Computational Courtship: Understanding the Evolution of Online Dating through Large-scale Data Analysis

Have we become more tolerant of dating people of different social backgrounds compared to ten years ago? Has the rise of online dating exacerbated or alleviated gender inequalities in modern courtship? Are the most attractive people on these platforms necessarily the most successful? In this work, we examine the mate preferences and communication patterns of male and female users of the online dating site eHarmony over the past decade to identify how attitudes and behaviors have changed over this time period. While other studies have investigated disparities in user behavior between male and female users, this study is unique in its longitudinal approach. Specifically, we analyze how men and women differ in their preferences for certain traits in potential partners and how those preferences have changed over time. The second line of inquiry investigates to what extent physical attractiveness determines the rate of messages a user receives, and how this relationship varies between men and women. Thirdly, we explore whether online dating practices between males and females have become more equal over time or if biases and inequalities have remained constant (or increased). Fourthly, we study the behavioural traits in sending and replying to messages based on one's own experience of receiving messages and being replied to. Finally, we found that similarity between profiles is not a predictor for success except for the number of children and smoking habits. This work could have broader implications for shifting gender norms and social attitudes, reflected in online courtship rituals. Apart from the data-based research, we connect the results to existing theories that concern the role of ICTs in societal change. As searching for love online becomes increasingly common across generations and geographies, these findings may shed light on how people can build relationships through the Internet.Comment: Preprint, under revie

POISED: Spotting Twitter Spam Off the Beaten Paths

Cybercriminals have found in online social networks a propitious medium to spread spam and malicious content. Existing techniques for detecting spam include predicting the trustworthiness of accounts and analyzing the content of these messages. However, advanced attackers can still successfully evade these defenses. Online social networks bring people who have personal connections or share common interests to form communities. In this paper, we first show that users within a networked community share some topics of interest. Moreover, content shared on these social network tend to propagate according to the interests of people. Dissemination paths may emerge where some communities post similar messages, based on the interests of those communities. Spam and other malicious content, on the other hand, follow different spreading patterns. In this paper, we follow this insight and present POISED, a system that leverages the differences in propagation between benign and malicious messages on social networks to identify spam and other unwanted content. We test our system on a dataset of 1.3M tweets collected from 64K users, and we show that our approach is effective in detecting malicious messages, reaching 91% precision and 93% recall. We also show that POISED's detection is more comprehensive than previous systems, by comparing it to three state-of-the-art spam detection systems that have been proposed by the research community in the past. POISED significantly outperforms each of these systems. Moreover, through simulations, we show how POISED is effective in the early detection of spam messages and how it is resilient against two well-known adversarial machine learning attacks

Web messaging among young people in online services : A descriptive mixed-methods study

Objective To describe web messaging patterns and the content of web messages among young people in a Finnish national online service. Methods A descriptive mixed-method was used. The data consisted of text-based web messaging communication between young people and a counsellor in a nationwide online service between 1 January and 31 December 2018. Web messaging patterns were analysed using descriptive statistics. The content of the messages was analysed with thematic analysis and qualitative results were presented. In addition, the factors associated with messaging patterns and content were analysed. Results A total of 1941 messages were sent by 1354 young people. Most of them were between 12 and 17 years old and females. Less than one-fifth of young people had multiple two-way discussions with counsellor. The total period of two-way discussions and the number of words in each message varied widely. The number of words was lower in messages sent by males. The content of the messages was divided into three main themes: interpersonal relationships and environment (Social relationships), oneself (Construction of self), and health-related problems and support received from professionals (Health and wellbeing). The young people's messages mostly contained topics related to the main theme of 'Social environment'. Conclusion Most young people sent one message only. Messages ranged from simple, single messages to complex texts describing the daily life of young people. Girls were more active in messaging, and they wrote longer texts.Peer reviewe

Communicating health decisions: an analysis of messages posted to online prostate cancer forums

Background  Experiential websites such as message forums and blogs allow Prostate Cancer (PCa) patients to communicate their health decisions to peers. The issues surrounding this form of indirect involvement in public health are little understood. Objective  This paper explores the types of decision-making processes that people are exposed to on PCa online message boards. The kinds of treatment choices patients are making and the reports of their decision-making processes to peers through an online environment are examined in the context of the Heuristic Systematic Model. Method  Messages about treatment decision making were collected from four PCa websites. In total, 137 messages were selected from blogs and online forums and their decision-making processes coded. Results  Men looking online for information about treatment options for PCa are exposed to a range of decision-making processes. Just under half (49.6%) of the messages reported non-systematic decision processes, with deferral to the doctor and proof of cancer removal being the most common. For systematic processing (36.5%), messages most commonly considered treatment outcomes and side-effects. Processes did not vary between the blogs and online forums. Discussion and conclusion  Compared to previous studies far fewer messages reported non-systematic decision processes and only a small number of messages reflected lay beliefs or misbeliefs about PCa treatment. Implications for men and their clinicians of seeking health information online are discussed

