Public Goods and Political Trust in the East Asian Mega-Cities: An Empirical Study on Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo

As the foundation of government legitimacy and policy effectiveness, political trust mediates the relationship between the government and society and plays an important role in urban governance. Based on survey data from the three most influential cities in the East Asian region, namely Beijing, Seoul and Tokyo, the paper examines how the provision of public goods affects political trust. We make a distinction between infrastructural goods and social justice goods and find out that (1) public goods provision has a significant effect on political trust; (2) as compared to infrastructural goods, social justice goods plays a more significant role in contributing to political trust. This suggests that government should provide more social justice goods for enhancing political trust in these mega-cities

How Facial Expressions of Recipients Influence Online Prosocial Behaviors?—Evidence from Big Data Analysis on Tencent Gongyi Platform

Cyberspace has significantly influenced people’s perceptions of social interactions and communication. As a result, the conventional theories of kin selection and reciprocal altruism fall short in completely elucidating online prosocial behavior. Based on the social information processing model, we propose an analytical framework to explain the donation behaviors on online platform. Through collecting textual and visual data from Tencent Gongyi platform pertaining to disease relief projects, and employing techniques encompassing text analysis, image analysis, and propensity score matching, we investigate the impact of both internal emotional cues and external contextual cues on donation behaviors. It is found that positive emotions tend to attract a larger number of donations, while negative emotions tend to result in higher per capita donation amounts. Furthermore, these effects manifest differently under distinct external contextual conditions

Optimal control of logical control network with noisy inputs

This paper considers the optimal control of the logical control network with noisy inputs. The optimal control problem concerning the minority game (MG) with mixed population is formulated. In the game the producers are represented by the states of nodes in the Boolean control network, the speculators and the noise traders are identified as the controllable inputs and the noisy inputs of the nodes. The speculators aim at achieving the maximum profits but the noise traders make the issue complicated. The Boolean logical variables and functions are transformed into the algebraic form by using the recently developed Semi-tensor Product of matrices technique. In this manner, we calculate the optimal cycles that lead to the optimal control and analyze the effect of noisy input based on the definition of score. Although we develop our method within the context of MG, it actually can be applied to other general cases of logical networks with noisy inputs. To avoid the computational expensive calculation of the optimal cycles for all states in the input-state network, we further propose a simplified algorithm with formulas for large scale MG case. An illustrative example is included to show the validity and efficiency of the simplified algorithm.Automation & Control SystemsEngineering, Electrical & ElectronicEICPCI-S(ISTP)

Bonding, Bridging, and Linking Social Capital and Self-Rated Health among Chinese Adults: Use of the Anchoring Vignettes Technique.

Three main opposing camps exist over how social capital relates to population health, namely the social support perspective, the inequality thesis, and the political economy approach. The distinction among bonding, bridging, and linking social capital probably helps close the debates between these three camps, which is rarely investigated in existing literatures. Moreover, although self-rated health is a frequently used health indicator in studies on the relationship between social capital and health, the interpersonal incomparability of this measure has been largely neglected. This study has two main objectives. Firstly, we aim to investigate the relationship between bonding, bridging, and linking social capital and self-rated health among Chinese adults. Secondly, we aim to improve the interpersonal comparability in self-rated health measurement. We use data from a nationally representative survey in China. Self-rated health was adjusted using the anchoring vignettes technique to improve comparability. Two-level ordinal logistic regression was performed to model the association between social capital and self-rated health at both individual and community levels. The interaction between residence and social capital was included to examine urban/rural disparities in the relationship. We found that most social capital indicators had a significant relationship with adjusted self-rated health of Chinese adults, but the relationships were mixed. Individual-level bonding, linking social capital, and community-level bridging social capital were positively related with health. Significant urban/rural disparities appeared in the association between community-level bonding, linking social capital, and adjusted self-rated health. For example, people living in communities with higher bonding social capital tended to report poorer adjusted self-rated health in urban areas, but the opposite tendency held for rural areas. Furthermore, the comparison between multivariate analyses results before and after the anchoring vignettes adjustment showed that the relationship between community-level social capital and self-rated health might be distorted if comparability problems are not addressed. In conclusion, the framework of bonding, bridging, and linking social capital helps us better understand the mechanism between social capital and self-rated health. Cultural and socioeconomic factors should be considered when designing health intervention policies using social capital. Moreover, we recommend that more studies improve the comparability of self-rated health by using the anchoring vignettes technique

A new method and application for controlling the steady-state probability distributions of probabilistic Boolean networks

Probabilistic Boolean networks (PBNs) have been proved to be a useful tool for modeling genetic regulatory interactions. The study of the steady-state probability distribution may help to understand the essential long-run behavior of a PBN. In this paper we focus on a type of PBNs derived from gene expression data collected in a study of metastatic melanoma. The metastatic melanoma model is usually described by a PBN containing seven genes among which WNT5A plays a significant role in the development of melanoma and is known to induce the metastasis of melanoma when highly active. This paper investigates the issue of how to drive the corresponding PBN towards desired steady-state probability distributions so as to reduce the WNT5A's ability to induce a metastatic phenotype. ? 2014 IEEE.EICPCI-S(ISTP)

Distribution of self-rated health (SRH) before and after adjustment using anchoring vignettes.

<p>Distribution of self-rated health (SRH) before and after adjustment using anchoring vignettes.</p

Two-level ordinal logistic regression estimates (odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals) and variance components with adjusted self-rated health (SRH) as outcome variables.

<p>^aAt the individual level, these models adjusted demographic variables (including sex, age and marital status), socio-economic variables (including Hukou, migrant status, educational attainment, employment, natural logarithm of personal income, subjective socio-economic status) and health risk factors (including health insurance, Body Mass Index, heavy smoking and heavy drinking); at the community level, they adjusted community economic status.</p><p>⁺ p<0.10;</p><p>^* p<0.05;</p><p>^** p<0.01;</p><p>^*** p<0.001.</p><p>SC referred to social capital.</p><p>Two-level ordinal logistic regression estimates (odds ratios and 95% confidence intervals) and variance components with adjusted self-rated health (SRH) as outcome variables.</p

Text of self-rated health and vignettes questions and response options.

<p>Text of self-rated health and vignettes questions and response options.</p