809 research outputs found
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
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
Enrichment and ranking of the YouTube tag space and integration with the Linked Data cloud
The increase of personal digital cameras with video functionality and video-enabled camera phones has increased the amount of user-generated videos on the Web. People are spending more and more time viewing online videos as a major source of entertainment and “infotainment”. Social websites allow users to assign shared free-form tags to user-generated multimedia resources, thus generating annotations for objects with a minimum amount of effort. Tagging allows communities to organise their multimedia items into browseable sets, but these tags may be poorly chosen and related tags may be omitted. Current techniques to retrieve, integrate and present this media to users are deficient and could do with improvement. In this paper, we describe a framework for semantic enrichment, ranking and integration of web video tags using Semantic Web technologies. Semantic enrichment of folksonomies can bridge the gap between the uncontrolled and flat structures typically found in user-generated content and structures provided by the Semantic Web. The enhancement of tag spaces with semantics has been accomplished through two major tasks: a tag space expansion and ranking step; and through concept matching and integration with the Linked Data cloud. We have explored social, temporal and spatial contexts to enrich and extend the existing tag space. The resulting semantic tag space is modelled via a local graph based on co-occurrence distances for ranking. A ranked tag list is mapped and integrated with the Linked Data cloud through the DBpedia resource repository. Multi-dimensional context filtering for tag expansion means that tag ranking is much easier and it provides less ambiguous tag to concept matching
Social network dynamics of face-to-face interactions
The recent availability of data describing social networks is changing our
understanding of the "microscopic structure" of a social tie. A social tie
indeed is an aggregated outcome of many social interactions such as
face-to-face conversations or phone-calls. Analysis of data on face-to-face
interactions shows that such events, as many other human activities, are
bursty, with very heterogeneous durations. In this paper we present a model for
social interactions at short time scales, aimed at describing contexts such as
conference venues in which individuals interact in small groups. We present a
detailed anayltical and numerical study of the model's dynamical properties,
and show that it reproduces important features of empirical data. The model
allows for many generalizations toward an increasingly realistic description of
social interactions. In particular in this paper we investigate the case where
the agents have intrinsic heterogeneities in their social behavior, or where
dynamic variations of the local number of individuals are included. Finally we
propose this model as a very flexible framework to investigate how dynamical
processes unfold in social networks.Comment: 20 pages, 25 figure
The Perspectives of Lagos Healthcare Leaders on Faith-Institution Involvement in Hypertension Health
BACKGROUND: Hypertension is an important challenge for the Nigerian healthcare system and multiple stakeholder mitigation is imperative. Faith institution mitigation is evolving but the opinion of healthcare leaders on their involvement in hypertension remains an important gap. OBJECTIVE: To explore the perspectives of a cross-section of leaders of healthcare institutions in Lagos (Nigeria) on faith institution-facilitated hyper tension inter vention against the background of current practice. METHODS: Attempts were made to recruit 152 healthcare institution leaders who were contacted using electronic mails, telephone conversations, institutional social media communication, institutions' web-mails and other contacts. The views of consenting leaders were gathered using an exploratory questionnaire survey, and analysed. RESULTS: The views of 23 leaders from the variety of institutions were that most (60%) hypertension cases were diagnosed during emergency presentations; and the public's hypertension health knowledge remains generally inadequate. Hypertension information dissemination was mostly verbal rather than in written/print form. Basic resources are deployed in hypertension management. There was majority support for collaboration in hypertension health promotion (90.0%), blood pressure screening (95.7%) and hypertension referral (95.5%). Fewer institutions had the resources to support hypertension health promotion (55.0%) and blood pressure screening (42.1%) compared to hypertension referral (90.9%). CONCLUSION: There is good support for faith institution involvement in hypertension health, with a particular interest in and capacity for health system referral. Deploying scarce resources to collaborate may be challenging. However, collaboration and better resources could improve hypertension prevention and management. Further work is needed for context specific innovation so faith institutions can contribute to hypertension health
Reporting of Adverse Events in Published and Unpublished Studies of Health Care Interventions : A Systematic Review
BACKGROUND: We performed a systematic review to assess whether we can quantify the underreporting of adverse events (AEs) in the published medical literature documenting the results of clinical trials as compared with other nonpublished sources, and whether we can measure the impact this underreporting has on systematic reviews of adverse events. METHODS AND FINDINGS: Studies were identified from 15 databases (including MEDLINE and Embase) and by handsearching, reference checking, internet searches, and contacting experts. The last database searches were conducted in July 2016. There were 28 methodological evaluations that met the inclusion criteria. Of these, 9 studies compared the proportion of trials reporting adverse events by publication status. The median percentage of published documents with adverse events information was 46% compared to 95% in the corresponding unpublished documents. There was a similar pattern with unmatched studies, for which 43% of published studies contained adverse events information compared to 83% of unpublished studies. A total of 11 studies compared the numbers of adverse events in matched published and unpublished documents. The percentage of adverse events that would have been missed had each analysis relied only on the published versions varied between 43% and 100%, with a median of 64%. Within these 11 studies, 24 comparisons of named adverse events such as death, suicide, or respiratory adverse events were undertaken. In 18 of the 24 comparisons, the number of named adverse events was higher in unpublished than published documents. Additionally, 2 other studies demonstrated that there are substantially more types of adverse events reported in matched unpublished than published documents. There were 20 meta-analyses that reported the odds ratios (ORs) and/or risk ratios (RRs) for adverse events with and without unpublished data. Inclusion of unpublished data increased the precision of the pooled estimates (narrower 95% confidence intervals) in 15 of the 20 pooled analyses, but did not markedly change the direction or statistical significance of the risk in most cases. The main limitations of this review are that the included case examples represent only a small number amongst thousands of meta-analyses of harms and that the included studies may suffer from publication bias, whereby substantial differences between published and unpublished data are more likely to be published. CONCLUSIONS: There is strong evidence that much of the information on adverse events remains unpublished and that the number and range of adverse events is higher in unpublished than in published versions of the same study. The inclusion of unpublished data can also reduce the imprecision of pooled effect estimates during meta-analysis of adverse events
Dynamics of social contagions with limited contact capacity
Individuals are always limited by some inelastic resources, such as time and energy, which restrict them to dedicate to social interaction and limit their contact capacities. Contact capacity plays an important role in dynamics of social contagions, which so far has eluded theoretical analysis. In this paper, we first propose a non-Markovian model to understand the effects of contact capacity on social contagions, in which each adopted individual can only contact and transmit the information to a finite number of neighbors. We then develop a heterogeneous edge-based compartmental theory for this model, and a remarkable agreement with simulations is obtained. Through theory and simulations, we find that enlarging the contact capacity makes the network more fragile to behavior spreading. Interestingly, we find that both the continuous and discontinuous dependence of the final adoption size on the information transmission probability can arise. There is a crossover phenomenon between the two types of dependence. More specifically, the crossover phenomenon can be induced by enlarging the contact capacity only when the degree exponent is above a critical degree exponent, while the final behavior adoption size always grows continuously for any contact capacity when degree exponent is below the critical degree exponent
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