Hasil untuk "Social sciences (General)"

Xiaofeng Su, Xiaoli Jiang, Anxin Xu

In China, the implementation of the rural revitalization strategy provides a broad stage for migrant workers to return home to start their own businesses. This study constructs a research framework of “competence – legitimacy – performance.” Through online and offline surveys, this study obtained 477 valid samples from new family farm entrepreneurs in Fujian province of China. By using structural equation model, this study explores the relationship between entrepreneurial competence and family farm entrepreneurial performance. The empirical analysis results show that all the five dimensions of family farm entrepreneurs’ entrepreneurial competence, namely, opportunity recognition competence, network competence, resource acquisition competence, entrepreneurial learning competence, and improvisational competence have positive impacts on family farm entrepreneurial performance. And organizational legitimacy also has a positive impact on family farm entrepreneurial performance. In addition, the mediating effect of organizational legitimacy in opportunity recognition competence, network competence, resource acquisition competence, entrepreneurial learning competence, and family farm entrepreneurial performance are supported by data. However, organizational legitimacy does not play a significant mediating role in the relationship between improvisational competence and family farm entrepreneurial performance. The research findings provide some enlightenment and reflections to family farm entrepreneurs and policy-makers.

Pratyusha Kiran

Streamlined production and innovative retail strategies have enabled the fashion industry to experience rapid growth in recent decades, with its complex global supply chain posing serious environmental and social sustainability challenges. Policymakers and advocacy groups have been demanding a transition toward a sustainable fashion system as awareness about the impact of this industry continues to rise. Although multiple initiatives and alternative business models have emerged in the sociotechnical system of fashion, a sustainable transition in this sector has not yet been realized. Conversely, the fashion system exhibits indications of being locked into unsustainable practices. This article aims to understand the barriers preventing the transition of the fashion industry to a sustainable system from the perspective of the actors within the supply chain. Ethnographic interviews with manufacturers and industry experts in India are leveraged to understand the challenges within the supply chain that are reinforcing the unsustainable practices in this industry. This article highlights the perspective of a developing country in the sustainability discourse. The interview analysis demonstrates that in fashion, brands implement various methods to attain sustainability through certifications or compliance standards in the manufacturing regions while lacking an understanding of local circumstances and contexts. This article argues that the disconnect between certifications and their implementation reinforces unsustainable behaviors in the supply chain instead of addressing them. Furthermore, it asserts that compliance efforts should steer away from the Western definition of sustainability and pivot toward sustainability strategies grounded in the local context of the manufacturing country.

N. Trifonov

The aim of this study is to attempt to define the content of the concept of food self-sufficiency as a determining factor in the modern concept of food security. The following methods were applied: functional analysis, comparative analysis, and communicative approach. For the first time, the essence and qualitative characteristics of the fundamental concept in food studies –food self-sufficiency –are defined. The essence and functions of food self-sufficiency are clarified. In contemporary conditions, food self-sufficiency appears to be a basic factor for the sustainable development of any society, state, and nation. Revealing its role and significance is a topical problem of scientific-theoretical research not only in the field of food studies but also in the social sciences.

Mohammad Nazrul Islam Khan, Nahid Fatima

The present paper aims to study the complete, horizontal and diagonal lifts of metallic structures in the cotangent bundle. Furthermore, the Nijenhuis tensor of a metallic structure is calculated and its integrability conditions by means of partial differential equations are established.

Stephen Scarano, Vijayalakshmi Vasudevan, Mattia Samory et al.

Social media platforms allow users to create polls to gather public opinion on diverse topics. However, we know little about what such polls are used for and how reliable they are, especially in significant contexts like elections. Focusing on the 2020 presidential elections in the U.S., this study shows that outcomes of election polls on Twitter deviate from election results despite their prevalence. Leveraging demographic inference and statistical analysis, we find that Twitter polls are disproportionately authored by older males and exhibit a large bias towards candidate Donald Trump relative to representative mainstream polls. We investigate potential sources of biased outcomes from the point of view of inauthentic, automated, and counter-normative behavior. Using social media experiments and interviews with poll authors, we identify inconsistencies between public vote counts and those privately visible to poll authors, with the gap potentially attributable to purchased votes. We also find that Twitter accounts participating in election polls are more likely to be bots, and election poll outcomes tend to be more biased, before the election day than after. Finally, we identify instances of polls spreading voter fraud conspiracy theories and estimate that a couple thousand of such polls were posted in 2020. The study discusses the implications of biased election polls in the context of transparency and accountability of social media platforms.

