Detecting Strong Ties Using Network Motifs

Detecting strong ties among users in social and information networks is a fundamental operation that can improve performance on a multitude of personalization and ranking tasks. Strong-tie edges are often readily obtained from the social network as users often participate in multiple overlapping networks via features such as following and messaging. These networks may vary greatly in size, density and the information they carry. This setting leads to a natural strong tie detection task: given a small set of labeled strong tie edges, how well can one detect unlabeled strong ties in the remainder of the network? This task becomes particularly daunting for the Twitter network due to scant availability of pairwise relationship attribute data, and sparsity of strong tie networks such as phone contacts. Given these challenges, a natural approach is to instead use structural network features for the task, produced by {\em combining} the strong and "weak" edges. In this work, we demonstrate via experiments on Twitter data that using only such structural network features is sufficient for detecting strong ties with high precision. These structural network features are obtained from the presence and frequency of small network motifs on combined strong and weak ties. We observe that using motifs larger than triads alleviate sparsity problems that arise for smaller motifs, both due to increased combinatorial possibilities as well as benefiting strongly from searching beyond the ego network. Empirically, we observe that not all motifs are equally useful, and need to be carefully constructed from the combined edges in order to be effective for strong tie detection. Finally, we reinforce our experimental findings with providing theoretical justification that suggests why incorporating these larger sized motifs as features could lead to increased performance in planted graph models.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of WWW 2017 (Web-science track

Tracing the Use of Practices through Networks of Collaboration

An active line of research has used on-line data to study the ways in which discrete units of information---including messages, photos, product recommendations, group invitations---spread through social networks. There is relatively little understanding, however, of how on-line data might help in studying the diffusion of more complex {\em practices}---roughly, routines or styles of work that are generally handed down from one person to another through collaboration or mentorship. In this work, we propose a framework together with a novel type of data analysis that seeks to study the spread of such practices by tracking their syntactic signatures in large document collections. Central to this framework is the notion of an "inheritance graph" that represents how people pass the practice on to others through collaboration. Our analysis of these inheritance graphs demonstrates that we can trace a significant number of practices over long time-spans, and we show that the structure of these graphs can help in predicting the longevity of collaborations within a field, as well as the fitness of the practices themselves.Comment: To Appear in Proceedings of ICWSM 2017, data at https://github.com/CornellNLP/Macro

Force, fraud, and coercion : Bridging from knowledge of intercountry adoption to global surrogacy

This report discusses concerns raised by participants of Thematic Area 4 (Force, Fraud and Coercion) of the International Forum on Intercountry Adoption and Global Surrogacy held in August 2014. There has been a significant body of research on intercountry adoption practices over the past 30 years; force, fraud, and coercion have been identified in a small but important component of the literature. However, this knowledge in intercountry adoption has not yet truly bridged into research in global surrogacy with some recent exceptions. Learning from the past of ICA and connecting the evidence is particularly relevant due to the fact that the need for international law focused on global surrogacy and issues of parentage has been considered. The lessons learned from a history of corruption and human rights abuses are important to integrate when formulating future international law and regulations to protect vulnerable peoples in global surrogacy practices. Concepts of exploitation and human trafficking are explored with considerations of how to prevent, protect, and prosecute as emergent focal points of discourse. Effective prosecution of crimes, implications for a convention on global surrogacy, exploitation in global surrogacy arrangements, emotional safeguards for surrogate mothers, limited knowledge about the sense of origin, and experiences of children born through surrogacy are all areas in need of continued research

Social Work in a Post-Dobbs World: The ‘Adoption Fallacy’, Decolonization, and Reproductive Justice

This article takes as its departure a critique of the ‘adoption fallacy’ underlying the US Supreme Court decision Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization to argue that the Dobbs decision incentivizes a reconsideration of social work practice as a site for advancing reproductive justice. To do this, however, social work must strive to decolonize the profession by critically reflecting on its role in reproductive policy and politics, particularly its complicity in abortion and adoption decisions that may have limited—and continue to limit—reproductive justice. Only then can social work effectively counter the adoption fallacy and advocate more broadly for reproductive justice