Belief Approach for Social Networks

Nowadays, social networks became essential in information exchange between individuals. Indeed, as users of these networks, we can send messages to other people according to the links connecting us. Moreover, given the large volume of exchanged messages, detecting the true nature of the received message becomes a challenge. For this purpose, it is interesting to consider this new tendency with reasoning under uncertainty by using the theory of belief functions. In this paper, we tried to model a social network as being a network of fusion of information and determine the true nature of the received message in a well-defined node by proposing a new model: the belief social network

A World Without Violence Against Children: Children and Young People's Voices and Recommendations for the Post 2015 Agenda

Preventing and responding to violence and exploitation is essential to ensuring children's rights to survival, development, participation and wellbeing. Children and young people have shared their views and messages to create a world without violence against children. They emphasise that prevention and response to violence is essential to ensuring children's rights to protection, survival, development, and participation.This brief summary report shares key recommendations and messages from girls and boys aged 8-17 years from consultations that were organised and reported on by different child focused agencies between 2012 and 2013. More than 12,000 children and young people from diverse backgrounds have been actively involved in face to face consultations on the post 2015 agenda from across 70 countries covering every region of the world. Violence against children was prioritised by girls and boys as one of their most significant concerns that must be addressed in the post 2015 agenda. Analysis of online MY WORLD consultations by more than 40,000 children also illustrate that child protection is a key priority requiring prevention and response

Double challenges to Japanese farmers : nuclear accident and transpactfic regional partnership = 日本農民的雙重挑戰 : 核危機及太平洋區域的合作關係

For a while after Japan was struck by a major earthquake and tsunami on 11 March this year, gloomy and depressing atmosphere was dominant in Japanese people. As soon as the disaster occurred, corporations refrained from distributing their commercial messages (CMs) on TV. Japanese people are usually exposed by the enormous amount of CMs, but could not but repeatedly watch CMs produced by AC (Advertising Council Japan), a private non-profit agency, during the few weeks. Most of the agency’s CMs are more public than those of other private companies, such as a CM to enhance women’s awareness of breast cancer screening tests. Many Japanese people watched again and again a CM that three Japanese soccer players sent solidarity messages to people who suffered from the earthquake and tsunami. One of them, Uchida Atsuto, a brilliant soccer player who is affiliated with a German club, tried to cheer up Japanese people by saying, “each person should do what he or she can do. Japan is like a team”. He advised his fellow Japanese people to be united (like an organised soccer team) in order to overcome difficulties. The representation of Japanese people as a whole and coherent unit is not new, but it is much more influential in the media after the earthquake and tsunami. I do not intend to deny this kind of nationalism to recover from the disaster. Rather I am just concerned that this representation can lead us to overlooking the unfair relationship between different groups of Japanese people. The list of people who are disadvantaged includes casual workers, people living in Fukushima, and farmers and fisheries. This paper focuses particularly on Japanese farmers who suffer from the nuclear accident. They are also challenged by Transpacific Strategic Economic Partnership Agreement (TPPA), a regional economic partnership agreement, which aims to facilitate trade liberalisation in the Pacific and Asian region

Correlated dynamics in egocentric communication networks

We investigate the communication sequences of millions of people through two different channels and analyze the fine grained temporal structure of correlated event trains induced by single individuals. By focusing on correlations between the heterogeneous dynamics and the topology of egocentric networks we find that the bursty trains usually evolve for pairs of individuals rather than for the ego and his/her several neighbors thus burstiness is a property of the links rather than of the nodes. We compare the directional balance of calls and short messages within bursty trains to the average on the actual link and show that for the trains of voice calls the imbalance is significantly enhanced, while for short messages the balance within the trains increases. These effects can be partly traced back to the technological constrains (for short messages) and partly to the human behavioral features (voice calls). We define a model that is able to reproduce the empirical results and may help us to understand better the mechanisms driving technology mediated human communication dynamics.Comment: 7 pages, 6 figure