Human Social Activities Research Articles

Two-Stage Interval-Parameter Stochastic Programming Model Based on Adaptive Water Resource Management

Water resource planning is often associated with system complexities and uncertainties, such as issues of precipitation randomness and complex the complexity of human social activities. In this study, a two-stage interval-parameter stochastic programming (TISP) model in conjunction with an adaptive water resource management (AWRM) model was applied. Compared to other optimization models, AWRM can address interactions between different water users and account for regional water exchange processes, and TISP models overcome the uncertainties of a water resource system by introducing interval-parameter and probability distribution methods. Reasonable solutions obtained by applying these models to a multi-water-resource, multi-region case show that in AWRM models, water can flow from a region of low efficiency to a region of high efficiency, improving water use efficiency. Under conditions of extreme scarcity, water can flow in the opposite direction thus ensuring regional minimum water requirements, enhancing system stability and reducing the probability of system paralysis. In policy making, optimistic water policies correspond to higher incomes but may be subject to higher risks of system failure. Alternatively, conservative policies are associated with a lower risk of system failure but easily waste water resources.

Space–time multiple regression model for grid-based population estimation in urban areas

ABSTRACTWe can collect, store, and analyze a huge amount of information about human mobility and social interaction activities due to the emergence of information and communication technologies and location-enabled mobile devices under cyber physical system frameworks. The high spatial resolution of population data on a multi-temporal scale is required by transport planners, human geographers, social scientists, and emergency management teams. In this study, we build a space-time multiple regression model to estimate grid-based (500 m × 500 m) spatial resolution at multi-temporal scale (30-min intervals) population data based on the space-time relationship among geospatially enabled person trip (PT) survey data and incorporate both mobile call (MC) and geotagged Twitter (GT) data. Since using geospatially enabled PT survey data as dependent variables enables us to acquire actual population amounts, which strongly depend on MCs and social interaction activities. Although many grids have a strong correlation between PT and MC/GT, some show fewer correlation results, especially where the grids have factories, schools, and workshops in which fewer MCs are found but a large population is presented. Although GT data are sparser than MCs, people from amusement and tourist areas can be detected by GT data. The space-time multiple regression model can also estimate the different amounts of populations based on human travel behavior that changes over space and time. According to accuracy assessments, the night-time estimated results, especially between 00:00 and 06:30, strongly correlate with national census data except in places where the grids have railway and subway stations.

Marx and Human Nature: The Historical, the Trans-Historical, and Human Flourishing

Abstract Marxists often dismiss the idea of human nature, claiming either that, for Marx, there is no human nature or that Marx had only a historical concept of human nature. A more careful reading reveals that Marx, in fact, had a robust trans-historical concept of human nature as well as a historical one. These two concepts operate at different levels. The trans-historical concept refers to the general form that human social activity takes, while the historical concept refers to the specific forms of human sociality and individuality within a given historical epoch. What Marx's trans-historical concept explains is how it is possible to have human nature in its historical form. Furthermore, it provides the ground for Marx's ideal of human flourishing implicit in his vision of a communist society, components of which are supported by Kropotkin's reconstruction of evolutionary theory and more recent developments in evolutionary psychology.

Noise as an external effect of traffic and transportation

The paper deals with the basic concepts and characteristics of external effects of traffic and transport, with an emphasis on the impact of traffic noise as one of the main external effects of transport nowadays. The main negative impacts of traffic noise on human life and social activities are given as well as the causes of elevated levels of noise from road, rail and tram traffic. In addition, the paper provides a review of the common measures that can be applied to reduce the impact of noise generated as a result of traffic and transport activities. In the end, we made a short review of the current situation regarding the impact of traffic noise in the Republic of Serbia and the Serbian Armed Forces.

Twitter as an indicator for whereabouts of people? Correlating Twitter with UK census data

Detailed knowledge regarding the whereabouts of people and their social activities in urban areas with high spatial and temporal resolution is still widely unexplored. Thus, the spatiotemporal analysis of Location Based Social Networks (LBSN) has great potential regarding the ability to sense spatial processes and to gain knowledge about urban dynamics, especially with respect to collective human mobility behavior. The objective of this paper is to explore the semantic association between georeferenced tweets and their respective spatiotemporal whereabouts. We apply a semantic topic model classification and spatial autocorrelation analysis to detect tweets indicating specific human social activities. We correlated observed tweet patterns with official census data for the case study of London in order to underline the significance and reliability of Twitter data. Our empirical results of semantic and spatiotemporal clustered tweets show an overall strong positive correlation in comparison with workplace population census data, being a good indicator and representative proxy for analyzing workplace-based activities.

