The Internet has created an environment where many technologies are used to provide net-based customer services. Recently, Online Live Chat Customer Service (OLCCS) has been adopted widely and rapidly on many websites. OLCCS extends traditional customer service channels by using live chats to deliver real-time help and on-demand assistance to online customers’ inquiries. The purpose of this dis...

Computer-mediated communication (CMC) once meant principally text-based communication mediated by computers, but rapid technological advances in recent years have heralded an era of multimodal communication with a growing emphasis on audio and video synchronous interaction. As CMC, in all its variants (text chats, video chats, forums, blogs, SMS, etc.), has become normalized practice in persona...

The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between mobile phone use and insomnia and depression in adolescents. A cross-sectional study was conducted on 295 high school students aged 15-19 in Japan. Insomnia and depression were assessed using Athene Insomnia Scales (AIS) and the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D), respectively. Mobile phones were owned by 9...

How do users behave in online chatrooms, where they instantaneously read and write posts? We analyzed about 2.5 million posts covering various topics in Internet relay channels, and found that user activity patterns follow known power-law and stretched exponential distributions, indicating that online chat activity is not different from other forms of communication. Analysing the emotional expr...

Evidence suggests that there is variation in support for specific chicken farming practices amongst stakeholder groups, and this should be explored in more detail to understand the nature of these differences and work towards convergence. Online focus groups were used to assess attitudes to animal welfare in meat chicken farming in this pilot study. Across six online chats, 25 participants (gen...

We are four academics teaching mathematics at three different higher education institutions over two continents. Through fortnightly meetings to research how our practices changed as a result of the Covid-19 lockdowns, we formed community practice. The process articulating experiences and ideas, reflecting on recorded written homework set ourselves, was reassuring motivational. identified five ...