Suparna De, Ionut Bostan, Nishanth Sastry

Recent studies have outlined the accessibility challenges faced by blind or visually impaired, and less-literate people, in interacting with social networks, in-spite of facilitating technologies such as monotone text-to-speech (TTS) screen readers and audio narration of visual elements such as emojis. Emotional speech generation traditionally relies on human input of the expected emotion together with the text to synthesise, with additional challenges around data simplification (causing information loss) and duration inaccuracy, leading to lack of expressive emotional rendering. In real-life communications, the duration of phonemes can vary since the same sentence might be spoken in a variety of ways depending on the speakers' emotional states or accents (referred to as the one-to-many problem of text to speech generation). As a result, an advanced voice synthesis system is required to account for this unpredictability. We propose an end-to-end context-aware Text-to-Speech (TTS) synthesis system that derives the conveyed emotion from text input and synthesises audio that focuses on emotions and speaker features for natural and expressive speech, integrating advanced natural language processing (NLP) and speech synthesis techniques for real-time applications. Our system also showcases competitive inference time performance when benchmarked against the state-of-the-art TTS models, making it suitable for real-time accessibility applications.

Hasan Pasalari, Angila Ataei-Pirkooh, Mitra Gholami et al.

The surveillance of wastewater treatment plant (WWTP) as the end point of SARS-CoV-2 shed from infected people arise a speculation on transmission of this virus of concern from WWTP in epidemic period. To this end, the present study was developed to comprehensively investigate the presence of SARS-CoV-2 in raw wastewater, effluent and air inhaled by workers and employee in the largest WWTP in Tehran for one-year study period. The monthly raw wastewater, effluent and air samples of WWTP were taken and the SARS-CoV-2 RNA were detected using QIAamp Viral RNA Mini Kit and real-time RT-PCR assay. According to results, the speculation on the presence of SARS-CoV-2 was proved in WWTP by detection this virus in raw wastewater. However, no SARS-CoV-2 was found in both effluent and air of WWTP; this presents the low or no infection for workers and employee in WWTP. Furthermore, further research are needed for detection the SARS-CoV-2 in solid and biomass produced from WWTP processes due to flaks formation, followed by sedimentation in order to better understand the wastewater-based epidemiology and preventive measurement for other epidemics probably encountered in the future.

Blanca Johanna Pérez Fernández, Diana Patricia Franco Campos, Nancy Marittza Oliveros Dávila

Team management is a fundamental process for achieving the objectives set in the project lifecycle. It is relevant that it be analyzed in contexts where team performance is of utmost importance for achieving institutional objectives. Higher Education Institutions (HEIs), where various types of projects are developed, and in research processes, were the scope of this work, in which evidence from bodies of knowledge regarding project team management was contrasted with its application in research project management. A qualitative approach was used through interviews with research professors who carry out research projects within the framework of developing work plans and management indicators. The research was structured in three parts: 1) it contains the theoretical foundation around project management models, in order to draw up a matrix to identify common elements that should structure team management in projects; 2) the analysis of the information collected from interviews conducted with research professors from two Higher Education Institutions, and 3) contains a proposed conceptual model for the management of research project teams in HEIs. The guidelines and methodologies for project team management at HEIs show that institutional policies for this purpose are not fully consistent with practice in the development and execution of research projects.

Hayeong Song, Zhengyang Qi, John Stasko et al.

Social media (i.e., Reddit) users are overloaded with people's opinions when viewing discourses about divisive topics. Traditional user interfaces in such media present those opinions in a linear structure, which can limit users in viewing diverse social opinions at scale. Prior work has recognized this limitation, that the linear structure can reinforce biases, where a certain point of view becomes widespread simply because many viewers seem to believe it. This limitation can make it difficult for users to have a truly conversational mode of mediated discussion. Thus, when designing a user interface for viewing people's opinions, we should consider ways to mitigate selective exposure to information and polarization of opinions. We conducted a needs-finding study with 11 Reddit users, who follow climate change threads and make posts and comments regularly. In the study, we aimed to understand key limitations in people viewing online controversial discourses and to extract design implications to address these problems. Our findings discuss potential future directions to address these problems.

