Design and Impact of Awareness Functions – A Study about Social Media in Virtual Teams

The usage of social media in leisure time settings has become a prominent research topic. However, less research has been done on the design of social media in collaboration settings. In this study, we investigate how social media can support asynchronous collaboration in virtual teams and specifically how they can increase activity awareness. On the basis of an open source social networking platform, we present two prototype designs: a standard platform with basic support for information processing, communication and process – as suggested by Zigurs and Buckland (1998) – and an advanced platform with additional support for activity awareness via specialfeed functions. We argue that the standard platform already conveys activity awareness to a certain extent, however, that this awareness can be increased even more by the feeds in the advanced platform. Both prototypes are tested in a field experiment and evaluated with respect to their impact on perceived activity awareness, coordination and satisfaction. We show that the advanced design increases coordination and satisfaction through increased perceived activity awareness.

A field trial of infrared thermography as a non-invasive diagnostic tool for early detection of digital dermatitis in dairy cows

Infrared thermography (IRT) was used to detect digital dermatitis (DD) prior to routine claw trimming. A total of 1192 IRT observations were collected from 149 cows on eight farms. All cows were housed in tie-stalls. The maximal surface temperatures of the coronary band (CB) region and skin (S) of the fore and rear feet (mean value of the maximal surface temperatures of both digits for each foot separately, CBmax and Smax) were assessed. Grouping was performed at the foot level (presence of DD, n=99; absence, n=304), or at the cow level (all four feet healthy, n=24) or where there was at least one DD lesion on the rear feet, n=37). For individual cows (n=61), IRT temperature difference was determined by subtracting the mean sum of CBmax and Smax of the rear feet from that of the fore feet. Feet with DD had higher CBmax and Smax (P<0.001) than healthy feet. Smax was significantly higher in feet with infectious DD lesions (M-stage: M2+M4; n=15) than in those with non-infectious M-lesions (M1+M3; n=84) (P=0.03), but this was not the case for CBmax (P=0.12). At the cow level, an optimal cut-off value for detecting DD of 0.99°C (IRT temperature difference between rear and front feet) yielded a sensitivity of 89.1% and a specificity of 66.6%. The results indicate that IRT may be a useful non-invasive diagnostic tool to screen for the presence of DD in dairy cows by measuring CBmax and Smax.