Hasil untuk "Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform"

Shiori Furukawa, Sho Tsugawa

Although beneficial information abounds on social media, the dissemination of harmful information such as so-called ``fake news'' has become a serious issue. Therefore, many researchers have devoted considerable effort to limiting the diffusion of harmful information. A promising approach to limiting diffusion of such information is link deletion methods in social networks. Link deletion methods have been shown to be effective in reducing the size of information diffusion cascades generated by synthetic models on a given social network. In this study, we evaluate the effectiveness of link deletion methods by using actual logs of retweet cascades, rather than by using synthetic diffusion models. Our results show that even after deleting 10\%--50\% of links from a social network, the size of cascades after link deletion is estimated to be only 50\% the original size under the optimistic estimation, which suggests that the effectiveness of the link deletion strategy for suppressing information diffusion is limited. Moreover, our results also show that there is a considerable number of cascades with many seed users, which renders link deletion methods inefficient.

سیاوش قلی پور, جلیل کریمی, حدیث السادات موسوی

این پژوهش به بررسی فرایند اسکان عشایر در مناطق لک نشین می‌پردازد. روش پژوهش توصیفی و تحلیلی است و فنون گردآوری داده بررسی اسناد و مصاحبه است. داده‌ها از طریق سازماندهی داده تجزیه‌وتحلیل شدند. یافته‌های پژوهش نشان می‌دهد: لک‌ها در دور قاجار کوچ رو و دارای نظام ایلی بودند. آنان در کوهستان‌های زاگرس میانی و دشت‌های اطراف، ییلاق و قشلاق می‌کردند و به‌عنوان یک نیروی اجتماعی نقش مؤثری در مناسبات سیاسی داشتند. در دوره رضاشاه اصلاحات گوناگونی مانند توسعه کشاورزی، توسعه صنعتی، توسعه راه‌ها، گسترش دیوان‌سالاری و اسکان عشایر در زاگرس میانی انجام گرفت. سهم مناطق لک نشین از این اصلاحات، احداث جاده شوسه خرم‌آباد - هرسین و اسکان عشایر بود که مورد اخیر به نحوی آمرانه و خونبار اجرا شد. این سیاست از سال ۱۳۰۲ شروع و در سال ۱۳۱۲ پایان یافت و سبب زوال شیوۀ زیست کوچ‌روی و تلف‌شدن دام‌‌ها شد. لک‌ها برای درامان‌ماندن از دست نیروهایِ ارتش، به نقاط صعب‌العبور پناه بردند و نوعی فرهنگ مقاومت را بنا نهادند. پس از شهریور ۱۳۲۰ به کوچروی بازگشتند؛ اما کم‌کم متوجه شدند دوران این شیوه از زندگی به سر آمده است. به‌طورکلی اسکان عشایر به همراه جغرافیایی کوهستانیِ مناطق لک نشین سبب «مدرنیزاسیون ناموزون» در زاگرس میانی شد. کردها و لرها در مقایسه با لک‌ها سازگاری بیشتری با شرایط جدید پیدا کردند و در دهه‌های پس از آن وضعیت به‌مراتب بهتری داشتند. از آن زمان تا کنون وضعیت توسعه‌نیافتگی مناطق لک نشین همچنان پایدار مانده است و مهم‌ترین پیامد آن مهاجرفرستی است.

Sho Tsugawa, Hiroyuki Ohsaki

In this paper, we address the challenge of discovering hidden nodes in unknown social networks, formulating three types of hidden-node discovery problems, namely, Sybil-node discovery, peripheral-node discovery, and influencer discovery. We tackle these problems by employing a graph exploration framework grounded in machine learning. Leveraging the structure of the subgraph gradually obtained from graph exploration, we construct prediction models to identify target hidden nodes in unknown social graphs. Through empirical investigations of real social graphs, we investigate the efficiency of graph exploration strategies in uncovering hidden nodes. Our results show that our graph exploration strategies discover hidden nodes with an efficiency comparable to that when the graph structure is known. Specifically, the query cost of discovering 10% of the hidden nodes is at most only 1.2 times that when the topology is known, and the query-cost multiplier for discovering 90% of the hidden nodes is at most only 1.4. Furthermore, our results suggest that using node embeddings, which are low-dimensional vector representations of nodes, for hidden-node discovery is a double-edged sword: it is effective in certain scenarios but sometimes degrades the efficiency of node discovery. Guided by this observation, we examine the effectiveness of using a bandit algorithm to combine the prediction models that use node embeddings with those that do not, and our analysis shows that the bandit-based graph exploration strategy achieves efficient node discovery across a wide array of settings.

