Question: The connections between attachment style, personality traits, interpersonal competency, and the utilization of Facebook.

This study delves into the intricate rhythms of social interaction among college students, specifically within the context of a massive online network like Facebook. By examining the anonymized metadata of 362 million messages sent by 4.2 million users over a 26-month period, we uncover robust patterns in daily and weekly communication that shed light on students' time management and social dynamics. These patterns exhibit seasonal fluctuations, offering insights into how academic calendars influence online interactions. Additionally, we explore the impact of institutional affiliations and virtual "friend" lists on these behavioral trends and temporal rhythms. Our findings indicate that Facebook users tend to form clusters based on their school affiliations, which in turn influences their messaging habits and temporal patterns, reflecting a community-driven aspect of online communication.

**Question**: The Effect of Technology on Job Satisfaction and Work-Life Balance in the Modern Workplace

**Documents**: The Role of Technology in Job Satisfaction: A Systematic Review
This systematic review aims to explore the role of technology in job satisfaction by synthesizing the findings from 30 empirical studies published between 2010 and 2020. The review reveals that technology has both positive and negative impacts on job satisfaction. On the positive side, technology can enhance job performance, improve communication, and increase efficiency, which can lead to higher job satisfaction. However, on the negative side, technology can also lead to job insecurity, work overload, and decreased autonomy, which can lower job satisfaction. The review also highlights the importance of individual differences, such as age and job type, in mediating the relationship between technology and job satisfaction.

**Similar Documents**: This comprehensive systematic review investigates the multifaceted role of technology in influencing job satisfaction, drawing from 30 empirical studies conducted over a decade, from 2010 to 2020. The analysis uncovers that technology's impact on job satisfaction is dualistic, encompassing both beneficial and detrimental effects. On one hand, technology is credited with boosting job performance, streamlining communication, and enhancing productivity, all of which contribute to greater job satisfaction. Conversely, it also introduces challenges such as job insecurity, increased workloads, and reduced autonomy, which can diminish job satisfaction. The review underscores the significance of individual characteristics, including age and occupation, in shaping how technology affects job satisfaction, highlighting the need for nuanced approaches to technology integration in the workplace.

We conducted a comprehensive analysis of assortative mating (i.e., the similarity between wives and husbands on a given characteristic) in a newlywed sample. These newlyweds showed (a) strong similarity in age, religiousness, and political orientation; (b) moderate similarity in education and verbal intelligence; (c) modest similarity in values; and (d) little similarity in matrix reasoning, self- and spouse-rated personality, emotional experience and expression, and attachment. Further analyses established that similarity was not simply due to background variables such as age and education and reflected initial assortment (i.e., similarity at the time of marriage) rather than convergence (i.e., increasing similarity with time). Finally, marital satisfaction primarily was a function of the rater's own traits and showed little relation to spousal similarity.

Prior meta-analyses investigating the relation between the Big 5 personality dimensions and job performance have all contained a threat to construct validity, in that much of the data included within these analyses was not derived from actual Big 5 measures. In addition, these reviews did not address the relations between the Big 5 and contextual performance. Therefore, the present study sought to provide a meta-analytic estimate of the criterion-related validity of explicit Big 5 measures for predicting job performance and contextual performance. The results for job performance closely paralleled 2 of the previous meta-analyses, whereas analyses with contextual performance showed more complex relations among the Big 5 and performance. A more critical interpretation of the Big 5-performance relationship is presented, and suggestions for future research aimed at enhancing the validity of personality predictors are provided.

Online Social Networks are so popular nowadays that they are a major component of an individual’s social interaction. They are also emotionally-rich environments where close friends share their emotions, feelings and thoughts. In this paper, a new framework is proposed for characterizing emotional interactions in social networks, and then using these characteristics to distinguish friends from acquaintances. The goal is to extract the emotional content of texts in online social networks. The interest is in whether the text is an expression of the writer’s emotions or not. For this purpose, text mining techniques are performed on comments retrieved from a social network. The framework includes a model for data collection, database schemas, data processing and data mining steps. The informal language of online social networks is a main point to consider before performing any text mining techniques. This is why the framework includes the development of special lexicons. In general, the paper presents a new perspective for studying friendship relations and emotions’ expression in online social networks where it deals with the nature of these sites and the nature of the language used. It considers Lebanese Face book users as a case study. The technique adopted is unsupervised, it mainly uses the k-means clustering algorithm. Experiments show high accuracy for the model in both determining subjectivity of texts and predicting friendship.

