REASONS BEHIND THE USAGE OF ONLINE AD BLOCKING TOOLS

Online advertising has been growing rapidly since the mid-90s. In recent years, online advertising has become as relevant as an advertising medium as print and television are. However, despite the growth, the generally held consensus is that consumers are not interested in online advertisements. The arrival of online ad blocking tools has offered consumers a very effective way to avoid and block online advertisements. Although these tools have now been around for several years and the most popular software’s have hundreds of millions of active users, the phenomenon of ad blocking has gathered surprisingly little attention from academic marketing research. For this reason, ad blocking was chosen as the topic of this thesis study. The researcher was particularly interested in the reasons behind the usage of online ad blocking tools. The object of the empirical part of this study is to provide new and valid information regarding the reasons behind the usage of online ad blocking tools. The empirical research of this study consisted of a survey study that mixed both quantitative and qualitative elements. Although the sample size of the study was fairly limited, the study provided useful answers to individual research questions and provided new knowledge regarding the reasons behind the usage of online ad blocking and the phenomenon of ad blocking as a whole. The study provides further evidence that consumers are aware of online ad blocking tools and a significant portion of them are interested in using them. This study indicates that many of the consumers who do not have previous knowledge of these tools would actually be interested in them. The reason for the usage of online ad blocking tools varies from institutional reasons to instrumental reason, such as poor quality of the online advertisements. However, there were participants who were not interested in the usage of online ad blocking tools, and some of them reported to find online advertising useful. There also seems to be a concern among some consumers that online ad blocking will have a negative effect on online content in the future if the ad blocking will keep growing as a phenomenon. This certainly can be the case, and it is very interesting to see how the development of online ad blocking will shape the online advertising, how the advertising industry will respond to the growth of online ad blocking and how will the consumers respond to these changes.

Social support in cyberspace: A content analysis of communication within a Huntington’s Disease online support group

Objective: Huntington’s Disease (HD) is an inherited disorder, characterised by a progressive degeneration of the brain. Due to the nature of the symptoms, the genetic element of the disease and the fact that there is no cure, HD patients and those in their support network often experience considerable stress and anxiety. With an expansion in Internet access, individuals affected by HD have new opportunities for information retrieval and social support. The aim of this study is to examine the provision of social support in messages posted to a HD online support group bulletin board. Methods: In total, 1313 messages were content analysed using a modified version of the Social Support Behaviour Code developed by Cutrona & Suhr (1992). Results: The analysis indicates that group members most frequently offered informational (56.2%) and emotional support (51.9%) followed by network support (48.4%) with esteem support (21.7%) and tangible assistance (9.8%) least frequently offered. Conclusion: This study suggests that exchanging informational and emotional support represents a key function of this online group. Practice implications: Online support groups provide a unique opportunity for health professionals to learn about the experiences and views of individuals affected by HD and explore where and why gaps may exist between evidence-based medicine and consumer behaviour and expectations.

Collecting valuable consumer data: Motivating consumers to disclose personal information

Collecting and analyzing consumer data is essential in today’s data-driven business environment. However, consumers are becoming more aware of the value of the information they can provide to companies, thereby being more reluctant to share it for free. Therefore, companies need to find ways to motivate consumers to disclose personal information. The main research question of the study was formed as “How can companies motivate consumers to disclose personal information?” and it was further divided into two subquestions: 1) What types of benefits motivate consumers to disclose personal information? 2) How does the disclosure context affect the consumers’ information disclosure behavior? The conceptual framework consisted of a classification of extrinsic and intrinsic benefits, and moderating factors, which were recognized on the basis of prior research in the field. The study was conducted by using qualitative research methods. The primary data was collected by interviewing ten representatives from eight companies. The data was analyzed and reported according to predetermined themes. The findings of the study confirm that consumers can be motivated to disclose personal information by offering different types of extrinsic (monetary saving, time saving, self-enhancement, and social adjustment) and intrinsic (novelty, pleasure, and altruism) benefits. However, not all the benefits are equally useful ways to convince the customer to disclose information. Moreover, different factors in the disclosure context can either alleviate or increase the effectiveness of the benefits and the consumers’ motivation to disclose personal information. Such factors include the consumer’s privacy concerns, perceived trust towards the company, the relevancy of the requested information, personalization, website elements (especially security, usability, and aesthetics of a website), and the consumer’s shopping motivation. This study has several contributions. It is essential that companies recognize the most attractive benefits regarding their business and their customers, and that they understand how the disclosure context affects the consumer’s information disclosure behavior. The likelihood of information disclosure can be increased, for example, by offering benefits that meet the consumers’ needs and preferences, improving the relevancy of the asked information, stating the reasons for data collection, creating and maintaining a trustworthy image of the company, and enhancing the quality of the company’s website.

