179 research outputs found
Where are my followers? Understanding the Locality Effect in Twitter
Twitter is one of the most used applications in the current Internet with
more than 200M accounts created so far. As other large-scale systems Twitter
can obtain enefit by exploiting the Locality effect existing among its users.
In this paper we perform the first comprehensive study of the Locality effect
of Twitter. For this purpose we have collected the geographical location of
around 1M Twitter users and 16M of their followers. Our results demonstrate
that language and cultural characteristics determine the level of Locality
expected for different countries. Those countries with a different language
than English such as Brazil typically show a high intra-country Locality
whereas those others where English is official or co-official language suffer
from an external Locality effect. This is, their users have a larger number of
followers in US than within their same country. This is produced by two
reasons: first, US is the dominant country in Twitter counting with around half
of the users, and second, these countries share a common language and cultural
characteristics with US
Charge transfer through single molecule contacts: How reliable are rate descriptions?
The trend to fabricate electrical circuits on nanoscale dimensions has led to
impressive progress in the field of molecular electronics in the last decade. A
theoretical description of molecular contacts as the building blocks of future
devices is challenging though as it has to combine properties of Fermi liquids
in the leads with charge and phonon degrees of freedom on the molecule. Apart
from ab initio schemes for specific set-ups, generic models reveal
characteristics of transport processes. Particularly appealing are descriptions
based on transfer rates successfully used in other contexts such as mesoscopic
physics and intramolecular electron transfer. However, a detailed analysis of
this scheme in comparison with numerically exact data is elusive yet.
It turns out that a formulation in terms of transfer rates provides a
quantitatively accurate description even in domains of parameter space where in
a strict sense it is expected to fail, e.g. for lower temperatures. Typically,
intramolecular phonons are distributed according to a voltage driven steady
state that can only roughly be captured by a thermal distribution with an
effective elevated temperature (heating). An extension of a master equation for
the charge-phonon complex to include effectively the impact of off-diagonal
elements of the reduced density matrix provides very accurate data even for
stronger electron-phonon coupling.Comment: 10 pages, 10 figure
Is Content Publishing in BitTorrent Altruistic or Profit-Driven
BitTorrent is the most popular P2P content delivery application where
individual users share various type of content with tens of thousands of other
users. The growing popularity of BitTorrent is primarily due to the
availability of valuable content without any cost for the consumers. However,
apart from required resources, publishing (sharing) valuable (and often
copyrighted) content has serious legal implications for user who publish the
material (or publishers). This raises a question that whether (at least major)
content publishers behave in an altruistic fashion or have other incentives
such as financial. In this study, we identify the content publishers of more
than 55k torrents in 2 major BitTorrent portals and examine their behavior. We
demonstrate that a small fraction of publishers are responsible for 66% of
published content and 75% of the downloads. Our investigations reveal that
these major publishers respond to two different profiles. On one hand,
antipiracy agencies and malicious publishers publish a large amount of fake
files to protect copyrighted content and spread malware respectively. On the
other hand, content publishing in BitTorrent is largely driven by companies
with financial incentive. Therefore, if these companies lose their interest or
are unable to publish content, BitTorrent traffic/portals may disappear or at
least their associated traffic will significantly reduce
Analyzing gender inequality through large-scale Facebook advertising data
Online social media are information resources that can have a transformative
power in society. While the Web was envisioned as an equalizing force that
allows everyone to access information, the digital divide prevents large
amounts of people from being present online. Online social media in particular
are prone to gender inequality, an important issue given the link between
social media use and employment. Understanding gender inequality in social
media is a challenging task due to the necessity of data sources that can
provide large-scale measurements across multiple countries. Here we show how
the Facebook Gender Divide (FGD), a metric based on aggregated statistics of
more than 1.4 Billion users in 217 countries, explains various aspects of
worldwide gender inequality. Our analysis shows that the FGD encodes gender
equality indices in education, health, and economic opportunity. We find gender
differences in network externalities that suggest that using social media has
an added value for women. Furthermore, we find that low values of the FGD are
associated with increases in economic gender equality. Our results suggest that
online social networks, while suffering evident gender imbalance, may lower the
barriers that women have to access informational resources and help to narrow
the economic gender gap
Politics in the Facebook era : evidence from the 2016 US presidential elections
Social media enable politicians to personalize their campaigns and target voters who may be decisive for the outcome of elections. We assess the effects of such political "micro-targeting" by exploiting variation in daily advertising prices on Facebook, collected during the course of the 2016 U.S. presidential campaign. We analyze the variation of prices across political ideologies and propose a measure for the intensity of online political campaigns. Combining this measure with information from the ANES electoral survey, we address two fundamental questions: (i) To what extent did political campaigns use social media to micro-target voters? (ii) How large was the effect, if any, on voters who were heavily exposed to campaigning on social media? We find that online political campaigns targeted on users' gender, geographic location, and political ideology had a signicant eect in persuading undecided voters to support Mr Trump, and in persuading Republican supporters to turn out on polling day. Moreover the effect of micro-targeting on Facebook was strongest among users without university or college-level education
ENDURING COVID-19 AS NYC SUBWAY RIDERS
My thesis paper describes my master art project of paintings about the New York City Subway riders commuting routine prior and during the Coronavirus. As a regular subway rider myself I am closely connected with this particular art project because I witnessed the subway riders endure the most contagious viral pandemic of the 21st century. My thesis recounts how from a few sketches and photo shots of people in the subway this art project developed into a collection of paintings carefully completed on large linen canvas and acrylic medium. The initial set of my paintings narrate typical NYC subway rider routines prior to the arrival of Covid-19. Mainly portraits of persons riding alone; families socializing; visitors planning their next destinations, etc. However, the remaining set of paintings, completed during the pandemic, depict riders absorbed in a tense and unpleasant NYC subway routine evidently revealing the signs of a dire pandemic. Primarily, my thesis paper mostly emphasizes how the global viral pandemic of Covid-19 altered in a significant degree our NYC subway rider’s routine. Now riders consistently wear face masks, mind social distance and avoid social interactions. As illustrated through my paintings and accentuated in my thesis paper, these required sanitary rules and adapted safety measures clearly transformed the once lively ambience of the NYC subway commute. Just as embodied in my thesis document, it is evident that we, loyal NYC subway riders, have been profoundly affected by the intrusive Coronavirus. Yet, we also know that hope is on the horizon
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