Social Network Information Research Articles

The Impact of Geographic Distance between Venture Capital and Start-ups on Operating Performance

China has a vast territory, and the development scale of venture capital varies significantly among different regions. The geographical distribution of venture capital is unbalanced, which makes it difficult for venture capital to choose to invest in local enterprises or cross-regional investment. Many studies have shown that geographical distance is related to the formation of social networks, the strength of information asymmetry and the amount of transaction costs. Therefore, depending on geographical distance, venture capital will face different investment situations, investment costs and investment returns, and entrepreneurial enterprises will therefore receive different levels of super-vision, value-added and post-investment management services. Therefore, this paper analyses the impact of geographical distance between VCs and start-ups on the operating performance of start-ups from a unique geographical distance perspective, and takes relevant data of listed start-ups from 2009 to 2019 as samples for empirical test. The study finds that the closer the geographical distance between VCs and start-ups, the higher the short-term operating performance of start-ups. Geographical distance has an insignificant effect on the long-term performance of startups. In addition, poor internal control of start-ups will weaken the positive impact of geographical proximity on operating performance of start-ups.

An improved competitive particle swarm optimization algorithm based on de-heterogeneous information

The problem of influence dissemination under competitive conditions can truly reflect the form of information in social networks, make reasonable decisions, and analyze the impact gain of different types of messages on users, so as to maximize the benefits of users. How to accurately simulate the spread of competitive influence is still a challenging problem. In such conditions to carry out the information dissemination, viral marketing, disease prevention and other works has a more reasonable significance. However, it is NP-hard to find the most influential node set in a competitive environment. Although an approximate optimal solution can be obtained by using a greedy algorithm to simulate influence propagation under competitive conditions, the time efficiency of the process is very low. Therefore, this paper designs a bionic optimized solution to explore the above problems. Firstly, We set optimization measures to balance the convergence and diversity of the optimization algorithm in the target space, and based on this, we propose a local impact ability evaluation metric based on the de-heterogeneous information within the 2-hop neighborhood of the node set to measure the propagation ability of the node set under competitive conditions. Secondly, the proposed evaluation index is applied to the improved particle swarm optimization algorithm to realize the screening of global optimal particles. Finally, we build a game model to simulate the interest-driven information ownership and dissemination of nodes. The effectiveness and efficiency of our method are verified by comparing the propagation range of competitive influence of different methods and the time complexity of each algorithm on real data sets.

RURAL LIVING AND DISABILITY IN OLDER ADULTS: THE ROLE OF ALTERNATIVE SUPPORT RESOURCES AS MEDIATORS

Abstract Rural communities are often characterized by sparse service environments offering limited care, services, and conveniences that help with daily activities. In lieu of community services that target older adults to assist with aging-in-place, alternative supportive features, including environmental modification and informal social networks may be especially important in rural settings to preserve functional independence. The purpose of this study was to assess the role of alternative support resources as potential mediators between service environments and Activities of Daily Living (ADL) functioning of older adults living in rural settings. Data from the National Health and Aging Trends Study (NHATS) were analyzed. Guided by the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health, regression models included covariates for sociodemographics, chronic conditions, mobility functioning, and participation. Service environments were quantified using a measure of the number of services (e.g., help with bathing) available in communities. Two potentially important support features were tested as mediators. Environmental modification was operationalized using indicators of whether homes had been modified (e.g., with features such as grab bars). Size and quality of individuals’ social networks were calculated using indicators of whom participants spoke to about important things in their life. Measures of ADLs served as key dependent variables. Results suggest a negative statistical relationship between service environments and disability that is explained in part by the availability of alternative support resources. Implications are that older adults who live in rural communities may often benefit by employing home modifications and relying on informal care options to meet their needs.

