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An Unhealthy Obsession with Theory
Full text linkAs the flagship journal of the Association for Information Systems (AIS), the Journal of the Association for Information Systems (JAIS) invites the incoming president of AIS to write an editorial about issues facing AIS and its members. In this editorial, I argue that over the past 30 years, information systems research has shifted to what I see as an unhealthy obsession with one particular type of theory to the exclusion of other types. I believe this obsession is stifling new research and is preventing us, as a discipline, from leading technology innovation. The solution is simple: return to our roots and embrace other types of theory. The opinions in this editorial are solely mine, and do not reflect the official policy of AIS, or the opinions of my colleagues at AIS or those who serve at JAIS
Visiting Scuttled Ships: An Examination of the Important Elements of the Wreck Diving Experience
Full text linkScuba diving is an increasingly popular recreational and tourist pastime. Diving enthusiasts are recognized for their dedication to the sport and willingness to both travel to and spend money on new and unique experiences. Subsequently dive tourism has become a multibillion dollar industry. In turn, many coastal (and other diveable) destinations are investing in the development of local dive sites. However, many popular dive attractions such as naturally occurring coral reefs and historic wrecks are fragile, easily damaged, and/or adversely impacted by visitors. Artificial reefs, or structures purposely sunk to create habitats for marine life and infrastructure for unique diving experiences (often stripped-down large scale pieces of machinery), can draw tourists away from fragile natural ecosystems. Ideally, artificial reefs could also be utilized as underwater cultural heritage management tools similarly drawing visitors away from aging, delicate historic wrecks. However, little is known about wreck divers and/or the wreck diving experience. Thus, the purpose of this study was to examine the specific aspects of the popular purposely scuttled wreck, the USS Spiegel Grove (off the coast of Key Largo) that contributed to visitors' dive experiences. A total of 100 TripAdvisor reviews about the Spiegel Grove were collected and analyzed as data. The majority of reviews were positive and revealed that the size of the ship, the challenge of the dive, the ability to penetrate the ship, the chance to check the dive off a bucket list, and the opportunity to see marine life contributed to divers' experiences. Historic ties were surprisingly of little importance. Although more research is needed, these findings should help destinations to better plan for and design artificial reefs aimed at attracting wreck divers
Remembering Richard Lugar
Full text linkPaul Helmke, former three-term mayor of Fort Wayne, Indiana, offers his memories of Indiana Senator Richard G. Lugar, who died April 28, 2019. Helmke met Lugar in 1969, while the latter was serving as mayor of Indianapolis and planning Unigov, the consolidation of the city with surrounding townships in Marion County. Helmke discusses how Lugar's career inspired his own career at both the state and national levels
Gender and Age Influences on Interpretation of Emoji Functions
Full text linkAn online survey, the Understanding Emoji Survey, was conducted to assess how English-speaking social media users interpret the pragmatic functions of emoji in examples adapted from public Facebook comments, based on a modified version of [15]’s taxonomy of functions. Of the responses received (N = 519; 351 females, 120 males, 48 “other”; 354 under 30, 165 over 30, age range 18--70+), tone modification was the preferred interpretation overall, followed by virtual action, although interpretations varied significantly by emoji type. Female and male interpretations were generally similar, while “other” gender respondents differed significantly in dispreferring tone and preferring multiple functions. Respondents over 30 often did not understand the functions or interpreted the emoji literally, while younger users interpreted them in more conventionalized ways. Older males were most likely, and younger females were least likely, to not understand emoji functions and to find emoji confusing or annoying, consistent with previously reported gender and age differences in attitudes toward, and frequency of, emoji use
The Role of Negative Information in Distributional Semantic Learning
Full text linkDistributional models of semantics learn word meanings from contextual co‐occurrence patterns across a large sample of natural language. Early models, such as LSA and HAL (Landauer & Dumais, 1997; Lund & Burgess, 1996), counted co‐occurrence events; later models, such as BEAGLE (Jones & Mewhort, 2007), replaced counting co‐occurrences with vector accumulation. All of these models learned from positive information only: Words that occur together within a context become related to each other. A recent class of distributional models, referred to as neural embedding models, are based on a prediction process embedded in the functioning of a neural network: Such models predict words that should surround a target word in a given context (e.g., word2vec; Mikolov, Sutskever, Chen, Corrado, & Dean, 2013). An error signal derived from the prediction is used to update each word's representation via backpropagation. However, another key difference in predictive models is their use of negative information in addition to positive information to develop a semantic representation. The models use negative examples to predict words that should not surround a word in a given context. As before, an error signal derived from the prediction prompts an update of the word's representation, a procedure referred to as negative sampling. Standard uses of word2vec recommend a greater or equal ratio of negative to positive sampling. The use of negative information in developing a representation of semantic information is often thought to be intimately associated with word2vec's prediction process. We assess the role of negative information in developing a semantic representation and show that its power does not reflect the use of a prediction mechanism. Finally, we show how negative information can be efficiently integrated into classic count‐based semantic models using parameter‐free analytical transformations
