Nichesourcing The Uralic Languages For The Benefit Of Linguistic Research And Lingual Societies

The emerging technologies have recently challenged the libraries to reconsider their role as a mere mediator between the collections, researchers, and wider audiences (Sula, 2013), and libraries, especially the nationwide institutions like national libraries, haven’t always managed to face the challenge (Nygren et al., 2014). In the Digitization Project of Kindred Languages, the National Library of Finland has become a node that connects the partners to interplay and work for shared goals and objectives. In this paper, I will be drawing a picture of the crowdsourcing methods that have been established during the project to support both linguistic research and lingual diversity. The National Library of Finland has been executing the Digitization Project of Kindred Languages since 2012. The project seeks to digitize and publish approximately 1,200 monograph titles and more than 100 newspapers titles in various, and in some cases endangered Uralic languages. Once the digitization has been completed in 2015, the Fenno-Ugrica online collection will consist of 110,000 monograph pages and around 90,000 newspaper pages to which all users will have open access regardless of their place of residence. The majority of the digitized literature was originally published in the 1920s and 1930s in the Soviet Union, and it was the genesis and consolidation period of literary languages. This was the era when many Uralic languages were converted into media of popular education, enlightenment, and dissemination of information pertinent to the developing political agenda of the Soviet state. The ‘deluge’ of popular literature in the 1920s to 1930s suddenly challenged the lexical orthographic norms of the limited ecclesiastical publications from the 1880s onward. Newspapers were now written in orthographies and in word forms that the locals would understand. Textbooks were written to address the separate needs of both adults and children. New concepts were introduced in the language. This was the beginning of a renaissance and period of enlightenment (Rueter, 2013). The linguistically oriented population can also find writings to their delight, especially lexical items specific to a given publication, and orthographically documented specifics of phonetics. The project is financially supported by the Kone Foundation in Helsinki and is part of the Foundation’s Language Programme. One of the key objectives of the Kone Foundation Language Programme is to support a culture of openness and interaction in linguistic research, but also to promote citizen science as a tool for the participation of the language community in research. In addition to sharing this aspiration, our objective within the Language Programme is to make sure that old and new corpora in Uralic languages are made available for the open and interactive use of the academic community as well as the language societies. Wordlists are available in 17 languages, but without tokenization, lemmatization, and so on. This approach was verified with the scholars, and we consider the wordlists as raw data for linguists. Our data is used for creating the morphological analyzers and online dictionaries at the Helsinki and Tromsø Universities, for instance. In order to reach the targets, we will produce not only the digitized materials but also their development tools for supporting linguistic research and citizen science. The Digitization Project of Kindred Languages is thus linked with the research of language technology. The mission is to improve the usage and usability of digitized content. During the project, we have advanced methods that will refine the raw data for further use, especially in the linguistic research. How does the library meet the objectives, which appears to be beyond its traditional playground? The written materials from this period are a gold mine, so how could we retrieve these hidden treasures of languages out of the stack that contains more than 200,000 pages of literature in various Uralic languages? The problem is that the machined-encoded text (OCR) contains often too many mistakes to be used as such in research. The mistakes in OCRed texts must be corrected. For enhancing the OCRed texts, the National Library of Finland developed an open-source code OCR editor that enabled the editing of machine-encoded text for the benefit of linguistic research. This tool was necessary to implement, since these rare and peripheral prints did often include already perished characters, which are sadly neglected by the modern OCR software developers, but belong to the historical context of kindred languages and thus are an essential part of the linguistic heritage (van Hemel, 2014). Our crowdsourcing tool application is essentially an editor of Alto XML format. It consists of a back-end for managing users, permissions, and files, communicating through a REST API with a front-end interface—that is, the actual editor for correcting the OCRed text. The enhanced XML files can be retrieved from the Fenno-Ugrica collection for further purposes. Could the crowd do this work to support the academic research? The challenge in crowdsourcing lies in its nature. The targets in the traditional crowdsourcing have often been split into several microtasks that do not require any special skills from the anonymous people, a faceless crowd. This way of crowdsourcing may produce quantitative results, but from the research’s point of view, there is a danger that the needs of linguists are not necessarily met. Also, the remarkable downside is the lack of shared goal or the social affinity. There is no reward in the traditional methods of crowdsourcing (de Boer et al., 2012). Also, there has been criticism that digital humanities makes the humanities too data-driven and oriented towards quantitative methods, losing the values of critical qualitative methods (Fish, 2012). And on top of that, the downsides of the traditional crowdsourcing become more imminent when you leave the Anglophone world. Our potential crowd is geographically scattered in Russia. This crowd is linguistically heterogeneous, speaking 17 different languages. In many cases languages are close to extinction or longing for language revitalization, and the native speakers do not always have Internet access, so an open call for crowdsourcing would not have produced appeasing results for linguists. Thus, one has to identify carefully the potential niches to complete the needed tasks. When using the help of a crowd in a project that is aiming to support both linguistic research and survival of endangered languages, the approach has to be a different one. In nichesourcing, the tasks are distributed amongst a small crowd of citizen scientists (communities). Although communities provide smaller pools to draw resources, their specific richness in skill is suited for complex tasks with high-quality product expectations found in nichesourcing. Communities have a purpose and identity, and their regular interaction engenders social trust and reputation. These communities can correspond to research more precisely (de Boer et al., 2012). Instead of repetitive and rather trivial tasks, we are trying to utilize the knowledge and skills of citizen scientists to provide qualitative results. In nichesourcing, we hand in such assignments that would precisely fill the gaps in linguistic research. A typical task would be editing and collecting the words in such fields of vocabularies where the researchers do require more information. For instance, there is lack of Hill Mari words and terminology in anatomy. We have digitized the books in medicine, and we could try to track the words related to human organs by assigning the citizen scientists to edit and collect words with the OCR editor. From the nichesourcing’s perspective, it is essential that altruism play a central role when the language communities are involved. In nichesourcing, our goal is to reach a certain level of interplay, where the language communities would benefit from the results. For instance, the corrected words in Ingrian will be added to an online dictionary, which is made freely available for the public, so the society can benefit, too. This objective of interplay can be understood as an aspiration to support the endangered languages and the maintenance of lingual diversity, but also as a servant of ‘two masters’: research and society.