FACTORS ASSOCIATED WITH VOLUNTEERING AMONG FAMILY CAREGIVERS OF OLDER ADULTS

Abstract Family caregiving has been linked to an increased risk of poor mental health, poor physical health, and higher rates of perceived social isolation among caregivers. Despite the connection between caregiving and negative outcomes, or perhaps because of this connection, caregivers seek out and enjoy other life roles and activities including formal volunteerism. To explore the connection between informal caregiving and volunteering and establish the representative prevalence of formal volunteering among caregivers, descriptive and multivariate logistic regression analyses were carried out with data from 1,745 caregivers in the National Study of Caregiving (NSOC) (2017). Utilizing social capital theory four models were constructed with salient demographic characteristics associated with volunteering (model 1), caregiving context (model 2), caregiver physical and mental health (model 3), along with participation in informal and formal social networks (model 4). About a quarter of the sample participated in volunteering (26%). The average age was 60.5 years (SD = 14.3) and more than half consisted of female caregivers (67.11%). Non-Hispanic Whites (62.9%) were the majority of the sample, followed by non-Hispanic Blacks (28%), Hispanic (6.5%), and caregivers in other racial/ethic groups (2.6%). Gender, educational achievement, caregiving for a spouse, coresiding with care recipient, caregiving for multiple care recipients, quality of relationship with care recipient, caregiver psychological well-being, having emotional/physical support, attending religious services, and group activity participation were all significant indicators for caregiver volunteerism. Findings support the importance of both human and social capital in volunteering among caregivers.

Концептуализация хаоса в WEB 2.0 и хаотический субъект Сети

Introduction. The article considers the theme of chaos, traditional for philosophy, in the perspective of materiality and spatiality, associated with manifestations of WEB 2.0: the stages of development of the global Web, where interactive content and content from the network users themselves prevail. Theoretical analysis. Here, an attempt is made to comprehend the question of chaos, using methods and models adequate for the digital sphere, as well as thematizing the concept of cyberchaos in order to answer the question of its relevance for modern Internet research. Understanding Internet subject, cyberchaos and the Internet as a chaotic system at the stage of WEB 2.0, where disorder and over-intensity of content predominate, shows it to be both a creative beginning and a method of catastrophic influence on the world, emerging from digital, but at the same time available for control and suppression. Conclusion. The current consideration makes it possible to take into account the scale of Deleuzian nomadology in the WEB 2.0 space. Its result is a series of proposals for the conceptualization of chaos and segments of modern life that relate to the Internet and WEB 2.0: social network subjectivity, information chaos and instant messengers as a driver of chaotic socio-political research.

Dynamics of a Discrete Lotka–Volterra Information Diffusion Model

To explore the process of online social network information interaction, in this paper, we analyze the dynamics of a discrete Lotka–Volterra information diffusion model. Using the center manifold theorem, the conditions for transcritical bifurcation and flip bifurcation are obtained. With the help of approximation by a flow and Picard iteration, we explore the qualitative structures and stability of degenerate fixed point of the model with eigenvalues [Formula: see text]. What’s interesting is that our results reveal a new and complex qualitative structure for fixed point, which are different from the previous reports and called degenerate saddle point. Additionally, the qualitative structures provide a new idea for investigation the stability of degenerate fixed point. Meanwhile, near the maximum user density, the dynamic results of degenerate fixed point indicate that if the intervention rate is greater than the inverse of the maximum user density, then the higher user density decreases, the lower user density increases when intrinsic growth rates are small (between 0 and 2). However, when the intrinsic growth rate is greater than 2, the high user density will continue to increase until it approaches the maximum user density indefinitely, while the small user density will approach 0, which provide us with new insights into information diffusion. Finally, we show the results of the model by numerical simulations, and the characteristics of information diffusion near the degenerate fixed point are predicted by theoretical analysis.

