Adaptability, Cooperation and Reconfiguration in Very Complex Multiregional Network Organizations

There seems to be a general trend that the development of technologies which interact with human beings also enhances the knowledge of human functions. For example, with the development of color television systems progress in the knowledge of human color vision was also recorded. In return this new knowledge then helped in the design of even more efficient color television system. A similar situation seems to reign in computer systems and computer networks. Managing different resources in computer systems by operational systems resembles somewhat the management of resources in an organization. The inference block in 5th generation computers may resemble human inference and is pursued by an artificial intelligence discipline. The study of cooperative features in computer systems and networks may bring us closer to understanding these processes in organizations or even in human societies at large. This happens because many causal relations are present in computer systems in clearer and sometimes more primitive forms, stripped of many of the accompanying but irrelevant (emotional) ingredients. This Collaborative Paper is the continuation of an activity that started when Dr. Cifersky joined the Management and Technology Area of IIASA in 1882 as a participant in the Young Scientists Summer Program, under the supervision of Dr. R. Lee. The paper scans those problems in organizations which are evoked by the environment. It attempts to describe some of those processes which are taking place in complex organizations as a response to external influences, and identifies some of the impacts this may have on the organization's performance objectives. The paper has not been edited and supplemented by a vocabulary, therefore it does not make easy reading. It uses terms common in organization research, computer systems (for example, communication protocol), or principles used in fail-safe computer systems (reconfiguration). The topic is interesting and stimulating and can contribute to further research at the Institute in this field

Collective emotions online and their influence on community life

E-communities, social groups interacting online, have recently become an object of interdisciplinary research. As with face-to-face meetings, Internet exchanges may not only include factual information but also emotional information - how participants feel about the subject discussed or other group members. Emotions are known to be important in affecting interaction partners in offline communication in many ways. Could emotions in Internet exchanges affect others and systematically influence quantitative and qualitative aspects of the trajectory of e-communities? The development of automatic sentiment analysis has made large scale emotion detection and analysis possible using text messages collected from the web. It is not clear if emotions in e-communities primarily derive from individual group members' personalities or if they result from intra-group interactions, and whether they influence group activities. We show the collective character of affective phenomena on a large scale as observed in 4 million posts downloaded from Blogs, Digg and BBC forums. To test whether the emotions of a community member may influence the emotions of others, posts were grouped into clusters of messages with similar emotional valences. The frequency of long clusters was much higher than it would be if emotions occurred at random. Distributions for cluster lengths can be explained by preferential processes because conditional probabilities for consecutive messages grow as a power law with cluster length. For BBC forum threads, average discussion lengths were higher for larger values of absolute average emotional valence in the first ten comments and the average amount of emotion in messages fell during discussions. Our results prove that collective emotional states can be created and modulated via Internet communication and that emotional expressiveness is the fuel that sustains some e-communities.Comment: 23 pages including Supporting Information, accepted to PLoS ON

Regional surname affinity: a spatial network approach

OBJECTIVE We investigate surname affinities among areas of modern‐day China, by constructing a spatial network, and making community detection. It reports a geographical genealogy of the Chinese population that is result of population origins, historical migrations, and societal evolutions. MATERIALS AND METHODS We acquire data from the census records supplied by China's National Citizen Identity Information System, including the surname and regional information of 1.28 billion registered Chinese citizens. We propose a multilayer minimum spanning tree (MMST) to construct a spatial network based on the matrix of isonymic distances, which is often used to characterize the dissimilarity of surname structure among areas. We use the fast unfolding algorithm to detect network communities. RESULTS We obtain a 10‐layer MMST network of 362 prefecture nodes and 3,610 edges derived from the matrix of the Euclidean distances among these areas. These prefectures are divided into eight groups in the spatial network via community detection. We measure the partition by comparing the inter‐distances and intra‐distances of the communities and obtain meaningful regional ethnicity classification. DISCUSSION The visualization of the resulting communities on the map indicates that the prefectures in the same community are usually geographically adjacent. The formation of this partition is influenced by geographical factors, historic migrations, trade and economic factors, as well as isolation of culture and language. The MMST algorithm proves to be effective in geo‐genealogy and ethnicity classification for it retains essential information about surname affinity and highlights the geographical consanguinity of the population.National Natural Science Foundation of China, Grant/Award Numbers: 61773069, 71731002; National Social Science Foundation of China, Grant/Award Number: 14BSH024; Foundation of China of China Scholarships Council, Grant/Award Numbers: 201606045048, 201706040188, 201706040015; DOE, Grant/Award Number: DE-AC07-05Id14517; DTRA, Grant/Award Number: HDTRA1-14-1-0017; NSF, Grant/Award Numbers: CHE-1213217, CMMI-1125290, PHY-1505000 (61773069 - National Natural Science Foundation of China; 71731002 - National Natural Science Foundation of China; 14BSH024 - National Social Science Foundation of China; 201606045048 - Foundation of China of China Scholarships Council; 201706040188 - Foundation of China of China Scholarships Council; 201706040015 - Foundation of China of China Scholarships Council; DE-AC07-05Id14517 - DOE; HDTRA1-14-1-0017 - DTRA; CHE-1213217 - NSF; CMMI-1125290 - NSF; PHY-1505000 - NSF)Published versio