Necesidades percibidas por los clientes de un sistema CRM en empresas de compra online

El CRM es una herramienta que apoya la gestión de relaciones sólidas y duraderas con los clientes de manera que los productos y servicios que la empresa ofrece cumplan efectivamente las expectativas de sus clientes y por tanto se garantice la continuidad de las ventas en un entorno tan competitivo como el actual. El objetivo de este documento es presentar los resultados de la investigación de mercados que busca identificar las principales características que debe tener, desde el punto de vista del cliente, un sistema CRM para la empresa ‘Antojos Saludables’, para ello se presentará una caracterización de los clientes o posibles clientes de la empresa y las expectativas o percepciones respecto a asuntos de infraestructura tecnológica como seguridad de transacciones online, medios de pago preferidos para compras online, aplicaciones más usadas en plataformas de compra online, para finalmente mostrar algunas sugerencias sobre estrategias convenientes para el diseño del sistema de información que soporte el CRM de "Antojos Saludables".

Online Supplement to ‘Myopic Allocation Policy with Asymptotically Optimal Sampling Rate’

This document is the Online Supplement to ‘Myopic Allocation Policy with Asymptotically Optimal Sampling Rate,’ to be published in the IEEE Transactions of Automatic Control in 2017.

Ethical aspects of children’s perceptions of information-giving in care

The aim of this study was to identify key aspects in the exchange of information and to determine how nurses communicate news to hospitalised children. For this study, we applied the critical incident technique with 30 children aged between 8 and 14 years. Data were collected in paediatric units in a hospital in Alicante (Spain) using participant observation and semi-structured interviews. The analysis yielded three main categories: the children’s reaction to the information, nursing staff behaviour as a key aspect in the exchange of information and communication of news as well as children’s experience. This article emphasises the need to promote children’s consent and participation in nursing interventions. An analysis of these aspects will verify whether children’s rights are being respected and taken into account in order to promote children’s well-being and adaptation to hospitalisation.

Flooded with Information from Social Media: Effects of Disaster Information Source and Visuals on Viewers' Cognitive, Affective, and Behavioral Responses

While a variety of crisis types loom as real risks for organizations and communities, and the media landscape continues to evolve, research is needed to help explain and predict how people respond to various kinds of crisis and disaster information. For example, despite the rising prevalence of digital and mobile media centered on still and moving visuals, and stark increases in Americans’ use of visual-based platforms for seeking and sharing disaster information, relatively little is known about how the presence or absence of disaster visuals online might prompt or deter resilience-related feelings, thoughts, and/or behaviors. Yet, with such insights, governmental and other organizational entities as well as communities themselves may best help individuals and communities prepare for, cope with, and recover from adverse events. Thus, this work uses the theoretical lens of the social-mediated crisis communication model (SMCC) coupled with the limited capacity model of motivated mediated message processing (LC4MP) to explore effects of disaster information source and visuals on viewers’ resilience-related responses to an extreme flooding scenario. Results from two experiments are reported. First a preliminary 2 (disaster information source: organization/US National Weather Service vs. news media/USA Today) x 2 (disaster visuals: no visual podcast vs. moving visual video) factorial between-subjects online experiment with a convenience sample of university students probes effects of crisis source and visuals on a variety of cognitive, affective, and behavioral outcomes. A second between-subjects online experiment manipulating still and moving visual pace in online videos (no visual vs. still, slow-pace visual vs. still, medium-pace visual vs. still, fast-pace visual vs. moving, slow-pace visual vs. moving, medium-pace visual vs. moving, fast-pace visual) with a convenience sample recruited from Amazon’s Mechanical Turk (mTurk) similarly probes a variety of potentially resilience-related cognitive, affective, and behavioral outcomes. The role of biological sex as a quasi-experimental variable is also investigated in both studies. Various implications for community resilience and recommendations for risk and disaster communicators are explored. Implications for theory building and future research are also examined. Resulting modifications of the SMCC model (i.e., removing “message strategy” and adding the new category of “message content elements” under organizational considerations) are proposed.

