Social Networking Systems Research Articles

Financial inclusions in social networks

Research background: The study suggests that social networks can offer all the same services and products as traditional financial intermediaries. Moreover, the scope and prospects for the inclusion of financial services in the social network system are not yet fully defined and not clear. Nevertheless, the modern largest social sites are constantly developing their financial functions. Moreover, they do it in their way and often differ from the traditional financial intermediation method: firstly, social networks offer all services in a “single window” - along with other information and in the course of social communications, that is, transfer the service of network users to omnichannel, including in this concept the whole complex of socio-communication and financial interactions. The problems of the interaction of social networks with economic networks are widely studied. Quite a lot of literature is devoted to the problem of innovation in the financial sector. There are also publications that contain literature reviews, conceptual and theoretical generalizations and discussions on this issue. No less abundant electronic finance literature – reviews, textbooks, numerous studies on specific issues and regional specificities of finance, as well as various web applications. Popular with researchers and the media are topics dedicated to social networks sites. Purpose of the article in the analysis of social networks is associated with new processes, the development of new provisions, clarification of terms, the development of new hypotheses and theoretical principles. Findings & Value added: The challenge facing researchers can be summarized as follows: the study of information and behavioral aspects of the interaction of two types of activities - financial intermediation and social networks, leading to new processes and the formation of new organizational forms and behavior. To this end, a purposeful search is carried out for concepts, models, and tools to determine the content and prospects of these processes and new approaches are being developed and proposed. Methods: At the first stage: (1) sociometric analysis based on graph theory, (2) concepts of interpersonal relationships, the behavior of various participants of groups and conditions for forming specific cliques in various groups, and (3) anthropological traditions, which were used to observe community members (including social networks), determine their structure, internal relations and conditions for their sustainability.

Evaluation of physiotherapy students' attitudes and engagement with social networking and eLearning systems: implications for education and training

Evaluation of physiotherapy students' attitudes and engagement with social networking and eLearning systems: implications for education and training

Зарубежная практика проектного подхода в реализации взаимодействия университетов и некоммерческих организаций

The present research examines the foreign experience of cooperation between universities and non-profit organizations (NPOs) related to the development of a civil society. A socially responsible University that successfully implements its main missions related to education and research, should also participate in the implementation of the third mission, which is closely connected with the development of a local community. When analyzing the system of interaction between Universities and NGOs, a project approach was used. The project approach is aimed at building social activity and responsibility among citizens which is possible due to interaction between universities and non-profit organizations. The analysis of foreign practice allowed the authors to identify main stakeholders of social networking system and formulate basic principle of the concept of effective partnership between universities and non-profit organizations, as well as suggest some directions and forms of organizing cooperation between a socially responsible university and a local community.

Thinking spatial

The systems community in both academia and industry has tremendous success in building widely used general purpose systems for various types of data and applications. Examples include database systems, big data systems, data streaming systems, and machine learning systems. The vast majority of these systems are ill equipped in terms of supporting spatial data. The main reason is that system builders mostly think of spatial data as just one more type of data. Any spatial support can be considered as an afterthought problem that can be supported via on-top functions or spatial cartridges that can be added to the already built systems. This article advocates that spatial data and applications need to be natively supported in special purpose systems, where spatial data is considered as a first class citizen, while spatial operations are built inside the engine rather than on-top of it. System builders should consider spatial data while building their systems. The article gives examples of five categories of systems, namely, database systems, big data systems, machine learning systems, recommender systems, and social network systems, that would benefit tremendously, in terms of both accuracy and performance, when considering spatial data as an integral part of the system engine.

The Role of Social Media in Promoting Ethics, Morals and Values

Over the last few years the nature of communication has undergone a substantial change and it is still changing. Especially the revolution in social networking systems has tremendously changed the way of social communication. Modern social media opens up the possibilities of learning, discovering and sharing ideas and interacting with one another. Ethics and values are the spiritual aspect of any religion and civilization. Islam is the comprehensive moral guide line for the whole mankind, which requires being spread out to them around the world. The Prophet (SAAS) also said, “Convey my teachings to the people even if it were a single sentence” (Bukhari, Hadith No. 667). So in the modern and cyber era, the practice of promoting moral values can be performed in many ways. Though there are no experimental studies regarding the use of social media in promoting ethics (dā’wah), this study will shed light on the understanding of how social media should be utilized for this purpose. It recommends, therefore, that the social media should be used by religious callers to improve the scalability of their dā’wah towards contemporary societies.

