Does Twitter know your political views? POLiTweets dataset and semi-automatic method for political leaning discovery

Every day, the world is flooded by millions of messages and statements posted on Twitter or Facebook. Social media platforms try to protect users' personal data, but there still is a real risk of misuse, including elections manipulation. Did you know, that only 13 posts addressing important or controversial topics for society are enough to predict one's political affiliation with a 0.85 F1-score? To examine this phenomenon, we created a novel universal method of semi-automated political leaning discovery. It relies on a heuristical data annotation procedure, which was evaluated to achieve 0.95 agreement with human annotators (counted as an accuracy metric). We also present POLiTweets - the first publicly open Polish dataset for political affiliation discovery in a multi-party setup, consisting of over 147k tweets from almost 10k Polish-writing users annotated heuristically and almost 40k tweets from 166 users annotated manually as a test set. We used our data to study the aspects of domain shift in the context of topics and the type of content writers - ordinary citizens vs. professional politicians

Does Choice Mean Freedom And Well-Being?

Americans live in a political, social, and historical context that values personal freedom and choice above all else, an emphasis that has been amplified by contemporary psychology. However, this article reviews research that shows that in non-Western cultures and among working-class Westerners, freedom and choice do not have the meaning or importance they do for the university-educated people who have been the subjects of almost all research on this topic. We cannot assume that choice, as understood by educated, affluent Westerners, is a universal aspiration. The meaning and significance of choice are cultural constructions. Moreover, even when choice can foster freedom, empowerment, and independence, it is not an unalloyed good. Too much choice can produce a paralyzing uncertainty, depression, and selfishness. In the United States, the path to well-being may require that we strike a balance between the positive and negative consequences of proliferating choice in every domain of life

Simultaneous pp-orderings and minimising volumes in number fields

In the paper "On the interpolation of integer-valued polynomials" (Journal of Number Theory 133 (2013), pp. 4224--4232.) V. Volkov and F. Petrov consider the problem of existence of the so-called $n$-universal sets (related to simultaneous $p$-orderings of Bhargava) in the ring of Gaussian integers. We extend their results to arbitrary imaginary quadratic number fields and prove an existence theorem that provides a strong counterexample to a conjecture of Volkov-Petrov on minimal cardinality of $n$-universal sets. Along the way, we discover a link with Euler-Kronecker constants and prove a lower bound on Euler-Kronecker constants which is of the same order of magnitude as the one obtained by Ihara.Comment: new version, substantial corrections in section 6, will appear in Journal of Number Theor

Kolmogorov complexity and the Recursion Theorem

Several classes of DNR functions are characterized in terms of Kolmogorov complexity. In particular, a set of natural numbers A can wtt-compute a DNR function iff there is a nontrivial recursive lower bound on the Kolmogorov complexity of the initial segments of A. Furthermore, A can Turing compute a DNR function iff there is a nontrivial A-recursive lower bound on the Kolmogorov complexity of the initial segements of A. A is PA-complete, that is, A can compute a {0,1}-valued DNR function, iff A can compute a function F such that F(n) is a string of length n and maximal C-complexity among the strings of length n. A solves the halting problem iff A can compute a function F such that F(n) is a string of length n and maximal H-complexity among the strings of length n. Further characterizations for these classes are given. The existence of a DNR function in a Turing degree is equivalent to the failure of the Recursion Theorem for this degree; thus the provided results characterize those Turing degrees in terms of Kolmogorov complexity which do no longer permit the usage of the Recursion Theorem.Comment: Full version of paper presented at STACS 2006, Lecture Notes in Computer Science 3884 (2006), 149--16