The model of problematic Internet use advanced and tested in the current study proposes that individuals' psychosocial well-being, along with their beliefs about interpersonal communication (both face-to-face and online) are important cognitive predictors of negative outcomes arising from Internet use. The study examined the extent to which social anxiety explains results previously attributed to loneliness as a predictor of preference for online social interaction and problematic Internet use. The results support the hypothesis that the relationship between loneliness and preference for online social interaction is spurious, and that social anxiety is the confounding variable.

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to evaluate and assess the awareness and extent of the use of social networking sites (SNSs) by the students and research scholars of universities of North India. Design/methodology/approach – The study is a questionnaire-based survey on the usage of SNSs among the students and research scholars of the universities of North India. The data of the study were collected through questionnaires, which were personally distributed to the identified population, i.e. undergraduate students, postgraduate students and research scholars, by the authors. The survey was based on a sample of 610 questionnaires; of which, 486 questionnaires were received, having a response rate of 79.67 per cent. Findings – The study showed that all the respondents were found to be aware of and making use of such applications in their academic affairs. It was revealed from the study that Facebook is the most popular SNS by all categories of respondents. To determine the purpose of SNSs, it emerged that SNSs are mostly used for entertainment and communication. The study also found that the majority of respondents were aware about the security aspects of SNSs. It signifies that excessive time consumption and fear of misusing personal information were the major hurdles in the way of accessing SNSs. Research limitations/implications – The study covers the students and research scholars of select universities of North India. It also signifies the use of SNSs in their research and academic environment. Originality/value – The paper provides reliable and authentic data. The study is worth, justifiable and enlightens the salient findings on the topic, which will be very useful for researchers in this area.

This paper describes a pilot study in using Facebook as an alternative to a learning management system (LMS). The paper reviews the current research on the use of Facebook in academia and analyzes the differences between a Facebook group and a regular LMS. The paper reports on a precedent-setting attempt to use a Facebook group as a course Web site, serving as a platform for delivering content and maintaining interactions among the students and between the students and the instructor. The paper presents findings from the students’ self-assessments and reflections on their experience. The students expressed satisfaction with learning in Facebook and willingness to continue using these groups in future courses.

A UK-based online questionnaire investigating aspects of usage of usergenerated media (UGM), such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, attracted 587 participants. Results show a high degree of engagement with social networking media such as Facebook, and a significant engagement with other media such as professional media, microblogs and blogs. Participants who experience information overload are those who engage less frequently with the media, rather than those who have fewer posts to read. Professional users show different behaviours to social users. Microbloggers complain of information overload to the greatest extent. Two thirds of Twitter-users have felt that they receive too many posts, and over half of Twitter-users have felt the need for a tool to filter out the irrelevant posts. Generally speaking, participants express satisfaction with the media, though a significant minority express a range of concerns including information overload and privacy. Keyword list: User-Generated Media, Social Networking, Information Overload, Information Overlook, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter

Using recent research, I argue that beliefs lie at the heart of personality and adaptive functioning and that they give us unique insight into how personality and functioning can be changed. I focus on two classes of beliefs—beliefs about the malleability of self-attributes and expectations of social acceptance versus rejection—and show how modest interventions have brought about important real-world changes. I conclude by suggesting that beliefs are central to the way in which people package their experiences and carry them forward, and that beliefs should play a more central role in the study of personality. KEYWORDS—personality; personality theories; change; self-beliefs; interventions

We have analyzed the fully-anonymized headers of 362 million messages exchanged by 4.2 million users of Facebook, an online social network of college students, during a 26 month interval. The data reveal a number of strong daily and weekly regularities which provide insights into the time use of college students and their social lives, including seasonal variations. We also examined how factors such as school affiliation and informal online “friend” lists affect the observed behavior and temporal patterns. Finally, we show that Facebook users appear to be clustered by school with respect to their temporal messaging patterns.

PURPOSE OF THE RESEARCH
This study aimed to determine the prevalence of addiction to social networking sites/platforms (SNS) and its comorbidity with other behavioral addiction and affective disorder among college students in Singapore. 1110 college students (age: M=21.46, SD=1.80) in Singapore completed measures assessing online social networking, unhealthy food intake and shopping addiction as well as depression, anxiety and mania. Descriptive analyses were conducted to investigate the prevalence and comorbidity of behavioral addiction and affective disorder. Chi-square tests were used to examine gender differences.

THE PRINCIPAL RESULTS
The prevalence rates of SNS, food and shopping addiction were 29.5%, 4.7% and 9.3% respectively for the total sample. SNS addiction was found to co-occur with food addiction (3%), shopping addiction (5%), and both food and shopping addiction (1%). The comorbidity rates of SNS addiction and affective disorder were 21% for depression, 27.7% for anxiety, and 26.1% for mania. Compared with the total sample, students with SNS addiction reported higher comorbidity rates with other behavioral addiction and affective disorder. In general, females as compared to males reported higher comorbidity rates of SNS addiction and affective disorder.

