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

A Place to Rest Your (Burnt) Bones? Mortuary Houses in Early Anglo-Saxon England

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Archaeological Journal on 5th October 2017, available online: doi: 10.1080/00665983.2017.1366704This article presents a fresh interpretation of square and rectangular mortuary structures found in association with deposits of cremated material and cremation burials in a range of early Anglo-Saxon (fifth-/sixth-century AD) cemeteries across southern and eastern England. Responding to a recent argument that they could be traces of pyre structures, a range of ethnographic analogies are drawn upon, and the full-range of archaeological evidence is synthesized, to re-affirm and extend their interpretation as unburned mortuary structures. Three interleaving significances are proposed: (i) demarcating the burial place of specific individuals or groups from the rest of the cemetery population, (ii) operating as ‘columbaria’ for the above-ground storage of the cremated dead (i.e. not just to demarcate cremation burials), and (iii) providing key nodes of commemoration between funerals as the structures were built, used, repaired and eventually decayed within cemeteries. The article proposes that timber ‘mortuary houses’ reveal that groups in early Anglo-Saxon England perceived their cemeteries in relation to contemporary settlement architectures, with some groups constructing and maintaining miniaturized canopied buildings to store and display the cremated remains of the dead

Przemiany rtęci w procesach spalania paliw stałych

The paper presents current reports on kinetics and mechanisms of reactions with mercury which take place in the exhaust gases, discharged from the processes of combustion of solid fuels (coals). The three main stages were considered. The first one, when thermal decomposition of Hg components takes place together with formation of elemental mercury (Hg0). The second one with homogeneous oxidation of Hg0 to Hg2+ by other active components of exhaust gases (e.g. HCl). The third one with heterogeneous reactions of gaseous mercury (the both - elemental and oxidised Hg) and solid particles of fly ash, leading to generation of particulate-bound mercury (Hgp). Influence of exhaust components and their concentrations, temperature and retention time on the efficiency of mercury oxidation was determined. The issues concerning physical (gas-solid) and chemical speciation of mercury (fractionation Hg0-Hg2+) as well as factors which have influence on the mercury speciation in exhaust gases are discussed in detail.Artykuł stanowi podsumowanie aktualnego stanu wiedzy nt. kinetyki i mechanizmów reakcji z udziałem rtęci, w tym reakcji homogenicznych i heterogenicznych, zachodzących w spalinach z procesów spalania paliw stałych. Opisano wpływ składników spalin i temperatury na efektywność utleniania rtęci. Omówiono również zagadnienia fizycznej i chemicznej specjacji rtęci w gazach spalinowych, jak również wpływ różnych czynników na specjację rtęci

The influence of hymenolepidosis on the tissue reactions in rats in experimental conditions

In the course of experimental hymenolepidosis in rats, varying mobilization of mastocytes, dependent on the organ of their origin, was observed. The highest was in the small intestine, lower in the mesenterial lymph nodes and the spleen. Various degree of correlation between the mastocyte mobilization and the histopathological changes was stated