A Hierarchy of Network Models Giving Bistability Under Triadic Closure

Triadic closure describes the tendency for new friendships to form between individuals who already have friends in common. It has been argued heuristically that the triadic closure effect can lead to bistability in the formation of large-scale social interaction networks. Here, depending on the initial state and the transient dynamics, the system may evolve towards either of two long-time states. In this work, we propose and study a hierarchy of network evolution models that incorporate triadic closure, building on the work of Grindrod, Higham, and Parsons [Internet Mathematics, 8, 2012, 402--423]. We use a chemical kinetics framework, paying careful attention to the reaction rate scaling with respect to the system size. In a macroscale regime, we show rigorously that a bimodal steady-state distribution is admitted. This behavior corresponds to the existence of two distinct stable fixed points in a deterministic mean-field ODE. The macroscale model is also seen to capture an apparent metastability property of the microscale system. Computational simulations are used to support the analysis.

A graph-based pivotal semantic mining framework for rumor detection

As the gathering place for modern content sharing, social platforms not only provide places for people to obtain information and express opinions, but also provide hidden channels for the generation and dissemination of rumors. Rumor detection is an important and challenging task for mining fake information in social networks. Previous methods utilized sequential models to embed semantic features, which are not comprehensive for mining pivotal semantic information and easy to ignore discontinuous dependencies. However, excessive mining of information content will lead to the acquisition of some redundant information, whose existence will affect the extraction of useful features and the detection ability of the model. To address these issues, this paper offers a graph-based pivotal semantic mining framework. Specifically, we model the content information as a graph structure, learn the semantic dependencies across segments through a gated graph neural network, and co-learn by combining the propagation features of rumors. Furthermore, in order to highlight the precious essential semantic information, a shared unit cell is offered to reduce the influence of redundant information. Experimental results on realworld datasets show that the proposed method exceeds existing methods in terms of benchmark testing.

СИСТЕМА ІНСТРУМЕНТІВ ОНЛАЙН-КОМУНІКАЦІЇ ДЛЯ ПОБУДОВИ ПЕРСОНАЛЬНОГО БРЕНДУ HR ДИРЕКТОРА КОМПАНІЇ

<p><strong><em>The aim </em></strong><em>of our study is to analyze the essence and structure of the online communication tools system for building the personal brand of the company’s HR director. For this purpose, the main tasks included: a review of the source base devoted to the essence of online communication tools and also to determine the structure of the modern online communication tools system for building a personal brand of the company’s HR director; definition of the current structure of online communication tools system for building a personal brand of the company’s HR director. </em></p><p><strong><em>Research methodology</em></strong><em>. To study the essence and structure of online communication tools system for building a personal brand of the company’s HR director, research methods such as observation, analysis, synthesis, reception, generalization, description, as well as a systematic approach were use. </em></p><p><strong><em>Results</em></strong><em>. The article shows the concept of online communication tools, as well as outlines their main properties. The main interpretive approaches of Ukrainian and foreign scientists are revealed, in which the structure of online communication tools system for building a personal brand. It is proved that today the online communication tools system for building a personal brand of the company’s HR director consists of: tools that are covered by the phenomenon of the blogosphere (blogs, microblogs); social networks (informal social networks; business social networks; corporate social networks; special social networks; forum type of social networks); media hosting (web platforms; audio podcast platforms); online messengers. </em></p><p><strong><em>The scientific novelty</em></strong><em> of the results obtained consists in identifying the most relevant and frequently used online communication tools system for building a personal brand of the company’s HR director. </em></p><p><strong><em>Practical significance</em></strong><em>. The results of the study are of practical importance since it contains propositions and recommendations that may be useful for the company’s HR director, as well as other media persons who wish to build their personal brand.</em></p><p><strong><em>Key</em></strong><strong><em> </em></strong><strong><em>words: </em></strong><em>blog, communication tools, media hosting, online communication, online messenger, personal brand, social network. </em></p>

Adolescent pregnancy outcomes in Jos, North Central Nigeria: The roles of disclosure and social support systems