MAJOR CONCLUSIONS
SNS addiction has a high prevalence rate among college students in Singapore. Students with SNS addiction were vulnerable to experience other behavior addiction as well as affective disorder, especially among females.


Question: The connections between attachment style, personality traits, interpersonal competency, and the utilization of Facebook.

Cupid's compass: exploring the dynamics of assortative mating in newlywed pairs.
This study delves into the intricacies of assortative mating—the tendency for individuals to select partners similar to themselves in various attributes—among newlywed couples. Our analysis reveals a striking pattern of homogeneity in age, religious beliefs, and political stance among spouses. Additionally, we observe a moderate level of similarity in educational attainment and verbal intelligence. However, the degree of alignment in personal values is more nuanced, demonstrating only a slight inclination towards similarity. Strikingly, there is minimal resemblance in areas such as abstract reasoning skills, personality traits as perceived by self and partner, emotional expression, and attachment styles. Subsequent investigations confirm that this observed similarity is not merely a byproduct of shared demographic factors like age and education, but rather indicative of an initial selection process that predates marriage. Moreover, the findings indicate that marital contentment is primarily contingent upon one's own characteristics, with little to no correlation to the degree of similarity with one's partner.

Social networking sites like Facebook are rapidly gaining in popularity. At the same time, they seem to present significant privacy issues for their users. We analyze two of Facebooks’s more recent features, Applications and News Feed, from the perspective enabled by Helen Nissenbaum’s treatment of privacy as “contextual integrity.” Offline, privacy is mediated by highly granular social contexts. Online contexts, including social networking sites, lack much of this granularity. These contextual gaps are at the root of many of the sites’ privacy issues. Applications, which nearly invisibly shares not just a users’, but a user’s friends’ information with third parties, clearly violates standard norms of information flow. News Feed is a more complex case, because it involves not just questions of privacy, but also of program interface and of the meaning of “friendship” online. In both cases, many of the privacy issues on Facebook are primarily design issues, which could be ameliorated by an interface that made the flows of information more transparent to users.

This paper describes a pilot study in using Facebook as an alternative to a learning management system (LMS). The paper reviews the current research on the use of Facebook in academia and analyzes the differences between a Facebook group and a regular LMS. The paper reports on a precedent-setting attempt to use a Facebook group as a course Web site, serving as a platform for delivering content and maintaining interactions among the students and between the students and the instructor. The paper presents findings from the students’ self-assessments and reflections on their experience. The students expressed satisfaction with learning in Facebook and willingness to continue using these groups in future courses.

A national survey asked 323 U.S. adults about paralinguistic digital affordances (PDAs) and how these forms of lightweight feedback within social media were associated with their perceived social support. People perceived PDAs (e.g., Likes, Favorites, and Upvotes) as socially supportive both quantitatively and qualitatively, even without implicit meaning associated with them. People who are highly sensitive about what others think of them and have high self-esteem are more likely to perceive higher social support from PDAs.

We studied the developmental trends of temperament and character in a longitudinal population-based sample of Finnish men and women aged 20-45 years using the Temperament and Character Inventory model of personality. Personality was assessed in 1997, 2001, and 2007 (n = 2,104, 2,095, and 2,056, respectively). Mean-level changes demonstrated qualitatively distinct developmental patterns for character (self-directedness, cooperativeness, and self-transcendence) and temperament (novelty seeking, harm avoidance, reward dependence, and persistence). Character developed toward greater maturity, although self-transcendence decreased with age. However, self-transcendence was the strongest predictor of overall personality change. Cohort effects indicated lower level of self-transcendence and higher level of self-directedness and cooperativeness in younger birth cohorts. Regarding temperament, novelty seeking decreased and persistence increased slightly with age. Both high novelty seeking and high persistence predicted overall personality change. These findings suggest that temperament and character traits follow different kinds of developmental trajectories.

In recent years many parents, advocates and policy makers have expressed concerns regarding the potential negative impact of social media use. Some studies have indicated that social media use may be tied to negative mental health outcomes, including suicidality, loneliness and decreased empathy. Other studies have not found evidence for harm, or have indicated that social media use may be beneficial for some individuals. The current correlational study examined 467 young adults for their time spent using social media, importance of social media in their lives and tendency to engage in vaguebooking (posting unclear but alarming sounding posts to get attention). Outcomes considered included general mental health symptoms, suicidal ideation, loneliness, social anxiety and decreased empathy. Results indicated that social media use was not predictive of impaired mental health functioning. However, vaguebooking was predictive of suicidal ideation, suggesting this particular behavior could be a warning sign for serious issues. Overall, results from this study suggest that, with the exception of vaguebooking, concerns regarding social media use may be misplaced.