The Taken Children of Ukraine

The invasion of Ukraine paints a complex picture for children. Russia has been accused of kidnapping and genocide, violating international rights and humanitarian laws. Some children taken by Russia will be adopted, all will be Russified, and the fate of others is unknown. Children of all ages taken from families or institutions have become weapons of war. Attempts at ‘rescues’ for the purpose of adoption mean children are also at risk from other actors. Social workers and NGOs play important roles in work with these children and their families. The Taken Children of Ukraine is the focus of this article

Global Commercial Surrogacy and International Adoption: Parallels and Differences

Over the decades, there have been numerous trends in the formation of family for those experiencing infertility. Adoption – initially domestic but now mostly international – has long been a prevailing method, with a dual outcome of also finding homes for parentless children. Those would-be parents with a stronger desire for genetic relatedness have turned to assisted reproductive technologies for the creation of their families. In the 21st century, capitalising on globalisation and advances in medical sciences and communication, global commercial surrogacy (GCS) is emerging as a dominant method of family formation. In seeking to publish this article in Adoption & Fostering, our primary objective was to provide its readership with an introductory look at GCS, thereby expanding an awareness of surrogacy to an audience whose work has traditionally been concerned with the care and protection of children through foster care and adoption. A secondary aim was to see where the long-standing field of adoption could potentially inform the burgeoning field of global commercial surrogacy. To achieve these objectives, we use international adoption and the adoption triangle as a framework, as we look at the similarities and differences between: (1) the adoptive and commissioning parents; (2) the birth mother and the surrogate; and (3) the adopted children and the children born of global surrogacy

Social work education in the Arabian Gulf: Challenges and opportunities

© 2017 Taylor & Francis. Religion is an integral part of life in Islamic countries in the Arabian Gulf nations of Bahrain, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and thus it informs social work education, practice, and policies. With the expansion of social work education around the world—both through Western universities opening international campuses and local universities developing social work programs—any Western faculty is part of developing social work education programs outside of their homeland. The development of social work education programs outside the Western world requires intentionality to avoid colonization (or recolonization) by, for example, adoption of inappropriate curricula and textbooks and/or promotion of culturally irrelevant or inappropriate interventions. Additional challenges, ethical considerations, and knowledge are needed to develop culturally relevant undergraduate and graduate social work education programs in the Arab Gulf region. This article focuses on the experience of Western social work educators in the Arab Gulf who are all Western-born and Western-trained social work faculty members who worked extensively in social work education in the Arabian Gulf region. They have developed programs in these nations and taught in both BSW and MSW programs in the Arab Gulf

Integrating Globalization into the Social Work Curriculum

The reality that social work is a global profession is explored. Authors encourage a broadening of social work education, moving beyond the traditional conception of internationalized to a globalized social work curriculum. Practical teaching strategies for a globalized perspective are presented with selected key concepts specifically applied to social policy, community practice, human behavior in the social environment, and sustainable development. Discussion includes macro-scale ethical considerations in a neoliberal economic system

Competition and Selection Among Conventions

In many domains, a latent competition among different conventions determines which one will come to dominate. One sees such effects in the success of community jargon, of competing frames in political rhetoric, or of terminology in technical contexts. These effects have become widespread in the online domain, where the data offers the potential to study competition among conventions at a fine-grained level. In analyzing the dynamics of conventions over time, however, even with detailed on-line data, one encounters two significant challenges. First, as conventions evolve, the underlying substance of their meaning tends to change as well; and such substantive changes confound investigations of social effects. Second, the selection of a convention takes place through the complex interactions of individuals within a community, and contention between the users of competing conventions plays a key role in the convention's evolution. Any analysis must take place in the presence of these two issues. In this work we study a setting in which we can cleanly track the competition among conventions. Our analysis is based on the spread of low-level authoring conventions in the eprint arXiv over 24 years: by tracking the spread of macros and other author-defined conventions, we are able to study conventions that vary even as the underlying meaning remains constant. We find that the interaction among co-authors over time plays a crucial role in the selection of them; the distinction between more and less experienced members of the community, and the distinction between conventions with visible versus invisible effects, are both central to the underlying processes. Through our analysis we make predictions at the population level about the ultimate success of different synonymous conventions over time--and at the individual level about the outcome of "fights" between people over convention choices.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of WWW 2017, data at https://github.com/CornellNLP/Macro