Characterising social media users by gender and place of residence

Characterising users through demographic attributes is a necessary step before conducting opinion surveys from information published by such users in social media. In this paper, we describe, compare and evaluate different techniques for the identification of the attributes "gender"' and "place of residence" by mining the metadata associated to the users, the content published and shared by themselves, and their friendship networks. The results obtained show that the social network is a valuable source of information for obtaining the sociodemographic attributes of single users

Multiscale mixing patterns in networks

Assortative mixing in networks is the tendency for nodes with the same attributes, or metadata, to link to each other. It is a property often found in social networks manifesting as a higher tendency of links occurring between people with the same age, race, or political belief. Quantifying the level of assortativity or disassortativity (the preference of linking to nodes with different attributes) can shed light on the factors involved in the formation of links and contagion processes in complex networks. It is common practice to measure the level of assortativity according to the assortativity coefficient, or modularity in the case of discrete-valued metadata. This global value is the average level of assortativity across the network and may not be a representative statistic when mixing patterns are heterogeneous. For example, a social network spanning the globe may exhibit local differences in mixing patterns as a consequence of differences in cultural norms. Here, we introduce an approach to localise this global measure so that we can describe the assortativity, across multiple scales, at the node level. Consequently we are able to capture and qualitatively evaluate the distribution of mixing patterns in the network. We find that for many real-world networks the distribution of assortativity is skewed, overdispersed and multimodal. Our method provides a clearer lens through which we can more closely examine mixing patterns in networks.Comment: 11 pages, 7 figure

Injecting equipment schemes for injecting drug users : qualitative evidence review

This review of the qualitative literature about needle and syringe programmes (NSPs) for injecting drug users (IDUs) complements the review of effectiveness and cost-effectiveness. It aims to provide a more situated narrative perspective on the overall guidance questions

Detecting country of residence from social media data : a comparison of methods

Identifying users' place of residence is an important step in many social media analysis workflows. Various techniques for detecting home locations from social media data have been proposed, but their reliability has rarely been validated using ground truth data. In this article, we compared commonly used spatial and Spatio-temporal methods to determine social media users' country of residence. We applied diverse methods to a global data set of publicly shared geo-located Instagram posts from visitors to the Kruger National Park in South Africa. We evaluated the performance of each method using both individual-level expert assessment for a sample of users and aggregate-level official visitor statistics. Based on the individual-level assessment, a simple Spatio-temporal approach was the best-performed for detecting the country of residence. Results show why aggregate-level official statistics are not the best indicators for evaluating method performance. We also show how social media usage, such as the number of countries visited and posting activity over time, affect the performance of methods. In addition to a methodological contribution, this work contributes to the discussion about spatial and temporal biases in mobile big data.Peer reviewe

Children in an Urban Tanzania

One in four children being born in today‟s Tanzania is likely to be growing up in an urban area. It is projected to be one in three in the short time span of one generation. Tanzania is more urban than it perceives itself and official figures disclose. Urban Tanzanians feel emotionally rooted in their villages of origin rather than in the cities and towns where one quarter of the total population lives. Urbanisation figures fail to account for extensive high density areas just because they are not officially classified as urban. Despite a persisting rural self-representation, Tanzania is one of the fastest urbanising countries in one of the world‟s fastest urbanising regions. The nearly half urban population aged 0-18 may well be the first truly urbanised generation in the history of the nation.\ud As urbanisation is rapidly transforming the physical, social and economic landscape of the country, how has Tanzania equipped itself to provide adequate water, sanitation, health care, education, protection services to meet the fundamental needs and rights of a swelling number of urban children and communities? National policy and programmatic frameworks still broadly target rural poverty, perceived as the nation‟s core development challenge. Urban poverty, growing alongside urban affluence, remains mainly unaccounted for and, as a result, unaddressed. The condition of poor and marginalised urban groups escapes official urban figures. Standard urban-rural disaggregation generates statistical averages that overshadow sub-municipal disparities. Also poverty lines tend to underestimate actual poverty. Based on mere consumption levels, they disregard living conditions, thus leaving unaccounted for several necessities that poor households are normally forced to acquire through cash purchases in a monetised urban economy. As a result, urban poverty is broadly overlooked and poor urban children, lost in skewed official estimates and tucked away in peripheral unplanned urban fringes, risk remaining invisible in development policy and investments. In-depth analysis based on sub-municipal data is urgently needed to accurately measure urban poverty in its multiple dimensions of income poverty, inadequate access to basic services and powerlessness.\ud The assumption underpinning the limited attention that has been paid to urban poverty is that of an urban advantage. Undoubtedly, cities enjoy an edge over rural areas. Urbanisation drives the development of a whole nation. High population concentration, economies of scale, proximity and agglomeration make cities engines of growth. They offer greater avenues for livelihood and education, and should be expected to afford children better opportunities for survival, growth and development than rural areas. Better economic resources and political visibility hold a potential to offer higher incomes and enhance the scope for the government and the private sector to fund services and infrastructure. Density, favouring economies of scale, promises to favour delivering of essential services.\ud Children, adolescents and youth are attracted to city life, aspiring to access better jobs, higher education and a richer cultural life. Urban areas are also hubs of technological innovation, social exchange and mass communication. Urban children can draw from resources that are denied to rural peers.\ud The urban advantage, however, is being eroded. Provision of social services and infrastructure is failing to keep pace with growing demand being generated by urbanisation.\ud  Availability of basic services, expected to be markedly higher in urban centres as compared to remote rural areas, has been declining. Decreasing urban access to improved sources of drinking water over the past decade epitomises this trend. The traditional urban – rural social sector performance gap has been narrowing against most indicators in the areas of education, health, nutrition, water and sanitation. In some cases gaps have been actually bridged and rural areas are even outperforming urban centres.\ud 7\ud  As urban social sector performance is declining, it is likely that it is the poor, underserviced communities to remain unreached. Although statistical averages prevent any level of sub-municipal analysis, limited data available on access to basic services and health and education outcomes in low-income urban communities suggests that the urban poor may be faring even worse than their rural counterparts.\ud  Urbanisation growth is projected to continue in the future. If the present scenarios are not going to be addressed now, they are likely to deteriorate further. As density increases and unplanned settlements become more congested, investments in social facilities and infrastructure can only be expected to become costlier, both financially and socially.\ud If not properly leveraged, the potential advantage that cities offer can turn into a disadvantage. A concentration of children in areas where services and infrastructure are lacking is a major disadvantage. Children residing in overcrowded and degraded settlements characterised by poorly managed sanitation systems, inadequate provision of safe water, inefficient solid waste management are faced with one of the most life-threatening environments possible – with climate change posed to increase vulnerability further. Such a disadvantage can be daunting in a situation where the overwhelming majority of urban dwellers reside in unplanned settlements, which in Tanzania‟s primate city, Dar es Salaam, are estimated to accommodate over 80 percent of the population, one of the highest proportions in Sub-Saharan Africa.\ud Availability and access are not synonymous. In most cities, availability of basic services does not translate necessarily into access. Higher quality and availability of services needs to be equally distributed across social classes and space to achieve equal access by all citizens. The difference between successfully exploiting the urban advantage and passively reeling under the urban disadvantage can be made by the way access to resources is managed. A competent, accountable and equitable system of local governance can make that difference. Good local governance can help overcome the disparities that still bar access by the poor to safe water and sanitation, quality education, adequate health care and nutrition, affordable transport, secure land tenure and decent housing. Accountable local authorities, proactive communities and enabled children are the key actors in a local governance process leading to the creation of cities friendly to children.\ud Young people are already participating in local governance processes. They are active in children‟s municipal councils, children‟s school councils and other similar institutions. Avenues for child participation needs to be strengthened and opened to all children, not only in institutional settings, but also in families and communities having primary responsibility for children‟s well being. Cities and communities provide the most relevant scale for genuine children‟s participation, where young people can effectively engage in addressing the problems that directly affect them.\ud Though universal human rights and global development goals are set at the international and national levels, it is ultimately in a myriad of local Tanzanian communities that they are expected to be fulfilled – in the family, the school, the ward and ultimately the city. The city government offers an ideal platform for converging a plethora of sectoral interventions independently targeting children and delivering them holistically, at the local level where children live. The horizon of children is local. Within the local dimension, children‟s goals and rights can be met and monitored by duty bearers who have primary responsibility for their fulfilment. If development goals and human rights are not implemented locally, they are likely to remain abstract declarations of intent and sterile. Local authorities, communities, families and children together can transform today‟s child unfriendly urban settings into child-friendly cities – as cities friendly to children are friendly to all