We describe a model for understanding interpersonal attraction in which attraction can be understood as a product of the initial evaluations we make about others. The model posits that targets are evaluated on two basic dimensions, capacity and willingness, such that affective and behavioral attraction result from evaluations of (a) a target's capacity to facilitate the perceiver's goals/needs and (b) a target's potential willingness to facilitate those goals/needs. The plausibility of the two-dimensional model of attraction is evaluated vis-à-vis the extant literature on various attraction phenomena including the reciprocity of liking effect, pratfall effect, matching hypothesis, arousal effects, and similarity effect. We conclude that considerable evidence across a wide range of phenomena supports the idea that interpersonal attraction is principally determined by inferences about the target's capacity and willingness.

This article provides a meta-analysis of the relationship between the five-factor model of personality and 3 central theories of performance motivation (goal-setting, expectancy, and self-efficacy motivation). The quantitative review includes 150 correlations from 65 studies. Traits were organized according to the five-factor model of personality. Results indicated that Neuroticism (average validity = -.31) and Conscientiousness (average validity = .24) were the strongest and most consistent correlates of performance motivation across the 3 theoretical perspectives. Results further indicated that the validity of 3 of the Big Five traits--Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Conscientiousness--generalized across studies. As a set, the Big Five traits had an average multiple correlation of .49 with the motivational criteria, suggesting that the Big Five traits are an important source of performance motivation.

Decades of psychology and decision-making research show that everyone makes decisions differently; yet security messaging is still one-size-fits-all. This suggests that we can improve outcomes by delivering information relevant to how each individual makes decisions. We tested this hypothesis by designing messaging customized for stable personality traits— specifically, the five dimensions of the General Decision-Making Style (GDMS) instrument. We applied this messaging to browser warnings, security messaging encountered by millions of web users on a regular basis. To test the efficacy of our nudges, we conducted experiments with 1,276 participants, who encountered a warning about broken HTTPS due to an invalid certificate under realistic circumstances. While the effects of some nudges correlated with certain traits in a statistically significant manner, we could not reject the null hypothesis—that the intervention did not affect the subjects’ behavior—for most of our nudges, especially after accounting for participants who did not pay close attention to the message. In this paper, we present the detailed results of our experiments, discuss potential reasons for why the outcome contradicts the decision-making research, and identify lessons for researchers based on our experience.

Purpose – The purpose of this study is to describe the usage of Social Networking Sites (SNSs) by the faculty members of the School of Library and Information Science (SLIS), at the College of Basic Education, the Public Authority for Applied Education and Training (PAAET), Kuwait. Design/methodology/approach – A survey conducted to collect data from 33 faculty members of whom only 21 members were using SNSs, representing 63.6 per cent of the total sample, and 12 members were not using SNSs, representing 36.4 per cent of the total sample. This study revealed that SNSs are used moderately by the faculty members. Findings – This study showed that faculty members who were using SNSs tend to be males, aged between 41 and 50 years, PhD holders, ranked as assistant professors, full-time members, specialized in information technologies with a relatively new experience of teaching ranged from one to five years, and most of the faculty members who were not using SNSs tended to be also males, aged between 41 and 60 years, PhD holders, ranked as lecturers, full-time members specialized in organization of information with a teaching experience ranged from 16 to 20 years. More than half of the faculty members were using SNSs for three years to less than six years, and a large number of them were using SNSs several times a week and were accessing these sites more from their school office, home and school laboratory. There are no any statistical significant differences between the demographic data of participants (gender, age and education level) and either their use or non-use of SNSs. There are no significant differences between the academic rank, teaching status and teaching experience of faculty and their use of SNSs. However, there is a significant relation between the faculty’s area of teaching and their use of SNSs. Faculty members were interested in the use of SNSs. YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and blogs respectively were used mostly by faculty members, but Twitter, Facebook and YouTube were the most famous SNSs they have profiles on. Faculty members have adopted SNSs mainly for the purpose of communicating with others, finding and sharing information with peers and students as well. Tasks on SNSs made by faculty members were mostly to make communication, send/receive messages and find general and specific information. Faculty members’ profiles on SNSs were mostly on Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, blogs, wikis and podcasting respectively. Faculty members confirmed that the use of YouTube, Facebook, blogs, Twitter, wikis and podcasting respectively was at least effective and the use of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Blogs and Wikis respectively was at least fairly useful fairly easy to them. Faculty members are in general agreement about the effectiveness of SNSs especially for disseminating and sharing information, communication and informal collaboration. The study showed The researcher would like to thank the Public Authority for Applied Education and Training (PAAET), the state of Kuwait, for supporting this paper (BE-11-10). The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at: www.emeraldinsight.com/0264-0473.htm

