Hasil untuk "Social sciences and state - Asia (Asian studies only)"

CAI Wei

Funeral traditions among the Miao people worldwide exhibit notable commonalities despite regional variations in form and ritual, collectively reflecting a shared Miao conception of personhood. A comparative analysis of the funeral rites and “Guiding scripture” of the Miao and Hmong peoples in the adjacent regions of Sichuan, Yunnan, and Guizhou reveals that, throughout their migrations, the Miao developed localized variations in funerary practice while maintaining a coherent cultural identity. Although dispersed across diverse regions, Miao communities retain overarching cultural continuities. What changes are their living environments and modes of cultural expression; what remains constant is the enduring sense of ethnic identity. This cultural lineage links Miao people across the globe, sustaining their collective identity, even as cultural transformations and evolving forms of self-identification continue to unfold amid changing times.

Masanori Takano, Kenji Yokotani, Takahiro Kato et al.

Online communication via avatars provides a richer online social experience than text communication. This reinforces the importance of online social support. Online social support is effective for people who lack social resources because of the anonymity of online communities. We aimed to understand online social support via avatars and their social relationships to provide better social support to avatar users. Therefore, we administered a questionnaire to three avatar communication service users (Second Life, ZEPETO, and Pigg Party) and three text communication service users (Facebook, X, and Instagram) (N=8,947). There was no duplication of users for each service. By comparing avatar and text communication users, we examined the amount of online social support, stability of online relationships, and the relationships between online social support and offline social resources (e.g., offline social support). We observed that avatar communication service users received more online social support, had more stable relationships, and had fewer offline social resources than text communication service users. However, the positive association between online and offline social support for avatar communication users was more substantial than for text communication users. These findings highlight the significance of realistic online communication experiences through avatars, including nonverbal and real-time interactions with co-presence. The findings also highlighted avatar communication service users' problems in the physical world, such as the lack of offline social resources. This study suggests that enhancing online social support through avatars can address these issues. This could help resolve social resource problems, both online and offline in future metaverse societies.

Ghazal Kalhor, Hannah Gardner, Ingmar Weber et al.

Online professional social networking platforms provide opportunities to expand networks strategically for job opportunities and career advancement. A large body of research shows that women's offline networks are less advantageous than men's. How online platforms such as LinkedIn may reflect or reproduce gendered networking behaviours, or how online social connectivity may affect outcomes differentially by gender is not well understood. This paper analyses aggregate, anonymised data from almost 10 million LinkedIn users in the UK and US information technology (IT) sector collected from the site's advertising platform to explore how being connected to Big Tech companies ('social connectivity') varies by gender, and how gender, age, seniority and social connectivity shape the propensity to report job promotions or relocations. Consistent with previous studies, we find there are fewer women compared to men on LinkedIn in IT. Furthermore, female users are less likely to be connected to Big Tech companies than men. However, when we further analyse recent promotion or relocation reports, we find women are more likely than men to have reported a recent promotion at work, suggesting high-achieving women may be self-selecting onto LinkedIn. Even among this positively selected group, though, we find men are more likely to report a recent relocation. Social connectivity emerges as a significant predictor of promotion and relocation reports, with an interaction effect between gender and social connectivity indicating the payoffs to social connectivity for promotion and relocation reports are larger for women. This suggests that online networking has the potential for larger impacts for women, who experience greater disadvantage in traditional networking contexts, and calls for further research to understand differential impacts of online networking for socially disadvantaged groups.

Amar Khelloufi, Huansheng Ning, Abdenacer Naouri et al.

The Social Internet of Things (SIoT), is revolutionizing how we interact with our everyday lives. By adding the social dimension to connecting devices, the SIoT has the potential to drastically change the way we interact with smart devices. This connected infrastructure allows for unprecedented levels of convenience, automation, and access to information, allowing us to do more with less effort. However, this revolutionary new technology also brings an eager need for service recommendation systems. As the SIoT grows in scope and complexity, it becomes increasingly important for businesses and individuals, and SIoT objects alike to have reliable sources for products, services, and information that are tailored to their specific needs. Few works have been proposed to provide service recommendations for SIoT environments. However, these efforts have been confined to only focusing on modeling user-item interactions using contextual information, devices' SIoT relationships, and correlation social groups but these schemes do not account for latent semantic item-item structures underlying the sparse multi-modal contents in SIoT environment. In this paper, we propose a latent-based SIoT recommendation system that learns item-item structures and aggregates multiple modalities to obtain latent item graphs which are then used in graph convolutions to inject high-order affinities into item representations. Experiments showed that the proposed recommendation system outperformed state-of-the-art SIoT recommendation methods and validated its efficacy at mining latent relationships from multi-modal features.