Using social media to reach consumers of Alento : a content analysis of its official Facebook page

Traditionally, consumers spent time on the Internet purely to expend content: they read, watched, and used it to purchase products and services. However, nowadays consumers are using social media platforms to co-create, share, modify and discuss Internet content. This symbolises a “social media phenomenon” that can now influence a company’s sales, reputation and survival (Kietzmann et al., 2011, p. 241). According to one recent estimate, there are over 1.79 billion monthly active Facebook users (Facebook newsroom, 2016), with an increase of 16% year-over-year, giving Facebook the largest number of Social Networking Sites (SNS) users in the world. Therefore, Facebook has become a very popular form of social media for companies to promote their brands or products (Cheung & Leung, 2016). Nevertheless, many executives mismanage or ignore this social network because they do not understand its importance and how to engage with it (Kietzmann et al., 2011). The purpose of this thesis is to provide a solution for a problem raised by Alento. Alento is a human resources and consulting company that intended to understand how the company should engage with its official Facebook page. With this in mind, an internship program was created which would focus on the gathering of information to access and analyse the company’s presence on Facebook. Kietzmann et al. (2011) proposed seven functional building blocks of social media engagement with fans: identity, conversations, sharing, presence, relationships, reputation and groups. This paper aims to find out which of the functional blocks of social media engagement with fans are the most important for Alento’s Facebook fan page, in order to understand how the company should engage with it. We also tried to understand the effect of some demographic and social factors in the perception of the importance of the seven functional building blocks of Facebook engagement with fans. In order to understand it, we conducted a survey that was taken by 205 Alento Facebook fans. Results contradicted expectations; they showed that the most important functional building blocks for Alento’s Facebook fan page’s engagement with fans are “presence”, “identity” and “reputation”. Furthermore, there are some factors that influence the perception of the importance of each of the seven functional building blocks for Alento’s Facebook fan page’s engagement with fans. In parallel, we analysed the results of some Facebook Marketing strategies developed during the internship. After extensive analysis of the data collected, and with the organisation’s collaboration, a plan of action was defined. The aim of this plan was to implement structural changes in Alento’s Facebook Marketing strategies on a short to medium term basis

Immigration as a Divisive Topic: Clusters and Content Diffusion in the Italian Twitter Debate

In this work, we apply network science to analyse almost 6 M tweets about the debate around immigration in Italy, collected between 2018 and 2019, when many related events captured media outlets’ attention. Our aim was to better understand the dynamics underlying the interactions on social media on such a delicate and divisive topic, which are the actors that are leading the discussion, and whose messages have the highest chance to reach out the majority of the accounts that are following the debate. The debate on Twitter is represented with networks; we provide a characterisation of the main clusters by looking at the highest in-degree nodes in each one and by analysing the text of the tweets of all the users. We find a strongly segregated network which shows an explicit interplay with the Italian political and social landscape, that however seems to be disconnected from the actual geographical distribution and relocation of migrants. In addition, quite surprisingly, the influencers and political leaders that apparently lead the debate, do not necessarily belong to the clusters that include the majority of nodes: we find evidence of the existence of a `silent majority’ that is more connected to accounts who expose a more positive stance toward migrants, while leaders whose stance is negative attract apparently more attention. Finally, we see that the community structure clearly affects the diffusion of content (URLs) by identifying the presence of both local and global trends of diffusion, and that communities tend to display segregation regardless of their political and cultural background. In particular, we observe that messages that spread widely in the two largest clusters, whose most popular members are also notoriously at the opposite sides of the political spectrum, have a very low chance to get visibility into other clusters