1,093 research outputs found
Rhythms of social interaction: messaging within a massive online network
We have analyzed the fully-anonymized headers of 362 million messages
exchanged by 4.2 million users of Facebook, an online social network of college
students, during a 26 month interval. The data reveal a number of strong daily
and weekly regularities which provide insights into the time use of college
students and their social lives, including seasonal variations. We also
examined how factors such as school affiliation and informal online friend
lists affect the observed behavior and temporal patterns. Finally, we show that
Facebook users appear to be clustered by school with respect to their temporal
messaging patterns
A Survey of Alaska, 1743-1799
"In this paper an attempt will be made to give a brief sketch of the history and conditions of Alaska from the time of its discovery to the organization of the Russia American Company.
Mining in Alaska before 1867
"When the Russian American Company was organized in 1799 it demanded the exclusive right to all the underground riches of Alaska.
Alaska, an Empire in the Making
"The book has its value in that it shows how certain people regard Alaska…not taken pains to consult the best historical books on Alaska….
Assessing the Community Partnerships Present at The University of Vermont’s Horticulture Research and Education Center
Agroecology can be defined as a countermovement against unsustainable practices in our current food system. It is a globally recognized approach to sustainable food systems that is being institutionalized through policies in multiple countries and global spaces, such as the FAO. Although significant efforts are being made to implement agroecological principles into concrete policy, there is limited and insufficient support for these movements. Through a close look at the University of Vermont’s Horticulture Research and Education Center (HREC), this project aimed to show the influence that the farm has on the individuals that interact with the space, the institution it’s connected to, and the greater Burlington community. Questions are posed about how the farm relates to agroecology and how an agroecological-minded farm could have potential benefits to its surrounding community, in terms of food security, innovation, and quality of life. Additionally, an ArcGIS Story Map was created for HREC, outlining the community connections and impacts that the farm holds. Hopefully, the Story Map will then be used to promote further conversations with the community partners of HREC to assess the strength and direction of HREC’s interactions with the local Burlington community in the future
Semantics, sensors, and the social web: The live social semantics experiments
The Live Social Semantics is an innovative application that encourages and guides social networking between researchers at conferences and similar events. The application integrates data and technologies from the Semantic Web, online social networks, and a face-to-face contact sensing platform. It helps researchers to find like-minded and influential researchers, to identify and meet people in their community of practice, and to capture and later retrace their real-world networking activities at conferences. The application was successfully deployed at two international conferences, attracting more than 300 users in total. This paper describes this application, and discusses and evaluates the results of its two deployment
Temporal Analysis of Activity Patterns of Editors in Collaborative Mapping Project of OpenStreetMap
In the recent years Wikis have become an attractive platform for social
studies of the human behaviour. Containing millions records of edits across the
globe, collaborative systems such as Wikipedia have allowed researchers to gain
a better understanding of editors participation and their activity patterns.
However, contributions made to Geo-wikis_wiki-based collaborative mapping
projects_ differ from systems such as Wikipedia in a fundamental way due to
spatial dimension of the content that limits the contributors to a set of those
who posses local knowledge about a specific area and therefore cross-platform
studies and comparisons are required to build a comprehensive image of online
open collaboration phenomena. In this work, we study the temporal behavioural
pattern of OpenStreetMap editors, a successful example of geo-wiki, for two
European capital cities. We categorise different type of temporal patterns and
report on the historical trend within a period of 7 years of the project age.
We also draw a comparison with the previously observed editing activity
patterns of Wikipedia.Comment: Submitte
Does switching pay off? The impact of parliamentary party instability on individual electoral performance
Members of parliament who change their parliamentary party group (PPG) affiliation can
be motivated by a variety of factors but the desire to improve their electoral prospects is often
argued to be the among the most important. But does switching PPG affiliation improve or damage the
electoral performance of those involved? We study the changes in electoral performance of Polish
MPs involved in parliamentary party instability since the mid-1990s using an original dataset on all
instances of switching compiled by the INSTAPARTY (Party Instability in Parliaments,
https://instapartyproject.com) project. In addition to analyzing whether the MPs run for the parliament
again in the following election, we zoom in on their electoral performance in terms of personal
preference votes. We consider the electoral dividends of different types of switching and find that the
effect of switching on personal electoral performance depends on the type of switching MPs were
involved in
Understanding the Complexity of Party Instability in Parliaments
We propose a new typology of parliamentary party switches (switching events) that focuses
on three dimensions: (1) the number of MPs and the degree of coordination, (2) the origin of switchers
and (3) the destination of switchers – a parliamentary party group (PPG) or independent status. We further
distinguish between switches with single and multiple destinations. Our approach sheds new light to party
instability in various ways. We elucidate types of party instability to emphasize the complexity of party
instability that have eluded the conceptual toolset available thus far. For example, “collective defection”
(coordinated movement from one PPG to another), “collective exit” (MPs exiting their parliamentary
group to become independent MPs) and “multi-PPG split” (coordinated moves from several PPGs to form
a new PPG). Using preliminary data compiled for Instaparty (Party Instability in Parliaments) project
from (mostly) Poland and Ireland, we find rich diversity in the forms of parliamentary party instability.
While individual defections are much more common than group defections, they are clearly more
dominant in Ireland than in Poland; furthermore, switches between PPGs (rather than between PPGs and
independent status) have been more common in Poland. Our typology is illustrated by the analysis of the
8th Polish Sejm that provides examples of nearly all single-origin switching events and of most multiorigin ones. The new typology presents the first step of our inquiry into the patterns, causes and
consequences of party switching in eight democracies (Estonia, Ireland, Italy, Lithuania, Norway, the
Netherlands, Poland and Romania) from 1960s/1990s to early 2020s
Independence versus Affiliation: What Determines Entry into Parliamentary Party Groups?
Political parties are often considered essential for structuring parliamentary decisionmaking in democracies. However, many MPs experience spells of being non-affiliated
with any parliamentary party group (PPG), either because they were elected as independent candidates or left their PPGs earlier in the legislative term. Whether such
non-affiliation periods end with an entry to a PPG, which PPG the legislator enters
and how long they remain independent before the entry, as well as the reasons for these
patterns, remains relatively unknown. This paper addresses these under-researched
questions by examining PPG entry in three Central and Eastern European countries
(Lithuania, Poland, and Romania) in the last two decades. We build and test an
argument that electoral, office and policy concerns of both the MPs considering the
entry and the potential receiving parties play an important role in driving entry. Our
findings suggest that legislators’ electoral incentives as a key explanation for their PPG
affiliation decisions
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