NOORASIAH SULAIMAN, MUKARAMAH HARUN, ARIEF ANSHORY YUSUF

Large allocations for fuel subsidies have long put the Government of Malaysia’s budget under great strain. Using a computable general equilibrium (CGE) model, this paper evaluates the impact of fuel subsidy rationalization on sectoral output and employment. Employment is classified into occupational categories and skill levels. Fuel subsidies were measured using the disaggregation of prices for petrol, diesel, and other fuel products. Findings show that removing fuel subsidies would hit economic performance through high input costs, specifically for industries closely attached to the petroleum refinery sector. The manufacturing sector has the largest reduction in output and employment. Nevertheless, high- and medium-skilled labor forces experience increased demand. To increase economic efficiency, the savings from the removal of fuel subsidies should be put toward policies such as sales tax reduction. This study provides useful information for policy makers in evaluating or updating current subsidy policies to reduce economic losses.

Satomi Miura

El presente trabajo expone un panorama de intercambios culturales entre Japón y América Latina en el campo de las artes escénicas, sobre todo en relación con la danza butoh en el siglo XXI. En varios países latinoamericanos, especialmente en México, Brasil, Chile, Ecuador y Argentina, se introdujeron nuevas formas estéticas de la «danza de la oscuridad» japonesa, que rompían el concepto «occidental» de la danza. Este fenómeno, desarrollado por intercambio de los bailarines y maestros, acarreó cierta «hibridación» dancística de diversas maneras. Al mismo tiempo, contribuyó a crear un espacio contracultural en las artes escénicas, vinculado con las situaciones sociales de cada país. El presente trabajo muestra la historia y la hibridación de la danza butoh en América Latina, analizando diversos elementos artísticos y contextuales.

Santanu Acharjee, Akhil Thomas Panicker

In this paper, we study trust levels in social networks from the perspective of Dunbar's number.

Jaehyuk Park, Bogdan State, Monica Bhole et al.

Due to their essential role as places for socialization, "third places" - social places where people casually visit and communicate with friends and neighbors - have been studied by a wide range of fields including network science, sociology, geography, urban planning, and regional studies. However, the lack of a large-scale census on third places kept researchers from systematic investigations. Here we provide a systematic nationwide investigation of third places and their social networks, by using Facebook pages. Our analysis reveals a large degree of geographic heterogeneity in the distribution of the types of third places, which is highly correlated with baseline demographics and county characteristics. Certain types of pages like "Places of Worship" demonstrate a large degree of clustering suggesting community preference or potential complementarities to concentration. We also found that the social networks of different types of social place differ in important ways: The social networks of 'Restaurants' and 'Indoor Recreation' pages are more likely to be tight-knit communities of pre-existing friendships whereas 'Places of Worship' and 'Community Amenities' page categories are more likely to bridge new friendship ties. We believe that this study can serve as an important milestone for future studies on the systematic comparative study of social spaces and their social relationships.

Martin Saveski, Farshad Kooti, Sylvia Morelli Vitousek et al.

People assume different and important roles within social networks. Some roles have received extensive study: that of influencers who are well-connected, and that of brokers who bridge unconnected parts of the network. However, very little work has explored another potentially important role, that of creating opportunities for people to interact and facilitating conversation between them. These individuals bring people together and act as social catalysts. In this paper, we test for the presence of social catalysts on the online social network Facebook. We first identify posts that have spurred conversations between the poster's friends and summarize the characteristics of such posts. We then aggregate the number of catalyzed comments at the poster level, as a measure of the individual's "catalystness." The top 1% of such individuals account for 31% of catalyzed interactions, although their network characteristics do not differ markedly from others who post as frequently and have a similar number of friends. By collecting survey data, we also validate the behavioral measure of catalystness: a person is more likely to be nominated as a social catalyst by their friends if their posts prompt discussions between other people more frequently. The measure, along with other conversation-related features, is one of the most predictive of a person being nominated as a catalyst. Although influencers and brokers may have gotten more attention for their network positions, our findings provide converging evidence that another important role exists and is recognized in online social networks.