An opportunistic routing based on symmetrical traffic distribution in vehicular networks

Efficient data delivery accompanied with low end-to-end delay is important in vehicular ad-hoc networks and optimal route selection is vital to improve these performance metrics. Different routing algorithms are proposed in VANETs. This paper reviews and analyzes these algorithms briefly and based on the analysis, a new opportunistic-based routing algorithm (OSTD) is proposed for urban scenarios. The proposed algorithm severely considers the type of vehicular distribution in the calculation of utility function. This utility function is used to evaluate the routes in the network. The reason of such a severe consideration is expressed and evaluated in the paper. Vehicle's driving path predictability is also used in the algorithm to forward the packet to a more suitable next hop, as vehicular mobility is the reflection of human social activity. Simulation results show that OSTD achieves a higher delivery ratio and lower end-to-end delay and packet loss compared to the other well-known protocols.

Density-based modularity for evaluating community structure in bipartite networks

A bipartite network is an important type of complex network in human social activities. Newman defined modularity as a measurement for evaluating community structure in unipartite networks. Due to the success of modularity in unipartite networks, bipartite modularities were developed according to different understandings of community in bipartite networks. However, these modularity measurements are subject to resolution limits that could reduce the quality of community partitioning. These modularity measurements contain an intrinsic scale that depends on the total size of links and ignores the number of nodes in a bipartite network. In this paper, we first illustrate such resolution limits of traditional bipartite modularities using several examples of bipartite networks. Next, we propose a quantitative measurement called density-based modularity to evaluate community partitioning in bipartite networks. We verify that optimization of the density-based modularity proposed has no resolution limit. By optimizing this density-based modularity, we can partition the network into the appropriate communities. Experiments on synthetic and real-world bipartite networks verify the accuracy and reliability of our bipartite density-based modularity.

Human Resources and Social Activity, As Engines of Social Development

Key factor for socio-economic development are people. They are the foundation of social management as a separate managerial area, the goal of which is the management of the interaction between the subject and the object, (having their social character), occurring in a particular social environment. To what degree the actions of the subject and the object, as elements of social management are adequate to the changes in the environment, is determined by their activity. Moreover, the rationalization of social managerial decisions is directly dependent on the social policy carried out. The social policy as a set of principles, legal norms, institutions and activities, aimed at creating conditions ensuring the quality of life of the citizens of a country, is an expression of the social relations between the state and its citizens. The social policy determines the safety (social, health, economic) and security of the people in the socium. This is why it is defined as philosophy, ideology, program for influence on the demographic situation, employment of the population, level, way and quality of living of the population, its income level and structure of consumption of material and cultural wealth,... forms of social security, social services to the population, ... providing targeted state aid to the most unprotected, the most vulnerable and poor layers of the population,… measures aimed at creating conditions for self-defense in order to maintain and improve the level of well-being.... It is noteworthy that within the scope of social policy is included a wide arsenal of concepts (social protection, social safety, social support, social self-protection, quality of life), defined in the quoted edition.From here, in the content of social policy are differentiated concrete actions of the state bodies, non-state institutions, public associations, related to the implementation of tactical and strategic objectives for the harmonization of public relations. Since the foundation of these relations are the people with their actions and skills, they are a crucial factor of social policy. Inside it are synthesized and multiplied the other components of a country's resources and thus they are transformed into a finished product in the planning of the goals for achieving socio-economic development, making it possible to carry out an effective social policy. Moreover, researches show that 70% of the world's wealth is in the form of human capital - the skills and knowledge of the people and not in physical or financial capital. The strategy of many companies today is clearly guided by the idea of human resources, stressing on individualization, service and innovation. Put another way, human resources are the people in an organization who, by their professional and personal qualities make it possible to achieve its strategic objectives. Together with rest of the resources, they should meet the needs of the organization, and the way they are transformed into abilities, predetermines the efficiency of their use. This means that they, human resources, together with others, become function, subsystem and object of management. Reason for this is the circumstance that in terms of goal setting, they are a function of management. The application of the accumulated scientific knowledge on the general theory of systems, basing on a system approach, interacting with other management subsystems, characterizes them as a management subsystem. They are subject to management because through the forward and backward informational feedback, they are subject to management, influence for the purpose of obtaining certain result.

