Modeling and inference of mixed dynamics and detection of causal emergent features.

Information and Influence Propagation in Multi-layer Networks: the Impact of Clustering and Multi-dimensional Content Spreading

This work is aimed at analyzing and highlighting the importance of using forecasting models in the study of the competitive environment of enterprise. Approaches to forecasting and modeling of the competitive environment of enterprise, which ensure the implementation of strategic planning and management, are studied. Various methods of forecasting are analyzed, which allow predicting future trends on the basis of available data. The key factors influencing the competitiveness of enterprise have been identified and their use for building a competitive model has been proposed. Forecasting requires a large amount of data and taking into account the versatility of the competitive environment. The use of several forecasting methods ensures high accuracy of predictions. No less important is the analysis of the impact of external factors on the activities of the enterprise, which allows you to quickly respond to changes. Forecasting is a dynamic process that requires constant updating and revision of results to maintain their relevance. Modeling of the competitive environment is based on the results of forecasting. The initial stage is to analyze the data and identify the key factors. Based on this, a model is built that reflects the interaction between these factors and allows you to evaluate the efficiency of different strategies. Models are subject to continuous evaluation and adjustment based on new data and changes in the environment, ensuring their adequacy and relevance. Particular attention is paid to the Irwin method, which is used to detect anomalies in data. This allows you to ensure high accuracy of the analysis and avoid the impact of random errors. On the basis of the carried out analysis, a table has been composed to systematize the directions of application of forecast models and methods in assessing the competitive environment of enterprise. It contains a brief description of forecasting methods and their characteristics, which contributes to a better understanding of the process and the choice of optimal approaches for specific situations. The importance of integrating forecasting and modeling to achieve effective enterprise management in a competitive environment is emphasized. The use of different methods and constant updating of models allow you to quickly adapt to changes, which is a key factor for success in today’s business environment.

Fast tunable gradient RBF networks for online modeling of nonlinear and nonstationary dynamic processes

This study carried out an analysis of social media and entrepreneurship development nexus in Benue State. The researcher used mainly primary data from a sample of three hundred entrepreneurs in Zone A, B & C in Benue State Nigeria. The primary data was obtained using a structured questionnaire. The data collected were analyzed using logit regression to establish the relationship between social media and entrepreneurship development while principal component analysis was used to identify the most important factors that affects the use of social media in entrepreneurship development. The result of the binary logistic regression analysis indicates that Social Media added significantly to the model/prediction. This means that the logistic model was statistically significant at 5 percent level of significance. Increasing the use of social media was associated with an increased likelihood of entrepreneurship development in Benue State. The logistic regression model was statistically significant, using values from the Omnibus Test of Model Coefficient. The model explained of the variance in post harvest losses of orange in the studied areas and correctly classified of cases. Use of social media was 0.018 times more likely to bring about entrepreneurship development in the studied areas. It was concluded that social media have a positive and significant effect on entrepreneurship development in Benue State Nigeria. It was recommended among others that entrepreneurs in the study area should engage more qualified personnel who can create the right content needed to engage the diverse customers of the business. When this is done, the likelihood of the use of social media in bringing about entrepreneurship development in Benue State can be increased.

Making sense of natural language and narratives requires building and manipulating a situation model by adding incoming information to the model and using the context stored in the model to comprehend subsequent details and events. Situation model maintenance is supported by the default mode network (DMN), but comprehension of the individual moments in the narrative relies on access to the conceptual store within the semantic system. The present study examined how these systems are engaged by different narrative content to investigate whether highly informative, or semantic, content is a particularly strong driver of semantic system activation compared with contextually driven content that requires using the situation model, which might instead engage DMN regions. The study further investigated which subregions of the graded semantic hub in the left anterior temporal lobe (ATL) were engaged by the type of narrative content. To do this, we quantified the semantic, pragmatic, social, ambiguous, and emotional content for each sentence in a complete narrative, the English translation of The Little Prince. Increased activation in the transmodal hub in the ventral ATL was only observed for high semantic (i.e., informative) relative to low semantic sentences. Activation in the dorsolateral and ventrolateral ATL subregions was observed for both high relative to low semantic and social content sentences, but the ventrolateral ATL effects were more extensive in the social condition. There was high correspondence between the social and pragmatic content results, particularly in the ventrolateral ATL. We argue that the ventrolateral ATL may be particularly engaged by internal, or endogenous, processing demands, aided by functional connections between the anterior middle temporal gyrus and the DMN. Pragmatic and social content may have driven endogenous processing given the pervasive and plot-progressing nature of this content in the narrative. We put forward a revised account of how the semantic system is engaged in naturalistic contexts, a critical step toward better understanding real-world semantic and social processing.

