5,193 research outputs found
Assessing Devolution in the Canadian North: A Case Study of the Yukon Territory
Despite a rich literature on the political and constitutional development of the Canadian territorial North, few scholars have examined the post-devolution environment in Yukon. This lacuna is surprising since devolution is frequently cited as being crucial to the well-being of Northerners, leading both the Government of Nunavut and the Government of the Northwest Territories to lobby the federal government to devolve lands and resources to them. This paper provides an updated historical account of devolution in Yukon and assesses its impact on the territory since 2003. Relying mainly on written resources and 16 interviews with Aboriginal, government, and industry officials in the territory, it highlights some broad effects of devolution and specifically analyzes the processes of obtaining permits for land use and mining. Our findings suggest that devolution has generally had a positive effect on the territory, and in particular has led to more efficient and responsive land use and mining permit processes
Minimizing Polarization and Disagreement in Social Networks
The rise of social media and online social networks has been a disruptive
force in society. Opinions are increasingly shaped by interactions on online
social media, and social phenomena including disagreement and polarization are
now tightly woven into everyday life. In this work we initiate the study of the
following question: given agents, each with its own initial opinion that
reflects its core value on a topic, and an opinion dynamics model, what is the
structure of a social network that minimizes {\em polarization} and {\em
disagreement} simultaneously?
This question is central to recommender systems: should a recommender system
prefer a link suggestion between two online users with similar mindsets in
order to keep disagreement low, or between two users with different opinions in
order to expose each to the other's viewpoint of the world, and decrease
overall levels of polarization? Our contributions include a mathematical
formalization of this question as an optimization problem and an exact,
time-efficient algorithm. We also prove that there always exists a network with
edges that is a approximation to the optimum.
For a fixed graph, we additionally show how to optimize our objective function
over the agents' innate opinions in polynomial time.
We perform an empirical study of our proposed methods on synthetic and
real-world data that verify their value as mining tools to better understand
the trade-off between of disagreement and polarization. We find that there is a
lot of space to reduce both polarization and disagreement in real-world
networks; for instance, on a Reddit network where users exchange comments on
politics, our methods achieve a -fold reduction in polarization
and disagreement.Comment: 19 pages (accepted, WWW 2018
Running Header: Video Game Product Placements
Since the early 1980\u27s there has been an increase in the use of product placement in the fields of motion pictures and broadcast television. Recently, companies have begun to use product placements in video games to increase exposure to their products. Being an interactive media, video games allow the user to interact with the advertisement, unlike motion pictures and broadcast television. The present study investigates game players\u27 recall of product placements in video games. Two focus groups of high school students and church members were monitored playing the FIFA World Cup 2002 video game. A pre-test/post-test was administered regarding the subjects\u27 recall of brands advertised in the video games. The results of the tests were compared with a content analysis to see if a relationship exists between the products that the players viewed in the game and how their opinions may have been altered
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