Téa Sernelj

Proceeding from the inseparable relation between ethics and aesthetics in traditional (and often also modern) Chinese thought, this article aims to illuminate two important approaches to the aesthetic foundations of Chinese modernity. The relation between the individual and society, which is a core question of modern ethics, is reflected in most of the ethical theories of 20th century China. In this context, the article first presents Li Zehou’s theory of aesthetics and his definition of aesthetic experience. In this way, it aims to illuminate Li’s interpretation of modern art and society, and to posit it into a contrastive position to Xu Fuguan’s ethico-aesthetic theories, especially the ones regarding modernity and Western culture. The basic approaches applied by these two important modern Chinese scholars reveal great differences in attitude towards the spiritual and material development of humanity in the 20th century, which is especially interesting since they are both rooted in the abovementioned belief that ethics cannot be separated from aesthetics. Besides, Li Zehou sincerely admired Xu Fuguan’s work on traditional Chinese aesthetics and referred to his comprehension of general concepts of traditional Chinese aesthetics in many of his own works dealing with aesthetics.

Andreas Kotsios, Matteo Magnani, Luca Rossi et al.

This article examines the principles outlined in the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in the context of social network data. We provide both a practical guide to GDPR-compliant social network data processing, covering aspects such as data collection, consent, anonymization and data analysis, and a broader discussion of the problems emerging when the general principles on which the regulation is based are instantiated to this research area.

Salvatore Giorgi, Veronica Lynn, Keshav Gupta et al.

Social media is increasingly used for large-scale population predictions, such as estimating community health statistics. However, social media users are not typically a representative sample of the intended population -- a "selection bias". Within the social sciences, such a bias is typically addressed with restratification techniques, where observations are reweighted according to how under- or over-sampled their socio-demographic groups are. Yet, restratifaction is rarely evaluated for improving prediction. In this two-part study, we first evaluate standard, "out-of-the-box" restratification techniques, finding they provide no improvement and often even degraded prediction accuracies across four tasks of esimating U.S. county population health statistics from Twitter. The core reasons for degraded performance seem to be tied to their reliance on either sparse or shrunken estimates of each population's socio-demographics. In the second part of our study, we develop and evaluate Robust Poststratification, which consists of three methods to address these problems: (1) estimator redistribution to account for shrinking, as well as (2) adaptive binning and (3) informed smoothing to handle sparse socio-demographic estimates. We show that each of these methods leads to significant improvement in prediction accuracies over the standard restratification approaches. Taken together, Robust Poststratification enables state-of-the-art prediction accuracies, yielding a 53.0% increase in variance explained (R^2) in the case of surveyed life satisfaction, and a 17.8% average increase across all tasks.

Saad Alqithami, Musaad Alzahrani, Fahad Alghamdi et al.

The paper provides an understanding of social capital in organizations that are open membership multi-agent systems with an emphasis in our formulation on the dynamic network of social interaction that, in part, elucidate evolving structures and impromptu topologies of networks. This paper, therefore, models an open source project as an organizational network. It provides definitions of social capital for this organizational network and formulation of the mechanism to optimize the social capital for achieving its goal that is optimized productivity. A case study of an open source Apache-Hadoop project is considered and empirically evaluated. An analysis of how social capital can be created within this type of organizations and driven to a measurement for its value is provided. Finally, a verification on whether the social capital of the organizational network is proportional towards optimizing their productivity is considered.

Pablo Jensen

I give an overview of the topic of this special issue, the applications of (statistical) physics to social sciences at large. I discuss several examples of simple social models put forward by physicists and discuss their interest. I argue that while they may be conceptually useful to correct our intuitive models of social mechanisms, their relevance for real social systems is moot. What is more, since physicists have always needed to tame the world inside laboratories to make their models relevant, I suggest that social modeling might be linked to human taming, a smashing political project.

Laurenz A Cornelissen, Petrus Schoonwinkel, Richard J Barnett

Automated accounts on social media have become increasingly problematic. We propose a key feature in combination with existing methods to improve machine learning algorithms for bot detection. We successfully improve classification performance through including the proposed feature.

