A generalized demand for public decision processes to be open, integrative, and adaptive is increasingly evident in the environmental debate. In biological conservation, however, as in most other environmental controversies, we continue to find that our basic nature (evolutionary and cultural) generally predisposes us to exclude and confront one another in words or deeds, sometimes violently. I...

We describe an unsupervised approach to the problem of automatically detecting subgroups of people holding similar opinions in a discussion thread. An intuitive way of identifying this is to detect the attitudes of discussants towards each other or named entities or topics mentioned in the discussion. Sentiment tags play an important role in this detection, but we also note another dimension to...

This paper focuses on individuals’ attitudes towards knowledge sharing. Beside a person’s willingness to share knowledge, we also distinguish eagerness to share, defined as the extent to which an individual has a strong internal drive to communicate their individual intellectual capital to others. The foundations for this distinction are discussed, and hypotheses are presented concerning the re...

The amount of email people have to deal with is overwhelming. People tend to work extra hours in order to keep up with their email, and some are even getting ill because of all the stress this overload generates. This paper describes the causes and symptoms of email overload, the strategies people use to deal with it and possible solutions towards the problem. These are given with the help of a...

Many Social Interactions display either or both of the following well documented phenomena. People tend to interact with similar others (homophily). And they tend to treat others more favorably if they are perceived to share the same identity (in-group bias). While both phenomena involve some degree of discrimination towards others, a systematic study of their relations and interplay is yet mis...