LIFE-LONG EDUCATION AS A RESOURCE TO OVERCOME THE PSYCHOLOGICAL BARRIERS IN THE PROCESS OF PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE INDIVIDUAL

The current situation in Russia is characterized by rapid modernization and development of various spheres of activity. Intense pace of social and economic development of some countries, the processes of globalization, increasing competition due to the open labor market, act as a call to the level of personal and professional specialist development, to its ability for properly planning activities, mobility reconstructed in a rapidly changing professional situation, develop innovative technology and build their professional career. The aim of this paper is a theoretical justification of continuing education as a resource for overcoming the psychological barriers in the process of professional development of the individual. Career stagnation objectively arising in the process of professionalization, the reduction of professional expectations and values mismatch personal and professional characteristics with the requirements of current professional situation are considered by the authors as psychological barriers to the professional development of an individual. Methods . The authors used theoretical methods of research – analysis of the literature on the study, the synthesis of the conceptual issues of the classification. The paper presents an analysis of the Russian and foreign theories on the origin and development of psychological barriers. Results . The terms «psychological barrier» and «overcoming the behavior» are specified. The psychological professional-development barriers of the person are highlighted and classified: professional degradation, deterioration of professional and psychological health of individuals. The resources for overcoming the psychological barriers are defined; the integral role is assigned to continuing education and self-education. As both Russian and international experience shows, adult education is becoming one of the leading forms of social activity having a wide array of technologies, methods and approaches; it is one of the principle forms of human social activities that provide an opportunity for constructive designing of successful professional individual trajectory of the human development. Practical significance . The research implications and results of the study can be used as the teaching and learning packages while the process of training and retraining, the professional development of corporate staff, and training on career planning.

Socially aware mobile application integrations in heterogeneous environments

Mobile web integration technologies and wireless sensor networks provide much more opportunities for human beings to interact with heterogeneous network environment including the communication network, the internet and sensor network. This paper investigates the integrated use of socially aware computing and data mining techniques through a mobile web application. It emphasises the study of regularity of human social activities through mobile applications in order to provide mobile users with intelligent assistance and support in the real world. The research investigates the effectiveness of single-layer and multi-layer evolutionary models of socially aware computing in order for these mobile web applications to be better integrated with the human social activities. Experimental analysis of our self-developed mobile platform as proposed from this research showed the superiority of socially aware computing when applied in the mobile field.

Searching for backyard birds in virtual worlds: Internet queries mirror real species distributions

As technology mediates more of human experience, effective conservation will increasingly rely on understanding how wildlife inhabits the real world and how people engage with information about wildlife in the virtual world. We explored how interest in birds—as measured by Internet search activity—was shaped by geographic distributions of bird populations and human social and cultural activities. Searches for the common names of 68 resident bird species were positively associated with estimates of bird population densities across the United States. Additional social and cultural predictors that we expected to influence state-level interest in local bird species explained little geographic variation in search activity. Results were congruent across analyses that focused on different bird groups and geographic regions within the United States. Our findings suggest that Americans are attuned to the avifauna that reside in their state and search for information about local species on the Internet. To the extent that searches reflect public values, abundant and easily accessible search activity data can be used to increase the relevance of conservation messaging and the likelihood of conservation action.

Building a Database for the Future: Humans and Lakes within Ecosystems

Fresh or saline, lakes constantly exchange with other water bodies on the Earth. Together, they form a crucial part of the water cycle – one of the most important ecosystem functions supporting humans and other biological communities. Lakes have provided invaluable and irreplaceable ecosystem services (benefits) for the survival of mankind and the development of their civilizations throughout history. For thousands of years, lakes and their ecosystems evolved independent of any significant impacts from humans. It is only in recent centuries that lakes have become threatened by human social activities. Consequently, human conservation activities have become valuable for sustaining the ecosystem services provided by lakes. In particular, for many societies, it has become a strategy to consider the maintenance of balanced and healthy connections between human societies and natural resources, such as lakes and other biological communities. To this end, this study proposes a framework for building a database to monitor and support the improvement of the LIN Hebin, Jeffrey THORNTON and Thomas SLAWSKI. 2014. Building a Database for the Future: Humans and Lakes within Ecosystems.