Young-Joo Lee, Jung-Hoon Lee, Kyung Sun Ham

The successful management of software (SW) projects is a continuous concern to managers, which is attributed to the contradictory demands that most projects are facing; meeting user requirements within time and budget limit while flexibly dealing risks during the progress of the projects. The present study asserts project performance and risk mitigation are not trade- off but to be achieved simultaneously, which is called SW project ambidexterity. Drawing on the literature on organizational behavior, hypotheses are developed speculating the relation among project performance, risk mitigation, team collective improvisation, team behavioral integration, and team diversity. Using empirical data collected from 102 SW project teams of 507 team members in South Korea, empirical analysis indicates team collective improvisation is a significant antecedent to SW project ambidexterity, playing a pivotal role to balance the contradictory demands. Furthermore, team behavioral integration positively influences the degree of team collective improvisation, and the magnitude of the relation is partially contingent on the team members’ age and major diversity. The present study advances theory by providing a context specific explanation about the SW project ambidexterity and its precedents.

Jan Gawron

Over the last few years ASEAN member states have begun collaborating more tightly in the tertiary education sector, which has led to a cooperation agreement with the European Union to help harmonize and lift the overall standard of tertiary education in the region. However, the broader question is - why is that the case? Education is not considered a classical field of regional integration, and this chapter seeks to analyze various sources - which include references from elitist circles, as well as the public sphere - in order to identify the motivation for cooperation in the education sector through qualitative content analysis. The analysis is based on a theoretical framework, which incorporates both a neofunctionalist approach and a norm diffusion approach which show that the predominant factors behind this cooperation process are economic.

Changtao Zhong, Hau-wen Chan, Dmytro Karamshuk et al.

This paper investigates when users create profiles in different social networks, whether they are redundant expressions of the same persona, or they are adapted to each platform. Using the personal webpages of 116,998 users on About.me, we identify and extract matched user profiles on several major social networks including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Instagram. We find evidence for distinct site-specific norms, such as differences in the language used in the text of the profile self-description, and the kind of picture used as profile image. By learning a model that robustly identifies the platform given a user's profile image (0.657--0.829 AUC) or self-description (0.608--0.847 AUC), we confirm that users do adapt their behaviour to individual platforms in an identifiable and learnable manner. However, different genders and age groups adapt their behaviour differently from each other, and these differences are, in general, consistent across different platforms. We show that differences in social profile construction correspond to differences in how formal or informal the platform is.

Juhi Kulshrestha, Muhammad Bilal Zafar, Lisette Espin-Noboa et al.

With the widespread adoption of social media sites like Twitter and Facebook, there has been a shift in the way information is produced and consumed. Earlier, the only producers of information were traditional news organizations, which broadcast the same carefully-edited information to all consumers over mass media channels. Whereas, now, in online social media, any user can be a producer of information, and every user selects which other users she connects to, thereby choosing the information she consumes. Moreover, the personalized recommendations that most social media sites provide also contribute towards the information consumed by individual users. In this work, we define a concept of information diet -- which is the topical distribution of a given set of information items (e.g., tweets) -- to characterize the information produced and consumed by various types of users in the popular Twitter social media. At a high level, we find that (i) popular users mostly produce very specialized diets focusing on only a few topics; in fact, news organizations (e.g., NYTimes) produce much more focused diets on social media as compared to their mass media diets, (ii) most users' consumption diets are primarily focused towards one or two topics of their interest, and (iii) the personalized recommendations provided by Twitter help to mitigate some of the topical imbalances in the users' consumption diets, by adding information on diverse topics apart from the users' primary topics of interest.

Tinka DELAKORDA KAWASHIMA

V zahodnih študijah religije se v zadnjem času religijo razumeva kot spreminjajoče se prakse ljudi, in ne kot skupek prepričanj in doktrino, ki jim verniki sledijo. To še posebej drži za japonsko religijsko konstelacijo, kjer je bogato prakticiranje različnih religij vselej prednjačilo pred pripadnostjo dogmam in verskim institucijam. Raziskovalci so v taki religioznosti opazili spodbudne elemente za razvoj moderne kapitalistične družbe. Članek podrobno prikaže, kako so Webrove teze o vplivu religije na razvoj moderne družbe sprejemali na Japonskem in na osnovi razširitve njegovih tez predstavi nekatera mogoča izhodišča za obravnavo religije v povezavi z razvojem modernega potrošništva na Japonskem.