Finding the optimal subset of individuals to observe in order to obtain the best estimate of the average opinion of a society is a crucial problem in a wide range of applications, including policy-making, strategic business decisions, and the analysis of sociological trends. We consider the opinion vector X to be updated according to a DeGroot opinion dynamical model with stubborn agents, subject to perturbations from external random noise, which can be interpreted as transmission errors. The objective function of the optimization problem is the variance reduction achieved by observing the equilibrium opinions of a subset K of agents. We demonstrate that, under this specific setting, the objective function exhibits the property of submodularity. This allows us to effectively design a Greedy Algorithm to solve the problem, significantly reducing its computational complexity. Simple examples are provided to validate our results.
Cities are the frontiers of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) adopted in the United Nations 2030 Agenda. Although quantitative methods have been applied to assess cities’ sustainability progress, knowledge gaps exist in the differences between inland and coastal cities’ performance and their internal variations against common standards. Using the Voronoi-based kaleidoscope diagram embedded in two circular plots, the article visualises the overall sustainability progress of China’s inland and coastal cities in economy, society, biosphere and partnership. By measuring overall progress with circular length and individual scores with kaleidoscope area size, triple inland-coastal gaps and trifold intracoastal inequalities were highlighted, as well as city types characterised by economy-society balance and land–sea relation. References for implementing sustainable development transformations for coastal cities were derived, along with the circular-kaleidoscope diagram’s potential for checking the pulse of cities’ performances in further uses and finishing the circle.
Regional economics. Space in economics, Regional planning
Глобальные влияния и местные условия формируют разнообразные культурные идентичности и становится важным иметь надежные инструменты для их измерения. Целью исследования является измерение глобально-локальных отношений, отражающие различные аспекты культурной динамики, формирующей молодежную идентичность в Казахстане, на основе оптимизированной и адаптированной шкалы глобальной идентичностей GIS.
Научная и практическая значимость: Поскольку глобальные влияния проникают в локальные пространства, они меняют традиционные структуры и отношения, вызывая необходимость в надежных методологиях, которые могут уловить нюансы этих преобразований. Такие измерения позволяют исследователям и практикам лучше понимать и решать конкретные потребности и проблемы, с которыми сталкивается эта демографическая группа в быстро глобализирующемся мире.
Методология: исследование оптимизирует и адаптирует GIS для изучения культурных предпочтений казахстанской студенческой молодежи. Данные собраны опросным методом. Участники отобраны равными соотношениями из двух групп: этнически гомогенные (казахи, N 225) и гетерогенные (другие, N225). Проанализированы всего 426 случаев в программе IBM SPSS. Для охвата разных ориентаций идентичности на основе GIS созданы конструкции "глобалисты", "локалисты", "глокалисты" и "негативисты".
Основные результаты, анализ и выводы: Анализ данных с использованием парных t-тестов показал, что большинство утверждений показывают статистически значимые различия между оценками глобалистов и локалистов. Результаты отражают преобладание глобализма, но с сохранением традиционных локальных идентичностей. Это сочетание говорит о поколенческом сдвиге к глобальной идентичности, независимо от этнической принадлежности. В целом, это исследование вносит ценный вклад в продолжающийся дискурс о глобальной и местной идентичности, особенно в постколониальном контексте, таком как - Казахстан, расширяя академическое понимание динамики культурной идентичности.
Практическое значение: исследование предоставляет значимую информацию для будущих исследованй, которые смогут расширяться за счет панельных исследований для отслеживания изменений в восприятии идентичности более широкого круга молодежи со временем, особенно в ответ на глобальные события или национальные изменения в политике.
Ключевые слова: глобальные и местные отношения, конструкт идентичностей, өлшей, GIS, студенты.
Paul DiMaggio's (1997) Annual Review of Sociology article urged integration of the cognitive and the cultural, triggering a cognitive turn in cultural sociology. Since then, a burgeoning literature in cultural sociology has incorporated ideas from the cognitive sciences—cognitive anthropology, cognitive psychology, linguistics, neuroscience and philosophy—significantly reshaping sociologists’ approach to culture, both theoretically and methodologically. This article reviews work published since DiMaggio's agenda-setting piece—research that builds on cross-disciplinary links between cultural sociology and the cognitive sciences. These works present new ideas on the acquisition, storage, and retrieval of culture, on how forms of personal culture interact, on how culture becomes shared, and on how social interaction and cultural environments inform cognitive processes. Within our discussion, we point to research questions that remain unsettled. We then conclude with issues for future research in culture and cognition that can enrich sociological analysis about action more generally.