Internet asiakastarpeiden kartoituksessa tuotekehitykselle.

Diplomityö on tehty Lappeenrannan teknillisen korkeakoulun tuotantotalouden osastolla. Työ on osa Asiakastarpeiden kustannus- ja aikatehokas selvittäminen kansainvälisiltä markkinoilta (Kannasta) -projektia. Työn tarkoituksena oli tutkia Internetiä asiakastarvekartoituksessa. Työn tavoitteena oli kar-toittaa Internetin avulla käytettäviä asiakastarvetiedon lähteitä tuotekehitykselle ja esitellä Internetin avulla tapahtuvan asiakastarvetiedon keräyksen toimintatapa sekä tiedon keräyksen apuvälineet. Internetin avulla voidaan yrityksen liiketoimintaympäristöstä kerätä asiakastarvetietoja. Tietojen keräys voidaan tehdä kirjoituspöytätutkimuksena tai kvantitatiivis-kvalitatiivisena tutkimuksena. Internetin avulla tehtävässä kirjoituspöytätutkimuksessa tietoa asiakkaista, asiakkaiden tarpeista ja kilpailijoista voidaan kerätä World Wide Web -sivuilta tai tietopankeista. Kvantitatiivis-kvalitatiivisessa tutkimuksessa tietoja asiakkaiden tarpeista ja vaatimuksista kerätään Internet-työkaluilla yrityksen asiakkailta ja muilta sen sidosryhmiltä. Työssä on esitelty kolme eri asiakastarvekartoituksen Internet-työkalua. Internetin avulla saadaan parannettua yrityksen ja sen asiakkaiden välistä viestintää sekä tehostettua asiakastarvetiedon keräystä.