Using recent research, I argue that beliefs lie at the heart of personality and adaptive functioning and that they give us unique insight into how personality and functioning can be changed. I focus on two classes of beliefs—beliefs about the malleability of self-attributes and expectations of social acceptance versus rejection—and show how modest interventions have brought about important real-world changes. I conclude by suggesting that beliefs are central to the way in which people package their experiences and carry them forward, and that beliefs should play a more central role in the study of personality. KEYWORDS—personality; personality theories; change; self-beliefs; interventions


Question: The influence of founders in creating online communities.

The dynamics of online community formation, expansion, and transformation represent a pivotal area of investigation in the digital era, mirroring traditional social science inquiries into the development of political movements, professional associations, and religious groups. The exponential growth of online platforms like MySpace and LiveJournal has catalyzed the rise of digital communities, yet the complexities of aggregating and analyzing vast, time-sensitive datasets on social dynamics have left many foundational questions unaddressed. This study endeavors to elucidate the factors that determine individual participation in online communities, the velocity of community expansion, and the temporal shifts in community intersections by leveraging two extensive data sources: LiveJournal's friendship networks and community memberships, and DBLP's co-authorship and conference publication records. In both datasets, explicit user-defined communities are evident, with conferences serving as indicators of community in the DBLP context. The investigation explores the interplay between community evolution and the underlying social network's architecture. It is revealed that individual propensity to affiliate with a community and the rate of community growth are intricately connected to nuanced aspects of network structure. For instance, an individual's likelihood to join a community is not solely contingent on the quantity of acquaintances within that community but is also significantly influenced by the interconnectedness of these acquaintances. Utilizing decision-tree analysis, the study pinpoints the most influential structural elements that govern these behaviors. Additionally, a pioneering method for quantifying inter-community mobility is introduced, demonstrating the strong correlation between individual movement and the evolving thematic foci of the communities in question.

The growth of social networking sites (SNS), like Facebook, has caused many to rethink how we understand political activism and citizen engagement. In 2010, 43% of Internet users reported using social networking sites " several times a day, " a sizeable increase from 2009 where only 34% reported using social networking at the same rate (Pew 2010). Research on digital activism has emphasized the use of websites, listservs, and other forums by formal organizations to raise awareness for their specific causes (McCaughey and Ayers 2003; Van de Donk 2004). Information communication technologies (ICT's) have been regarded as particularly effective tools in mobilizing disparate, resource-poor counter-spheres in collective off-line activity (Van de Donk 2004). In recent years, scholars have moved away from viewing information communication technologies (ICT's) as simply a tool for formal activist organizations. Breindl (2010) argues that on-line digital activism has largely been examined through a classic " social movement paradigm. " She calls for scholarship that looks at how the meaning and structure of activism has been transformed by ICT's. One key way it has been transformed is by allowing for small scale, many-to-many forms of politically oriented communication, what I conceptualize as a new term: microactivism. Examples include the formation of political Facebook groups, re-tweeting of articles of political interest and sharing politically relevant videos on YouTube. These acts reflect micro-level intentions and are not necessarily geared towards mobilization like more traditional forms of digital activism. This microactivism has helped bring about a radical reformulation of the political arena. One major change that emerges from the ease of many-to-many communication brought about by SMS is the reduced incentive to join social movements (Earl and Schussman 2003). These new applications encourage movement entrepreneurs (Garrett 2006) not affiliated with formal social movements but interested in fomenting social change. The ease with which individuals can create content and connect with one another to share content is viewed by others as a harbinger of a more democratic and egalitarian society (Benkler 2006, Jenkins 2007, Shirky 2010). Salter (2005) argues that sites like SNS' provide new radical public spheres that provide additional spaces for voice cultivation and political citizenship formation. More importantly, in his view information technologies help shift political discourse to more informal venues that are less subject to elite control (Dahlberg 2004). Social critics like Morozov (2009) suggest, however, that microactivism might do more harm than good. Morozov (2009) refers …

