Social Ranking Research Articles

Social event identification and ranking on flickr

Effective event modeling allows accurate event identification and monitoring to enable timely response to emergencies occurring in various applications. Although event identification (or detection)...

Personality correlates (BAS-BIS), self-perception of social ranking, and cortical (alpha frequency band) modulation in peer-group comparison

The perception and interpretation of social hierarchies are a key part of our social life. In the present research we considered the activation of cortical areas, mainly the prefrontal cortex, related to social ranking perception in conjunction with some personality components (BAS – Behavioral Activation System – and BIS – Behavioral Inhibition System). In two experiments we manipulated the perceived superior/inferior status during a competitive cognitive task. Indeed, we created an explicit and strongly reinforced social hierarchy based on incidental rating in an attentional task. Specifically, a peer group comparison was undertaken and improved (Experiment 1) or decreased (Experiment 2) performance was artificially manipulated by the experimenter. For each experiment two groups were compared, based on a BAS and BIS dichotomy. Alpha band modulation in prefrontal cortex, behavioral measures (performance: error rate, ER; response times, RTs), and self-perceived ranking were considered. Repeated measures ANOVAs and regression analyses showed in Experiment 1 a significant improved cognitive performance (decreased ER and RTs) and higher self-perceived ranking in high-BAS participants. Moreover, their prefrontal activity was increased within the left side (alpha band decreasing). Conversely, in Experiment 2 a significant decreased cognitive performance (increased ER and RTs) and lower self-perceived ranking was observed in higher-BIS participants. Their prefrontal right activity was increased in comparison with higher BAS. The regression analyses confirmed the significant predictive role of alpha band modulation with respect of subjects' performance and self-perception of social ranking, differently for BAS/BIS components. The present results suggest that social status perception is directly modulated by cortical activity and personality correlates.

Sustainable development in the BRICS countries: an efficiency analysis by data envelopment

There is much concern about the social and environmental impacts caused by the economic growth of nations. Thus, to evaluate the socio-economic performance of nations, economists have increasingly addressed matters related to social welfare and the environment. It is within the scope of this context that this work discusses the performance of countries in the BRICS group regarding sustainable development. The objective of this study regards evaluating the efficiency of these countries in transforming productive resources and technological innovation into sustainable development. The proposed objective was achieved by using econometric tools as well as the data envelopment analysis method to then create economic, environmental, and social efficiency rankings for the BRICS countries, which enabled to carry out comparative analyses on the sustainable development of those countries. The results of such assessments can be of interest for more specific scientific explorations.

Multiple Facets of Compassion: The Impact of Social Dominance Orientation and Economic Systems Justification

Business students appear predisposed to select disciplines consistent with pre-existing worldviews. These disciplines (e.g., economics) then further reinforce the worldviews which may not always be adaptive. For example, high levels of Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) is a trait often found in business school students (Sidanius et al., Political Psychol 12(4):691–721, 1991). SDO is a competitive and hierarchical worldview and belief-system that ascribes people to higher or lower social rankings. While research suggests that high levels of SDO may be linked to lower levels of empathy, research has not established the potential relationship between another related adaptive trait in the workplace, compassion. Compassion facilitates workplace performance by lowering levels of litigation, easing stress, and facilitating cooperation. Accordingly, the following study aimed to examine the relationship between SDO and compassion while hypothesizing Economic Systems Justification (ESJ) would mediate this relationship. Because of the importance of compassion in the workplace, the prevalence of SDO in the business academic community (Sidanius et al. 1991) and the topicality of ESJ, we conducted our study with business school students. Results confirmed all but one hypothesis.

Evaluation of Sex Sensitivity in Local Lymph Node Assay Using Acephate and α- Hexylcinnamaldehyde