Social Media is an ever-growing tool which will only continue to grow as time goes by. As the commercial applications of social media increase exponentially, interest in using AI techniques to predict the performance of posts has also increased. In this paper we have discussed four major approaches and methodologies to analyse the information present in social media posts and on the basis of the historical data obtained, predict the popularity of any future post in terms of number of likes, comments and shares. These approaches include Deep Neural Network (DNN), Multimodal approach by using the multimodal information embedded in a social media post on a given social media platform, Social Network Services (SNS) for the collection and inference of user-related data and Social Forecast method for the accurate forecast of popularity of content put up on a social media platform. All these methodologies are performed on a dataset in the form of algorithms to obtain results of predictions. These methods take into consideration textual and multimedia content such as images and videos and on the basis of data acquired from these, eventually draw results. Our hope is that this paper can provide an insight into the current state of ML approaches towards social media metrics prediction.

Interdisciplinary approaches to dynamics in biology

Since the end of the 1970ies a wide range of psychological, economic and sociological laboratory and field experiments proved human beings deviating from rational choices and standard neo-classical profit maximization axioms to fail to explain how human actually behave. Behavioral economists proposed to nudge and wink citizens to make better choices for them with many different applications. While the motivation behind nudging appears as a noble endeavor to foster peoples’ lives around the world in very many different applications, the nudging approach raises questions of social hierarchy and class division. The motivating force of the nudgital society may open a gate of exploitation of the populace and – based on privacy infringements – stripping them involuntarily from their own decision power in the shadow of legally-permitted libertarian paternalism and under the cloak of the noble goal of welfare-improving global governance. Nudging enables nudgers to plunder the simple uneducated citizen, who is neither aware of the nudging strategies nor able to oversee the tactics used by the nudgers. The nudgers are thereby legally protected by democratically assigned positions they hold or by outsourcing strategies used, in which social media plays a crucial rule. Social media forces are captured as unfolding a class dividing nudgital society, in which the provider of social communication tools can reap surplus value from the information shared of social media users. The social media provider thereby becomes a capitalist-industrialist, who benefits from the information shared by social media users, or so-called consumer-workers, who share private information in their wish to interact with friends and communicate to public. The social media capitalist-industrialist reaps surplus value from the social media consumer-workers’ information sharing, which stems from nudging social media users. For one, social media space can be sold to marketers who can constantly penetrate the consumer-worker in a subliminal way with advertisements. But also nudging occurs as the big data compiled about the social media consumer-worker can be resold to marketers and technocrats to draw inferences about consumer choices, contemporary market trends or individual personality cues used for governance control, such as, for instance, border protection and tax compliance purposes. The law of motion of the nudging societies holds an unequal concentration of power of those who have access to compiled data and who abuse their position under the cloak of hidden persuasion and in the shadow of paternalism. In the nudgital society, information, education and differing social classes determine who the nudgers and who the nudged are. Humans end in different silos or bubbles that differ in who has power and control and who is deceived and being ruled. The owners of the means of governance are able to reap a surplus value in a hidden persuasion, protected by the legal vacuum to curb libertarian paternalism, in the moral shadow of the unnoticeable guidance and under the cloak of the presumption that some know what is more rational than others. All these features lead to an unprecedented contemporary class struggle between the nudgers (those who nudge) and the nudged (those who are nudged), who are divided by the implicit means of governance in the digital scenery. In this light, governing our common welfare through deceptive means and outsourced governance on social media appears critical. In combination with the underlying assumption of the nudgers knowing better what is right, just and fair within society, the digital age and social media tools hold potential unprecedented ethical challenges.

PurposeThis paper presents M-PoP, a method to model large, complex, and dynamic business processes. These processes have sometimes resulted from alliances of organizations (i.e. joint ventures and mergers and acquisitions) and are referred to as Processes-of-Business Processes (PoP). Due to the difficulty of modeling these dynamic processes, alliances of organizations have often lost opportunities, competitiveness, and profitability, so requiring suitable modeling methods.Design/methodology/approachThe authors proposed M-PoP that can model PoP through three views in different abstraction levels and using well-known techniques in industry and academia, mainly those from Business Process Model and Notation (BPMN). For this, M-PoP presents three main steps: identification of PoP elements, modeling of PoP, and verification of PoP models. To evaluate M-PoP, we applied it in a real-world business process in the health domain.FindingsThe evaluation results point out the capability and viability of M-PoP to deal with dynamic business processes.Research limitations/implicationsM-PoP still needs to be applied in various real-world scenarios to gather evidence of its productivity, efficiency, and scalability.Practical implicationsThis novel method could change the way organizations model their business processes and, as a consequence, it could leverage strategic business opportunities.Originality/valueM-PoP is the first method that makes it possible to model large and complex business processes and, most importantly, dynamic processes.