Betül Kodaş, Zekeriya Aksoy

Memorable food experiences are an important factor in both the tourism business and destination marketers and managers attracting not only current tourists but also potential tourists. Recently, several studies have been performed to explore or understand memorable food experiences, as food experiences are a crucial indicator of tourist behavioural intentions and satisfaction. Thus, the purpose of the current study is to understand tourists’ memorable local food experiences, food experience satisfaction, and behavioural intentions. Accordingly, data was collected through online reviews (424) posted about tourists’ memorable local food experiences in Gaziantep between 9 April 2021 and 29 May 2021. A phenomenological approach and content analysis technique were used to analyse the data. In the results of the present study, a theoretical model of memorable local food experiences (MLFEs) was developed with six key components: novelty, hospitality and services, taste and food attributes, togetherness and local interactions, ambience and setting, and local culture. In addition, tourists’ food experience satisfaction and behavioural intentions were found to be positive while experiencing regional local food. Based on the results of this study, practical and managerial implications are discussed, and future research recommendations are proposed.

Nouamane Arhachoui, Esteban Bautista, Maximilien Danisch et al.

Measuring the influence of users in social networks is key for numerous applications. A recently proposed influence metric, coined as $ψ$-score, allows to go beyond traditional centrality metrics, which only assess structural graph importance, by further incorporating the rich information provided by the posting and re-posting activity of users. The $ψ$-score is shown in fact to generalize PageRank for non-homogeneous node activity. Despite its significance, it scales poorly to large datasets; for a network of $N$ users, it requires to solve $N$ linear systems of equations of size $N$. To address this problem, this work introduces a novel scalable algorithm for the fast approximation of $ψ$-score, named \textit{Power}-$ψ$. The proposed algorithm is based on a novel equation indicating that it suffices to solve one system of equations of size $N$ to compute the $ψ$-score. Then, our algorithm exploits the fact that such a system can be recursively and distributedly approximated to any desired error. This permits the $ψ$-score, summarizing both structural and behavioral information for the nodes, to run as fast as PageRank. We validate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm, which we release as an open source Python library, on several real-world datasets.

Johannes Jakubik, Michael Vössing, Dominik Bär et al.

The storming of the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021 has led to the killing of 5 people and is widely regarded as an attack on democracy. The storming was largely coordinated through social media networks such as Parler. Yet little is known regarding how users interacted on Parler during the storming of the Capitol. In this work, we examine the emotion dynamics on Parler during the storming with regard to heterogeneity across time and users. For this, we segment the user base into different groups (e.g., Trump supporters and QAnon supporters). We use affective computing (Kratzwald et al. 2018) to infer the emotions in the contents, thereby allowing us to provide a comprehensive assessment of online emotions. Our evaluation is based on a large-scale dataset from Parler, comprising of 717,300 posts from 144,003 users. We find that the user base responded to the storming of the Capitol with an overall negative sentiment. Akin to this, Trump supporters also expressed a negative sentiment and high levels of unbelief. In contrast to that, QAnon supporters did not express a more negative sentiment during the storming. We further provide a cross-platform analysis and compare the emotion dynamics on Parler and Twitter. Our findings point at a comparatively less negative response to the incidents on Parler compared to Twitter accompanied by higher levels of disapproval and outrage. Our contribution to research is three-fold: (1) We identify online emotions that were characteristic of the storming; (2) we assess emotion dynamics across different user groups on Parler; (3) we compare the emotion dynamics on Parler and Twitter. Thereby, our work offers important implications for actively managing online emotions to prevent similar incidents in the future.

R. I. M. Dunbar, Valerio Arnaboldi, Marco Conti et al.

We use data on frequencies of bi-directional posts to define edges (or relationships) in two Facebook datasets and a Twitter dataset and use these to create ego-centric social networks. We explore the internal structure of these networks to determine whether they have the same kind of layered structure as has been found in offline face-to-face networks (which have a distinctively scaled structure with successively inclusive layers at 5, 15, 50 and 150 alters). The two Facebook datasets are best described by a four-layer structure and the Twitter dataset by a five-layer structure. The absolute sizes of these layers and the mean frequencies of contact with alters within each layer match very closely the observed values from offline networks. In addition, all three datasets reveal the existence of an innermost network layer at ~1.5 alters. Our analyses thus confirm the existence of the layered structure of ego-centric social networks with a very much larger sample (in total, >185,000 egos) than those previously used to describe them, as well as identifying the existence of an additional network layer whose existence was only hypothesised in offline social networks. In addition, our analyses indicate that online communities have very similar structural characteristics to offline face-to-face networks.

Lori Bradford

M. A. Barchiesi, A. Fronzetti Colladon

This study uses an innovative measure, the Semantic Brand Score, to assess the interest of stakeholders in different company core values. Among others, we focus on corporate social responsibility (CSR) core value statements, and on the attention they receive from five categories of stakeholders (customers, company communication teams, employees, associations and media). Combining big data methods and tools of Social Network Analysis and Text Mining, we analyzed about 58,000 Italian tweets and found that different stakeholders have different prevailing interests. CSR gets much less attention than expected. Core values related to customers and employees are in the foreground.