This talk presents ongoing work on the study of information diffusion in social media, focusing in particular on political communication in the Twitter microblogging network. Social media platforms play an important role in shaping political discourse in the US and around the world. The truthy.indiana.edu infrastructure allows us to mine and visualize a large stream of social media data related to political themes. The analyses in this keynote address polarization and cross-ideological communication, and partisan asymmetries in the online political activities of social media users. Machine learning efforts can successfully leverage the structure of meme diffusion networks to detect orchestrated astroturf attacks that simulate grassroots campaigns, and to predict the political affiliation of active users. The retweet network segregates individuals into two distinct, homogenous communities of left- and right-leaning users. The mention network does not exhibit this kind of segregation, instead forming a communication bridge across which information flows between these two partisan communities. We propose a mechanism of action to explain these divergent topologies and provide statistical evidence in support of this hypothesis. Related to political communication are questions about the birth of online social movements. Social media data provides an opportunity to look for signatures that capture these seminal events. Finally, I will introduce a model of the competition for attention in social media. A dynamic of information diffusion emerges from this process, where a few ideas go viral while most do not. I will show that the relative popularity of different topics, the diversity of information to which we are exposed, and the fading of our collective interests for specific memes, can all be explained as deriving from a combination between the competition for limited attention and the structure of social networks. Surprisingly, one can reproduce the massive heterogeneity in the popularity and persistence of ideas without the need to assume different intrinsic values among those ideas.

In the massive online worlds of social media, users frequently rely on organizing themselves around specific topics of interest to find and engage with like-minded people. However, navigating these massive worlds and finding topics of specific interest often proves difficult because the worlds are mostly organized haphazardly, leaving users to find relevant interests by word of mouth or using a basic search feature. Here, we report on a method using the backbone of a network to create a map of the primary topics of interest in any social network. To demonstrate the method, we build an interest map for the social news web site reddit and show how such a map could be used to navigate a social media world. Moreover, we analyze the network properties of the reddit social network and find that it has a scale-free, small-world, and modular community structure, much like other online social networks such as Facebook and Twitter. We suggest that the integration of interest maps into popular social media platforms will assist users in organizing themselves into more specific interest groups, which will help alleviate the overcrowding effect often observed in large online communities. Subjects Network Science and Online Social Networks, Visual Analytics

Protecting social norms as confidentiality wanes.

This paper studies people recommendations designed to help users find known, offline contacts and discover new friends on social networking sites. We evaluated four recommender algorithms in an enterprise social networking site using a personalized survey of 500 users and a field study of 3,000 users. We found all algorithms effective in expanding users' friend lists. Algorithms based on social network information were able to produce better-received recommendations and find more known contacts for users, while algorithms using similarity of user-created content were stronger in discovering new friends. We also collected qualitative feedback from our survey users and draw several meaningful design implications.

Directed links in social media could represent anything from intimate friendships to common interests, or even a passion for breaking news or celebrity gossip. Such directed links determine the flow of information and hence indicate a user’s influence on others—a concept that is crucial in sociology and viral marketing. In this paper, using a large amount of data collected from Twitter, we present an in-depth comparison of three measures of influence: indegree, retweets, and mentions. Based on these measures, we investigate the dynamics of user influence across topics and time. We make several interesting observations. First, popular users who have high indegree are not necessarily influential in terms of spawning retweets or mentions. Second, most influential users can hold significant influence over a variety of topics. Third, influence is not gained spontaneously or accidentally, but through concerted effort such as limiting tweets to a single topic. We believe that these findings provide new insights for viral marketing and suggest that topological measures such as indegree alone reveals very little about the influence of a user.

A wide variety of deviant behavior may arise as the population of an online multimedia community increases. That behavior can span the range from simple mischievous antics to more serious expressions of psychopathology, including depression, sociopathy, narcissism, dissociation, and borderline dynamics. In some cases the deviant behavior may be a process of pathological acting out—in others, a healthy attempt to work through. Several factors must be taken into consideration when explaining online deviance, such as social/cultural issues, the technical infrastructure of the environment, transference reactions, and the effects of the ambiguous, anonymous, and fantasy-driven atmosphere of cyberspace life. In what we may consider an "online community psychology," intervention strategies for deviant behavior can be explored along three dimensions: preventative versus remedial, user versus superuser based, and automated versus interpersonal.