Quotation extraction is a widely useful task both from a sociological and from a Natural Language Processing perspective. However, very little data is available to study this task in languages other than English. In this paper, we present a manually annotated corpus of 1676 newswire texts in French for quotation extraction and source attribution. We first describe the composition of our corpus and the choices that were made in selecting the data. We then detail the annotation guidelines and annotation process, as well as a few statistics about the final corpus and the obtained balance between quote types (direct, indirect and mixed, which are particularly challenging). We end by detailing our inter-annotator agreement between the 8 annotators who worked on manual labelling, which is substantially high for such a difficult linguistic phenomenon.
Pranav Narayanan Venkit, Mukund Srinath, Sanjana Gautam
et al.
We conduct an inquiry into the sociotechnical aspects of sentiment analysis (SA) by critically examining 189 peer-reviewed papers on their applications, models, and datasets. Our investigation stems from the recognition that SA has become an integral component of diverse sociotechnical systems, exerting influence on both social and technical users. By delving into sociological and technological literature on sentiment, we unveil distinct conceptualizations of this term in domains such as finance, government, and medicine. Our study exposes a lack of explicit definitions and frameworks for characterizing sentiment, resulting in potential challenges and biases. To tackle this issue, we propose an ethics sheet encompassing critical inquiries to guide practitioners in ensuring equitable utilization of SA. Our findings underscore the significance of adopting an interdisciplinary approach to defining sentiment in SA and offer a pragmatic solution for its implementation.
The COVID-19 pandemic prompted global supply chain upheavals, triggering shortages and delays. Governments and companies sought resilient strategies for future crises. A US response was "nearshoring," shifting manufacturing from China to Mexico. Analyzing trade data from 2019 to 2023, this study examines if this shift occurred and its sectoral impact. Both countries initially rebounded post-Q1 2020 disruptions. However, China's exports waned, while Mexico's surged, surpassing China by March 2023. Sectors like machinery and electrical components showed similar trends. Mexico excelled in US supply, while China's dominance eroded, affirming the nearshoring hypothesis. Proximity significantly bolstered long-term supply chain resilience.
Transportation and communications, Urban groups. The city. Urban sociology
Abstract The discipline is at a crossroads. Will sociology answer ASA past president Aldon Morris' call for an emancipatory sociology? Or will sociology, as Morris puts it, “continue pretending to be an aloof, objective, detached science”? Recently, Hirschman and Garbes issued a call for an economic sociology of race, wherein they contend that race and racism are not central to economic sociology and that economic sociologists don't engage with contemporary race scholarship. In this paper, I assess and build upon their call. I argue that while the article importantly calls for understanding race and racism in economic sociology, in practice, it—used here as an example of a broader pattern within economic sociology—re‐centers whiteness and men, reifies elitism, and erases marginalized scholars and their contributions. I set forth an alternative perspective. To rise to the Du Boisian challenge, scholars need to critique racialized modernity as Itzigsohn and Brown importantly argue. We must also root our sociological consciousness, citation practices, and conversations in existing, yet marginalized, research. Failure to do so means future research risks reproducing inequities in the discipline and continuing to marginalize the very people, theories, and research that an emancipatory sociology is meant to address.
Code-switching, or switching between languages, occurs for many reasons and has important linguistic, sociological, and cultural implications. Multilingual speakers code-switch for a variety of purposes, such as expressing emotions, borrowing terms, making jokes, introducing a new topic, etc. The reason for code-switching may be quite useful for analysis, but is not readily apparent. To remedy this situation, we annotate a new dataset of motivations for code-switching in Spanish-English. We build the first system (to our knowledge) to automatically identify a wide range of motivations that speakers code-switch in everyday speech, achieving an accuracy of 75% across all motivations. Additionally, we show that the system can be adapted to new language pairs, achieving 66% accuracy on a new language pair (Hindi-English), demonstrating the cross-lingual applicability of our annotation scheme