P. A. Gloor, A. Fronzetti Colladon, F. Grippa et al.

The purpose of this study is to examine the impact of board member composition and board members' social media presence on the performance of startups. Using multiple sources, we compile a unique dataset of about 500 US-based technology startups. We find that startups with more venture capitalists on the board and whose board members are active on Twitter attract additional funding over the years, though they do not generate additional sales. By contrast, startups which have no venture capitalists on the board and whose board members are not on Twitter show an increased ability to translate assets into sales. Consistent with other research, our results indicate that startups potentially benefit from working with VCs because of the opportunity to access additional funding, although their presence does not necessarily translate into sales growth and operational efficiency. We use a number of control variables, including board gender representation and board members' position in the interlocking directorates' network.

Tafadzwa Kaseke, Umezuruike Linus Opara, Olaniyi Amos Fawole

Fruit seed is a by-product of fruit processing into juice and other products. Despite being treated as waste, fruit seed contains oil with health benefits comparable or even higher than the conventional seed oil from field crops. In addition to essential fatty acids, the fruit seed oil is a rich source of bioactive compounds such as tocopherols, carotenoids, flavonoids, phenolic acids and phytosterols, which have been implicated in the prevention of chronic and degenerative diseases such as cancer, diabetes and cardiovascular diseases. The emerging potential of fruit seed oil application in food and nutraceuticals has prompted researchers to study the effect of preharvest and processing factors on the seed oil quality with respect to nutritional qualities, antioxidant compounds and properties. Herein, the effect of cultivar, fruit-growing region, seeds pretreatment, seeds drying and seed oil extraction on tocopherols, polyphenols, phytosterols, carotenoids, fatty acids, antioxidant activity and oxidative stability of the fruit seed oil is critically discussed. Understanding the influence of these factors on seed oil bioactive phytochemicals, nutritional qualities and antioxidant properties is critical not only for genetically improving the oilseeds plants with desired characteristics, but also in seed oil processing and value addition. Therefore, preharvest and processing factors are essential considerations when determining the application of fruit seed oil.

Mindoso, André Victorino

O artigo se propõe a compreender a construção da narrativa ambientalista global e o lugar que o continente africano nela ocupa. Para o efeito, analisa documentos produzidos pelas Nações Unidas (ONU) e União Africana, entre 1972 e 2002, e que versam sobre a questão do desenvolvimento, natureza e meio ambiente. Os resultados da análise indicam que a dita narrativa obrigava os países a incorporarem a dimensão ambiental em suas políticas desenvolvimentistas. Dada a situação de pobreza dominante em África, contudo, o continente era encarado como incapaz de preservar a natureza, ao que deveria estar sob a tutela de países do norte-global. Sugeria-se que estes, por via da expansão de seu capital econômico e assistencialismo técnico, seriam capazes de eliminar a pobreza dos africanos e, consequentemente, os impediriam de agredir a natureza. Essa situação, contudo, conflitava com a agenda desenvolvimentista africana iniciada no pós-independência, e que via na exploração da natureza o caminho pelo qual alcançaria a sua emancipação econômica

Arkadiusz Jędrzejewski, Bartłomiej Nowak, Angelika Abramiuk et al.

Motivated by the empirical study that identifies a correlation between particular social responses and different interaction ranges, we study the $q$-voter model with various combinations of local and global sources of conformity and anticonformity. The models are investigated by means of the pair approximation and Monte Carlo simulations on Watts-Strogatz and Barabási-Albert networks. We show that within the model with local conformity and global anticonformity, the agreement in the system is the most difficult to achieve, and the role of the network structure is the most significant. Interestingly, the model with swapped interaction ranges, namely with global conformity and local anticonformity, becomes almost insensitive to the changes in the network structure. The obtained results may have far reaching consequences for marketing strategies conducted via social media channels.

Verónica Ruiz-Lagier

This work is a reflection on the accelerated linguistic displacement that exists in two chuje communities: San Lorenzo and Nuevo Porvenir, located in the border municipality of La Trinitaria, Chiapas. My interest is to reflect on the social and institutional context that generates discrimination towards the Chuj population. We reflect on the urgency of implementing teaching models that strengthen cultural identity, and that generate collective knowledge from the ontological perspective chuj called junk'olal.