How motivations of SNSs use and offline social trust affect college students' self-disclosure on SNSs: An investigation in China

Social Networking Sites (SNSs) have been proliferating and growing in popularity worldwide throughout the past few years, which have received significant interest from researchers. Previous literatures on Internet suggest that offline social trust influences online perceptions and behaviors, and there is linkage between trust and self-disclosure in face-to-face context. Adopting the Uses and Gratifications perspective as the theoretical foundation, this exploratory study aimed to address the roles that motivations of SNSs use and offline social trust play in predicting levels of self-disclosure on SNSs. Taking 640 snowballing sampling on Renren.com, the study found that there was an instrumental orientation of SNSs use among China's college students. Social interaction, self-image building and information seeking were three major motivations when college students use SNSs. As expected, the results also indicated that motivations of SNS use and offline social trust play a more important role in predicting self-disclosure on SNSs than demographics. This exploratory study gives an empirical insight in the influence of motivations of SNSs use and offline social trust on self-disclosure online. --Social Networking Sites,Motivations,Self-disclosure,Offline Social Trust

Community detection in airline networks : an empirical analysis of American vs. Southwest airlines

In this paper, we develop a route-traffic-based method for detecting community structures in airline networks. Our model is both an application and an extension of the Clauset-Newman-Moore (CNM) modularity maximization algorithm, in that we apply the CNM algorithm to large airline networks, and take both route distance and passenger volumes into account. Therefore, the relationships between airports are defined not only based on the topological structure of the network but also by a traffic-driven indicator. To illustrate our model, two case studies are presented: American Airlines and Southwest Airlines. Results show that the model is effective in exploring the characteristics of the network connections, including the detection of the most influential nodes and communities on the formation of different network structures. This information is important from an airline operation pattern perspective to identify the vulnerability of networks

The Changing Demography of South Dakota

Dr. Zhang talks about the latest research on population composition and diversity in South Dakota with an eye to emerging trends