Affiliative Relationships Research Articles

Tabular affiliation extraction based on graph convolutional network

This paper studies the problem of extracting affiliation relationships between cells in a table in the field of table recognition and analysis. The task of extracting affiliation relationships between tables is defined. Combining the similarity between table and graph structure, a graph representation method for cells in a table is given, and a graph convolutional network-based affiliation relationshipextraction model is proposed. The model aggregates features of cells in a table and their neighboring cells through a graph convolutional network, predicts whether there is an affiliation relationship between cells, and realizes relationship extraction. In order to verify the effectiveness of the model, two datasets, Rel-forms for Chinese forms and Rel-SciTSR for English forms, are annotated. Through experiments, the F1 scores on the above two datasets and the joint dataset reached , respectively 98.61%、96.55%、97.05%, verifying the effectiveness of the affiliation relationship extraction model on these two datasets, and analyzing the influence of different factors such as text content, coordinate information, cell attributes, and relative direction between cells on the experimental results of affiliation relationship extraction.

Spatial distribution characteristics of Tibetan Buddhism principal-subordinate monastery systems in the Hehuang region

Tibetan Buddhist monasteries constitute significant cultural heritages of ethnic minorities, evolving into the Principal-Subordinate Monastery System (PSMS) with profound historical and cultural significance. This system exhibits an integrated hierarchical structure in terms of religious dominance, political administration, and cultural diffusion. Existing research primarily focuses on internal humanistic factors such as governance patterns, while there is not any research focused on its patterns and manifestations in spatial distribution. This study aims to elucidate the spatial distribution characteristics of the PSMS in Hehuang region, including the Tibetan Buddhist monasteries from all sects in the Hehuang region since the Song Dynasty It establishes a hierarchical PSMS database based on the affiliation relationships, aimed at storing spatial and property information related to PSMS. The database standardizes the naming and coding of monasteries, and classifies them through hierarchical relationships to ensure data consistency and usability. Finally, the classified and coded monastery data were analyzed by GIS tools to form the PSMS spatial distribution characterisation framework. Results reveal that (1) Monasteries demonstrate notable spatial clustering patterns from both holistic and sectarian perspectives, with density being influenced by the principal monastery’s position. (2) Almost every PSMS exhibits a spatial pattern centered around the principal monastery, with subordinate monasteries clustering within a defined range correlated with the administrative region of the principal monastery. (3) PSMS scale variations are controlled by principal monasteries, exhibiting positive correlations in hierarchical structure, control quantity, and distribution range. (4) The spatial orientation of PSMS correlates with river distribution, while the relationships among mountain ranges require further investigation. These findings provide initial insights into the spatial distribution characteristics of PSMS, confirming the spatial influence of the principal monastery. Besides, this study established an innovative spatial research framework for heritage clusters with multiple types and hierarchies. Thus, this study offers new insights into the spatial distribution of Tibetan Buddhist monastery heritage and presents a framework for further examining the spatial distribution of the Tibetan Buddhist monastery heritage in other regions, as well as other heritage clusters where connected and clustered through religious and cultural ties.

FDM: Document image seen-through removal via Fuzzy Diffusion Models

While scanning or shooting a document, factors like ink density and paper transparency may cause the content from the reverse side to become visible through the paper, resulting in a digital image with a ‘seen-through’ phenomenon, which will affect practical applications. In addition, document images can be affected by random factors during the imaging process, such as differences in the performance of camera equipment and variations in the physical properties of the document itself. These random factors increase the noise of the document image and may cause the seen-through phenomena to become more complex and diverse. To tackle this issue, we propose the Fuzzy Diffusion Model (FDM), which combines fuzzy logic with diffusion models. It effectively models complex seen-through effects and handles uncertainties in document images. Specifically, we gradually degrade the original image with mean-reverting stochastic differential equation(SDE) to transform it into seen-through mean state with fixed Gaussian noise version. Following this, fuzzy operations are introduced into the noise network. Which helps the model better learn noise and data distributions by reasoning about the affiliation relationship of each pixel point through fuzzy logic. Eventually, in the reverse process, the low-quality image is gradually restored by simulating the corresponding reverse-time SDE. Extensive quantitative and qualitative experiments conducted on various datasets demonstrate that the proposed method significantly removes the seen-through effects and achieves good results under several metrics. The proposed FDM effectively solves the seen-through effects of document images and obtains better visual quality.

Birds of a feather age together: telomere dynamics and social behavior predict life span in female Japanese quail (Coturnix japonica).