Tim Donkers, Jürgen Ziegler

The rise of social media has fundamentally transformed how people engage in public discourse and form opinions. While these platforms offer unprecedented opportunities for democratic engagement, they have been implicated in increasing social polarization and the formation of ideological echo chambers. Previous research has primarily relied on observational studies of social media data or theoretical modeling approaches, leaving a significant gap in our understanding of how individuals respond to and are influenced by polarized online environments. Here we present a novel experimental framework for investigating polarization dynamics that allows human users to interact with LLM-based artificial agents in a controlled social network simulation. Through a user study with 122 participants, we demonstrate that this approach can successfully reproduce key characteristics of polarized online discourse while enabling precise manipulation of environmental factors. Our results provide empirical validation of theoretical predictions about online polarization, showing that polarized environments significantly increase perceived emotionality and group identity salience while reducing expressed uncertainty. These findings extend previous observational and theoretical work by providing causal evidence for how specific features of online environments influence user perceptions and behaviors. More broadly, this research introduces a powerful new methodology for studying social media dynamics, offering researchers unprecedented control over experimental conditions while maintaining ecological validity.

Alberto Cavassa Berrío

Ori Swed, Sachith Dassanayaka, Dimitri Volchenkov

In 2016, a network of social media accounts animated by Russian operatives attempted to divert political discourse within the American public around the presidential elections. This was a coordinated effort, part of a Russian-led complex information operation. Utilizing the anonymity and outreach of social media platforms Russian operatives created an online astroturf that is in direct contact with regular Americans, promoting Russian agenda and goals. The elusiveness of this type of adversarial approach rendered security agencies helpless, stressing the unique challenges this type of intervention presents. Building on existing scholarship on the functions within influence networks on social media, we suggest a new approach to map those types of operations. We argue that pretending to be legitimate social actors obliges the network to adhere to social expectations, leaving a social footprint. To test the robustness of this social footprint we train artificial intelligence to identify it and create a predictive model. We use Twitter data identified as part of the Russian influence network for training the artificial intelligence and to test the prediction. Our model attains 88% prediction accuracy for the test set. Testing our prediction on two additional models results in 90.7% and 90.5% accuracy, validating our model. The predictive and validation results suggest that building a machine learning model around social functions within the Russian influence network can be used to map its actors and functions.

Mahasan Offutt-Chaney

Between the 1970s and 1980s, a bipartisan group of philanthropists, educational researchers, and eventually the Ronald Reagan administration politicized the image of the strict school disciplinarian as the key to urban school turnaround. While Black communities saw Black leaders as part of a broader project of racial and economic justice, local and national networks of educational elites reduced Black urban communities’ demands for self-determination to the disciplinarian strategies of strict Black leaders. This group of actors advanced Black school leaders’ disciplinarian strategies as a substitute for structural reforms that targeted the political and economic conditions that constrained urban schools. This idea of the strict Black disciplinarian clarifies how discipline became a dominant focus of school reform after 1970. In doing so, it deepens understanding of the educationalization of social problems, clarifies how and why discipline became a dominant focus of school reform after 1970, and illuminates the consequences of the neoliberal carceral turn in urban education.

María del Carmen Meralla Cruz, Yenileidys Lorenzo Cabezas, Marta María Cruz Bravo

En el contexto cubano actual, a partir de las exigencias del desarrollo local endógeno y del entorno natural, ambiental, tecnológico, socioeconómico y legal, en el cual desarrollan su actividad las cooperativas agropecuarias, constituye una necesidad insoslayable el perfeccionamiento de los sistemas de gestión integral de riesgos y seguros, como componente imprescindible de su gestión, al permitir a estas organizaciones enfrentar con mayor efectividad los eventos a los que se exponen. En el caso concreto del municipio Consolación del Sur existen 50 estructuras de este tipo, que son clave en el desarrollo del polo productivo del municipio, por ende, en el desarrollo local sostenible. En los últimos años, estas organizaciones han tenido importantes pérdidas por diferentes sucesos, especialmente naturales y tecnológicos, que han afectado su estabilidad económico- financiera. La investigación que se presenta está dirigida a analizar las particularidades del proceso de gestión integral de riesgos y seguros en las cooperativas agropecuarias del municipio de Consolación del Sur. Para su desarrollo se emplearon métodos teóricos y empíricos, así como, técnicas para la recolección y procesamiento de la información, posibilitando la realización de un diagnóstico del estado actual del proceso objeto de estudio en las cooperativas agropecuarias del referido municipio, lo que permitió determinar el manejo que estas organizaciones hacen de la incertidumbre, los riesgos y el seguro, el desarrollo de herramientas apropiadas para la identificación, evaluación, reducción, mitigación y control de los riesgos que afectan el normal desarrollo de estas empresas, como actores claves para el desarrollo del municipio.