Constant Checking Is Not Addiction: A Grounded Theory of IT-Mediated State-Tracking

“Constant checking” of digital devices has been a widely observed phenomenon: people check email clients, social networking systems, news websites, and other information technologies (ITs) at the expense of distracted driving, neglected children, and lost productivity. The predominant perspective on such phenomena of excessive IT use is that users are addicted to technology. But actually, we know very little about what exactly “constant checking” is, what causes it, and under what conditions negative outcomes might ensue. Based on qualitative data collected from 90 individuals, we develop a grounded theory that views “constant-checking” behaviors as information-seeking habits instead of an addiction in need of medical treatment. We find that these habits satisfy deep-rooted and recurring needs for information, are facilitated by today’s high accessibility of information, and are fueled by an interesting reward pattern. To represent “constant-checking” behaviors in light of our findings, we posit a new construct: IT-mediated state-tracking, defined as an individual’s habitual use of IT to seek information that closes the gap between their knowledge about a real-world domain’s state and its actual state. We also learn that the intended and unintended consequences of IT-mediated state-tracking are contingent upon situational factors, which suggests that a more balanced perspective on these behaviors is warranted. Our research steers the discussion about excessive IT use in a new direction by offering a new construct and a grounded theory that helps us to better understand the phenomenon of “constant checking.”

An Adaptive Delay-Tolerant Routing Algorithm for Data Transmission in Opportunistic Social Networks

In opportunistic networks, the requirement of QoS (quality of service) poses several major challenges to wireless mobile devices with limited cache and energy. This implies that energy and cache space are two significant cornerstones for the structure of a routing algorithm. However, most routing algorithms tackle the issue of limited network resources from the perspective of a deterministic approach, which lacks an adaptive data transmission mechanism. Meanwhile, these methods show a relatively low scalability because they are probably built up based on some special scenarios rather than general ones. To alleviate the problems, this paper proposes an adaptive delay-tolerant routing algorithm (DTCM) utilizing curve-trapezoid Mamdani fuzzy inference system (CMFI) for opportunistic social networks. DTCM evaluates both the remaining energy level and the remaining cache level of relay nodes (two-factor) in opportunistic networks and makes reasonable decisions on data transmission through CMFI. Different from the traditional fuzzy inference system, CMFI determines three levels of membership functions through the trichotomy law and evaluates the fuzzy mapping from two-factor fuzzy input to data transmission by curve-trapezoid membership functions. Our experimental results show that within the error interval of 0.05~0.1, DTCM improves delivery ratio by about 20% and decreases end-to-end delay by approximate 25% as compared with Epidemic, and the network overhead from DTCM is in the middle horizon.

CONSTRUCT A STATE OF WELFARE (AN STUDY ON THE IMPROVEMENT OF WELFARE THROUGH THE SOCIAL SECURITY SYSTEM IN INDONESIA)

Poverty is still inherent in every aspect of human life, so it requires comprehensive, integral, and sustainable countermeasures. Indonesia has made a national commitment to eradicate poverty in the context of implementing sustainable development, where the government and all state apparatuses together with various elements of society bear the primary responsibility for achieving sustainable development and simultaneously alleviating poverty. International and national commitments strongly emphasize the importance of social security, especially as a strategy to deal with poverty in a systemic, institutionalized and integrated manner. The development of a social security system program to support the achievement of people's welfare needs to be seen as an effort to restore the community's ability to achieve their own welfare. In Indonesia, the development of a social network system as an alternative to improving people's welfare can be done by revamping the mechanism for implementing a social assistance program that is not centralized, which accommodates the diversity of local characteristics and demands as well as the integration and strong relationship between the management of economic development fields and the field of social welfare. In addition, the social security system needs to be strengthened as an infrastructure of social capital for the community towards a stable life.