Social support is vital for mental and physical health and is linked to lower rates of disease and early mortality. Conversely, anti-social behavior can increase mortality risks, both for the initiator and target of the behavior. Chronic stress, which also can increase mortality, may serve as an important link between social behavior and healthy lifespan. There is a growing body of literature in both humans, and model organisms, that chronic social stress can result in more rapid telomere shortening, a measure of biological aging. Here we examine the role of anti-social behavior and social support on physiological markers of stress and aging in the social Japanese quail, Coturnix Japonica. Birds were maintained in groups for their entire lifespan, and longitudinal measures of antisocial behavior (aggressive agonistic behavior), social support (affiliative behavior), baseline corticosterone, change in telomere length, and lifespan were measured. We found quail in affiliative relationships both committed less and were the targets of less aggression compared to birds who were not in these relationships. In addition, birds displaying affiliative behavior had longer telomeres, and longer lifespans. Our work suggests a novel pathway by which social support may buffer against damage at the cellular level resulting in telomere protection and subsequent longer lifespans.

Social influence and attention bias in free-ranging domestic pigs: Effects of demonstrator rank and friendship

Pigs, as highly social animals, form stable hierarchies and different relationships to other members of their group. Pigs, mostly of very young ages, have been shown to use social learning to gather information about food locations and even extractive foraging techniques from various types of sources. The present study aims to investigate whether also adult pigs, living in a long-term stable kin-based sounder, use information of their group mates and, more specifically, whether this is based on their mates' rank or their relationship with them. The dominance order of 20 female semi-naturally housed Kune Kune pigs (aged between five to seven years) was established with dyadic hierarchy tests, where two pigs competed against each other over a monopolizable food source. Their affiliative relationships (i.e. friendships) towards each other were assessed based on observations during their daily lives. After finding suitable demonstrator dyads, differing in rank and/or relationship quality to the respective observer, six rounds of two-choice tests were conducted. Prior to each two-choice test, two demonstrators were positioned on each side of the observer and were allowed to feed from a trough with an assigned olfactory cue that provided additional information in the subsequent test. After two minutes, the observer pig was allowed to enter a test room and was given the choice between two food bowls, which were marked with the olfactory cues connected to the respective demonstrators. Results indicate that sows, irrespective of their own rank, preferred to pay attention to the relatively lower-ranking demonstrator during the exposure phase, possibly due to avoidance of the relatively higher-ranking demonstrator. Furthermore, the observers with higher sociability preferred to pay more attention to the demonstrators with whom they had better friendships. In the two-choice test, we found no significant effect of demonstrator rank or friendship. However, a left side bias in more sociable observers may point towards at least some social effects. Overall, the study provided evidence that not only dominance, but also socio-positive relationships between individuals affect the behaviour of domestic pigs.

Proximity tracking using ultra-wideband technology for equine social behaviour research

Sociopositive interactions with conspecifics are essential for equine welfare and quality of life. This study aimed to validate the use of wearable ultra-wideband (UWB) technology to quantify the spatial relationships and dynamics of social behaviour in horses by continuous (1/s) measurement of interindividual distances. After testing the UWB devices’ spatiotemporal accuracy in a static environment, the UWB measurement validity, feasibility and utility under dynamic field conditions was assessed in a group of 8 horses. Comparison of the proximity measurements with video surveillance data established the measurement accuracy and validity (r = 0.83, p < 0.0001) of the UWB technology. The utility for social behaviour research was demonstrated by the excellent accordance of affiliative relationships (preferred partners) identified using UWB with video observations. The horses remained a median of 5.82 m (95% CI 5.13–6.41 m) apart from each other and spent 20% (median, 95% CI 14–26%) of their time in a distance ≤ 3 m to their preferred partner. The proximity measurements and corresponding speed calculation allowed the identification of affiliative versus agonistic approaches based on differences in the approach speed and the distance and duration of the resulting proximity. Affiliative approaches were statistically significantly slower (median: 1.57 km/h, 95% CI 1.26–1.92 km/h, p = 0.0394) and resulted in greater proximity (median: 36.75 cm, 95% CI 19.5–62 cm, p = 0.0003) to the approached horse than agonistic approaches (median: 3.04 km/h, 95% CI 2.16–3.74 km/h, median proximity: 243 cm, 95% CI 130–319 cm), which caused an immediate retreat of the approached horse at a significantly greater speed (median: 3.77 km/h, 95% CI 3.52–5.85 km/h, p < 0.0001) than the approach.