Internet-markkinointiviestintä Venäjällä - Esimerkkinä Aktivist Networkin Pietarin portaali

Työn tavoitteena on selvittää Internet-markkinointiviestinnän nykytilaa Venäjällä. Se alkaa markkinointiviestinnän teorioiden esittelemisellä, joista edetään Internetin lyhyen esittelyn jälkeen siellä tapahtuvaan markkinointiviestintään. Työn empiirisen osan alussa tutustutaan Venäjän Internetiin sekä sen kehitykseen vaikuttaviin taloudellisiin, poliittisiin ja teknisiin seikkoihin. Venäjän Internet-markkinointiviestintä esitellään työssä laajasti ensin erilaisiin kirjallisiin lähteisiin perustuen, jonka jälkeen kuvaa täydennetään työn esimerkkiyrityksen Aktivist Pietarin portaalitoiminnan esittelyllä. Työssä selvisi, että huolimatta muutamista erityispiirteistä, on Internet-markkinointiviestintä Venäjällä suurelta osin samanlaista kuin sitä hieman aikaisemmin aloittamaan päässeissä länsimaissa. Suurimman eron tekee tekniikan matalampi taso, mikä osaltaan vaikuttaa joihinkin viestinnällisiin ratkaisuihin. Tämä ilmenee erityisesti interaktiivisuuden puutteena.

Development of e-Service tools for customer services and processes, Case: KONE Oyj Finland

Tutkimuksen tavoitteena oli selvittää miten kehittää yrityksen nykyistä e-palvelujärjestelmää, Internet -teknologiaan perustuvaa sähköisiä kommunikaatio- ja tiedonjakojärjestelmää, yrityksen business-to-business asiakkuuksien johtamisessa. Tavoitteena oli myös luoda ehdotukset uusista e-palvelusopimusmalleista. Tutkimuksen teoriaosuudessa pyrittiin kehittämään aikaisempiin tutkimuksiin, tietokirjallisuuteen ja asiantuntijoihin perustuva viitekehysmalli. Empiirisessä osassa tutkimuksen tavoitteisiin pyrittiin haastattelemalla yrityksen asiakkaita ja henkilöstöä, sekä tarkastelemalla asiakaskontaktien nykyistä tilaa ja kehittymistä. Näiden tietojen perusteella selvitettiin e-palvelun käyttäjien tarpeita, profiilia ja valmiuksia palvelun käyttöön sekä palvelun nykyistä houkuttelevuutta. Tutkimuksen teoriaosan lähdeaineistona käytettiin kirjallisuutta, artikkeleita ja tilastoja asiakashallinnasta sekä e-palveluiden, erityisesti Internet ja verkkopalveluiden markkinoinnista, nykytilasta sekä palveluiden kehittämisestä. Lisäksi tutkittiin kirjallisuutta arvoverkostoanalyysistä, asiakkaan arvosta, informaatioteknologiasta, palvelun laadusta ja asiakastyytyväisyydestä. Tutkimuksen empiirinen osa perustuu yrityksen henkilöstöltä sekä asiakkailta haastatteluissa kerättyihin tietoihin, yrityksen ennalta keräämiin materiaaleihin sekä Taloustutkimuksen keräämiin tietoihin. Tutkimuksessa käytettiin case -menetelmää, joka oli yhdistelmä sekä kvalitatiivista että kvantitatiivista tutkimusta. Casen tarkoituksena oli testata mallin paikkansapitävyyttä ja käyttökelpoisuutta, sekä selvittää onko olemassa vielä muita tekijöitä, jotka vaikuttavat asiakkaan saamaan arvoon. Kvalitatiivinen aineisto perustuu teemahaastattelumenetelmää soveltaen haastateltuihin asiakkaisiin ja yrityksen työntekijöihin. Kvantitatiivinen tutkimus perustuu Taloustutkimuksen tutkimukseen ja yrityksen asiakaskontakteista kerättyyn tietoon. Haastatteluiden perusteella e-palvelut nähtiin hyödyllisinä ja tulevaisuudessa erittäin tärkeinä. E-palvelut nähdään yhtenä tärkeänä kanavana, perinteisten kanavien rinnalla, tehostaa business-to-business -asiakkuuksien johtamista. Tutkimuksen antamien tulosten mukaan asiakkaiden palveluun liittyvän tieto-, taito-, tarpeellisuus- ja kiinnostavuustasojen vaihtelevaisuus osoittaa selvän tarpeen eritasoisille e-palvelupaketti ratkaisuille. Tuloksista muodostettu ratkaisuehdotus käsittää neljän eri e-palvelupaketin rakentamisen asiakkaiden eri tarpeita mukaillen.