The current OECD Test Guideline for the conduct of the Local Lymph Node Assay (LLNA) recommends the use of only female mice for the assessment of skin sensitization potential for a given chemical. The NIH publication N° 99-4494 recommends that only female CBA mice be used, as they reportedly develop a stronger contact dermatitis response when compared to males however if male to be used, systematic studies evaluating potential sex differences should be conducted. Moreover, males were reported to display a larger variation in response due to a greater tendency to fight and to be involved in 'social ranking' behavior when group housed. However, there are several advantages to consider with the inclusion of male mice in LLNA testing including a more refined and responsible use of animals. Therefore, to begin to systematically assess the appropriateness of using male mice in the LLNA a comparative guideline study was conducted with individual housing of mice using a non-sensitizer and a sensitizer viz., Acephate 97 DF and α-hexylcinnamaldehyde (HCA) respectively. We have conducted an in-house study using a vehicle (dimethyl formamide) that is recommended by OECD 429 for the testing of mixtures in the LLNA for assessing skin sensitisation. We conducted the test according to the methods described by OECD 429 (Skin Sensitization: Local Lymph Node Assay). One common pesticide formulation, Acephate 97 DF and one known skin sensitizer - HCA, were each applied to the dorsum of both ears (25 µL per ear) of groups of 5 female CBA/J mice (male and female). Acephate 97 DF was applied at 3 separate concentrations and one concentration for HCA for 3 consecutive days (days 0, 1 and 2). A further group was given the vehicle (dimethyl formamide), alone. On day 5, all mice were injected intravenously (tail vein) with approximately 20 (±1) µCi of tritiated methyl thymidine. Five hours post-administration the uptake of 3H-thymidine into the auricular (local) lymph nodes draining the site of chemical application was measured in order to assess the proliferative response of the lymph node. The DPM values were measured individually for each mouse. Stimulation Index (SI Value) was calculated and are given below: - Acephate 97 DF (Male) (10%) 1.16 (25%) 1.58 (50%) 1.59 - Acephate 97 DF (Female (10%) 1.39 (25%) 1.55 (50%) 1.56 -

Exposure variability of fosfomycin administered to pigs in food or water: Impact of social rank

The objective of this study was to document the effect of social ranking on the internal exposure of pigs to an antibiotic (fosfomycin) administered either in food or in drinking water. Signs of aggression were recorded at the feeder and drinker. The interindividual variability explained by the social rank was even greater when the test antibiotic was given in food despite the fact that the water consumption was less variable than the food intake. The range of plasma concentrations after administration of fosfomycin either in food or drinking water leads to a number of pigs in the treated group being exposed to rather low and highly variable concentrations of fosfomycin and not able to maintain adequate plasma concentrations above the typical minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC). Social rank clearly influences the level of exposure of pigs to fosfomycin both in food and drinking. However, its administration in drinking water is likely to be the best option to optimize antibiotic efficacy.

Editors’ Summary

Editors’ Summary Raquel Bernal, Marcela Eslava, Ugo Panizza, and Roberto Rigobón This issue of Economía consists of four papers. The first paper by Gladys López-Acevedo and Mónica Tinajero-Bravo looks at the effects of several programs aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises in Mexico on firm performance in the long term. The second paper by Eduardo Lora and Johanna Fajardo compares perception of one’s social ranking with objective measures of social ranking to find that there is a large difference between the two, partly because individuals incorporate a wide variety of wealth measures in their assessment apart from income. Verónica Amarante, Mery Ferrando, and Andrea Vigorito study the effects of conditional cash transfers on school attendance and child labor among teenagers in Uruguay in the third paper. Finally, Rodrigo Taborda discusses possible media bias in the reporting of exchange rate–related news during revaluation episodes in comparison with reporting during devaluation episodes in the fourth and last paper of this volume. In the first paper, Gladys López-Acevedo and Mónica Tinajero-Bravo estimate the effects of a variety of support programs aimed at small and medium-sized enterprises in Mexico by using a novel ten-year panel data set of firm-level data from 1994 to 2005. These programs comprise primarily business development services such as consulting services, training programs for workers, quality control practices, and export promotion, among others, and programs that support R&D activities. Rigorous evaluations of such programs are scarce, particularly in developing countries, owing to lack of appropriate data sets that contain longitudinal information and allow some correction for self-selection into program participation. López-Acevedo and Tinajero-Bravo link a firm panel data set with program participation information from a different source to estimate treatment effects by using fixed-effects models. The longitudinal dimension of the data proves to be extremely useful in allowing identification of effects that take a long time to realize after program participation begins. [End Page vii] The results indicate that three of the four programs for small and mediumsized enterprises assessed have been successful in improving firm outcomes such as sales, value added per worker, and exports. Programs that promote R&D activities have been particularly effective in these dimensions. However, these effects only show after three to four years following the start of program participation, so they are undetectable in cross-section data sets or panel data sets with a shorter span. In some cases, effects continue to increase (as much as threefold) from year 3 to year 10 of program participation. Alessandro Maffioli highlights several contributions of the paper. He notes that the construction of a long-term panel data set allows López-Acevedo and Tinajero-Bravo to address a variety of questions unanswered in the literature, owing to lack of appropriate data. However, Maffioli also indicates that it would have been extremely useful to understand not only individual program effects but also complementarities among them. In particular, the possibility of understanding coordination and sequencing of different policy instruments available for small and medium-sized enterprises is important for policy design. In the second paper, Eduardo Lora and Johanna Fajardo use a rich data set for sixteen Latin American countries to assess the gap between perceived social ranking and objective social ranking based on income measures. After showing that the gap is large, the authors proceed to explore the factors that most explain this difference. By using the usual definitions of middle class (income ranges from US$2 to US$13 per day or from 0.5 to 1.5 times the median income), the authors show that only 69 percent of middle-income individuals classify themselves as such according to the first definition and only about 45 percent do so according to the second one. The authors indicate that individuals consider a wide variety of measures of wealth apart from income when assessing their social ranking. These include human capital (education), access to financial services, access to public utilities, and ownership of durable goods such as a car, washing machine, television, or computer, and they also consider the presence of children in the household...

