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Vol. 2 (May 2, 2014).

Methodology

Abstract

Objective: Social networking sites (SNSs) are increasingly used for research. This paper reports on two studies examining the feasibility of friending adolescents on SNSs for research purposes. Methods: Study 1 took place on www.MySpace.com where public profiles belonging to 18-year-old adolescents received a friend request from an unknown physician. Study 2 took place on www.Facebook.com where college freshmen from two US universities, enrolled in an ongoing research study, received a friend request from a known researcher´s profile. Acceptance and retention rates of friend requests were calculated for both studies.
Results: Study 1: 127 participants received a friend request; participants were 18 years-old, 62.2% male and 51.8% Caucasian. 49.6% accepted the friend request. After 9 months, 76% maintained the online friendship, 12.7% defriended the study profile and 11% deactivated their profile. Study 2: 338 participants received a friend request; participants were 18 years-old, 56.5% female and 75.1% Caucasian. 99.7% accepted the friend request. Over 12 months, 3.3% defriended the study profile and 4.1% deactivated their profile. These actions were often temporary; the overall 12-month friendship retention rate was 96.1%.
Conclusion: Friending adolescents on SNSs is feasible and friending adolescents from a familiar profile may be more effective for maintaining online friendship with research participants over time.

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Research

Abstract

We developed a tool based on a modified number pad to empower persons with certain diseases, in particular of neuromuscular origin, to efficiently operate a computer and enter text. As the keypad lies securely in both hands, the system is ideal for someone who has motor problems using a full-size keyboard. The software offers various assistive techniques. For example, text entry is facilitated with the help of word prediction, and an ambiguous mode with word-level disambiguation allows text entry using the entire Latin alphabet with six keys. In addition to describing the system, we analyze the ambiguous mode and the influence of dictionary size. Initial empirical results with the system, which is already in operation, indicate that it indeed represents a viable alternative by decreasing effort without increasing the time to operate a computer. This journal article mainly differs from the related proceedings paper through an extended literature review and
analyses regarding dictionary size.

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Abstract

Motion sensors integrated into contemporary smartphones allow the introduction of new mobile interaction paradigms, here including tilt-based input control in the mobile context. Namely, as opposed to existing implementations that typically apply continuous feedback on tilting, we define Pitch and Roll movement sequences that change the orientation of the mobile device as discrete-tilt input primitives. The respective commands are then used to manage text entry within three discrete-tilt-based methods thus introduced: keyboard bisection, single cursor, and quad cursor. Each method is based on the use of a particular QWERTY-based keyboard layout with related strategy for character input. We model upper-bound text entry speeds for the input methods, taking into account both movement aspects and language context. The movement model corresponds to both the tilt-based shortest path between two consequent characters, which is theoretically defined, and the time of discrete-tilt execution, which is obtained from user testing experiment we conducted. The linguistic model, comprising digraph statistics, is constructed basing on available English corpora. This modeling approach provides discrete-tilt-based text entry speed predictions representing efficiency rates for expert behavior, i.e. for optimal performance. The results obtained enable the evaluation of the proposed designs without need to test with real users, and can furthermore serve as a baseline for efficiency of text entry implementations that rely on discrete tilt.

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