Higher oxytocin concentrations occur in subjects who build affiliative relationships with companion robots

Building affiliative relationships with others is important for mental health. Recently, robots have been expected to play a role in improving mental health, but there is little scientific evidence as to whether they can build affiliative relationships with humans. To investigate that, we conducted studies combining behavior, physiology and questionnaires for companion robot Owners and Non-Owners. The results reveal that the steady-state concentration of oxytocin, a hormone related to affiliative relationships, was significantly higher in Owners than in Non-Owners. In addition, the Owners showed more behaviors indicative of intimacy than the Non-Owners. These results suggest that humans can build affiliative relationships with robots. Fifteen minutes of contact with the robot decreased the concentration of cortisol in both groups, suggesting that even a brief contact can contribute to improving mental health. Therefore, relationships between humans and robots may be one option to improve mental health and enhance well-being.

Prohibition of Concurrent Position of Commissioner of State-Owned Enterprises Reviewed Under Indonesian Business Competition Law

One of the assessments of the dominant position of a business actor can be conducted based on the affiliation relationship of the business actor with other business actors, where the affiliation relationship regulated in Law of the Republic of Indonesia Number 5 Year 1999 on the Prohibition of Monopolistic Practices and Unfair Business Competition is concurrent positions and cross-shareholdings. Concurrent positions are prohibited when a person holds positions as directors or board of commissioners in two or more companies at the same time, where the companies are in the same relevant market, have close links in the type and/or field of business, or together can control the market share of certain services and/or goods. Legal issues regarding the concurrent position of members of the board of commissioners of BUMN arose during the enactment of Permen-BUMN PER-10/MBU/10/2020, which allows members of the board of commissioners of BUMN to hold concurrent positions under certain conditions. This is normative legal research that examines the prohibition of concurrent positions of BUMN commissioners in terms of business competition law in Indonesia.

Analisis Perusahaan Jasa Konstruksi Terafiliasi dalam UU Jasa Konstruksi dan UU Larangan Praktek Monopoli dan Persaingan Usaha Tidak Sehat

The economy of a country is closely related to economic transactions carried out by actors, namely producers, sellers and buyers. Such conditions increase the value of efficiency and reduce government costs due to community participation. This is in accordance with the objectives of Law number 5 of 1999 concerning the Prohibition of Monopolistic Practices and Unfair Business Competition and Law number 2 of 2017 concerning Construction Services. Therefore, it is necessary to examine the compatibility between Article 44 of the Construction Services Law and Article 22 of the Antimonopoly and Unfair Business Competition Law and the position of affiliated construction companies in tenders for government procurement of goods and services using the rule of reason and per se illegal approach. The research method in this journal is normative juridical, library research and comparative study. So it can be concluded that article 44 of the Construction Services Law prohibits affiliation between service users and service providers (collutive vertical) with an illegal per se approach while article 22 of the Antimonopoly and Unfair Business Competition Law prohibits affiliation with a rule of reason approach. The method of inviting or directly appointing a service provider can create an affiliation relationship between the user and the service provider which can be interpreted as a form of nepotism. All parties involved in the process of procuring goods and/or services by the government must follow the principles of fair business competition.

Understanding children's prosocial behaviour and classroom affiliative relationships: A social network analysis

AbstractThe present study uses social network analyses to examine the associations between children's prosocial behaviour and classroom affiliative relationships (i.e., hanging out relationships). Our sample includes data from 257 children and their teachers in 12 s through fourth‐grade classrooms living in high‐poverty, inner‐urban city neighbourhoods (98.4% African American). We estimated a series of exponential random graph models (ERGMs) for the 12 classrooms and then meta‐analysed the ERGM results using a multi‐level meta‐analysis technique to examine the effects of prosocial behaviour and homophily of prosocial behaviour on children's affiliative relationships across classrooms. Our results revealed a significant effect of prosocial behaviour, suggesting that children with higher levels of prosocial behaviour were more likely to have more affiliative relationships. We also saw a significant effect of homophily of prosocial behaviour, suggesting that the more similar the children were in terms of prosocial behaviour, the more likely they were to have an affiliative relationship. Our findings highlight the importance of prosocial behaviour in children's affiliative relationships and have implications for fostering children's affiliative relationships and improving their well‐being.

