic growth and the most promising industry branch. Since Montenegro declares itself as the country pursuing the progress of information society, currently there is a need for a better understanding of the e-tourism concept and implementation of ICT in the field of tourism services, its potentials and factors that hinder its faster development. The particular aim of this research is to quantify online presence of the Montenegrin tourism companies and notice critical factors of entering into electronic environment. In that purpose, we have used the Web Assessment Index (WAI), and the Facebook Assessment Index (FAI) as a tool for efficiency assessment of web and social networks of Montenegrin companies in the field of tourism. The results obtained from the analysis have been compared with the perceptions of the Internet users in order to perceive interdependence between the method of presentation of companies and attitudes of their users. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article, we review the role of distribution in revenue management (RM) in the airline industry over the last 50 years, describing the evolution of these systems and providing evidence for their interdependence. With the omnipresence of the Internet, the proliferation of mobile communication devices and the growing trend of personalized retailing, the benefits of the distributor middleman are being questioned; airlines can access customers through their own websites and dynamically package best offers. In this fast changing environment, we discuss our vision for the future roles of RM and distribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Acountry's human capital and economic productivity increasingly depend on the Internet as a result of its expanding role in providing information and communications. This has prompted a search for ways to increase Internet adoption and narrow its disparity across countries--the global "digital divide." Previous work has focused on demographic, economic, and infrastructure determinants of Internet access that are difficult to change in the short run. Internet content increases adoption and can be changed more quickly; however, the magnitude of its impact, and therefore its effectiveness as a policy and strategy tool, has until now been unknown. Quantifying the role of content is challenging because of feedback (network effects) between content and adoption: more content stimulates adoption, which in turn increases the incentive to create content. We develop a methodology to overcome this endogeneity problem. We find a statistically and economically significant effect, implying that policies promoting content creation can substantially increase adoption. Because it is ubiquitous, Internet content is also useful to effect social change across countries. Content has a greater effect on adoption in countries with more disparate languages, making it a useful tool to overcome linguistic isolation. Our results offer guidance for policymakers on country characteristics that influence adoption's responsiveness to content and for Internet firms on where to expand internationally and how to quantify content investments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The evolution of the Internet has manifested itself in many ways: the traffic characteristics, the interconnection topologies, and the business relationships among the autonomous components. It is important to understand why (and how) this evolution came about, and how the interplay of these dynamics may affect future evolution and services. We propose a network-aware, macroscopic model that captures the characteristics and interactions of the application and network providers, and show how it leads to a market equilibrium of the ecosystem. By analyzing the driving forces and the dynamics of the market equilibrium, we obtain some fundamental understandings of the cause and effect of the Internet evolution, which explain why some historical and recent evolutions have happened. Furthermore, by projecting the likely future evolutions, our model can help application and network providers to make informed business decisions so as to succeed in this competitive ecosystem. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This piece is a short rejoinder to César Bolaño’s paper The Political Economy of the Internet and related articles (e.g., Comor, Foley, Huws, Reveley, Rigi and Prey, Robinson) that center around the relevance of Marx’s labor theory of value for understanding social media. I argue that Dallas Smythe’s assessment of advertising was made to distinguish his approach from the one by Baran and Sweezy. Smythe developed the idea of capital’s exploitation of the audience at a time when both feminist and anti-imperialist Marxists challenged the orthodox idea that only white factory workers are exploited. The crucial question is how to conceptualize productive labor. This is a theoretical, normative, and political question. A mathematical example shows the importance of the “crowdsourcing” of value-production on Facebook. I also point out parallels of the contemporary debate to the Soviet question of who is a productive or unproductive worker in the Material Product System. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Marketing involves anticipating, stimulating, recognizing and meeting demands. It means understanding of what can be sold to whom, when and in what quantity. Moreover, it involves searching for what the consumer wants, and further creation of a product that meets these demands. The aim of the present paper is to present the systems of tourism promotion. Particular attention was given to tourism marketing, its role and meaning in tourism, as well as functions and influence on development of tourist areas. The article has been written mainly with the use of information included in publications connected with international tourism. In the process of preparation of this paper, there has been used a source of statistical data - the Internet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Alongside existing research into the social, political and economic impacts of the Web, there is a need to study the Web from a cognitive and epistemic perspective. This is particularly so as new and emerging technologies alter the nature of our interactive engagements with the Web, transforming the extent to which our thoughts and actions are shaped by the online environment. Situated and ecological approaches to cognition are relevant to understanding the cognitive significance of the Web because of the emphasis they place on forces and factors that reside at the level of agent-world interactions. In particular, by adopting a situated or ecological approach to cognition, we are able to assess the significance of the Web from the perspective of research into embodied, extended, embedded, social and collective cognition. The results of this analysis help to reshape the interdisciplinary configuration of Web Science, expanding its theoretical and empirical remit to include the disciplines of both cognitive science and the philosophy of mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]