BACKGROUND Trained healthcare workers are an essential resource for effective health systems. However, healthcare workers' perspective on healthcare, the challenges they face to provide quality health services, and opportunities to improve motivation and providing adequate care are rarely investigated in resource-constrained settings of sub-Saharan Africa. METHODS All reachable nurses of Abou...

Anchor text has been widely used in web search as an effective complement to web page content. This motivates the investigation of similar sources of evidence about relevance. Social media postings often contain links to associated web pages, although typically not with anchor text. In this paper, we explore the use of these links and the text in the social postings as a form of anchor text (so...

The Five Factor Model of personality has been used extensively in the management and psychology fields to predict attitudes and behaviors. Only recently have researchers begun to examine the role of psychological factors in influencing an individual’s use of technology platforms, such as Facebook. This study uses both a survey of Facebook users and actual Facebook data to uncover why some indiv...

OBJECTIVE Online discussion forums are often used by people with eating disorders. METHOD This study analyses 2,072 threads containing a total of 14,903 postings from an unmoderated German "prorecovery" forum for persons suffering from bulimia nervosa (www.ab-server.de) during the period from October 2004 to May 2006. The threads were inductively analyzed for underlying structural types, and ...

During disastrous events, much information is posted on microblogging services. These postings sometimes contain important information concerning, for example, safety and support for afflicted people. However, due to the overwhelming volume of information on microblog, it is often difficult to find such useful information using the current microblogging search system. Given the background, this...

Much of opinion mining research focuses on product reviews because reviews are opinion-rich and contain little irrelevant information. However, this cannot be said about online discussions and comments. In such postings, the discussions can get highly emotional and heated with many emotional statements, and even personal attacks. As a result, many of the postings and sentences do not express po...

As part of an ethnographic study, the impact of foreign postings on spouses who accompany military personnel was explored. Individual interviews and focus groups with 34 British military spouses based in one location in southern Europe were conducted. Key findings suggested that reaction to a foreign posting was a reflection of personal attitudes, prior experiences, support, ability to adjust t...

Educators are constantly seeking ways of utilising Internet technologies to enhance the learning of their students. Computer conferences provide a medium in which students have opportunity to discuss and engage with topics while constructing meaning through interaction with their peers. This paper examines the discourse arising from discussion of four topics, in an on-campus, first year, teache...

Emergent knowledge does not come from a particular document or a particular knowledge source, but comes from a collection of documents or knowledge sources. This paper proposes a system which combines social web content and semantic web technology to process the emergent knowledge from the blogosphere. The proposed system regards blog postings as experiences of people on particular topics. By a...

This study looks at online discussions within the context of a group endeavor and attempts to evaluate three assertions: 1) students in an online discussion proceed through higher levels of thinking; 2) Online conversations follow an “ebb and flow” pattern; 3) The level of the first posting to the discussion influences the level of subsequent postings. Postings were classified by the Bloom’s ta...