Human behavior on the Internet

In this thesis, "Human behavior on the Internet", the human anxiety is conceptualized. The following questions have guided the writing of the thesis: How humans behave with the Internet technology? What goes in their mind? What kinds of behaviors are shown while using the Internet? What is the role of the content on the Internet and especially what are the types of anxiety behavior on the Internet? By conceptualization this thesis aims to provide a model for studying whether humans show signs of less or exacerbated anxiety while using the Internet. The empirical part of this thesis was built on new developed model and user study that utilizes that model. For the user study, the target users were divided into two groups based on their skill level. The user study used both qualitative and quantitative research methods. The qualitative research was conducted using interviews and observational analysis. The quantitative research was conducted in three iterations by using questionnaires and surveys. These results suggest that the significance of human on using technology would be integral part of such a study. The study also suggests that Internet has lulled humans with the sense of dependency to greater extent. In particular, the results identified seven main areas of human anxiety. These forms of anxiety require further studies to encompass human anxiety in more detail.

The Connectivity of Musical Aptitude and Foreign Language Learning Skills: Neural and Behavioural Evidence

Given the structural and acoustical similarities between speech and music, and possible overlapping cerebral structures in speech and music processing, a possible relationship between musical aptitude and linguistic abilities, especially in terms of second language pronunciation skills, was investigated. Moreover, the laterality effect of the mother tongue was examined with both adults and children by means of dichotic listening scores. Finally, two event-related potential studies sought to reveal whether children with advanced second language pronunciation skills and higher general musical aptitude differed from children with less-advanced pronunciation skills and less musical aptitude in accuracy when preattentively processing mistuned triads and music / speech sound durations. The results showed a significant relationship between musical aptitude, English language pronunciation skills, chord discrimination ability, and sound-change-evoked brain activation in response to musical stimuli (durational differences and triad contrasts). Regular music practice may also have a modulatory effect on the brain’s linguistic organization and cause altered hemispheric functioning in those who have regularly practised music for years. Based on the present results, it is proposed that language skills, both in production and discrimination, are interconnected with perceptual musical skills.

How (not) to interview children : interviews with young children in sexual abuse investigations in Finland

