Detecting the Influence of Spreading in Social Networks with Excitable Sensor Networks

Detecting spreading outbreaks in social networks with sensors is of great significance in applications. Inspired by the formation mechanism of human's physical sensations to external stimuli, we propose a new method to detect the influence of spreading by constructing excitable sensor networks. Exploiting the amplifying effect of excitable sensor networks, our method can better detect small-scale spreading processes. At the same time, it can also distinguish large-scale diffusion instances due to the self-inhibition effect of excitable elements. Through simulations of diverse spreading dynamics on typical real-world social networks (facebook, coauthor and email social networks), we find that the excitable senor networks are capable of detecting and ranking spreading processes in a much wider range of influence than other commonly used sensor placement methods, such as random, targeted, acquaintance and distance strategies. In addition, we validate the efficacy of our method with diffusion data from a real-world online social system, Twitter. We find that our method can detect more spreading topics in practice. Our approach provides a new direction in spreading detection and should be useful for designing effective detection methods

Industry Labor Force Quality: An Investigation from the Customer Service Perspective

To investigate the labor force quality deficiency in the Macao casino industry, this study conducted a survey among Macao casino guests on their assessment of customer service. The mean scores of different service features were calculated and compared across casinos operated by different casino companies. Furthermore, different service features were examined for their importance to the overall customer satisfaction based on an estimated regression model. The study found that most of the service features were below satisfactory rating, but Wynn Resorts stood out as the top performer among the four gaming companies. The regression model identified respect , smile and skill as the most important contributors to overall customer satisfaction. The findings suggest that to become a top gaming destination, Macao must strengthen its labor force quality in both technical and interpersonal skills

Persistence in an antiferromagnetic Ising model with conserved magnetisation

We obtain the persistence exponents for an antiferromagnetic Ising system in which the magnetisation is kept constant. This system belongs to Model C (system with non-conserved order parameter with a conserved density) and is expected to have persistence exponents different from that of Model A (system with no conservation) but independent of the conserved density. Our numerical results for both local persistence at zero temperature and global persistence at the critical temperature however indicate that the exponents are dependent on the conserved magnetisation in both two and three dimensions. This nonuniversal feature is attributed to the presence of the conserved field and is special to the persistence phenomena.Comment: 8 pages, to be published in Physica A (Proceedings of the Statphys-Kolkata IV, 2002