The Social World of Content Abusers in Community Question Answering

Community-based question answering platforms can be rich sources of information on a variety of specialized topics, from finance to cooking. The usefulness of such platforms depends heavily on user contributions (questions and answers), but also on respecting the community rules. As a crowd-sourced service, such platforms rely on their users for monitoring and flagging content that violates community rules. Common wisdom is to eliminate the users who receive many flags. Our analysis of a year of traces from a mature Q&A site shows that the number of flags does not tell the full story: on one hand, users with many flags may still contribute positively to the community. On the other hand, users who never get flagged are found to violate community rules and get their accounts suspended. This analysis, however, also shows that abusive users are betrayed by their network properties: we find strong evidence of homophilous behavior and use this finding to detect abusive users who go under the community radar. Based on our empirical observations, we build a classifier that is able to detect abusive users with an accuracy as high as 83%.Comment: Published in the proceedings of the 24th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2015

Growing Acts of Indiscipline in Ghanaian Schools: Perception of Students and Teachers at Abuakwa South Municipality

Indiscipline in schools has attracted the attention of many people and has eventually become the focus of discussions on many platforms. The purpose of the study was to find out the perceptions of teachers and students at the Abuakwa South Municipality of Ghana on student indiscipline behaviours. The study employed the descriptive survey and the approach was concurrent mixed method, involving bothquantitative and qualitative paradigms. Purposive and simple random sampling methods were used to obtaina sample size of five hundred and thirty (530) respondents. The main instruments used for the study were questionnaire and a semi-structured interview guide. Data was analysed using inferential statistics and content analysis. Findings from the study revealed that; there was no perceptual difference between students and teachers views on acts that constitute disciplinary behaviours. Additional, there were differences in thestudents and teachers perceptions of the influences of peer pressure on students’ disciplinary behaviours. Itwas recommended among others that peer counselling sessions should be organized periodically among students for them to be aware of acceptable behaviours in the school system and how they can maintain desirable behaviours

Growing Acts of Indiscipline in Ghanaian Schools

Indiscipline in schools has attracted the attention of many people and has eventually become the focus of discussions on many platforms. The purpose of the study was to find out the perceptions of teachers and students at the Abuakwa South Municipality of Ghana on student indiscipline behaviours. The study employed the descriptive survey and the approach was concurrent mixed method, involving bothquantitative and qualitative paradigms. Purposive and simple random sampling methods were used to obtaina sample size of five hundred and thirty (530) respondents. The main instruments used for the study were questionnaire and a semi-structured interview guide. Data was analysed using inferential statistics and content analysis. Findings from the study revealed that; there was no perceptual difference between students and teachers views on acts that constitute disciplinary behaviours. Additional, there were differences in thestudents and teachers perceptions of the influences of peer pressure on students’ disciplinary behaviours. Itwas recommended among others that peer counselling sessions should be organized periodically among students for them to be aware of acceptable behaviours in the school system and how they can maintain desirable behaviours

Who Escapes? The Relation of Church-Going & Other Background Factors to the Socio-Economic Performance of Blk. Male Yths. from Inner-City Pvrty Tracts

Using data from the NBER survey of Inner City youth and the National longitudinal survey of young men this paper examines the effect of church-going and other aspects of the background of youth their allocation of time, socially deviant behavior, and labor force behavior. 1)Church-going is associated with substantial differences in the behavior of youths, and thus in their chances to 'escape' from innercity poverty. It affects allocation of time, school-going, work activity, and the frequency of socially deviant activity.2)The diverse background factors examined in this study have different effects on various outcomes. Their differential effects suggest true causal impacts, with for example, the proportion of a youth's family working having positive effects on his labor market activity but not on other activities. 3) In addition to church going, the background factors that most influence'who escapes' are whether other members of the family work and whether the family is on welfare.4)The allocation of time and activities by youth is significantly influenced by market opportunities (or perceptions thereof). Those youths who believe it is easy to find a job are more likely to engage in socially productive activities than others. Youths who see many opportunities to make money illegally are less likely to engage in socially productive activities than other youths.

Linguistic Interventions and Transformative Communicative Disruption

What words we use, and what meanings they have, is important. We shouldn't use slurs; we should use 'rape' to include spousal rape (for centuries we didn’t); we should have a word which picks out the sexual harassment suffered by people in the workplace and elsewhere (for centuries we didn’t). Sometimes we need to change the word-meaning pairs in circulation, either by getting rid of the pair completely (slurs), changing the meaning (as we did with 'rape'), or adding brand new word-meaning pairs (as with 'sexual harassment'). A problem, though, is how to do this. One might worry that any attempt to change language in this way will lead to widespread miscommunication and confusion. I argue that this is indeed so, but that's a feature, not a bug of attempting to change word-meaning pairs. The miscommunications and confusion such changes cause can lead us, via a process I call transformative communicative disruption, to reflect on our language and its use, and this can be further, rather than hinder, our goal of improving language

Cleavage in a Tank Top: Bodily Prohibition and the Discourses of School Dress Codes

In this article I explore the gendered assumptions in the new generation of dress codes that have swept through North American schools in response to how girls are dressing these days. Through a feminist poststructural examination of a particular case in Langley, British Columbia, I locate three contradictory discourses in one school’s dress code policy that positioned girls as irresponsible, deviant, and in need of help. I argue that these discourses reproduce dominant and oppressive forms of gender and sexuality. I conclude by suggesting that much work remains to be done on the minutiae of school policies such as dress codes given that they contribute to how the student(’s) body is thought about, looked at, and treated.Dans cet article, je me penche sur les hypothèses genrées sur lesquelles reposent les nouveaux codes vestimentaires qui ont été instaurés dans les écoles en Amérique du Nord en réaction à la tenue des filles de nos jours. Une étude féministe poststructurale d’un cas à Langley, en Colombie-Britannique a révélé trois discours contradictoires dans la politique vestimentaire d’une école où le code présentait les filles comme étant irréfléchies, déviantes et ayant besoin d’aide. Je propose que ces discours reproduisent les positions dominantes et abusives face à la sexualité et au rôle des hommes et des femmes. Je termine l’article en concluant qu’il reste beaucoup de travail à accomplir dans le domaine des politiques scolaires comme les codes vestimentaires étant donné que ceux-ci jouent un rôle dans la façon que l’on perçoit, regarde et aborde le corps des étudiants

Citizen Engineers: Leaders in Building a Sustainable World

As with the “citizen soldiers” of World War II, the engineering industry must produce “citizen engineers” who will accept the leadership challenge necessary to deliver a combination of technical, economic, social, and environmental values to its stakeholders that will truly improve people’s quality of life

Medical, Racist, and Colonial Constructions of Power in Anne Fadiman\u27s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down

This essay looks at the values attributed or denied to culture (medical culture, history, Southeast Asian refugees, Asian American cultural citizenship) in the care surrounding a Hmong child diagnosed with spirit loss, according to Hmong interpretation, or epilepsy, as defined by Western medicine. In my reading of Anne Fadiman\u27s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down: A Hmong Child, Her American Doctors, and the Collision of Two Cultures, medical, colonial, and authorial knowledge often converge in devastating ways, linking the seemingly disparate discourses of war, refugee medicine, and the model minority through colonial representations. I also look at the book\u27s lacuna in its investigation of cultural collisions, finding that its approaches to reporting the medical-cultural conflict from a seemingly neutral position-one balancing the reported views of the epileptic child\u27s parents and the views of her medical practitioners-often reinscribe the Hmong subjects into the very colonial parameters from which the book attempts to extract them