Testing the Public Officials’ Integrity in the Moonlighting of State-Owned Company Commissioner

Conflict of interest is related to fraud and corruption, whose sources include the following, (a) concurrent positions or moonlighting, (b) public sector non-cooling off work/business activities post-employment, (c) work and personal business interests of family, friends, and associates, (d) affiliate relationship of community groups, organizations, and political aspirations. Therefore, this study aimed (1) to develop a catalogue of laws and regulations implicitly and explicitly prohibiting state officials or government employees from implementing moonlighting. It indicated the explicit prohibition of moonlighting against interfering with the conditions causing conflicts of interest. It also aimed (2) to examine the moonlighting of SOE commissioners through state officials. In this analysis, SOE was selected as the sample due to being simultaneously regulated by various policies prohibiting conflicts of interest and moonlighting. The sample was also exchange-listed because of the obligation to disclose information in the Capital Market Law as an Annual Report, where the profiles of the Commissioner members were often showcased. The results showed that moonlighting was unacceptable by public officials as commissioner members, regarding the compiled catalogue.

Dogs showed lower parasympathetic activity during mutual gazing while owners did not

The affiliative relationship between humans and dogs is compared to a mother–infant attachment relationship. We hypothesized that dog’s attachment behavior in negative emotional state aroused the owner’s attention toward the dog, that is, reduced parasympathetic activity. We measured heart rate variability in both dogs and humans during the Strange Situation Test to examine whether the owners' parasympathetic activity was decreased by being gazed at by their dogs. Our results in a short-term of 6 s before and after the moment the dog gazed at the human face indicated that dogs’ parasympathetic activity was lower when the dogs were gazing at their owners than when it was gazing at unfamiliar persons. Dog’s autonomic activity was also lower when the dogs were living with their owners for a longer period. However, we could not determine whether gaze from the dog affected the autonomic activity in humans as attachment behavior.

Variation of social strategies between bluff and unobtrusive immigrant males during integration into a new social group: a case study in Macaca thibetana

Immigrant males employed a range of species-specific social strategies to facilitate integration into a new social group for establishing stable dominant ranks and affiliative relationships with unfamiliar competitors who require them to adapt their behavior. However, less is known whether the social strategies of integration were individual-specific. In this study, a case that nine adult males immigrated into the subject social group provided a natural experiment to investigate the variation of social strategies between the bluff and unobtrusive immigrant males during integration into a new social group. We followed the wild YA1 Tibetan macaque group and collected the behavioral data from August 2021 to May 2022. The results showed that the bluff and unobtrusive immigrant males faced similar social pressure from intrasexual individuals in the target social group during both the prospecting and integrating stages. During the prospecting stage, the bluff and unobtrusive immigrant males formed “attempt strategies” to seek and establish social relationships with unfamiliar individuals in a new group. The bluff immigrant males formed affiliative relationships with high-ranking females and resident males whereas the unobtrusive immigrant males formed affiliative relationships with low-ranking females during the integrating stage. Our results firstly provided quantitative methods to distinguish prospecting and integrating stages during immigration processes. This case study also demonstrated that the bluff and unobtrusive immigrant males formed varied social strategies. Our results provided new insight into understanding the individual-specific social strategies of immigrant males during integration into a new social group.

Behavioral responses of solicitors after failure to receive grooming in Macaca fuscata

Grooming is one of the most common cooperative behaviors among several animal species. However, the tactics used to cope with uncooperative partners in grooming interactions remain unclear. Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata) solicit grooming from partners through postural behaviors, but may not necessarily receive grooming. This study investigated the behavior of female Japanese macaques after they solicited but did not receive grooming. We predicted that unsuccessful solicitors would engage in grooming interactions with uncooperative partners if they were affiliated. If they were not affiliated, the solicitors would not do so and may seek grooming interactions with other grooming partners. We used a focal-animal sampling method, targeting 17 females at Katsuyama, Okayama Prefecture, Japan. We recognized affiliative relationships by measuring close spatial association. After unsuccessful solicitation, females tended to scratch themselves, suggesting that solicitors may experience anxiety or distress when they do not receive grooming. They also tended to be proximate with affiliated partners after solicitation, regardless of whether the solicitors received grooming from their partners. In contrast, when solicitors failed to receive grooming from unaffiliated partners, their subsequent proximity was lower than when they were groomed. Moreover, unsuccessful solicitors were likely to engage in grooming interactions with affiliated partners who were uncooperative (receivers of unsuccessful solicitations). However, they were less likely to engage in grooming interactions with unaffiliated partners and instead engaged in grooming interactions with other nearby partners. These findings indicate that female Japanese macaques decide whether to engage in grooming interactions with uncooperative partners who have not groomed solicitors based on affiliative relationships and the availability of other grooming partners. It is probable that, when the cost of searching for a grooming partner is low, female Japanese macaques are likely to switch partners, potentially leading to an increase in the benefits obtained from grooming interactions.