On Ordered Weighted Averaging Social Optima

In this paper, we look at the classical problem of aggregating individual utilities and study social orderings which are based on the concept of Ordered Weighted Averaging Aggregation Operator. In these social orderings, called Ordered Weighted Averaging Social Welfare Functions, weights are assigned a priori to the positions in the social ranking and, for every possible alternative, the total welfare is calculated as a weighted sum in which the weight corresponding to the kth position multiplies the utility in the kth position. In the α-Ordered Weighted Averaging Social Welfare Function, the utility in the kth position is the kth smallest value assumed by the utility functions, whereas in the β-Ordered Weighted Averaging Social Welfare Function it is the utility of the kth poorest individual. We emphasize the differences between the two concepts, analyze the continuity issue, and provide results on the existence of maximum points.

Edinburgh University, schools and the civil service in the early twentieth century

This article is a case study of the relation between urban schooling and university education, using two main sources. Data on the schools attended by history students at Edinburgh University between 1899 and 1933 illustrate the diversity and social ranking of schools in the city. New higher grade schools had a key role in increasing access to university education for both men and women, especially for prospective teachers; the significance of the Education (Scotland) Act of 1918 for Catholic schools, and the continuing importance of small private schools for girls, are also shown. The second source analyses the school origins of successful Edinburgh candidates in civil service examinations between 1896 and 1944, supplemented for other parts of Scotland by the report of the Royal Commission on the Civil Service of 1912. This elite career drew mainly from older schools, and contemporary claims for equality of opportunity in Scotland need to be treated with reserve.

Social Rankings in Human-Computer Committees

Despite committees and elections being widespread in thereal-world, the design of agents for operating in humancomputer committees has received far less attention than thetheoretical analysis of voting strategies. We address this gapby providing an agent design that outperforms other voters ingroups comprising both people and computer agents. In oursetting participants vote by simultaneously submitting a ranking over a set of candidates and the election system uses a social welfare rule to select a ranking that minimizes disagreements with participants’ votes. We ran an extensive studyin which hundreds of people participated in repeated votingrounds with other people as well as computer agents that differed in how they employ strategic reasoning in their votingbehavior. Our results show that over time, people learn todeviate from truthful voting strategies, and use heuristics toguide their play, such as repeating their vote from the previous round. We show that a computer agent using a bestresponse voting strategy was able to outperform people in thegame. Our study has implication for agent designers, highlighting the types of strategies that enable agents to succeedin committees comprising both human and computer participants. This is the first work to study the role of computeragents in voting settings involving both human and agent participants.

Adaptive all-season image tag ranking by saliency-driven image pre-classification

Social image tag ranking has emerged as an important research topic due to its application on web image search. This paper presents an adaptive all-season tag ranking algorithm which can handle the images with and without distinct object(s) using different tag ranking strategies. Firstly, based on saliency map derived from the visual attention model, a linear SVM is trained to pre-classify an image as attentive or non-attentive category by using the gray histogram descriptor on the corresponding saliency map. Then, an image with distinct object is processed by the tag saliency ranking algorithm emphasizing distinct object, which combines image saliency map with sparse representation based multi-instance learning algorithm. On the other hand, an image without distinct object can be processed by the tag relevance ranking algorithm via the sparse representation based neighbor-voting strategy. Such adaptive all-season tag ranking strategy can be regarded as taking full advantage of existing tag ranking paradigms. Experiments conducted on well-known image data sets demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed framework.