Loukas Ilias, Dimitris Askounis

Stress and depression are prevalent nowadays across people of all ages due to the quick paces of life. People use social media to express their feelings. Thus, social media constitute a valuable form of information for the early detection of stress and depression. Although many research works have been introduced targeting the early recognition of stress and depression, there are still limitations. There have been proposed multi-task learning settings, which use depression and emotion (or figurative language) as the primary and auxiliary tasks respectively. However, although stress is inextricably linked with depression, researchers face these two tasks as two separate tasks. To address these limitations, we present the first study, which exploits two different datasets collected under different conditions, and introduce two multitask learning frameworks, which use depression and stress as the main and auxiliary tasks respectively. Specifically, we use a depression dataset and a stressful dataset including stressful posts from ten subreddits of five domains. In terms of the first approach, each post passes through a shared BERT layer, which is updated by both tasks. Next, two separate BERT encoder layers are exploited, which are updated by each task separately. Regarding the second approach, it consists of shared and task-specific layers weighted by attention fusion networks. We conduct a series of experiments and compare our approaches with existing research initiatives, single-task learning, and transfer learning. Experiments show multiple advantages of our approaches over state-of-the-art ones.

Marcelo Sartori Locatelli, Pedro Calais, Matheus Prado Miranda et al.

Politicization is a social phenomenon studied by political science characterized by the extent to which ideas and facts are given a political tone. A range of topics, such as climate change, religion and vaccines has been subject to increasing politicization in the media and social media platforms. In this work, we propose a computational method for assessing politicization in online conversations based on topic shifts, i.e., the degree to which people switch topics in online conversations. The intuition is that topic shifts from a non-political topic to politics are a direct measure of politicization -- making something political, and that the more people switch conversations to politics, the more they perceive politics as playing a vital role in their daily lives. A fundamental challenge that must be addressed when one studies politicization in social media is that, a priori, any topic may be politicized. Hence, any keyword-based method or even machine learning approaches that rely on topic labels to classify topics are expensive to run and potentially ineffective. Instead, we learn from a seed of political keywords and use Positive-Unlabeled (PU) Learning to detect political comments in reaction to non-political news articles posted on Twitter, YouTube, and TikTok during the 2022 Brazilian presidential elections. Our findings indicate that all platforms show evidence of politicization as discussion around topics adjacent to politics such as economy, crime and drugs tend to shift to politics. Even the least politicized topics had the rate in which their topics shift to politics increased in the lead up to the elections and after other political events in Brazil -- an evidence of politicization.

O. Hrin

At the current stage of the development of legal science, the historical and legal research of the national system of judicial bodies and the problems of its reform is relevant. The transition of Ukraine from totalitarianism to a democratic, legal, social state contributed to the formation of a new system of judicial bodies, designed to meet the new historical conditions of social development and world standards.The problem of determining the role and place of the judiciary in the legal state, the necessary conditions for the construction of which are the affirmation of the autonomy and independence of this authority, the improvement of the existing system of relations between its bodies and other branches of government, and the optimal balancing of the mechanism of their interaction and mutual control, is gaining considerable relevance. Since the territories of modern Ukraine have been part of various state entities throughout history, the analysis of the reform of the judicial system and the judiciary in these territories is interesting and important in terms of the given problem.The article is devoted to the reform of the judicial system and judiciary of Carpathian Ukraine, which underwent a kind of evolution from autonomy to a federal system within Czechoslovakia and the declaration of independence (end of 1938 – beginning of 1939). It analyzes the process of evacuation and reformation of various judicial bodies caused by the decision of the first Vienna Arbitration (October 2, 1938) on the transfer of a large part of the territories of Czechoslovakia to Hungary, the Constitutional Law on the Autonomy of Subcarpathian Rus dated November 22, 1938 No 328 in terms of functioning, competence and principles of the formation of the judiciary, as well as the order of the second regional government of A. Voloshyn regarding the procedure and principles of the judiciary in the region.

