Who students interact with? A social network analysis perspective on the use of Twitter in language learning

This paper reports student interaction patterns and self-reported results of using Twitter microblogging environment. The study employs longitudinal probabilistic social network analysis (SNA) to identify the patterns and trends of network dynamics. It is building on earlier works that explore associations of student achievement records with the observed network measures. It integrates gender as an additional variable and reports some relation with interaction patterns. Additionally, the paper reports the results of a questionnaire that enables further discussion on the communication patterns

Do personal conditions and circumstances surrounding partner loss explain loneliness in newly bereaved older adults?

This longitudinal study aims to explain loneliness in newly bereaved older adults, taking into account personal and circumstantial conditions surrounding the partner's death. A distinction is made between emotional and social loneliness. Data were gathered both before and after partner loss. Results were interpreted within the framework of the Theory of Mental Incongruity. The findings reveal that being unable to anticipate the partner's death is related to higher levels of emotional loneliness. Standards of instrumental support, measured indirectly by poor physical condition, lead to stronger emotional as well as social loneliness. Standards measured directly by importance attached to support or contacts result in higher emotional loneliness but, unexpectedly, in lower social loneliness. Furthermore, difficulties with establishing personal contacts, caused, for instance, by social anxiety, add to loneliness. It is concluded that circumstances related to the partner's illness may contribute to emotional loneliness after bereavement. Moreover, the results highlight the importance of taking coping attitudes into consideration for a better understanding of how newly bereaved older adults adapt to the loss of a partner

Current treatment of low grade gliomas

Low grade gliomas affect predominantly young adults, and have a relatively favorable prognosis compared to grade III and grade IV gliomas. The challenge for an optimal management of these patients is to find the balance between an optimal survival and the preservation of neurological function including cognition. Because all medical treatments may induce side effects, in young and nearly asymptomatic patients the choices can be difficult. This review summarizes the current strategies: a watch-and-wait policy, surgery, chemotherapy, and radiotherapy

Mining Social Interaction Data in Virtual Worlds

Virtual worlds and massively multi-player online games are rich sources of information about large-scale teams and groups, offering the tantalizing possibility of harvesting data about group formation, social networks, and network evolution. However these environments lack many of the cues that facilitate natural language processing in other conversational settings and different types of social media. Public chat data often features players who speak simultaneously, use jargon and emoticons, and only erratically adhere to conversational norms. This chapter presents techniques for inferring the existence of social links from unstructured conversational data collected from groups of participants in the Second Life virtual world

Differentially Private Exponential Random Graphs

We propose methods to release and analyze synthetic graphs in order to protect privacy of individual relationships captured by the social network. Proposed techniques aim at fitting and estimating a wide class of exponential random graph models (ERGMs) in a differentially private manner, and thus offer rigorous privacy guarantees. More specifically, we use the randomized response mechanism to release networks under $\epsilon$-edge differential privacy. To maintain utility for statistical inference, treating the original graph as missing, we propose a way to use likelihood based inference and Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) techniques to fit ERGMs to the produced synthetic networks. We demonstrate the usefulness of the proposed techniques on a real data example.Comment: minor edit

Politics Matters: Dynamics of Inter-organizational Networks among Immigrant Associations

We model the dynamics of the two-mode network among directors and boards of voluntary associations, using a stochastic actor-based model, SIENA [12], including the structural effects proposed in [6], and considering the political orientation of associations as a covariate. Using data from [14], we compare the evolution of interlocks among Turkish associations in two European capitals, and explain the noticeable difference in structure by looking at statistically significant differences among the estimated effects.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe