Online video might be effective, whether people watch it or not

/ Katja Reuter

A study based on multivariate testing conducted by Treepodia seems to show that not only shoppers who view a product video buy at a higher rate, but surprisingly also those who choose not to watch the video. This article suggests that online video serves as a trust factor. Users might associate it with believe and investment in a product.

The results on the best way to display video are also interesting: adding a simple link to video from any given page, led to a 5%-15% video view rate, while a video player embedded on the same page delivered 10%-35%.

Neil McBean from RivalSchools who we’re working with on our video project pointed me to the study and to Zappos successful use of video demos online.

Currently one of my favorite online videos is Google’s piece on Gmail Priority Inbox. They truly have found a way to turn even a basic feature like this into an enjoyable thing to learn about.  Watch it

Short Attention Spans for Web Videos – NYTimes.com

/ kristinemoss

The New York Times reports:

After watching an online video for a full minute, 44.1 percent of viewers will have clicked away, according to Visible Measures. But an outsize slice of that loss occurs in the first 10 seconds, during which 19.4 percent of a video’s audience defects.

Read more at Drilling Down – Short Attention Spans for Web Videos – NYTimes.com.

Salesforce announces Chatter, social network for the enterprise

/ kristinemoss

As Virtual Home prepares ShareCenter pilots, the enterprise collaboration software space continues to expand. Salesforce recently announced the availability of Chatter, an enterprise social networking application that it has been testing with select customers. Features include user profiles, groups, secure document sharing, status updates, news feeds, and email alerts. Additionally, it allows for building custom Chatter apps, as well as embedding Chatter features into other tools.

Other recently announced offerings in the enterprise collaboration space include Acquia’s Drupal Commons and Cisco’s QUAD which join the mix with established offerings from Socialtext, Jive, IBM, and a sizable list of other players.

Read more about Salesforce Chatter in VentureBeat:

Salesforce says social network Chatter is ready to talk | VentureBeat.

Notes from the Science of Team Science Conference at Northwestern University

/ Katja Reuter / 1 Comment

The event was packed with theories about the motors and challenges of team science and some interesting initiatives and tools. One of the highlights for us was certainly the introduction to UCINET, a social network analysis tool for team science, which might be useful for the further impact analysis of ShareCenter and crowdsourcing tools like our Open Forum. John Skvoretz from the University of South Florida walked us through the basic methods of social network analysis for team science. Using this program we could get better insight into whether these tools help researchers from different disciplines to connect, and whether most users make new connections or connect with people they already know offline which revives the question whether distance is dead. The program can handle a maximum of 32,767 nodes and includes centrality measures, subgroup identification, role analysis, and more. Now, the challenge is to get the data!

Bonnie Spring from Northwestern University presented COALESCE, a CTSA Online Assistance for Leveraging the Science of Collaborative Effort, that will “create, evaluate, and disseminate new, durable, readily accessible on-line learning resources to enhance essential skills needed to perform transdisciplinary, team-based, basic and clinical translational research”. Four learning modules will be developed over the next two years for the “Science of Team Science,” “Team Science Research Process in Basic Science and in Clinical Science”, as well as “Team Science in Behavioral Medicine.” The Team Science module, for example, will introduce the key concepts of team science by showcasing successful national transdisciplinary NIH research programs and interviews with prominent team science experts.

In the spirit of a web portal for collaboration, we learned about a couple of tools that help researchers manage and evaluate collaborations. 1) Gary Olson from UC Irvine talked about a “collaboration success wizard”, a web-based tool to help researchers assess the prospective success of a collaborative project before it starts. The tool is expected to be available July this year. 2) Howard Gadlin, who runs – as he puts it – an emergency room for team science at the NIH Center for Cooperative Resolution, gave a fabulous presentation talking from the other end of the telescope, about the “dark side” of collaboration. He introduced us to a collaborative agreement, a “pre-nuptial agreement” for scientists, to help scientific collaborators commence their project by anticipating, discussing, and resolving possible areas of disagreement. Using the pre-nup, the parties can jointly define a process for constructively handling disputes should they arise in the future. And 3) the National Cancer Center will launch a “team science toolkit” shortly that intends to provide an online hub for team science-related resources and communication.

William Trochim from Cornell University introduced us to concept mapping, a mixed methods participatory approach that combines group processes (brainstorming, sorting, group interpretation) with a sequence of multivariate statistical analyses (multidimensional scaling, hierarchical cluster analysis) – maybe something to explore in the light of our upcoming survey and research projects. See his paper about “Concept Mapping as an Alternative Approach for the Analysis of Open-Ended Survey Responses”.

