577 research outputs found
L'Occidente e la primavera araba
The ârevolutionsâ in the Arab world have forced us to radically revise our geopolitical concepts and ideological interpretations of what we call the âGreater Middle Eastâ. These were the result of an attempt to apply the basic principles of liberalism to a context radically different from its origins, and to spread them throughout a region that stretches from the Atlantic to the Hindukush. In general, the error was to think that democratic procedures could be exported without ensuring at the same time the conditions for strengthening democratic processes, and without waiting for them to acquire greater awareness and conviction in the societies concerned. The events of 2011 show that the West, and Europe in a special way, must pass from the rhetorical exportation of democracy to real democracy support, by strengthening the extremely fragile democracies coming to life in North Africa and the Middle East.Le ârivoluzioniâ del mondo arabo obbligano a rivedere radicalmente un concetto geo-politico ed un postulato ideologico ormai superato, quello espresso dalle parole: âAmpio Medio Orienteâ. Esso corrispondeva al tentativo di applicare, in un contesto radicalmente diverso da quello originario, i principi fondamentali della filosofia politica del liberalismo, estendendoli a una regione compresa tra lâAtlantico e lâHindukush. PiĂš in generale, lâerrore è stato quello di chi ritiene di poter esportare le procedure democratiche, senza parallelamente verificare le condizioni per rafforzare i processi democratici e senza attendere che essi emergessero ad un livello di maggior consapevolezza e convinzione nelle societĂ interessate. I fatti del 2011 dimostrano che è necessario, per lâOccidente e, in particolare, per lâEuropa, passare dalla retorica del democracy export, cioè dellâesportazione (anche forzata) della democrazia, alla concretezza del democracy support, vale a dire del sostegno alle nuove fragilissime democrazie nascenti in Nord Africa e in Medio Oriente
The concept of periphery in Pope Francis' discourse : a religious alternative to globalization ?
Published on 16 January 2015.Since the beginning of his mandate, Pope Francis has used the concept of periphery as a metaphor of social marginality. However, the notion of periphery also seems to target the asymmetries generated by the liberal version of globalization. Pope Francisâ narrative has to be read in the broader context of the relation between religions and globalization. That interaction is usually conceptualized in terms of religions capitalizing on global âvectorsâ, such as new information and communication technologies, processes of political and institutional integration, shared cultural patterns, transnational phenomena and organizations. An alternative way to analyze the role of religions consists in considering them as agencies defending the perspective of a universal community, putting into question the national political boundaries and contesting the existing global order. Understood in those terms, the concept of periphery reveals to be a powerful rhetoric device, insofar as it suggests that it is possible to get a wider perspective of the current state of the world looking form the edge rather than from the center
Globalization and Post-Secularism: Religions and a Universal Common Identity
The most celebrated âreturnâ of religion on the international scene has been considered by analysts, scholars, and diplomats mainly as a confirmation on a wider scale of the hypothesis of a âpost-secularâ era. What is missing, however, is a reflection on the present-day functioning of religions in connection with the systemic analysis of international relations in a phase of global transformation. If world religions are to be taken seriously in the field of international relations, this would require an approach to their role in the international system as a structural element rather than a mere cultural phenomenon with only a derivative or secondary influence on world order. In particular, it will be useful to make a clear conceptual distinction between the two diverging paradigms of âglobalizationâ and âuniversalism,â as embodied in an explicit or implicit way in many world religions today; and to investigate if and how religions could contribute to the formation of a global collective identity, both symbolic and pluralistic
Improving Recommendation Quality by Merging Collaborative Filtering and Social Relationships
Matrix Factorization techniques have been successfully applied to raise the quality of suggestions generated\ud
by Collaborative Filtering Systems (CFSs). Traditional CFSs\ud
based on Matrix Factorization operate on the ratings provided\ud
by users and have been recently extended to incorporate\ud
demographic aspects such as age and gender. In this paper we\ud
propose to merge CF techniques based on Matrix Factorization\ud
and information regarding social friendships in order to\ud
provide users with more accurate suggestions and rankings\ud
on items of their interest. The proposed approach has been\ud
evaluated on a real-life online social network; the experimental\ud
results show an improvement against existing CF approaches.\ud
A detailed comparison with related literature is also presen
Enhancing community detection using a network weighting strategy
A community within a network is a group of vertices densely connected to each
other but less connected to the vertices outside. The problem of detecting
communities in large networks plays a key role in a wide range of research
areas, e.g. Computer Science, Biology and Sociology. Most of the existing
algorithms to find communities count on the topological features of the network
and often do not scale well on large, real-life instances.