ABSTRACT Adolescent pregnancy is mostly unintended and an indicator of unmet sexual and reproductive health (SRH) needs. In most African cultures, sociocultural and religious expectations of chastity make unintended adolescent pregnancy a traumatic experience. This study examined the roles of disclosure and social support networks in determining adolescent pregnancy outcomes in Jos, Nigeria. Using a qualitative design, we conducted in-depth interviews with 17 young persons aged 16–24 years, recruited through purposive and snowballing sampling methods. Data were analysed using an inductive approach. Informal social support networks, mainly mothers and close friends, played prominent roles in pregnancy disclosure. The fear of unsafe abortion complications and lack of other options forced most participants into early motherhood. Parenting issues also contributed to unintended adolescent pregnancies. Participants noted that adolescent males had better access to contraceptive devices like condoms. Additionally, the absence of formal opportunities for institutional support through education and youth-friendly SRH services constituted barriers to preventing unintended adolescent pregnancies. Considering the important role family plays, preventing unintended adolescent pregnancies requires empowering parents on SRH communication. A gender-based approach to adolescent-friendly SRH services is recommended. The Nigerian government needs to reconsider how to provide contextually-acceptable comprehensive sexuality education to young people.

MSQ: a mobile and social-based Q&A system

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to propose a mobile and social-based question-and-answer (Q&A) system that analyzes users' social relationships and past answering behavior, considers users' interest similarity and answer quality to infer suitable respondents and forwards the questions to users that are willing to give high quality answers.Design/methodology/approachThis research applies first-order logic (FOL) inference calculation to generate question/interest ID that combines a users' social information, interests and social network intimacy to choose the nodes that can provide high-quality answers. After receiving a question, a friend can answer it, forward it to their friends according to the number of TTL (Time-to-Live) hops, or send the answer directly to the server. This research collected data from the TripAdvisor.com website and uses it for the experiment. The authors also collected previously answered questions from TripAdvisor.com; thus, subsequent answers could be forwarded to a centralized server to improve the overall performance.FindingsThe authors have first noticed that even though the proposed system is decentralized, it can still accurately identify the appropriate respondents to provide high-quality answers. In addition, since this system can easily identify the best answerers, there is no need to implement broadcasting, thus reducing the overall execution time and network bandwidth required. Moreover, this system allows users to accurately and quickly obtain high-quality answers after comparing and calculating interest IDs. The system also encourages frequent communication and interaction among users. Lastly, the experiments demonstrate that this system achieves high accuracy, high recall rate, low overhead, low forwarding cost and low response rate in all scenarios.Originality/valueThis paper proposes a mobile and social-based Q&A system that applies FOL inference calculation to analyze users' social relationships and past answering behavior, considers users' interest similarity and answer quality to infer suitable respondents and forwards the questions to users that are willing to give high quality answers. The experiments demonstrate that this system achieves high accuracy, high recall rate, low overhead, low forwarding cost and low response rate in all scenarios.

Female cooperative labour networks in hunter-gatherers and horticulturalists.

Cooperation in food acquisition is a hallmark of the human species. Given that costs and benefits of cooperation vary among production regimes and work activities, the transition from hunting-and-gathering to agriculture is likely to have reshaped the structure of cooperative subsistence networks. Hunter-gatherers often forage in groups and are generally more interdependent and experience higher short-term food acquisition risk than horticulturalists, suggesting that cooperative labour should be more widespread and frequent for hunter-gatherers. Here we compare female cooperative labour networks of Batek hunter-gatherers of Peninsular Malaysia and Tsimane forager-horticulturalists of Bolivia. We find that Batek foraging results in high daily variation in labour partnerships, facilitating frequent cooperation in diffuse networks comprised of kin and non-kin. By contrast, Tsimane horticulture involves more restricted giving and receiving of labour, confined mostly to spouses and primary or distant kin. Tsimane women also interact with few individuals in the context of hunting/fishing activities and forage mainly with spouses and primary kin. These differences give rise to camp- or village-level networks that are more modular (have more substructure when partitioned) among Tsimane horticulturalists. Our findings suggest that subsistence activities shape the formation and extent of female social networks, particularly with respect to connections with other women and non-kin. We discuss the implications of restricted female labour networks in the context of gender relations, power dynamics and the adoption of farming in humans. This article is part of the theme issue 'Cooperation among women: evolutionary and cross-cultural perspectives'.