Addressing Brazilian diversity in personal computing systems with a tailoring-based approach

Access to knowledge, information, and technology is a key element for the development of individuals and society as a whole. While computing systems play a fundamental role in this process, efforts aimed at diminishing the worldwide digital divide are still scarce. In this study, we propose a tailoring-based approach for personal systems design as a way to promote digital and social inclusion in contexts of highly unbalanced access to computing technology. Our approach uses theories and methods of participatory design and semiotics to tailor user interfaces according to principles of universal access. We propose the integration of the PLuRaL framework for the system conception and design with the FAN (flexibility through AJAX and norms) framework for implementation and deployment of tailorable user interfaces, reaching a complete approach for the creation of systems. The approach, frameworks, and methods were effectively analyzed during the design of an inclusive social network system in Brazil. In addition, we present an evaluation of the developed system and discuss possible impacts on digital inclusion.

Psychometric evaluation of Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale (BFAS) among Iranian adolescents

ABSTRACT Since there is currently no specific instrument for measuring addiction to Social Network Systems (SNSs), in the Iranian adolescent users, the present study aimed to investigate the psychometric properties of the Persian version of Bergen Facebook Addiction Scale (BFAS) in Iranian students. After translating the long-form English version of the BFAS (18 items) into the Persian language (Farsi) and backward translation into English and comparing them, the Persian version was prepared for administration. A total of 345 students (14–18 years of age) constituted the research sample. The Random Cluster Sampling was employed. Data were analyzed using SPSS and package lavaan, in the R system for statistical computing. The results of the Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) using the Principal Factor Analysis (PFA) and Promax Rotation showed that the questionnaire was composed of five factors, namely withdrawal, relapse, salience, conflict, and mood modification. These factors explained more than 63.09% of the total variance. The internal consistency of the items of the questionnaire using Cronbach’s Alpha method was 0.75. The correlation of each item with the total score of the test showed acceptable reliability. The test-retest reliability after 2 weeks of administrating the test was 0.86. The Farsi-BFAS is confirmed in Iranian youth due to good reliability and validity and is applicable for screening and investigating SNSs in the Iranian adolescent users. Additional studies are needed in cases of sensitivity and specificity when compared with other similar instruments for addiction as well as in different populations and circumstances.

How Government Credibility and Social Morality Work in a Public Health Emergency. A Study of Public Quarantine Willingness in COVID‐19

AbstractThis study explores the relationships among the variables: willingness to quarantine, perception of the epidemic, willingness to do outdoor activities, government credibility, and public morality. To understand these relationships, it integrates theories including epidemic prevention and control, government credibility, public morality, and social network systems. Structural equation modeling (SEM) with bootstrapping estimation was conducted using data calculated from 368 healthy citizens who are quarantining at home due to COVID‐19 in Chinese cities that have launched a first‐level primary public safety incident response. The results show that residents’ perception of the epidemic has a positive effect on their willingness to quarantine, and willingness to do outdoor activities has a negative effect. Moreover, government credibility and public morality have a mediating effect on the relationship between the perception of epidemic and willingness to quarantine. What is more, government credibility has a moderating effect on the relationship between willingness to do outdoor activities and willingness to quarantine. We discuss the implications of these results for beating future epidemics that may break out.

Exploring the emerging evolution trends of disaster risk reduction research: a global scenario

This study aimed at appraising the scientific research on disaster risk reduction (DRR) and to identify their evolutionary trajectory between 1990 and 2019. This study used published research articles on DRR retrieved from the database of Web of Science on December 9, 2019, which hosted reliable and efficient high-impact scientific research. To assess the previous studies on DRR, we used “Disaster Risk Reduction” as the key term for the studies published during the period using bibliometric innovative techniques. The results reveal that the published studies on DRR from 1990 to 2019 had an annual growth rate of about 3%, which connotes that the studies on DRR have been increasing over time especially during the period of study. The number of articles witnessed a drastic increment with about 110, 123 and 129 articles in the years 2015, 2016 and 2018, respectively, and there was a decline in 2017 (99 articles) during the same period. This study highlights five of the various innovations that can be highly useful in DRR practice; these include geographic information system and remote sensing, disaster risk insurance, social networking systems and materials that are resilient to disasters. Such technologies are considered very successful, but they are not always easy to utilise. This study concludes that the DRR-related research hotspots are focused primarily on disaster management and science, environmental science, climate change and ecosystem services.