Trust and reputation systems represent a significant trend in decision support for Internet mediated service provision. The basic idea is to let parties rate each other, for example after the completion of a transaction, and use the aggregated ratings about a given party to derive a trust or reputation score, which can assist other parties in deciding whether or not to transact with that party in the future. A natural side effect is that it also provides an incentive for good behaviour, and therefore tends to have a positive effect on market quality. Reputation systems can be called collaborative sanctioning systems to reflect their collaborative nature, and are related to collaborative filtering systems. Reputation systems are already being used in successful commercial online applications. There is also a rapidly growing literature around trust and reputation systems, but unfortunately this activity is not very coherent. The purpose of this article is to give an overview of existing and proposed systems that can be used to derive measures of trust and reputation for Internet transactions, to analyze the current trends and developments in this area, and to propose a research agenda for trust and reputation systems. Josang, A., R. Ismal, and C. Boyd (2007). A Survey of Trust and Reputation Systems for Online Service Provision, Journal of Decision Support Systems, 43(2):618-644 Citation: Outline of Presentation • Section 1: Introduction • Section 2: Define trust and reputation • Section 3: Trust and Reputation relationship as security mechanisms • Section 4: Collaborative filtering and reputation • Section 5: Trust Classes • Section 6: Four categories of reputation and trust semantics • Section 7: Centralized and distributed architectures for reputation Outline of Presentation Continued • Section 8: Reputation computation methods (Day 1 Goal) • Section 9: Reputation systems used in commercial applications • Section 10: Description of main problems in reputation systems • Section 11: Ending discussion Section 1: Introduction • Online transactions differ from those of in person transactions because of the inherent asymmetry in the transaction, the seller has all the power so to say. • The nature of online transactions obscure the traditional metrics used to establish if a brick and mortar store is trustworthy. Example: a brick and mortar store takes time to establish a web site takes very little time to set up. – These reasons make it hard to determine rather or not a particular online venue is trustworthy or not and is why this trust issue is receiving so much attention from an academic point of view. • The authors of this paper wrote it in part because of the rapidly growing interest in this topic and because they felt that the prior overviews used inconsistent terminology. Section 2: Define trust and reputation • Two kinds of trust: reliability and decision trust • Reliability Trust: Trust is the subjective probability by which an individual, A, expects that another individual, B, performs a given action on which its welfare depends. • Decision Trust: Trust is the extent to which one party is willing to depend on something or somebody in a given situation with a feeling of relative security, even though negative consequences are possible. • The authors mention that the prior mentioned definitions are not as simple as they seem. – For example: Trust in an individual is not necessarily enough to enter into a state of dependence with a person. In other words, that danger might seem to the agent an intolerable risk. • The authors mentions that only a few papers deal with trust and that in economic circles there are some who reject trust as a computational model. • Someone by the name of Williamson argues that the notion of trust should be avoided when modeling economic interactions, because it adds nothing new, and that well known notions such as reliability, utility and risk are adequate ad sufficient for that purpose. • Williamson argues however that personal trust is still important for modeling, and that non-computation models for trust can be meaningful for studying certain relationships. • Concerning reputation, the authors mention two aspects: trust because of good reputation and trust despite of bad reputation. • These two statements shed light on the fact that trust is often made with outside information, knowledge about the relationship that is not general know, instincts and feelings, etc. • Reputation can also be considered as a collective measure of trustworthiness based on referrals from the community. • Research in Trust and Reputation Systems should have two foci: – Finding adequate online substitutes for traditional cues in the physical world and identifying new elements specific to the online applications which are suitable for measurements. – Taking advantage of IT and Internet to create efficient systems for collecting information and deriving measurements of trust and reputation in order to aid decision making and improve online markets. • These simple principles invite rigorous research in order to answer some fundamental questions: What information elements are most suitable for deriving measures of trust and reputation in a given application? How can these information elements be captured and collected? What are the best principles for designing such systems from a theoretic and from a usability point of view? Can they be made resistant to attacks of manipulation by strategic agents? How should users include the information provided by such systems into their decision process? What role can these systems play in the business model of commercial companies? Do these systems truly improve the quality of online trade and interactions? These are important questions that need good answers in order to determine the potential for trust and reputation systems in online environments. • According to a cited reference in the paper, Resnick, a reputation system must have the following: 1. Entities must be long lived, so that with every interaction there is always an expectation of future interactions. 2. Ratings about current interactions are captured and distributed. 3. Ratings about past interactions must guide decisions about current interactions. Example of how trust is derived. (Fig. 1 from paper) Section 3: Trust and Reputation relationship as security mechanisms • In a general sense, the purpose of security mechanisms is to provide protection against malicious parties. • In many situations we have to protect ourselves from those who offer resources so that the problem in fact is reversed. Information providers can for example act deceitfully by providing false or misleading information, and traditional security mechanisms are unable to protect against this type of threat. Trust and reputation systems on the other hand can provide protection against such threats. • To summaries this section the author basically says that a computer system that appears to have robust security appears more trust worthy to the user. Listing known security vulnerabilities and using encryption techniques make the system appear to me more trust worthy. Section 4: Collaborative filtering and reputation • Collaborative filtering systems are a mechanism that shares traits with a reputation system but they are different at the same time. • Collaborative filtering systems (henceforth CF) are a mechanism that attempts to take into consideration that different people have different tastes. • If two separate people rate two items similarly then they are called neighbours in CF terminology. • This new fact can be used to recommend to one something that the other liked, a technique called a recommender system. • This takes the opposite assumption of reputation systems which assume that all people will judge the same performance or transaction consistently. • The example provided by the article is that in CF systems users might rate a video or music file differently based on tastes but one containing a virus would be universally rated poorly. • Another caveat about CF vs reputation systems is that CF systems assume an optimistic world view and reputation systems assume a pessimistic world view. • In specifics, CF systems assume all participants are trustworthy and sincere, meaning that all participants report their genuine opinion. • Conversely, reputation system assume that participants will try to misrepresent the quality of services in order to make more profit and will lie to achieve said goals. • This duel opposing nature of these type systems can make it very advantageous to combine them as will be explored in the study of Amazon in section 9 which does this to some extent. Section 5: Trust Classes • Types of Trust classes: – Provision – Access – Delegation – Identity – Context • Paper mentions them in order to get specific about trust semantics. • Paper focuses on provision trust so it is emphasized. • Provision trust describes the relying party’s trust in a service or resource provider. It is relevant when the relying party is a user seeking protection from malicious or unreliable service providers. I extrapolated from the paper that this is the type of trust that would be studied in business through subjects like contract law. • Access trust describes trust in principals for the purpose of accessing resources owned by or under the responsibility of the relying party. This relates to the access control paradigm which is a central element in computer security. • Delegation trust describes trust in an agent (the delegate) that acts and makes decision on behalf of the relying party. • Identity trust describes the belief that an agent identity is as claimed. Identity trust systems have been discussed mostly in the information security community. An example mentioned in the paper is PGP encryption technology. • Context trust describes the extent to which the relying party believes that the necessary systems and institutions ar