Personalized Sliding Window Recommendation Algorithm Based on Sequence Alignment.

With the explosive growth of the amount of information in social networks, the recommendation system, as an application of social networks, has attracted widespread attention in recent years on how to obtain user-interested content in massive data. At present, in the process of algorithm design of the recommending system, most methods ignore structural relationships between users. Therefore, in this paper, we designed a personalized sliding window for different users by combining timing information and network topology information, then extracted the information sequence of each user in the sliding window and obtained the similarity between users through sequence alignment. The algorithm only needs to extract part of the data in the original dataset, and the time series comparison shows that our method is superior to the traditional algorithm in recommendation Accuracy, Popularity, and Diversity.

Poverty, social networks, and clientelism

Why are the poor susceptible to clientelism, and what factors shield them from the influence of vote buying? We explore the role of both formal and informal social networks in shaping the likelihood of being targeted with private inducements. We argue that when the poor lack access to formal social networks, they become increasingly reliant on vote buying channelled through informal networks. To test our theory, we build the informal, family-based network linkages between voters and local politicians spanning a city in the Philippines. We then collect survey data on formal network connections, electoral handouts, and voting behaviour of 900 voters randomly drawn from these family networks. We show first that campaigns disproportionately target poorer voters. We then show that familial ties further influence targeting among poor voters. Finally, we show that access to formal networks such as workers’ associations mitigate voter fears of punishment for failing to reciprocate.

Awareness of Racism Among Social Work Students in a Challenging Era

This study focused on understanding individual (e.g., political identity and alignment of social work core values with the Black Lives Matter movement and the All Lives Matter argument) and social environmental correlates (e.g., social network composition) of awareness of racism among social work students. A convenience sample of social work students (n=98) recruited from a major Midwest land grant university completed an online anonymous survey with questions covering individual characteristics, social network information, and attitudes toward social phenomena. The Color-Blind Racial Attitudes Scale was used to assess overall awareness of racism, White privilege, institutional racism, and blatant racism. Regression models were conducted to identify correlates of these domains of racial attitudes separately. Liberal political view identification and alignment of Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement with social work core values were associated with better awareness of racism across all domains; aligning All Lives Matter with social work core values was associated with unawareness of overall racism, institutional racism, and blatant racism. Finally, discussion on racial issues with network members was associated with better awareness of overall racism, White privilege, and blatant racism. Social work programs should facilitate inter-group dialogues to build consensus on countering racism. Discussions on the mission and the context of BLM and its opposition efforts should also be incorporated in the curriculum. Finally, more emphasis on the impact of institutional racism should be included into course activities to further discussion on such topics within students’ network.

Arabic Twitter Conversation Dataset about the COVID-19 Vaccine

The development and rollout of COVID-19 vaccination around the world offers hope for controlling the pandemic. People turned to social media such as Twitter seeking information or to voice their opinion. Therefore, mining such conversation can provide a rich source of data for different applications related to the COVID-19 vaccine. In this data article, we developed an Arabic Twitter dataset of 1.1 M Arabic posts regarding the COVID-19 vaccine. The dataset was streamed over one year, covering the period from January to December 2021. We considered a set of crawling keywords in the Arabic language related to the conversation about the vaccine. The dataset consists of seven databases that can be analyzed separately or merged for further analysis. The initial analysis depicts the embedded features within the posts, including hashtags, media, and the dynamic of replies and retweets. Further, the textual analysis reveals the most frequent words that can capture the trends of the discussions. The dataset was designed to facilitate research across different fields, such as social network analysis, information retrieval, health informatics, and social science.