Is dialogue addictive?

Abstract In this study, we shed some light on the thinking behind Facebook addiction. Since social network system are dialogical communication tools, we carve out a space for a theoretical and methodological alternative to the research on social media addiction, as it relates specifically to Facebook addiction. Based on several meta-evaluations and synthesis of extant empirical research, we uncover the two most prominent functionalist approaches sustaining these empirical researches. Upon pointing to their epistemological, theoretical and methodological limitations, we delve into dialogic approach and theory with a view to isolate how and what it is in a dialogic communication that makes it addictive. Finally, we offer some theoretical and methodological alternatives from a dialogical perspective on how to study Facebook addiction.

A Secure and Privacy-Preserving Approach to Protect User Data across Cloud based Online Social Networks

The tremendous growth of social networking systems enables the active participation of a wide variety of users. This has led to an increased probability of security and privacy concerns. In order to solve the issue, the article defines a secure and privacy-preserving approach to protect user data across Cloud-based online social networks. The proposed approach models social networks as a directed graph, such that a user can share sensitive information with other users only if there exists a directed edge from one user to another. The connectivity between data users data is efficiently shared using an attribute-based encryption (ABE) with different data access levels. The proposed ABE technique makes use of a trapdoor function to re-encrypt the data without the use of proxy re-encryption techniques. Experimental evaluation states that the proposed approach provides comparatively better results than the existing techniques.

Awareness of the Risks and Dangers of Social Networking: Exploration on Four Types of Malaysian Secondary Schools

While social networking (SN) undoubtedly plays a vital role in the life of today's teenagers, its risks cannot be overlooked. SN can be a pervasive technology which can result in risky behaviours. Issues linked to such behaviours have been investigated in a variety of contexts abroad (however, less so in the Malaysian context). The study aims at investigating Malaysian Secondary school students’ awareness of the risks and dangers of SN. A quantitative approach involving a questionnaire survey was used to collect data. The questionnaire was designed to elicit information from the students regarding their awareness of the risks and dangers as well as abuse of the SN systems such as cyberbullying, harassment, sexting etc. The questionnaire was distributed to all available Form Four students from four selected schools in the Klang Valley and Selangor i.e. an urban school, a suburban school, a rural school and an elite school. The quantitative study was conducted on 562 students from the four schools. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used in analysing the data. The findings revealed that there was no rural-urban divide with regard to awareness of the risks and dangers involved in SN. Students in general seemed to be aware of the risks and dangers of SN. Likewise, there was no clear rural-urban divide regarding awareness of privacy issues. However, there was some ignorance regarding certain risks. For example, they were generally not aware that it was not possible to stay anonymous online. There were also some marked differences across school-types. Keywords: Social networking, risks and dangers of social networking, rural-urban divide, different school types, teenagers.

Cross-platform personality exploration system for online social networks: Facebook vs. Twitter

Cross-platform personality exploration system for online social networks: Facebook vs. Twitter

On ‘Economies of Sequence’ in the Architectural Theory of Agglomeration: A Case of the Kyoto Tourism Industry

This paper focuses on an architecture-based theory of agglomeration. An agglomeration is composed of a number of segments such as physical infrastructure facilitation including airports and stations. ‘Economies of sequence’ can be defined as the sequencing of the segments toward the efficient building of an agglomeration. The main three findings are as follows: first, foreign nationals from Kansai International Airport Granger-cause the number of tourists to Kyoto Prefecture, foreign nationals from Kansai International Airport Granger-cause the number of foreign tourists to Kyoto City, and passengers at JR Kyoto Station Granger-cause the number of tourists to Kyoto City; second, the number of foreign tourists Granger-causes revenues in the tourism industry in the cases of Malaysia, the United States of America, and China; and third, the promotion of the tourism industry to redevelop Kyoto station mall in 1997, the “Kyoto Winter Special” campaign in 2003, and the global “Travel & Leisure” destination SNS (social networking service) promotion in 2015 were effective in building the segments of a tourist agglomeration. In conclusion, the economies of sequence of the segments of a tourism industry agglomeration are as follows: the first priority is to reduce transportation costs for tourists through the renovation of airports and stations, and the next segments for enhancing the level of cultural elements are a branding strategy through the promotion of the tourist industry by campaigns and projects using social network systems.