T. Elbuzdukaeva, O. Shmatko, Sotsita Gaytamirova

In modern Russia, the urgent task of social development is the reform of the educational system. The problems of education, the content of textbooks, the management of educational processes and other aspects of education policy are under the close attention of the Russian leadership. The problem of public education is patriotic upbringing, civic consciousness of the younger generation. Another serious problem facing the modern school is the problem of training qualified teaching staff. These issues require scientific analysis when developing education policy, and History lessons need to be taken into account. The chosen topic is relevant, since the accumulated experience of school education during the Great Patriotic War shows that the political, social, professional management of the education system is of not only scientific, but also practical interest. This is, firstly, a study of the adaptation of school education to the extreme conditions of wartime, the activation of patriotic upbringing. Unfortunately, local wars are being waged on the territory of the former Soviet Union, having a negative impact on the education system. Therefore, the historical experience of the school education functioning during the Great Patriotic War must be adopted. Compliance with the law on universal education was accompanied by great difficulties, especially in the initial period of the war. This was explained by the fact that students at the beginning of the war had no time to study; many evacuees were on their way to their destination; teenagers en masse went to work in production. The problems of universal education at the beginning of the war intersected with the child safety issues. The country faced the task of combating homelessness and neglect. Millions of people had their homes destroyed, thousands of children lost their relatives and families.

Cristina Villegas

America’s foster care system has a noble goal—to care for children that for various reasons can no longer be cared for by their families—but years of inattention and inadequate funding have left many foster youth in a precarious state. This resource provides a comprehensive and authoritative overview of the American foster care system. Areas of coverage include the scaffolding of foster care systems in the various states (each of which operate their own unique systems through their social service agencies); conditions under which children are taken out of their families of origin and placed in foster care; the experiences of both young children and older teens in foster homes; challenges for foster children who “age out” of the system; and proposals to reform and improve foster care across the nation. Geared for students, this book contains chapters devoted to the background and history of foster care in America; the systems’s problems, controversies, and solutions; original essay contributions exploring various facets of the system; profiles of leading foster care activists and organizations; governmental data and excerpts of primary documents on the topic; and an annotated list of important books, scholarly journals, and nonprint sources for further research. It closes with a detailed chronology, glossary of terms, and subject index.

Svetlana Alexandrova

The paper analyses the potential of the online environment for obtaining empirical data. It discusses the positive and the negative aspects of their use in scientific research and attempts to highlight the challenges of using social media for empirical data collection. Facebook and its growing levels of consumption attracts research interest because it facilitates recruitment of respondents, saves considerable money, time and effort, and opens access to hard-to-reach populations and highly engaged citizens in a variety of topics. At the same time, the use of online space for empirical data collection remains problematic in terms of representativeness, accessibility and security. The article briefly describes the process of recruiting Facebook respondents to participate in an online survey - a post-election study. The analysis of the results clearly shows the outreach, based on convenience sampling, to an online sample that is characterized by high interest in political issues, active communication practices, variety of information sources used, well-established practices of civic activism and participation in elections, relatively stable party affiliation and consistency in political orientation.

Petr Kolychev

The article deals with the idea of the city as the independent actor in the “Crepuscule” film. The author states that: 1) the screening time, showing the city 2) the city has an impact to the other actors, when it interacts with them, giving its reactions, 3) there are city close-ups in the film, when the whole screen shows the city, 4) these city-only close-ups are based on the narrative of the film, 5) symmetry (similarity) of images of the main characters achieved by using the same means of their presentation. The city is the quintessence of culture. The culture has been researched with the help of the activity concept, so the idea of aggressiveness of culture is important. The culture is hostile to the part of spiritual life, which is not connected to the material consumption sphere. This spiritual side of the personality has another way for the implementation in the city. This way is livoli.

Lucas Skora, Helen Senefonte, Myriam Delgado et al.

A better understanding of the behavior of tourists is strategic for improving services in the competitive and important economic segment of global tourism. Critical studies in the literature often explore the issue using traditional data, such as questionnaires or interviews. Traditional approaches provide precious information; however, they impose challenges to obtaining large-scale data, making it hard to study worldwide patterns. Location-based social networks (LBSNs) can potentially mitigate such issues due to the relatively low cost of acquiring large amounts of behavioral data. Nevertheless, before using such data for studying tourists' behavior, it is necessary to verify whether the information adequately reveals the behavior measured with traditional data -- considered the ground truth. Thus, the present work investigates in which countries the global tourism network measured with an LBSN agreeably reflects the behavior estimated by the World Tourism Organization using traditional methods. Although we could find exceptions, the results suggest that, for most countries, LBSN data can satisfactorily represent the behavior studied. We have an indication that, in countries with high correlations between results obtained from both datasets, LBSN data can be used in research regarding the mobility of the tourists in the studied context.