The visualization and analysis of urban facility pois using network kernel density estimation constrained by multi-factors

The urban facility, one of the most important service providers is usually represented by sets of points in GIS applications using POI (Point of Interest) model associated with certain human social activities. The knowledge about distribution intensity and pattern of facility POIs is of great significance in spatial analysis, including urban planning, business location choosing and social recommendations. Kernel Density Estimation (KDE), an efficient spatial statistics tool for facilitating the processes above, plays an important role in spatial density evaluation, because KDE method considers the decay impact of services and allows the enrichment of the information from a very simple input scatter plot to a smooth output density surface. However, the traditional KDE is mainly based on the Euclidean distance, ignoring the fact that in urban street network the service function of POI is carried out over a network-constrained structure, rather than in a Euclidean continuous space. Aiming at this question, this study proposes a computational method of KDE on a network and adopts a new visualization method by using 3-D "wall" surface. Some real conditional factors are also taken into account in this study, such as traffic capacity, road direction and facility difference. In practical works the proposed method is implemented in real POI data in Shenzhen city, China to depict the distribution characteristic of services under impacts of multi-factors.

The Application of Polymer Materials with High Mechanical Properties in Competitive Sports

With the development of science and technology, the requirements on the properties of new materials was increasing, polymer materials become one kind of important material type which has been widely used in the current human social activity. Due to its high properties such as strength, elasticity and toughness, polymer materials with high mechanical properties’ application in the field of competitive sports has incomparable advantages. This paper analyzes the characteristics of high mechanical properties of polymer materials and its advantage in competitive sports, in order to promote its application in the field of sports.

Unusual Humean issues in materialistic political economy

Capitalism as we know it presents typical dialectical features that isolate it from nature, in which real oppositions make evolution revolutionary: A dialectical metaphysics replaces the free flow of events allowing capitalist relationships but preventing the practice of materialism. Some radically sceptical issues in Hume's Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion and A Treatise of Human Nature come useful here. A materialistic approach with complete (i.e., non-dialectical) ruptures in fact dovetails with Hume's argument on the unpredictability of nature and the predictability of human social activities. As a consequence, a thus renewed materialistic political economy concerned with the concrete must work out its own categories dynamically, to discard them once they have been proved metaphysical.

Big Questions for Social Media Big Data: Representativeness, Validity and Other Methodological Pitfalls

Large-scale databases of human activity in social media have captured scientific and policy attention, producing a flood of research and discussion. This paper considers methodological and conceptual challenges for this emergent field, with special attention to the validity and representativeness of social media big data analyses. Persistent issues include the over-emphasis of a single platform, Twitter, sampling biases arising from selection by hashtags, and vague and unrepresentative sampling frames. The socio-cultural complexity of user behavior aimed at algorithmic invisibility (such as subtweeting, mock-retweeting, use of “screen captures” for text, etc.) further complicate interpretation of big data social media. Other challenges include accounting for field effects, i.e. broadly consequential events that do not diffuse only through the network under study but affect the whole society. The application of network methods from other fields to the study of human social activity may not always be appropriate. The paper concludes with a call to action on practical steps to improve our analytic capacity in this promising, rapidly-growing field.

Evaluation of Ecological Civilization Construction of Water System

Water Environment Comprehensive Assessment System is a comprehensive system of water environment impact related to a variety of factors, including water and other natural attributes, and human social and economic activities and other social attributes of the water environment giant system merits of a scientific evaluation system, which for the water environment pollution prevention and scientific management decision-making basis. This paper presents the evaluation of water environment system engineering methods, the method takes into account the water environment facilities and managerial factors, etc., may reflect the situation of water environment of the objective entity.

Land Cover Classification Method Oriented to Geographic National Conditions Investigation

Abstract. Developing the project of geographic national conditions investigation is in order to obtain land cover change information which is caused by natural and human social and economic activities, and serve the information for government, enterprise and public. Land cover is an important method to describe the geographic national conditions information, which can truly reflect the land surface material type and its natural attribute. It has been contained in the content system preliminary scheme as an important portion. In this paper, it discusses and analyzes on the method and key technology, with according to the land cover content that geographic national conditions watches on. Then it evaluates the applicability of automatic classification method using in land cover information extraction, and comprehensively analyzes various extraction methods’ maximum effectiveness. Finally, it proposes a method that is based on high spatial resolution remote sensing imagery and can be used in engineering applications, which provides a reference method for geographic national conditions investigation.