Utilizing Edmodo in writing class: Why and how?

ABSTRACT
 This paper comes up to discuss the theories and previous studies about using Edmodo in writing class. Using social network system in the Industrial era 4.0 helps teaching and learning activities become more effective because students can learn in and outside the class. Thus, it is helpful especially in writing class which require long learning time to use this kind of application. Therefore, utilizing an online applications in writing class can help students to improve their writing skill and to make learning time more efficient. One of online applications that is widely used in writing is Edmodo. Generally, this paper then will discuss about explanation of writing processes, problems in writing, explanation about learning media, description of online application, description of Edmodo,benefits of Edmodo, and how to apply Edmodo in writing course. Some previous research highlighting the effect of Edmodo on student’s writing skill is the next discussion. This paper finally gives conclusion and pedagogical implication as the closing.
 Keywords: writing class, online application, Edmodo

SPCSS: Social Network Based Privacy-Preserving Criminal Suspects Sensing

With development of online social networks, many criminal suspects use social network to communicate with each other. In order to obtain valuable criminal clues, considerable research works have been done to analyze criminal suspects’ social data. However, most of them did not pay much attention on privacy-preserving problems, which may leak some sensitive data in the analysis process. To solve this problem, we propose a novel analysis approach of criminal suspects by exploiting social data and crime data that are collected by social network and police information systems. We enable the social cloud server and public security cloud server to exchange social information of criminal suspects and user’s public information in a privacy-preserving way. Specifically, we propose a privacy-preserving data retrieving method based on oblivious transfer to guarantee that only the authorized entities can perform queries on suspects’ social data, while the social cloud server cannot infer anything during the query. Moreover, several building blocks, such as encrypted data comparing, secure classification and regression tree ( CART ) model are also proposed. Based on these building blocks, we designed a privacy-preserving criminal suspects sensing scheme. Finally, we demonstrate a performance evaluation which shows that our scheme can enhance analysis of criminal suspects without privacy leakage, while with low overhead.

QuickPoint: Efficiently Identifying Densest Sub-Graphs in Online Social Networks for Event Stream Dissemination

Efficient event stream dissemination is a challenging problem in large-scale Online Social Network (OSN) systems due to the costly inter-server communications caused by the per-user view data storage. To solve the problem, previous schemes mainly explore the structures of social graphs to reduce the inter-server traffic. Based on the observation of high cluster coefficients in OSNs, a state-of-the-art social piggyback scheme can save redundant messages by exploiting an intrinsic hub-structure in an OSN graph for message piggybacking. Essentially, finding the best hub-structure for piggybacking is equivalent to finding a variation of the densest sub-graph. The existing scheme computes the best hub-structure by iteratively removing the node with the minimum weighted degree. Such a scheme incurs a worst computation cost of $O(n^2)$ O ( n 2 ) , making it not scalable to large-scale OSN graphs. Using alternative hub-structure instead of the best hub-structure can speed up the piggyback assignment. However, they greatly sacrifice the communication efficiency of the assignment schedule. Different from the existing designs, in this work, we propose a QuickPoint algorithm, which removes a fraction of nodes in each iteration in finding the best hub-structure. We mathematically prove that QuickPoint converges in $O(log_an) (a>1)$ O ( l o g a n ) ( a > 1 ) iterations in finding the best hub-structure for efficient piggyback. We implement QuickPoint in parallel atop Pregel, a vertex-centric distributed graph processing platform. Comprehensive experiments using large-scale data from Twitter and Flickr show that our scheme is 38.8× more efficient compared to existing schemes.