"Pagod, Dugot, Pawis (Exhaustion, Blood, and Sweat)": Transnational Practices of Care and Emotional Labour among Filipino Kin Networks

While the global care chains literature presupposes that care work flows unidirectionally along a hierarchical chain from the Global South to the Global North (Hochschild 2000; Parreas 1998, 2000), this dissertation argues for a reconceptualization of transnational care and emotional labour that goes beyond links in a chain. Drawing on multisited ethnographic research conducted with a total of seventy participants in the Philippines, Canada, and Hong Kong, this study offers a more expansive approach to understanding transnational care and emotional labour as multiphased, multidirectional, multirelational, and multilocational in scope. This dissertation makes some key interventions in gender, migration, and care scholarship. First, it understands that transnational care occurs in multiple phases in order to account for reconfigurations of care across the life course, such as migrants performing end-of-life care for elderly kin. Second, in contrast to the global care chains literature, which frames care as unidirectional, it highlights the ways in which care flows in multiple directions, showing how those who receive care also give care. Third, it moves away from an exclusive focus on the mother-child dyad, thereby decentering the Western heteronormative nuclear family structure and demonstrating how transnational care is multirelational, involving several generations and broader communities of carers. Fourth, it underscores the ways in which transnational care is multilocational by acknowledging how migrant networks often shift locales and perform care labour from multiple sites at once. Finally and most importantly, this dissertation foregrounds Pinay peminist kuwentuhan, or Filipina feminist talkstory - a dynamic, collective, inclusive, participatory storytelling and storybuilding process that activates Pinay ways of knowing and being in the world. Pinay peminist kuwentuhan guides readers on a journey towards understanding the ways in which transnational Filipinos maintain kin solidarity and support the collective survival of migrant carers over time. Tracing the transnational caring practices of four Filipino migrant networks specifically, their innovative use of traveling artefacts and information and communication technologies (ICTs) this dissertation provides a more culturally nuanced approach to understanding transnational practices of care and emotional labour

Nodes and Arcs: Concept Map, Semiotics, and Knowledge Organization.

Purpose – The purpose of the research reported here is to improve comprehension of the socially-negotiated identity of concepts in the domain of knowledge organization. Because knowledge organization as a domain has as its focus the order of concepts, both from a theoretical perspective and from an applied perspective, it is important to understand how the domain itself understands the meaning of a concept. Design/methodology/approach – The paper provides an empirical demonstration of how the domain itself understands the meaning of a concept. The paper employs content analysis to demonstrate the ways in which concepts are portrayed in KO concept maps as signs, and they are subjected to evaluative semiotic analysis as a way to understand their meaning. The frame was the entire population of formal proceedings in knowledge organization – all proceedings of the International Society for Knowledge Organization’s international conferences (1990-2010) and those of the annual classification workshops of the Special Interest Group for Classification Research of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (SIG/CR). Findings – A total of 344 concept maps were analyzed. There was no discernible chronological pattern. Most concept maps were created by authors who were professors from the USA, Germany, France, or Canada. Roughly half were judged to contain semiotic content. Peirceian semiotics predominated, and tended to convey greater granularity and complexity in conceptual terminology. Nodes could be identified as anchors of conceptual clusters in the domain; the arcs were identifiable as verbal relationship indicators. Saussurian concept maps were more applied than theoretical; Peirceian concept maps had more theoretical content. Originality/value – The paper demonstrates important empirical evidence about the coherence of the domain of knowledge organization. Core values are conveyed across time through the concept maps in this population of conference paper