The Meaning of 'Law' in Comparing Laws or the Complexity of What the Object of Legal Comparison Is

The Meaning of 'Law' in Comparing Laws or the Complexity of What the Object of Legal Comparison Is

William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship: The Roots of Environmentalism in Nineteenth-Century Culture by Scott Hess

BOOK REVIEWS 629 I would have liked to learn more about what Kelley has to say about bo­ tanical figures in the work ofWordsworth, P. B. Shelley, and Keats, among others, but in a study in which plants teach us to follow the paths of errancy, a tightly argued book may not always be the best way to proceed. Kelley’s turn to colonial Indian botany in the subsequent chapter, which discusses the work of Sir William Jones and considers the illustrations pro­ duced by anonymous Indian artists for William Roxburgh’s Plants of the Coast of Coromandel and Flora Indica, raises interesting questions about the colonial appropriation of other natures and about voices lost in translation. In a penultimate chapter pointing toward the nineteenth-century nonLinnaean rethinking of plant morphology, Kelley provides something of a reprise of the dialectics of her book in the debate between Goethe and Hegel over the nature of plants. She then concludes with a reflection on Clare’s favorite plants, the orchids, by reflecting on James Bateman’s monograph The Orchidaceae of Mexico and Guatemala. This is a very fine work, a superb contribution to the study of the Ro­ mantic period and the relationship between botany and literature. In its deep commitment to historical understanding and to close reading, captur­ ing the figural play occasioned by the material nature of plants and their culture, Kelley’s Clandestine Marriage provides a unique account ofcomplex stirrings that lie just below the surface of the Romantic love of plants. Alan Bewell University of Toronto Scott Hess. William Wordsworth and the Ecology of Authorship: The Roots of Environmentalism in Nineteenth-Century Culture. Charlottesville & Lon­ don: University of Virginia Press, 2012. Pp. 290. $55. William Wordsworth and the Ecology ofAuthorship represents an important and provocative contribution to ecocritical readings of Wordsworth, of British and American Romanticism, and of the legacy ofWordsworthian versions of “nature” and authorship in modern environmentahsm. The “ecology of authorship” identified in Hess’s title refers to a “discursive system” respon­ sible for constructing “a high-aesthetic version ofnature in relation to indi­ vidual authors and, through them, also individual readers.” This “discourse of nature” allows “individual author(s) and reader(s)” to “construct their ‘true selves’ in relation to one another through seemingly autonomous imaginative activity without actually meeting in person, while at the same time identifying together as part of the new middle-class cultural model of the nation” (2). In five chapters, Hess locates Wordsworth’s “ecology of SiR, 53 (Winter 2014) 630 BOOK REVIEWS authorship” in an impressive range of particular discursive contexts: the picturesque and the emergence of photographic subjectivity; travel guides and landscape architecture; environmental protest movements; museum culture; and the gender politics of colonial travel-writing. At the conclu­ sion of each chapter, Hess reflects on how we might wrest ourselves from the limiting effects of Wordsworth’s legacy, clearing space “for new social ecologies of participation, embodiment, place and community” (19). Hess’s questioning of Wordsworth’s “ecology of authorship” is, in turn, a questioning of “Romantic ecocriticism” as it emerged in the 1990s (ex­ emplified throughout the book by Jonathan Bate’s work in Romantic Ecol­ ogy [1991] and Song ofthe Earth [2000]). Hess notes how Wordsworth’s “in­ dividualized, aesthetic appreciation of nature” (3) became the model for a cntical approach that rejected poststructuralist and New Historicist deconstructions of the environment in favor of a turning “back to a ‘nature’ supposedly set apart from social systems and practices” (4). Echoing recent critiques of this approach by Timothy Morton and Ashton Nichols, Hess traces the “historically and culturally specific meanings” of a seemingly universal version of “nature,” accessed through “silence, solitude, highaesthetic activity, and contemplation” (5). Hess argues, instead, that “an ecology that includes human beings in any meaningful way has to include space also for human economic and social activity, as well as a wide range of other human cultural practices” (5). Such an intervention is certainly valuable, although the persistent responses to “environmental criticism of the Batesian variety” (6) do at times feel like belated replies to an easy target. Chapter One shows how, despite Wordsworth’s claims to have out­ grown his early attraction...