In this article we propose a strategy to enhance existing community detection
algorithms by adding a pre-processing step in which edges are weighted
according to their centrality w.r.t. the network topology. In our approach, the
centrality of an edge reflects its contribute to making arbitrary graph
tranversals, i.e., spreading messages over the network, as short as possible.
Our strategy is able to effectively complements information about network
topology and it can be used as an additional tool to enhance community
detection. The computation of edge centralities is carried out by performing
multiple random walks of bounded length on the network. Our method makes the
computation of edge centralities feasible also on large-scale networks. It has
been tested in conjunction with three state-of-the-art community detection
algorithms, namely the Louvain method, COPRA and OSLOM. Experimental results
show that our method raises the accuracy of existing algorithms both on
synthetic and real-life datasets.Comment: 28 pages, 2 figure
On Facebook, most ties are weak
Pervasive socio-technical networks bring new conceptual and technological
challenges to developers and users alike. A central research theme is
evaluation of the intensity of relations linking users and how they facilitate
communication and the spread of information. These aspects of human
relationships have been studied extensively in the social sciences under the
framework of the "strength of weak ties" theory proposed by Mark Granovetter.13
Some research has considered whether that theory can be extended to online
social networks like Facebook, suggesting interaction data can be used to
predict the strength of ties. The approaches being used require handling
user-generated data that is often not publicly available due to privacy
concerns. Here, we propose an alternative definition of weak and strong ties
that requires knowledge of only the topology of the social network (such as who
is a friend of whom on Facebook), relying on the fact that online social
networks, or OSNs, tend to fragment into communities. We thus suggest
classifying as weak ties those edges linking individuals belonging to different
communities and strong ties as those connecting users in the same community. We
tested this definition on a large network representing part of the Facebook
social graph and studied how weak and strong ties affect the
information-diffusion process. Our findings suggest individuals in OSNs
self-organize to create well-connected communities, while weak ties yield
cohesion and optimize the coverage of information spread.Comment: Accepted version of the manuscript before ACM editorial work. Check
http://cacm.acm.org/magazines/2014/11/179820-on-facebook-most-ties-are-weak/
for the final versio
Analyzing the Facebook Friendship Graph
Online Social Networks (OSN) during last years acquired a\ud
huge and increasing popularity as one of the most important emerging Web phenomena, deeply modifying the behavior of users and contributing to build a solid substrate of connections and relationships among people using the Web. In this preliminary work paper, our purpose is to analyze Facebook, considering a signi�cant sample of data re\ud
ecting relationships among subscribed users. Our goal is to extract, from this platform, relevant information about the distribution of these relations and exploit tools and algorithms provided by the Social Network Analysis (SNA) to discover and, possibly, understand underlying similarities\ud
between the developing of OSN and real-life social networks
XML Matchers: approaches and challenges
Schema Matching, i.e. the process of discovering semantic correspondences
between concepts adopted in different data source schemas, has been a key topic
in Database and Artificial Intelligence research areas for many years. In the
past, it was largely investigated especially for classical database models
(e.g., E/R schemas, relational databases, etc.). However, in the latest years,
the widespread adoption of XML in the most disparate application fields pushed
a growing number of researchers to design XML-specific Schema Matching
approaches, called XML Matchers, aiming at finding semantic matchings between
concepts defined in DTDs and XSDs. XML Matchers do not just take well-known
techniques originally designed for other data models and apply them on
DTDs/XSDs, but they exploit specific XML features (e.g., the hierarchical
structure of a DTD/XSD) to improve the performance of the Schema Matching
process. The design of XML Matchers is currently a well-established research
area. The main goal of this paper is to provide a detailed description and
classification of XML Matchers. We first describe to what extent the
specificities of DTDs/XSDs impact on the Schema Matching task. Then we
introduce a template, called XML Matcher Template, that describes the main
components of an XML Matcher, their role and behavior. We illustrate how each
of these components has been implemented in some popular XML Matchers. We
consider our XML Matcher Template as the baseline for objectively comparing
approaches that, at first glance, might appear as unrelated. The introduction
of this template can be useful in the design of future XML Matchers. Finally,
we analyze commercial tools implementing XML Matchers and introduce two
challenging issues strictly related to this topic, namely XML source clustering
and uncertainty management in XML Matchers.Comment: 34 pages, 8 tables, 7 figure
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