The present thesis had two main objectives: The first was to assess how child sexual abuse (CSA) interviews in Finland are conducted through analysing the interviewing techniques applied and the language used by the interviewers, as well as to suggest ways to improve interviews if they were found to have deficiencies. The second main aim was to contribute to the growing research corpus concerning CSA interviews, in particular, by addressing how interviewers follow up information provided by the child, by analysing whether child health care professionals would use childadapted language, and by studying the kind of modifications in the verbal behaviour of interviewers and children that were associated with a) repeated interviews, b) a support person’s presence at the interview, and c) the use of anatomically detailed dolls. Two complementary samples of CSA interviews were analysed. The first one was composed of child interviews with 3-12-year-old children (N = 27) that had been considered problematic by lawyers or other involved professionals (Studies I and IV). The second sample consisted of unselected interviews (N = 43) with children aged 3 to 8 years conducted in a number of hospitals in different parts of the country (Studies II and III). Study I: The verbal interaction between interviewer and child was analysed in a sample of interviews that had been considered to be problematic by involved professionals. Results showed that interviewers used inappropriate questioning techniques, relying on option-posing, specific suggestive and unspecific suggestive questions to a significant extent, these comprising around 50% of all interviewer utterances. The proportion of invitations, which the research community recommends interviewers to rely on, was strikingly low. Invitations and directive utterances were associated with an increase in informative responses by the child in terms of response type, number of new details reported, as well as length of response. The opposite was true for option-posing and suggestive utterances. Longer questions by the interviewer (in number of words) often rendered no reply from the child, whereas shorter questions were followed by descriptive answers. Even after the child had provided an informative answer, interviewers failed to follow up the information in an adequate way and instead continued to rely on focused and leading questions. Study II: Due to the possible bias of the sample analysed in Study I, the most important analyses were rerun with the unselected sample and reported separately. Results were quite similar between the two studies, indicating that the problems observed in Study I, with interviewers relying on option-posing and suggestive questions to a significant extent, are likely to be general and not specific for those interviews. Even if suggestive questions were slightly less and invitations slightly more common in this sample than in the previous study, almost half of the interviewer questions were still optionposing or suggestive, and also in this sample, interviewers failed to follow up information by the child in a facilitating manner. Differentiating between judicial and contextual details showed that while facilitators, invitations, and directive utterances elicited more contextual than judicial details, the opposite was true for specific suggestive utterances. These results might be explained by the reluctance of children to describe sexual details related to the abuse events. Alternatively, they may also be due to children describing incorrect sexual details as a result of suggestive interviewing techniques. Study III: This study examined features of the language used by the interviewers. Interviewer utterances included multiple questions, long statements, complicated grammar and concepts, as well as unclear references to persons and situations. More than a fifth of the interviewer utterances were coded as belonging to at least one of these categories. The results suggest that even professionals who are experienced in interacting with children may have difficulties in using a child-sensitive language, adding to the pool of studies showing similar problems to occur in legal hearings with children conducted by lawyers. As children rarely comment on, or even recognise, their lack of comprehension, the use of a language that is too complex can have detrimental consequences for the outcomes of investigative interviews. Interviewers used different approaches to introduce the topic of abuse. While 15% of the children spontaneously addressed the topic of abuse, probably indicating that they felt confident with the interviewer and the situation, in almost 50% of the cases, the interviewer introduced the topic of abuse in a way that can be considered leading. Interviews were characterised by a lack of structure, apparent in frequent rapid switches of topic by the interviewer. This manner was associated with a decrease in the number of new details provided by the children. Study IV: This study analysed possible changes in the interview dynamics associated with repeated interviewing, the presence of a support person (related to the child), and the use of anatomically detailed (AD) dolls. Repeated interviewing, in combination with suggestive questions, has previously been found to seriously contaminate children’s accounts. In the present material, interviewers used significantly more suggestive utterances in the repeated condition, thus endangering the reliability of the children’s reports. Few studies have investigated the effects of a support person’s presence at the interview. The results of the present study showed that interviewers talked more and children provided less information when a support person was present. Supporting some earlier findings regarding the use of AD dolls, the present results showed that using AD dolls was associated with longer interviewer utterances and shorter, less responsive, and less detailed child responses. Interviewers used up to five times more unspecific suggestive utterances when dolls were used, for instance through repeatedly asking the child to show “what really happened” with the dolls. Conclusion: The results indicate that CSA interviews in Finland are not conducted in a manner that follows best practice as defined by the research community and as stated in a number of guidelines. When comparing these questioning strategies with the recommendations, which have been predominant in the field for more than ten years now, it can be concluded that the interviews analysed were conducted in a manner that undermines the possibility to elicit an uncontaminated and accurate narrative from the children. A particularly worrying finding was the fact that interviewers did not follow up relevant information by the children in an adequate way. A number of clinical implications can be drawn from the results, particularly concerning the need for improvement in the quality of CSA interviews. There is convincing research regarding how to improve CSA interviews, notably through training forensic child interviewers to use a structured interviewing protocol, and providing them with continuous supervision and feedback. Allocating appropriate resources to improve the quality of forensic child interviews is a matter of protecting the rights of all persons involved in CSA investigations, in particular those of the children.

ICT Disparities In Finland - Access and Implications

The Internet and other new information and communication technologies (ICTs) have become an integral part of most Western societies, from the perspective of both individuals and organizations. In this dissertation the evolving role of the Internet and other new ICTs in Finland over the past decade is studied from the perspective of disparity. The ICT disparities are seen to be constructed from two interconnecting elements, access and implications. The main goal of this dissertation is to examine how access, different user purposes, as well as implications, reflect disparities among different socio-demographic and socioeconomic population groups. For the purposes of this work, four research studies, each with its own, specific topic, were constructed. According to the results, age is clearly the most significant element associated with both access and implications for the new ICTs in Finland. Although other examined factors were also significant, they were often associated with individual research topics. In addition, the dissertation will also provide new research elements for future reference.