Says Who? The Effects of Presentation Format and Source Rating on Fake News in Social Media
Full text linkNews—real or fake—is now abundant on social media. News posts on social media focus users’ attention on the headlines, but does it matter who wrote the article? We investigate whether changing the presentation format to highlight the source of the article affects its believability and how social media users choose to engage with it. We conducted two experiments and found that nudging users to think about who wrote the article influenced the extent to which they believed it. The presentation format of highlighting the source had a main effect; it made users more skeptical of all articles, regardless of the source’s credibility. For unknown sources, low source ratings had a direct effect on believability. Believability, in turn, influenced the extent to which users would engage with the article (e.g., read, like, comment, and share). We also found confirmation bias to be rampant: users were more likely to believe articles that aligned with their beliefs, over and above the effects of other factors
Mission-driven research for stratospheric aerosol geoengineering
Full text linkThe last decade has seen broad exploratory research into stratospheric aerosol (SA) geoengineering, motivated by concern that reducing greenhouse gas emissions may be insufficient to avoid significant impacts from climate change. Based on this research, it is plausible that a limited deployment of SA geoengineering, provided it is used in addition to cutting emissions, could reduce many climate risks for most people. However, “plausible” is an insufficient basis on which to support future decisions. Developing the necessary knowledge requires a transition toward mission-driven research that has the explicit goal of supporting informed decisions. We highlight two important observations that follow from considering such a comprehensive, prioritized natural-science research effort. First, while field experiments may eventually be needed to reduce some of the uncertainties, we expect that the next phase of research will continue to be primarily model-based, with one outcome being to assess and prioritize which uncertainties need to be reduced (and, as a corollary, which field experiments can reduce those uncertainties). Second, we anticipate a clear separation in scale and character between small-scale experimental research to resolve specific process uncertainties and global-scale activities. We argue that the latter, even if the radiative forcing is negligible, should more appropriately be considered after a decision regarding whether and how to deploy SA geoengineering, rather than within the scope of “research” activities
On the Critique of Paramilitarism
Full text linkThis essay considers the ideological work performed by the term “paramilitary.” Departing from the fury directed at paramilitary policing in Ferguson, Missouri in 2014, it argues that despite its use to critique the police, the term “paramilitary” functions to legitimize police violence. The notion “paramilitary” frames the shared use of lethal technology by police and military forces in a way that obscures the constancy of exchange between them: as an insistence on the distinction between military and police, the term anchors the legitimacy of both. In three brief sections offering definitions of key terms, histories of police and military overlap in the US, and state theory in relation to police and violence, this essay argues that the prefix “para” works to distinguish, rhetorically, police force from military violence. This argument urges critics of police and other axes of state violence to work actively against the ideological and affective work enabled by the “para” and instead expose the lethal capacity of state violence inflicted at home and abroad
Switching Schemas: Do Effects of Mindless Interactions With Agents Carry Over to Humans and Vice Versa?
Full text linkThe Revised Ethopoeia Concept proposes that agents should activate human schema in the form of social expectations and rules. However, studies have demonstrated inconsistent reactions to agents and avatars, potentially due to the activation of a nonhuman schema that constrains people’s ability to mentally connect with agents. We first examined whether the schema activated during agent or avatar game play were consistent with and influenced a subsequent interaction with a human. Results suggested that schemas activated across consecutive interactions with an agent and then a human were incongruent, while avatars successfully influenced subsequent interactions with humans (i.e., prosocial behaviors) by evoking congruent schemas. A second experiment corroborated this by demonstrating a match between schemas activated during game play with agents and subsequent interactions with another human-like but nonhuman entity (i.e., artificial intelligence). Additional results and implications related to switching schemas in consecutive interactions with agents and humans are discussed