Popular E-Content at The New York Public Library: Successes and Challenges

Updated from a presentation given at Biblionext.it in Rome in April 2011, this article will highlight The New York Public Library’s success with e-books and other forms of popular e-content and our efforts to stay one step ahead of the consumer shift from print reading to e-reading. Consumer e-reading is dominated by Amazon.com in the US, followed by one of the largest chain bookstores, BarnesandNoble.com. The availability of digital versions of very popular titles, coupled with the explosion of e-readers, tablets, and smartphones that are priced competitively and fairly easy to use, are helping move a lot of Americans into the e-book world. Last month, Amazon.com announced they sold more e-books than physical books for the first time ever. Print books are not going away, but our experience is that it is clear e-books are no longer just an extra format to offer, they are integral to our future.     

Is there an ethics of algorithms?

We argue that some algorithms are value-laden, and that two or more persons who accept different value-judgments may have a rational reason to design such algorithms differently. We exemplify our claim by discussing a set of algorithms used in medical image analysis: In these algorithms it is often necessary to set certain thresholds for whether e.g. a cell should count as diseased or not, and the chosen threshold will partly depend on the software designer’s preference between avoiding false positives and false negatives. This preference ultimately depends on a number of value-judgments. In the last section of the paper we discuss some general principles for dealing with ethical issues in algorithm-design.     

Ethics in e-trust and e-trustworthiness: the case of direct computer-patient interfaces

In this paper, I examine the ethics of e-trust and e-trustworthiness in the context of health care, looking at direct computer-patient interfaces (DCPIs), information systems that provide medical information, diagnosis, advice, consenting and/or treatment directly to patients without clinicians as intermediaries. Designers, manufacturers and deployers of such systems have an ethical obligation to provide evidence of their trustworthiness to users. My argument for this claim is based on evidentialism about trust and trustworthiness: the idea that trust should be based on sound evidence of trustworthiness. Evidence of trustworthiness is a broader notion than one might suppose, including not just information about the risks and performance of the system, but also interactional and context-based information. I suggest some sources of evidence in this broader sense that make it plausible that designers, manufacturers and deployers of DCPIs can provide evidence to users that is cognitively simple, easy to communicate, yet rationally connected with actual trustworthiness.     

Bibliometric mapping of computer and information ethics

This paper presents the first bibliometric mapping analysis of the field of computer and information ethics (C&IE). It provides a map of the relations between 400 key terms in the field. This term map can be used to get an overview of concepts and topics in the field and to identify relations between information and communication technology concepts on the one hand and ethical concepts on the other hand. To produce the term map, a data set of over thousand articles published in leading journals and conference proceedings in the C&IE field was constructed. With the help of various computer algorithms, key terms were identified in the titles and abstracts of the articles and co-occurrence frequencies of these key terms were calculated. Based on the co-occurrence frequencies, the term map was constructed. This was done using a computer program called VOSviewer. The term map provides a visual representation of the C&IE field and, more specifically, of the organization of the field around three main concepts, namely privacy, ethics, and the Internet.     

Contextual gaps: privacy issues on Facebook

Social networking sites like Facebook are rapidly gaining in popularity. At the same time, they seem to present significant privacy issues for their users. We analyze two of Facebooks’s more recent features, Applications and News Feed, from the perspective enabled by Helen Nissenbaum’s treatment of privacy as “contextual integrity.” Offline, privacy is mediated by highly granular social contexts. Online contexts, including social networking sites, lack much of this granularity. These contextual gaps are at the root of many of the sites’ privacy issues. Applications, which nearly invisibly shares not just a users’, but a user’s friends’ information with third parties, clearly violates standard norms of information flow. News Feed is a more complex case, because it involves not just questions of privacy, but also of program interface and of the meaning of “friendship” online. In both cases, many of the privacy issues on Facebook are primarily design issues, which could be ameliorated by an interface that made the flows of information more transparent to users.     

e-Trust and reputation

Trust online can be a hazardous affair; many are trustworthy, but some people use the anonymity of the web to behave very badly indeed. So how can we improve the quality of evidence for trustworthiness provided online? I focus on one of the devices we use to secure others’ trustworthiness: tracking past conduct through online reputation systems. Yet existing reputation systems face problems. I analyse these, and in the light of this develop some principles for system design, towards overcoming these challenges. In providing better evidence for trustworthiness online, so we can also encourage people actually to be trustworthy more often, which is an ethically welcome outcome.     

Membrane-integrated microfluidic device for high-resolution live cell imaging

The design and fabrication of a membrane-integrated microfluidic cell culture device (five layers,≤500 μm total thickness) developed for high resolution microscopy is reported here. The multi-layer device was constructed to enable membrane separated cell culture for tissue mimetic in vitro model applications and pharmacodynamic evaluation studies. The microdevice was developed via a unique combination of low profile fluidic interconnect design, substrate transfer methodology, and wet silane bonding. To demonstrate the unique high resolution imaging capability of this device, we used oil immersion microscopy to image stained nuclei and mitochondria in primary hepatocytes adhered to the incorporated membrane     

Automaticity of exercise self-regulatory efficacy beliefs in adults with high and low experience in exercise self-regulation

Guided by social cognitive theory (SCT), we investigated whether exercise self-regulatory efficacy beliefs can be activated nonconsciously in individuals experienced and inexperienced in exercise self-regulation, and whether these beliefs are automatically associated with exercise self-regulation processes. The study used a 2 (Exercise Self-Regulation Experience Group) × 3 (Prime Condition) between-subjects design in which individuals experienced and inexperienced in exercise self-regulation were randomly assigned to receive subliminal, supraliminal, or no priming of exercise self-regulatory efficacy beliefs. Participants completed hypothetical diary entries, which were assessed for exercise self-regulatory efficacy and self-regulation expressions using content analyses with a SCT coding system and the Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) text analysis program. For both exercise self-regulation experience groups, self-efficacy priming led to more expressions of low exercise self-regulatory efficacy and dysfunctional exercise self-regulation strategies compared with the control prime. For participants experienced in exercise self-regulation, supraliminal priming (vs. control priming) led to more expressions of high exercise self-regulatory efficacy and functional exercise self-regulation strategies. For the experienced groups, priming led to automaticity of exercise expressions compared with the control condition. For inexperienced participants in the subliminal prime condition, priming led to automaticity of self-regulatory efficacy beliefs and work-related goals compared with the control condition. Automatic activation of exercise self-regulatory efficacy and exercise self-regulation processes suggests that self-regulation of exercise behavior can occur nonconsciously.