Lucio La Cava, Andrea Tagarelli

Decentralized Online Social Networks (DOSNs) represent a growing trend in the social media landscape, as opposed to the well-known centralized peers, which are often in the spotlight due to privacy concerns and a vision typically focused on monetization through user relationships. By exploiting open-source software, DOSNs allow users to create their own servers, or instances, thus favoring the proliferation of platforms that are independent yet interconnected with each other in a transparent way. Nonetheless, the resulting cooperation model, commonly known as the Fediverse, still represents a world to be fully discovered, since existing studies have mainly focused on a limited number of structural aspects of interest in DOSNs. In this work, we aim to fill a lack of study on user relations and roles in DOSNs, by taking two main actions: understanding the impact of decentralization on how users relate to each other within their membership instance and/or across different instances, and unveiling user roles that can explain two interrelated axes of social behavioral phenomena, namely information consumption and boundary spanning. To this purpose, we build our analysis on user networks from Mastodon, since it represents the most widely used DOSN platform. We believe that the findings drawn from our study on Mastodon users' roles and information flow can pave a way for further development of fascinating research on DOSNs.

Ronak Doshi, Ajay Ramesh Ranganathan, Shrisha Rao

Social media are extensively used in today's world, and facilitate quick and easy sharing of information, which makes them a good way to advertise products. Influencers of a social media network, owing to their massive popularity, provide a huge potential customer base. However, it is not straightforward to decide which influencers should be selected for an advertizing campaign that can generate high returns with low investment. In this work, we present an agent-based model (ABM) that can simulate the dynamics of influencer advertizing campaigns in a variety of scenarios and can help to discover the best influencer marketing strategy. Our system is a probabilistic graph-based model that provides the additional advantage to incorporate real-world factors such as customers' interest in a product, customer behavior, the willingness to pay, a brand's investment cap, influencers' engagement with influence diffusion, and the nature of the product being advertized viz. luxury and non-luxury. Using customer acquisition cost and conversion ratio as a unit economic, we evaluate the performance of different kinds of influencers under a variety of circumstances that are simulated by varying the nature of the product and the customers' interest. Our results exemplify the circumstance-dependent nature of influencer marketing and provide insight into which kinds of influencers would be a better strategy under respective circumstances. For instance, we show that as the nature of the product varies from luxury to non-luxury, the performance of celebrities declines whereas the performance of nano-influencers improves. In terms of the customers' interest, we find that the performance of nano-influencers declines with the decrease in customers' interest whereas the performance of celebrities improves.

Mubbasher Hassan, Dr. Hafiz Muhammad Sajjad

The present age is again reflecting the conditions of the sixth century AD. The Prophet of Islam, peace and blessings be upon him, created a historic and unprecedented revolution. And human history is a witness that the best time of all times is when the Muslim Ummah follows its great Prophet, the Prophet of Mercy and spending days and nights in it. As time passed by, the Muslim Ummah began to suffer from negligence in following its beloved Prophet (peace be upon him), due to which every coming time began to present a severe situation. The most important social problems that are being faced today are corruption, lack of trust in Allah. Lack of Trust and turning away from following the Prophet (PBUH), usury, proselytizing, intellectual, practical, and moral decline and terrorism, deterioration of family system, bad culture, bad peace and bad order, restlessness and mental pressure, materialism etc. are important. In every era, the thinkers had the pain of the Ummah, made efforts to reform it. Sheikh e Silsila Naqshbandiyya Owaisiya and Ameer Tanzeem Al-Ikhwan, Maulana Muhammad Akram Awan (R.A), is one of the great thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who offered their services in every field of life. In this Article, solution of such Problems in the light of the thoughts of Maulana Muhammad Akram Awan are discussed.

Fan He, Yongnan Zhu, Shan Jiang

Abstract This chapter systematically reviews the development history of water resources management in China at different historical stages. The current mode of water resources management in China, its achievements and main problems are emphatically analyzed. This chapter also analyzes the main challenges facing the current and future water resources security, integrating the background of China’s national conditions, water conditions, economic and social development, and puts forward the reform and innovation direction of China’s future comprehensive water resources management.