Productivity and Services – Safety Telephone Services for the Elderly

Previous research on productivity is often associated with manufacturing or uses manufacturing definitions of productivity. Marketing research on services has not been satisfied with the manufacturing definitions. No universal definition for service productivity exists. The lack of a universal definition highlights the complexity entailed in the concept of productivity. The objective of this study was to investigate service productivity in situations, where traditional ways are in some cases even not possible or are not enough. In one definition of the productivity of service organisations there is the efficiency of the organisation on the input side and on the output side the customers’ perceived quality or value-in-use. To learn about value-in-use, many methods have been developed. A common practice is to make customer opinion surveys in the form of customer questionnaires and interviews. However, customers cannot always be asked directly, for example, because of impaired cognitive abilities. Such cases include the elderly and children. Furthermore, customer opinion surveys are time consuming. In addition, customers do not always know what kind of services they would benefit from. For the empirical part of the study, a business area was identified where traditional ways of measuring value-in-use are difficult or in some cases even not possible. This business area is safety telephone services. These services are most often used by the elderly. The way to define value-in-use here was to assess how well the services offered met customer expectations. Comparing the services customers asked for and the services provided to them indicated whether customer expectations were met. This study showed that customers had their ideas concerning the contents of the services but many times the services provided did not meet these expectations. Organisational efficiency aspirations can decrease customers’ value-in-use. This study found a solution, in which increasing organisational efficiency would go hand-in-hand with increasing customers’ value-in-use; the result being that the organisations’ needs and the service users’ expectations were in line. Value creation for customers produced organisational efficiency and thus increased productivity. In this study, customer expectations were observed by means of wellness technology. With the help of modern technology, customer expectations can be followed quickly and easily and customers can co-create with the organisation. This type of an approach could be useful even in the development of other services for other ages and in different contexts. If a service organisation decreases the number of personnel and, at the same time, tries to offer services to the same or a larger clientele, customers easily notice the change, which is often negative. To avoid harmful decrease in value-in-use, limitations to the aspiration of efficiency should be implemented – one of such is that the organisation is required to meet certain quality standards defined by experts. The aim is to secure that, as a result of efficiency aspirations in the organisation, the quality of the service offerings does not diminish below mutually agreed standards. Traditionally, when productivity in services has been estimated, organisational efficiency has not been combined with both customer expectations and an expert assessment of quality. This study contributes with novel thinking entitled ‘Relationship Management of the Elderly’. This study handles productivity, expert defined quality and value-in-use in an organisational context, which is practically untouched in previous research studies.

Design and evaluation of web interface signs to improve web usability : a semiotic framework

Technological innovations, the development of the internet, and globalization have increased the number and complexity of web applications. As a result, keeping web user interfaces understandable and usable (in terms of ease-of-use, effectiveness, and satisfaction) is a challenge. As part of this, designing userintuitive interface signs (i.e., the small elements of web user interface, e.g., navigational link, command buttons, icons, small images, thumbnails, etc.) is an issue for designers. Interface signs are key elements of web user interfaces because ‘interface signs’ act as a communication artefact to convey web content and system functionality, and because users interact with systems by means of interface signs. In the light of the above, applying semiotic (i.e., the study of signs) concepts on web interface signs will contribute to discover new and important perspectives on web user interface design and evaluation. The thesis mainly focuses on web interface signs and uses the theory of semiotic as a background theory. The underlying aim of this thesis is to provide valuable insights to design and evaluate web user interfaces from a semiotic perspective in order to improve overall web usability. The fundamental research question is formulated as What do practitioners and researchers need to be aware of from a semiotic perspective when designing or evaluating web user interfaces to improve web usability? From a methodological perspective, the thesis follows a design science research (DSR) approach. A systematic literature review and six empirical studies are carried out in this thesis. The empirical studies are carried out with a total of 74 participants in Finland. The steps of a design science research process are followed while the studies were designed and conducted; that includes (a) problem identification and motivation, (b) definition of objectives of a solution, (c) design and development, (d) demonstration, (e) evaluation, and (f) communication. The data is collected using observations in a usability testing lab, by analytical (expert) inspection, with questionnaires, and in structured and semi-structured interviews. User behaviour analysis, qualitative analysis and statistics are used to analyze the study data. The results are summarized as follows and have lead to the following contributions. Firstly, the results present the current status of semiotic research in UI design and evaluation and highlight the importance of considering semiotic concepts in UI design and evaluation. Secondly, the thesis explores interface sign ontologies (i.e., sets of concepts and skills that a user should know to interpret the meaning of interface signs) by providing a set of ontologies used to interpret the meaning of interface signs, and by providing a set of features related to ontology mapping in interpreting the meaning of interface signs. Thirdly, the thesis explores the value of integrating semiotic concepts in usability testing. Fourthly, the thesis proposes a semiotic framework (Semiotic Interface sign Design and Evaluation – SIDE) for interface sign design and evaluation in order to make them intuitive for end users and to improve web usability. The SIDE framework includes a set of determinants and attributes of user-intuitive interface signs, and a set of semiotic heuristics to design and evaluate interface signs. Finally, the thesis assesses (a) the quality of the SIDE framework in terms of performance metrics (e.g., thoroughness, validity, effectiveness, reliability, etc.) and (b) the contributions of the SIDE framework from the evaluators’ perspective.