Comentários online nos websites de comparação de hotéis

Com o rápido aumento da utilização da internet no mundo, os consumidores utilizam cada vez mais os websites para comparação, compra e venda de produtos. Atualmente os utilizadores da internet deixaram de procurar exclusivamente informação e tornaram-se eles próprios fornecedores de experiências através de comunidades online, que continuam em grande crescimento. Seguindo essa tendência, muitas indústrias escolheram a internet como canal de comunicação preferido e a indústria hoteleira não foge à regra. Assim a presente dissertação resulta numa pesquisa, em que o principal objetivo é entender de que forma os diversos fatores de informação presentes nos comentários online realizados nos websites de comparação de hotéis influenciam a utilização da informação pelo consumidor. Na presente metodologia é utilizado o modelo de Filieri e McLeay (2014), o tipo de inquérito utilizado é um questionário online para analisar quais os fatores que mais influenciam os consumidores a utilizarem a informação disponível nos comentários online. Os principais resultados obtidos neste estudo indicam que a precisão da informação, a consistência da informação e o ranking do alojamento influenciam a utilização da informação presente nos comentários online.

RACISM IN DIGITAL ERA: DEVELOPMENT AND INITIAL VALIDATION OF THE PERCEIVED ONLINE RACISM SCALE (PORS V1.0)

Racism continues to thrive on the Internet. Yet, little is known about racism in online settings and the potential consequences. The purpose of this study was to develop the Perceived Online Racism Scale (PORS), the first measure to assess people’s perceived online racism experiences as they interact with others and consume information on the Internet. Items were developed through a multi-stage process based on literature review, focus-groups, and qualitative data collection. Based on a racially diverse large-scale sample (N = 1023), exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses provided support for a 30-item bifactor model with the following three factors: (a) 14-item PORS-IP (personal experiences of racism in online interactions), (b) 5-item PORS-V (observations of other racial/ethnic minorities being offended), and (c) 11-item PORS-I (consumption of online contents and information denigrating racial/ethnic minorities and highlighting racial injustice in society). Initial construct validity examinations suggest that PORS is significantly linked to psychological distress.

AN EMPIRICAL ASSESSMENT OF USER ONLINE SECURITY BEHAVIOR: EVIDENCE FROM A UNIVERSITY

The ever-increasing number and severity of cybersecurity breaches makes it vital to understand the factors that make organizations vulnerable. Since humans are considered the weakest link in the cybersecurity chain of an organization, this study evaluates users’ individual differences (demographic factors, risk-taking preferences, decision-making styles and personality traits) to understand online security behavior. This thesis studies four different yet tightly related online security behaviors that influence organizational cybersecurity: device securement, password generation, proactive awareness and updating. A survey (N=369) of students, faculty and staff in a large mid-Atlantic U.S. public university identifies individual characteristics that relate to online security behavior and characterizes the higher-risk individuals that pose threats to the university’s cybersecurity. Based on these findings and insights from interviews with phishing victims, the study concludes with recommendations to help similat organizations increase end-user cybersecurity compliance and mitigate the risks caused by humans in the organizational cybersecurity chain.