Status, health, and lifestyle in Middle Iron Age Britain: A bioarcheological study of elites and non-elites from East Yorkshire, Northern England

The development of socially-ranked societies has been associated with disparities in human health in a variety of settings. The unique context of the Arras culture of East Yorkshire, Northern England, provides an excellent opportunity to explore how health and well-being may have varied in relation to social factors in Iron Age Britain. Bioarcheological data were collected from two Middle Iron Age (400–100BC) cemeteries, Rudston (N=164) and Burton Fleming (N=56), from the East Yorkshire region of Britain. Social status was inferred from orientational cosmology, animal symbolism, and grave goods. Results indicate a significant difference in hypoplastic lesions, with a higher frequency observed in non-elite individuals, whereas the prevalence of cribra orbitalia and periostitis do not differ between the groups. The similar degree of dental wear as well as the similar frequency of carious lesions and dental abscesses suggests a common dietary pattern, despite a significantly higher prevalence of antemortem tooth loss among the elite. The prevalence of degenerative joint disease and trauma indicate non-elites may have participated more frequently in labor-intensive and hazardous farming activities. These data suggest that although social ranking may not have been marked, inequalities were likely present, resulting in disparities in health.

Factors Influencing the Use of Mobile Technologies in a University Environment

The use of mobile technologies in higher education seem to be lagging those in other service sectors, which have been quick to utilize the advantages that mobile communications have to offer. Based on the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM), this study analyzes the range factors and the level of influence on undergraduate intention to use a proposed mobile technology information service on the campus of a Peruvian university. The results, derived from factor analysis and regression, support the TAM showing that Perceived Usefulness and Perceived Ease of Use are the principal factors influencing the intention to use the proposed service, with the external factors of mobility and social influence ranking as the next important. These results lead to the conclusion that the awareness of the attributes which the student’s value and their social contexts are significant factors to ensure student uptake and use when designing and introducing student focused mobile services.

ELITE - A Novel Ranking Algorithm for Social Networking Sites Using Generic Scoring Function

Social networks need to manage and control the drift of insane amount of information by filtering and ranking everything in order to ensure they are right there for users’ viewing pleasure. However, the realization of social networks ranking is currently dictated by fairly straightforward optimization algorithms. Hence, there is a need for a newly enhanced and improved ranking algorithm to be formulated since users have been occasionally seeing what they should not. A composition of a generic score and a collective score that would equate to a whopping new-fangled algorithm called E.L.I.T.E. which comprises of five essential elements Engagement-U, Lifetime, Impression, Timeframe and Engagement-O in ensuring a more accurate result for users to see more of what they care about, less of what they do not and more of who they are interested in, less of who they are not. Engagement-U is the affinity between users measured by the relationships and other related interests between them, Lifetime is a trace of users’ past based on their positive, neutral and even negative interactions and actions with other users, Impression is the weight of each object determined by the number of positive responses from users, Timeframe is the timeline scoring technique in which an object naturally loses its value as time passes and Engagement-O is the attraction of users to objects measured between objects and associated interests of users.

Burial mounds and settlement patterns: a quantitative approach to their identification from the air and interpretation

The author describes a process of systematic integration of aerial and satellite imagery, which has provided a huge increase in the number of known burial mounds in the area where the Danube meets the Black Sea. Careful evaluation of newly acquired and archival imagery from satellites and lower level platforms shows where data is comparable and how visibility varies with imagery type. Excavations to date suggest the majority of the mounds are of Greco-Roman date and associated with the large towns and their road networks. Clusters of barrows exist, hinting at associated settlement aggregation, but a large proportion are single tumuli, raising interesting questions about their social role in this period. Above all, the large numbers revealed by the survey must invite new thoughts on whether, or in what way, the mounds reflect social ranking.

Gesture Use by Chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes): Differences Between Sexes in Inter‐ and Intra‐Sexual Interactions

Communication and social relationships are two of the most important aspects of primate life, but few studies have focused on linking these aspects in apes. There are some shared social pressures between the two sexes (e.g., kin selection, alliance formation, and protection against attack), but there are also differences (e.g., mate selection, dispersal, and social ranking systems). The aim of this study was to identify the communication strategies of the sexes with respect to their particular communication partner. I hypothesized the sexes use different strategies in their gestural communication based on their different social pressures. Specifically, males should have more positive intra-sexual relationships than females because of high focus on male-male alliance formation and maintaining high social rank, both of which directly affect their mating opportunities and relationships with all other members of the group. On the other hand, females should have more positive inter-sexual relationships due to the abuse they could receive from insubordination to males and because there is less focus on maintaining multiple, positive relationships with other females. Furthermore, because of differences in social pressures, males should have higher incidence of reassurance in same-sex interactions than females because it should be more important for males to mitigate negative interactions. I analyzed the characteristics of the gesture repertoire and frequency of gesture use for each sex in each of four contexts: (1) aggression, (2) submission, (3) greeting, and (4) reassurance. I looked at intra-sexual and inter-sexual interactions, separately. I found that, indeed, males and females utilize different strategies of gestural communication. I also found that females, but not males, have a distinct gesture strategy for communicating with the opposite sex than for the same sex. This study shows there are distinct strategies utilized by the two sexes and these differences may be explained by their differing social pressures.