Comparing adult-youth and adult-adult online sexual solicitation: Manipulative behaviors, situational factors, and outcomes

Online sexual solicitation (solicitation) of youth has received widespread media and research attention during the last decade. The prevalence rates of youth who have experienced solicitation or solicitation attempts vary between studies depending on the methodology used (e.g., whether youth or adults are the target study group). In studies focusing on youth victims, the prevalence of solicitation attempts made by adults during the past year is typically reported to be between 5 and 9%. Adults who solicit youth online have been found to use deception and other manipulative behaviors to gain access to sexual activities with youth. However, previous studies have lacked a control group of adults who solicit other adults online. Without this comparison, one could argue that deceiving others online about one’s identity, and engaging in manipulative behaviors, is an inherent part of most online sexual interactions with strangers. Additionally, little is known about the associations between manipulative behaviors and the solicitation outcomes. In research concerning offline sexual behaviors, it has been noted that situational factors, such as sexual arousal, may alter both sexual interest and behavior. The effects of situational factors on online sexual behaviors have been less extensively studied (especially so with a quantitative approach); no studies have to date focused on adults’ solicitation of youth. Investigating the role of a lowered sexual age preference and the role of situational factors in the soliciting adults could be an important step in order to receive deeper knowledge of the role of traits and states in the context of solicitation. Additionally, there is a lack of knowledge of the effect of the age of the youth. Although previous studies on solicitation has found that older youth, compared with younger youth and children, are more often solicited, the possible reasons for this have not been investigated. Are adults who solicit youth affected by legal deterrence (through the legal age of consent), is it because older youth are more available online, or are the adults’ age preferences merely a product of a normally distributed age preference in the population? The purpose of the present thesis was fivefold: 1) to obtain an estimate of the frequency of adults’ solicitation of youth as self-reported and observed in actual behavior; 2) to explore whether the legal age of consent (LAC) affects solicitation frequency, or whether a normally distributed sexual age preference more accurately describe the proportion of solicited youth of different ages; 3) to investigate the associations of both traits (e.g., lower sexual age preference) and states (immediate situational factors, such as alcohol intoxication), and the solicitation target; 4) to explore whether adults who solicit youth and adults who solicit adults are equally deceitful and manipulative online, and whether the different solicitation outcomes are as common in both groups; and 5) to investigate whether the deceitful and manipulative behaviors engaged in had different associations with the solicitation outcomes depending on the age of the solicited. In the survey study, a convenience sample of 1393 adult participants (aged 18 years or older) self-reported any online communication with strangers during the past year. Of these, 56% (776 respondents) reported that they had solicited or attempted to solicit at least one stranger. Of the respondents, 453 (58.4%) were men, and 323 (41.6%) were women. Participants with only adult contacts (18 years or older) constituted the majority (640 respondents). In contrast, 136 individuals reported a youth contact (a 13 year old or younger, or a 14 to 17-year old). Approximately half of the participants were men in the adult contact group, while 75% of the participants were men in the youth contact group. Approximately 60% of the participants with youth contacts were recruited from two websites associated with a pedophilic sexual interest. In an online quasi-experimental study, with researchers impersonating youth of different ages (10–18 year olds) in chat rooms, 251 online conversations with chat room visitors made up the entire sample. All chat room visitors alleged to be men. The self-reported frequency of having solicited youth (0–17-year olds) during the past year was approximately 10% in our sample of adults who reported communicating with any strangers online. When we observed this behavior in chat rooms, we found that approximately 30% of the chat room visitors who believed they interacted with a 10 to 14 year old attempted to solicit the youth. We found that solicitation attempts increased equally much when increasing the age of the impersonated youth from 14 to 16, as from 16 to 18. Thus, we concluded that a normally distributed age preference in the population was a more plausible explanation to the effect of the age of the solicited, rather than the LAC (here; 15 and 16). If the chat room visitors would have been deterred only by the LAC, we would have expected that the change in amount of solicitation attempts from an illegal age group to a legal age group would have been significantly stronger than changes between age groups within illegal-illegal and legal-legal groups. Our subsample of survey participants from the pedophilia-related websites expectedly reported that they had solicited youth more often in comparison to the sample gathered through general (i.e., not associated with any particular sexual preference) websites. We also found that participants with a youth contact reported higher levels of sexual arousal and shame before the sexual interaction with their online contact, compared with participants with an adult contact. Additionally, the participants with youth contacts who reported consumption of child- and adolescent pornography also reported being more sexually aroused before the interaction, compared to the participants with youth contacts who did not report consumption of these kinds of pornography. We also found clear indications that the online sexual interaction had an alleviatory effect on reported levels of sadness, boredom and stress, independent of the age of the contact. Generally, the participants with youth and adult contacts reported deceiving their contacts as often and suggesting keeping the communication a secret from someone as often. Participants with a youth contact, however, reported using more persuasion techniques for online sexual purposes or for the purpose of an offline meeting, compared to those with an adult contact. In the chat rooms, we found that more indirect ways of future sexual communication (e.g., continuing chatting) was suggested by the chat room visitors that were under the assumption of interacting with youth aged 10 to 14, compared with more direct means (e.g., meeting offline). Survey participants with youth contacts who had used deception, suggested keeping the interactions a secret, and/or persuaded their contact by appealing to the contacts feelings of love and attachment for the participant had also more often engaged in cybersex with the contact. No other manipulative behaviors were associated with the other investigated solicitation outcomes (receiving a sexual picture, meeting offline, and engaging in sexual contact offline) within this group of participants. However, using deception, suggesting secrecy and using persuasion was also positively associated with certain solicitation outcomes within participants with an adult contact. In summary, adults’ solicitation of youth is much more frequent when observed in chat rooms than self-reported. Additionally, an underlying lowered sexual age preference seems to be a motivating factor on a group level in adults who solicit youth. We concluded that directed prevention efforts should be made on pedophiliarelated websites. Additionally, the role of situational factors, especially sexual arousal in persons with a pedo- or hebephilic sexual interest should be investigated further in the context of online sexual solicitation.