As redes sociais online na hotelaria

Dissertação de Mestrado, Direção e Gestão Hoteleira, Escola Superior de Gestão, Hotelaria e Turismo, Universidade do Algarve, 2016

Subjetividade e interação nos fóruns online reflexões sobre a permanência em educação a distância

Este artigo foi desenvolvido com objetivo de produzir indicadores que possam melhorar a funcionalidade dos fóruns online e contribuir numa maior permanência dos estudantes da Educação a Distância. Foi realizada uma análise, orientada pela Epistemologia Qualitativa, dos processos subjetivos e interacionais produzidos nos fóruns de apresentação e fóruns temáticos de duas disciplinas de formação pedagógica – (1) Estratégias de Ensino e Aprendizagem e (2) A Psicologia e a Construção do Conhecimento – ofertadas nos cursos de Licenciatura em Teatro, Música e Artes Visuais, UAB/UnB. As informações produzidas apontam para a necessidade de reconhecimento e valorização do estudante como sujeito na aprendizagem, a consolidação da presença pedagógica do tutor, a valorização dos fóruns como espaços de aprendizagem e a produção de espaços sociais de pertencimento. ______________________________________________________________________________ ABSTRACT

Information security value in e-entrepreneurship

This paper researches the information security value in e-entrepreneurship by revising the literature that establishes the entrepreneurial domain and by relating it with the development of technological resources that create value for the customer in an online business. It details multiple paradigms regarding consumer’s values of information security, while relating them with common practices and previous researches in technological entrepreneurship. This research presents and discusses the benefits of information security standards in e-entrepreneurship. It details and discusses the ISO 27001 and PCI-DSS information security standards that can be used to differentiate security initiatives to achieve competitive advantage, while preserving information leadership as a critical resource for online business success. Based on the literature review, a theoretical research model is presented and research hypotheses are discussed. This model believes that information security affects information leadership and that information leadership, as a unique resource in e-business, contributes to e-entrepreneurship success. The adoption of information security standards affects customer’s trust in e-business, which also benefits e-entrepreneurial strategy.

ViDRILO: The Visual and Depth Robot Indoor Localization with Objects information dataset

In this article we describe a semantic localization dataset for indoor environments named ViDRILO. The dataset provides five sequences of frames acquired with a mobile robot in two similar office buildings under different lighting conditions. Each frame consists of a point cloud representation of the scene and a perspective image. The frames in the dataset are annotated with the semantic category of the scene, but also with the presence or absence of a list of predefined objects appearing in the scene. In addition to the frames and annotations, the dataset is distributed with a set of tools for its use in both place classification and object recognition tasks. The large number of labeled frames in conjunction with the annotation scheme make this dataset different from existing ones. The ViDRILO dataset is released for use as a benchmark for different problems such as multimodal place classification and object recognition, 3D reconstruction or point cloud data compression.

AUTOMATIC LABELING OF RSS ARTICLES USING ONLINE LATENT DIRICHLET ALLOCATION

The amount of information contained within the Internet has exploded in recent decades. As more and more news, blogs, and many other kinds of articles that are published on the Internet, categorization of articles and documents are increasingly desired. Among the approaches to categorize articles, labeling is one of the most common method; it provides a relatively intuitive and effective way to separate articles into different categories. However, manual labeling is limited by its efficiency, even thought the labels selected manually have relatively high quality. This report explores the topic modeling approach of Online Latent Dirichlet Allocation (Online-LDA). Additionally, a method to automatically label articles with their latent topics by combining the Online-LDA posterior with a probabilistic automatic labeling algorithm is implemented. The goal of this report is to examine the accuracy of the labels generated automatically by a topic model and probabilistic relevance algorithm for a set of real-world, dynamically updated articles from an online Rich Site Summary (RSS) service.