Peer Crowd Affiliation's Relationship with Health Risk and Promotion Behaviors in Emerging Adult Sexual Minoritized Men: The P18 Cohort Study

Peer Crowd Affiliation's Relationship with Health Risk and Promotion Behaviors in Emerging Adult Sexual Minoritized Men: The P18 Cohort Study

Learning Pixel Affinity Pyramid for Arbitrary-Shaped Text Detection

Arbitrary-shaped text detection in natural images is a challenging task due to the complexity of the background and the diversity of text properties. The difficulty lies in two aspects: accurate separation of adjacent texts and sufficient text feature representation. To handle these problems, we consider text detection as instance segmentation and propose a novel text detection framework, which jointly learns semantic segmentation and a pixel affinity pyramid in a unified fully convolutional network. Specifically, the pixel affinity pyramid is proposed to encode multi-scale instance affiliation relationships of pixels, which is not only robust to varying shapes of text but also provides an accurate boundary description for separating closely located texts. In the inference phase, a simple but effective post-processing is presented to reconstruct text instances from the semantic segmentation results under the guidance of the learned pixel affinity pyramid, achieving good accuracy and efficiency. Furthermore, to enhance the representation of text features in the neural network, two modules — the Region Enhancement Module (REM) and Attentional Fusion Module (AFM) — are proposed. The REM models the semantic correlations of regional features to enhance the features from the text area, which effectively suppresses false-positive detection. The AFM adaptively fuses multi-scale textual information through an attention mechanism to obtain abundant text semantic features, which benefits multi-sized text detection. Extensive ablation experiments are conducted demonstrating the effectiveness of the REM and AFM. Evaluation results on standard benchmarks, including Total-Text, ICDAR2015, SCUT-CTW1500, and MSRA-TD500, show that our method surpasses most existing text detectors and achieves state-of-the-art performance, denoting its superior capability in detecting arbitrary-shaped texts.

Research collaboration networks in Latin American geography education

The current development of science is characterized by a global trend of scientific collaboration (SC). However, this growth has been mostly linked to intra-national cooperation. Several factors including geographic, institutional, and social proximities have been identified as key for promoting or hinder collaboration among scholars. Based on these premises, the present study analyses the co-authorship and affiliation relationships among geography education researchers in Latin America, exploring through a general trend and social network analysis, the characteristics of SC in geography education. For this purpose, 1774 articles (922 co-authored) published within the region were included as part of the data used for understanding the structure of SC. The results showed an increasing and dominant pattern of co-authoring in the region, but mostly developed at the local and national scale, with scarce intra-regional research. Moreover, the network analysis showed that there are some institutions with a dominant role in the production of research, and a loose network structure of research that could foster diverse perspectives on the field. These findings offer opportunities for thinking about how to enhance future SC processes in the region to strengthen the development of geography education research based on a regional collaborative approach.

BTD: An effective business-related hot topic detection scheme in professional social networks

Professional social networks (PSNs) usually involve a large amount of valuable information for the business world. A heterogeneous network is constructed based on the structural characteristics of several communities from a PSN. Then, an effective business-related hot topic detection (BTD) scheme in PSNs is proposed, and this BTD scheme extracts business-related topics from posts found on the PSN. Furthermore, a business-related hot topic detection algorithm is proposed by extending the PageRank algorithm based on the heterogeneous network. The performance of the proposed method is evaluated by using real data from a PSN for B2B e-commerce. The experimental results show that the proposed method is able to detect business-related hot topics in heterogeneous networks from three aspects: affiliation relationships between posts and topics, users’ contributions to posts, and following relationships among users. The coverage rate is higher and the degree of distinction is greater than those of existing typical methods.

Non-recognition Aggression in Cats

When a cat is taken out of their home and then taken back, for example to the veterinarian, they can experience "non-recognition aggression." Even cats who previously had a strong affiliative relationship can fail to recognize each other under certain circumstances, and show aggressive behaviors as a result. This article summarizes a small citizen science project looking at what cat guardians have tried to prevent and address non-recognition aggression in the cats in their household.

Inderect and Mutual Holding Affiliation Relationship Transactions

Inderect and Mutual Holding Affiliation Relationship Transactions