Self-Harm Content on Social Media and Proximal Risk for Self-Injurious Thoughts and Behaviors Among Adolescents

OBJECTIVE: To examine the effects of social media use on eating disorders and to explore the pathways of eating disorders in people with normal/abnormal perceptions of their weight. METHODS: The Eating Disorder Examination Self-Assessment Questionnaire, the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, the Chinese Frost Perfectionism Questionnaire, and the Self-Objectification Questionnaire were used to investigate 240 Chinese social media users. RESULTS: Social media use and self-esteem were direct predictors of eating disorders, and body mass index partially mediated the relationship between social media use and eating disorders; perfectionism and self-objectification fully chain-mediated the relationship between social media use and eating disorders. For the non-normally perceived group, low self-esteem and perfectionism were the most significant factors in the formation of eating disorders, whereas the level of eating disorders in the normally perceived group was mainly influenced by body mass index, perfectionism and media use. CONCLUSION: The formation of eating disorder tendencies is a dynamic process, and the pathways of influence of different perceptual groups should not be confused.

In order to live a normal life, a person must answer the question about themselves - about their image, worldview, capabilities. Typically, one’s identity is built on the basis of the opinions of the environment. A person either compares themselves with it or uses the opinions of people who are important to them. In this way, the person builds their own inner continuity, which provides them with a sense of stability. It is a dynamic process which very often determines the colour and complexity of human life. Today, the closest environment are more and more often the social media. Especially for young people, they are becoming an important source of information about themselves and the world. Yet to what extent do social media offer opportunities for authentic manifestation of one’s self, and to what extent do they become a space for creating parallel identities? Young users are eager to use social media, which influence their lives and identities. The problem is illustrated with the example of China, a large and original social media market.

Simple SummaryWildlife adapting to urban environments has increased encounters between people and wild animals. The rise of social media, especially short video platforms, has provided more possibilities for people to experience human–wildlife encounters in virtual forms. In this case study, by sharing the co-habitation of humans and kestrels, the video producer performs a harmonious human–wildlife relationship on social media and fosters an intimate “companionship” for audiences. We argue that the knowledge production of wildlife from social media is a dynamic process co-created by multiple actors’ mutual connection and action. We also articulate the relationship between humans and wildlife in urban contexts; knowledge production and perception of these animals in social media demonstrate the unequal and unbalanced power relation held by different species.Wildlife residing in cities has made encounters between humans and wild animals a common phenomenon. The perspective of the conflict-laden animal–human relationship has been over-emphasized by traditional media, which neglects the peaceful and harmonious daily encounters between residents and urban wildlife. This paper addresses the lacuna in extant literature by examining the virtual encounters between urban residents and wildlife on TikTok by sharing the living habits of Falco tinnunculus. Participatory observation, semi-structured interviews, and text analysis were adopted to explore the knowledge production process of urban wildlife as well as the emotional response of audiences. We found that displaying urban wildlife in short videos is a dynamic process involving the mutual participation of wildlife and humans. Meanwhile, audiences’ anthropocentric gaze of wildlife via TikTok attends to their desires for intimacy with nature and demonstrates the unequal and unbalanced power between wild animals and humans. These findings suggest that more efforts should be made to guide the public to pay attention to native urban wildlife species and to reflect upon the ethics and rationality of such unequal power relations between wild animals and humans.

This paper examines the process through which Occupy activists came to constitute themselves as a collective actor and the role of social media in this process. The theoretical framework combines Melucci's (1996) theory of collective identity with insights from the field of organizational communication and particularly from the ‘CCO’ strand – short for ‘Communication is Constitutive of Organizing’. This allows us to conceptualize collective identity as an open-ended and dynamic process that is constructed in conversations and codified in texts. Based on interviews with Occupy activists in New York, London and other cities, I then discuss the communication processes through which the movement was drawing the boundaries with its environment, creating codes and foundational documents, as well as speaking in a collective voice. The findings show that social media tended to blur the boundaries between the inside and the outside of the movement in a way that suited its values of inclusiveness and direct participation. Social media users could also follow remotely the meetings of the general assembly where the foundational documents were ratified, but their voices were not included in the process. The presence of the movement on social media also led to conflicts and negotiations around Occupy's collective voice as constructed on these platforms. Thus, viewing the movement as a phenomenon emerging in communication allows us an insight into the efforts of Occupy activists to create a collective that was both inclusive of the 99% and a distinctive actor with its own identity.

Social Media Networks (SMNs) became very important in our life. SMNs made people communicating with almost everyone in the world. This technology facilitates the sharing of ideas and information through virtual communities. Accounts (pages) on SMNs are public profiles which are created for different reasons such as businesses, brands, and celebrities. These accounts can gain unlimited number of fans based on a profile orientation and its description that is published by owners. Accordingly, SMNs users face the content-related problem which is clear when they found unrelated content with profile orientation. A possible solution is computing the degree of relevance between the orientation and profile account content. This can be achieved by using the term frequency-inverse document frequency (TF-IDF) algorithm with some algebraic geometry such as intersection sets and mathematical framework such as probability. The promised output of this study is to obtain a matching percentage between the profile orientation and the content. Such outcomes can help users on social media networks make a suitable decision whether like or follow a certain account based on the content related.