Human hierarchies: a general theory

Human beings are hierarchical animals. Always and everywhere, people have developed social ranking systems. These differ dramatically in how they are organized, but the underlying causal mechanisms that create and sustain them are the same. Whether they are on the top or bottom of the heap, people attempt to be superior to some other persons or group. This is the root of Melvyn L. Fein's thesis presented in Human Hierarchies: A General Theory. Fein traces the development of changes from hunter-gatherer times to our own techno-commercial society. In moving from small to large communities, humans went from face-to-face contests for superiority to more anonymous and symbolic ones. Societies evolved from hunting bands where the parties knew each other through big-men societies, chieftainships, agrarian empires, patronage chains, caste societies, estate systems, and market-oriented democracies. Where once small groupings were organized primarily by strong forces such as personal relationships, the now standard large groupings are more dependent on weaker forces such as those provided by social roles. Bureaucracies and professional roles have become prominent. Bureaucracies allow large-scale organizations to maintain control of people by limiting the potential destructiveness of unregulated tests of strength and by clarifying chains of command. Their rigidity and unresponsiveness requires that they be supplemented by professional roles. At the same time, a proliferation of self-motivated experts delegate authority downward, thereby introducing a more flexible decentralization. This analysis is a unique and significant advance in both the sociology and anthropology of stratification among humans.

The Distance between Perception and Reality in the Social Domains of Life

The distance between perception and reality with respect to the social domains of life is often striking. Using survey data collected on Latin American countries, this paper provides an overview of the main empirical findings on the gaps between perception and reality in four social domains—health, employment, the perception of security, and social ranking. The overview emphasizes the psychological biases that may explain the gaps. Biases associated with cultural values are very relevant with respect to health and job satisfaction. Cultural differences across countries are pronounced in perceptions of health, while cultural differences across socioeconomic groups are more apparent with respect to job satisfaction. Affect and availability heuristics are the dominant sources of bias in the case of perceptions of security. The formation of subjective social rankings appears to be less culturally dependent but more dependent on the socioeconomic development in the country. The gaps between objective and subjective indicators in the social domains of life are a rich source of data to help understand how perceptions are formed, identify important aspects of people’s lives that do not appear in official indicators, inform public debate on social policy, and shed light on public attitudes on key social issues.

Social linkage and ranking model for tags-based resources

With the proliferation of social media, it is becoming important to support a significant amount of user tags in selecting the most appropriate resource description during the search process. In this paper, we propose to identify and structure the links between resources by taking into account a resource social dimension. Each resource is assigned to a cluster of tags hierarchy. The clusters of tags are formed by a classification method while the hierarchical classification of tags within clusters is defined using a hierarchy classification algorithm. User's query is expanded by a social dimension and the clusters of tags are used to facilitate the search and ranking process. The results of our experiment, crawled from Delicious Folksonomy, demonstrate significant improvement over traditional retrieval approaches.

Social temporal collaborative ranking for context aware movie recommendation

Most existing collaborative filtering models only consider the use of user feedback (e.g., ratings) and meta data (e.g., content, demographics). However, in most real world recommender systems, context information, such as time and social networks, are also very important factors that could be considered in order to produce more accurate recommendations. In this work, we address several challenges for the context aware movie recommendation tasks in CAMRa 2010: (1) how to combine multiple heterogeneous forms of user feedback? (2) how to cope with dynamic user and item characteristics? (3) how to capture and utilize social connections among users? For the first challenge, we propose a novel ranking based matrix factorization model to aggregate explicit and implicit user feedback. For the second challenge, we extend this model to a sequential matrix factorization model to enable time-aware parametrization. Finally, we introduce a network regularization function to constrain user parameters based on social connections. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study that investigates the collective modeling of social and temporal dynamics. Experiments on the CAMRa 2010 dataset demonstrated clear improvements over many baselines.