The Economic Dimension of Social Trust

The statistical analyses performed demonstrated a statistically significant correlation between the examined phenomena and proved that the highest developmental level is a characteristic feature of the districts with a high level of social trust. This conforms the claims of Polish and international scholars who see trust as a non-economic determinant of economic development

Scientific Polarization

Contemporary societies are often "polarized", in the sense that sub-groups within these societies hold stably opposing beliefs, even when there is a fact of the matter. Extant models of polarization do not capture the idea that some beliefs are true and others false. Here we present a model, based on the network epistemology framework of Bala and Goyal ["Learning from neighbors", \textit{Rev. Econ. Stud.} \textbf{65}(3), 784-811 (1998)], in which polarization emerges even though agents gather evidence about their beliefs, and true belief yields a pay-off advantage. The key mechanism that generates polarization involves treating evidence generated by other agents as uncertain when their beliefs are relatively different from one's own.Comment: 22 pages, 5 figures, author final versio

Positioning for the Possible: Investing in Education Reform in New Mexico

At the beginning of 2010, the New Mexico Association of Grantmakers (NMAG ) asked Chris Sturgis of MetisNet to explore ways in which philanthropic investments could be structured to lead to improved student achievement and to produce a more effective public education system. This paper is designed to provoke discussion among funders and educational leadership to discover ways to maximize the benefits of philanthropic investments in New Mexico

A high-level semiotic trust agent scoring model for collaborative virtual organisations

In this paper, we describe how a semiotic ladder, together with a supportive trust agent, can be used to address “soft” trust issues in the context of collaborative Virtual Organisations (VO). The intention is to offer all parties better support for trust (as reputation) management including the reduction of risk and improved reliability of VO e-services. The semiotic ladder is intended to support the VO e-service lifecycle through the articulation of e-trust at various levels of system abstraction, including trust as measurable confidence. At the social level, reputation and reliability measures of e-trust are the relevant dimensions as regards choice of VO partner and are also relevant to the negotiation of service level agreements between the VO partners. By contrast, at the lower levels of the trust ladder, e-trust measures typically address the degree to which secure sign on and message level security conforms to various tangible technological security protocols. The novel trust agent provides the e-service consumer with an objective measure of the trustworthiness of the e-service at run-time, just prior to its actual consumption. Specifically, VO e-service consumer confidence level is informed, by leveraging third party objective evidence. This evidence comprises a set of Corporate Governance (CG) scores. These scores are used as a trust proxy for the "real" owner of the VO. There are also inherent limitations associated with the use of CG scores. These are duly acknowledged

Identification and Inference of Network Formation Games with Misclassified Links

This paper considers a network formation model when links are potentially measured with error. We focus on a game-theoretical model of strategic network formation with incomplete information, in which the linking decisions depend on agents' exogenous attributes and endogenous network characteristics. In the presence of link misclassification, we derive moment conditions that characterize the identified set for the preference parameters associated with homophily and network externalities. Based on the moment equality conditions, we provide an inference method that is asymptotically valid when a single network of many agents is observed. Finally, we apply our proposed method to study trust networks in rural villages in southern India

Achieving Results Through Community School Partnerships

Outlines the importance of and strategies for building and maintaining successful partnerships for community schools that integrate academics, youth development, family support, health and social services, and community development. Makes recommendations

Trust Management Model for Cloud Computing Environment

Software as a service or (SaaS) is a new software development and deployment paradigm over the cloud and offers Information Technology services dynamically as "on-demand" basis over the internet. Trust is one of the fundamental security concepts on storing and delivering such services. In general, trust factors are integrated into such existent security frameworks in order to add a security level to entities collaborations through the trust relationship. However, deploying trust factor in the secured cloud environment are more complex engineering task due to the existence of heterogeneous types of service providers and consumers. In this paper, a formal trust management model has been introduced to manage the trust and its properties for SaaS in cloud computing environment. The model is capable to represent the direct trust, recommended trust, reputation etc. formally. For the analysis of the trust properties in the cloud environment, the proposed approach estimates the trust value and uncertainty of each peer by computing decay function, number of positive interactions, reputation factor and satisfaction level for the collected information.Comment: 5 Pages, 2 Figures, Conferenc

Why Does Dave Spend Ten Times More Time on Interaction with Industry than Paul? : Toward a Model of Social Capital Activation for Entrepreneurial Academics

This paper focuses on academics that are looking for entrepreneurial ways to pursue their teaching, research and commercialization interests, in particular by actively engaging in university-industry interactions. The paper aims to improve our knowledge of why some academics exploit their social networks with industry more actively than others. We develop a conceptual model that aims to explain a mechanism behind social capital activation, and to identify factors that are likely to have the highest predictive power. We theorize on how academic’s motivation, perceived social influence and perceived ability unite into readiness to activate social capital, and under what circumstances this readiness is likely to result in actual behavior. Specifically, the objective of this paper is to further develop the model constructs and to operationalize them into a set of measurable items. For each of the readiness constructs, we present a set of composite variables, as well as corresponding observable variables. We conclude with implications of our analysis for theory and practice, and set directions for future research

The state-of-the-art in personalized recommender systems for social networking

With the explosion of Web 2.0 application such as blogs, social and professional networks, and various other types of social media, the rich online information and various new sources of knowledge flood users and hence pose a great challenge in terms of information overload. It is critical to use intelligent agent software systems to assist users in finding the right information from an abundance of Web data. Recommender systems can help users deal with information overload problem efficiently by suggesting items (e.g., information and products) that match users’ personal interests. The recommender technology has been successfully employed in many applications such as recommending films, music, books, etc. The purpose of this report is to give an overview of existing technologies for building personalized recommender systems in social networking environment, to propose a research direction for addressing user profiling and cold start problems by exploiting user-generated content newly available in Web 2.0