A Comparison of B2C E-Commerce in Finland, Germany and United Kingdom

E-Commerce is not a new phenomenon, but strictly speaking, it has breakthrough during the past 15 years. E-commerce is adopted differently across European countries, even though almost all of them are considered to be advanced industrialized nations. These notions are made at the same time as E-Commerce markets grow year by year. Countries seem to evolve at a different pace. At the same time, customers get more and more experienced with the Internet and perceive online marketplace more critically. Also, companies have their important role in the development of E-Commerce. E-Commerce research has been conducted on three levels of analysis: individual, company, and country. In this thesis, the primary focus is on the differences between B2C retail E-Commerce in Finland, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The research is conducted with an exploratory method by collecting data from secondary sources. The research suggests that there are no significant differences between delivery methods in Finland, Germany, and the United Kingdom. When it comes to payment methods, the results suggests that there is a statistically significant difference between Germany and United Kingdom.

A human-centric service approach for architecting and reengineering global system

Production of a new system in any range is expanding dramatically and new ideas are there upon introduced, the logic stands behind the matter is the growth of application of the internet and granting web-based systems. Before producing a system and distribute to the customer, various aspects should be studied which multiple the profit of the system. The process of productizing a new system from being unprocessed idea until delivers to the final user has been unambiguous. In this thesis, the systematize service in a way that benefits both the customer and provider, along with an effort to establish trust and diminish customer’s risk and increase service productivity are in detail presented. Characteristics of Servitization and Productization as two faces of one coin have been interpreted. Apart from the abovementioned issues state of art, service-oriented architecture (SOA) and New Service Development (NSD) has been included in this report for solving the problem of gradually decline in value of companies.