Uncovering the Deviation of Farmers’ Green Manure Planting Willingness and Behavior

Planting green manure is an effective way to improve the agricultural environment and the quality of cultivated land in China. However, deviation from green manure planting willingness and behavior (DWB) becomes a serious obstacle to the promotion of green manure planting technology. For economic farmers, whether to plant green manure is a rational choice made after weighing up family endowments. In addition, ecological cognition plays a moderating role in the “willingness-behavior” transformation process of farmers’ green manure planting on the basis of family endowments. We selected four counties in which to conduct a questionnaire survey in Gansu and carried out interviews with 375 farmers. Based on the survey data, our study identified determinants that influence farmers’ DWB and examined the moderating effect of ecological cognition. In our paper, results show that the probability of farmers’ DWB is 41.87%. Farmers’ DWB is not only negatively affected by social network information and ecological compensation (eco-compensation) and positively influenced by the scale of cultivated land, but also restricted by human capital endowment characteristics such as age and education. In addition, ecological cognition played a significant moderating effect on farmers’ DWB. Farmers with high ecological cognition were more aware and capable of promoting green manure planting intentions into practice. Furthermore, different groups of farmers had different characteristics of DWB. The findings are useful and helpful in better understand the influencing factors of farmers’ DWB for policy makers and managers and can provide some effective support for policies designed to encourage farmers to adopt more sustainable green manure.

The existence of a pure Nash equilibrium in the two-player competitive diffusion game on graphs having chordality

The competitive diffusion game is a game-theoretic model of information spreading on a graph proposed by Alon et al. (2010). It models the diffusion process of information in social networks where several competitive companies want to spread their information, for example. The nature of this game strongly depends on the graph topology, and the relationship is studied from several aspects. In this paper, we investigate the existence of a pure Nash equilibrium of the two-player competitive diffusion game on chordal and its related graphs. We show that a pure Nash equilibrium always exists on split graphs, block graphs, and interval graphs, all of which are well-known subclasses of chordal graphs. On the other hand, we show that a pure Nash equilibrium does not always exist on (strongly) chordal graphs; the boundary of the existence of a pure Nash equilibrium is found.

Deep learning and social network analysis elucidate drivers of HIV transmission in a high-incidence cohort of people who inject drugs.

Globally, people who inject drugs (PWID) experience some of the fastest-growing HIV epidemics. Network-based approaches represent a powerful tool for understanding and combating these epidemics; however, detailed social network studies are limited and pose analytical challenges. We collected longitudinal social (injection partners) and spatial (injection venues) network information from 2512 PWID in New Delhi, India. We leveraged network analysis and graph neural networks (GNNs) to uncover factors associated with HIV transmission and identify optimal intervention delivery points. Longitudinal HIV incidence was 21.3 per 100 person-years. Overlapping community detection using GNNs revealed seven communities, with HIV incidence concentrated within one community. The injection venue most strongly associated with incidence was found to overlap six of the seven communities, suggesting that an intervention deployed at this one location could reach the majority of the sample. These findings highlight the utility of network analysis and deep learning in HIV program design.

SybilFlyover: Heterogeneous graph-based fake account detection model on social networks

Organized social robot accounts can launch Sybil attacks on online social networks (OSNs) for various malicious purposes, thus significantly affecting the user experience of online communities and damaging the reputation of OSNs. Therefore, detecting Sybil accounts in OSNs is crucial in cyberspace governance. Among the existing Sybil account detection methods, structure-based methods appear to be the most promising because of their ability to model the states and behaviors of social network accounts effectively. However, most of these structure-based methods only model the social accounts in OSNs while ignoring the content generated in OSNs, such as tweets of Twitter accounts. To address this deficiency, this study proposes an efficient model called SybilFlyover, which uses a heterogeneous graph-based method to represent all types of entities existing in an OSN uniformly, as well as complex relationships between the entities in a directed heterogeneous social network graph. During the modeling process, content-based social network information is injected into the model using a method based on prompt learning to achieve more accurate modeling of the real state of an OSN. Finally, the social network graph was processed using a transformer-based method to identify nodes representing Sybil accounts. The results of an experiment on a real public dataset demonstrate that the proposed SybilFlyover model outperforms existing state-of-the-art baseline models in Sybil account detection.