Katy Boerner  from Indiana University spoke about the “Cyberinfrastructures for Network Science”. She presented a couple of tools, such as 1) the Network Workbench, a large-scale network analysis, modeling and visualization, which purportedly supports network science research across scientific boundaries, and 2) the Scholarly Database (SDB) that focuses on supporting large studies of changes in science over time and communicating findings via knowledge-domain visualizations. The database currently provides access to around 18 million publications, patents, and grants. In the future, Boerner said, she wants to leverage the power of network analysis to understand better what delays and inhibits science. The tools are available at http://sci.slis.indiana.edu/registration/user/.

More resources from the SciTS Conference are available at http://scienceofteamscience.northwestern.edu/team-science-resources

Further reading:

Written by: Rachael Sak, Leslie Yuan and Katja Reuter

The “green” font…

/ leslieyuan

We’ve recently had discussions about the font of the VH site, changing it for readability etc.  And now, for another interesting take on fonts… the ‘green’ font.  From the AP, a recent news story from the UW – Green Bay.

UW-Green Bay: New e-mail font will save money

Associated Press
Updated: 03/25/2010 08:48:18 AM CDT

A Wisconsin college has found a new way to cut costs with e-mail — by changing the font.

The University of Wisconsin-Green Bay has switched the default font on its e-mail system from Arial to Century Gothic. It says the change sounds minor, but it will save money on printer ink when students print out e-mails in the new font.

Diane Blohowiak, the school’s director of computing, says the new font uses about 30 percent less ink than the previous one.

That could add up to real savings, since the cost of printer ink works out to about $10,000 per gallon.

Blohowiak says the decision is part of the school’s five-year plan to go green. She tells Wisconsin Public Radio it’s great that a change that’s eco-friendly also saves money.

—

I looked this up online and the story got picked up by several newspapers. Below a link to the story in the Washington Post — read the comments below the actual story.  Some funny analysis as to whether this really is green…

http://voices.washingtonpost.com/campus-overload/2010/03/font_change_could_save_money_p.html

Twitter, revisited….would we or should we use it? Here are 11 Commandments to ponder.

/ leslieyuan / 1 Comment

I read a short article this morning about the fact that the Department of Defense issued its social-media policy, and essentiall gave it the thumbs up.   The article goes on to discuss rules of engagement for employees’ use of social media, or lack thereof.  The author puts forth The 11 Commandments of Corporate Tweeting and while these are focused on the use of Twitter in corporate America, I think the 11 are straightforward and rational, and would apply to our setting as well.  A few of them are listed below.

– We can articulate the company vision in 140 characters or less, minus PR puffery and cliché.

– We are willing to give credit to cool, innovative, or thought-provoking ideas, even if coined by someone else.

– We are willing to challenge a potentially destructive position even if our position generates criticism.

Tangential Thoughts: Robot Scientists for a Better Use of Existing Data – And Why Translational Science May Still Need a Slightly Different Approach

/ Katja Reuter

Is serendipity necessary for innovation? Or in other words: Would an autonomous scientific discovery process that utilizes all available data at the time be incapable of innovation? Some think so. But not researcher Andrew Sparkes and colleagues who created Adam and Eve, two robot scientists, designed to carry out biomedical scientific research. The researchers claim that scientists robots will “make scientific information more accurate, reproducible and reusable”.

Adam and Eve are capable of generating hypotheses about a problem based on information obtained from publicly available databases, designing experiments to test these hypotheses, running the physical experiments, analyzing, interpreting the resulting data – and they even collaborate. Eve, for example, is a prototype system to demonstrate the automation of closed-loop learning in drug-screening and design.

So why not stretching this idea a bit? Could such a robot help support the clinical and translational research process? The authors of the recent paper “Translational Medicine – doing it backwards” may disagree. They argue that the general approach to hypothesis-driven research poorly suits the needs of translational biomedical research “unless efforts are spent in identifying clinically relevant hypotheses”. As Steinman pointed out, animal models, for example, can lead to results that are the opposite of what is ultimately seen in human disease. So, the authors propose “that hypothesis tested research should follow ‘factsdriven research’ and only when the collection of facts relevant to human disease has been extensive, should hypotheses be constructed to expand beyond what can be directly observed. What is needed is an approach that begins at the Bedside and then goes to the ‘Clinical Bench’.”

I guess once there are public databases available filled with “clinical realities” provided by clinically active physicians and non-physicians, robots like Adam and Eve could frame their research questions accordingly and reverse the discovery process starting with the “human reality”.