With the proliferation of social networking and electronic commerce, social commerce helps people engage in various forms of online social commercial activities through sharing their product or service knowledge and experiences. A better understanding of users’ engagement in social commerce websites thus become increasingly important. Based on the attractiveness theory, this study proposes a research model that highlights the unique role of technology attractiveness, including task, social, and physical attractiveness, in promoting user involvement, which in turn affects social commerce engagement. Results demonstrate that users’ perceptions of technology attractiveness are positively associated with their involvement with social commerce websites, and further stimulate engagement. In addition, website involvement partially and fully mediates the effects of social and physical attractiveness, respectively, on social commerce engagement. The limitations and implications of this study for research and practice are further discussed.

How do social networks affect the spread of behavior? A popular hypothesis states that networks with many clustered ties and a high degree of separation will be less effective for behavioral diffusion than networks in which locally redundant ties are rewired to provide shortcuts across the social space. A competing hypothesis argues that when behaviors require social reinforcement, a network with more clustering may be more advantageous, even if the network as a whole has a larger diameter. I investigated the effects of network structure on diffusion by studying the spread of health behavior through artificially structured online communities. Individual adoption was much more likely when participants received social reinforcement from multiple neighbors in the social network. The behavior spread farther and faster across clustered-lattice networks than across corresponding random networks.


Question: The influence of founders in creating online communities.

The Dynamics of Online Group Formation: The Critical Role of Founders

In the realm of online communities, the initial stages of group formation are often heavily influenced by the actions and characteristics of the founding members. This paper explores the pivotal role founders play in shaping the trajectory of online groups. Analogous to the way nuts and bolts work together to create a functional structure, or how home audio components and programming combine to deliver entertainment, founders serve as the essential components that lay the groundwork for the development of vibrant online communities. Just as automobiles, repair parts, and service collectively provide transportation, founders and early members create the environment that facilitates communication and collaboration online. The paper delves into the economics of online group formation, emphasizing the importance of expectations, coordination, and compatibility in fostering successful communities. Expectations about the future of the group, coordination among members to align goals, and compatibility between various aspects of the community (such as technology and user interests) are critical for growth. Much like market competition between systems, competition between online groups highlights the significance of these factors. The paper also discusses the various private and public institutions that emerge within online communities to manage expectations, facilitate coordination, and achieve compatibility. Given that participation in online groups often spans over time, understanding how rational users form expectations about the future of these groups is crucial for their long-term success.

This paper focuses on the problem of identifying influential users of micro-blogging services. Twitter, one of the most notable micro-blogging services, employs a social-networking model called "following", in which each user can choose who she wants to "follow" to receive tweets from without requiring the latter to give permission first. In a dataset prepared for this study, it is observed that (1) 72.4% of the users in Twitter follow more than 80% of their followers, and (2) 80.5% of the users have 80% of users they are following follow them back. Our study reveals that the presence of "reciprocity" can be explained by phenomenon of homophily. Based on this finding, TwitterRank, an extension of PageRank algorithm, is proposed to measure the influence of users in Twitter. TwitterRank measures the influence taking both the topical similarity between users and the link structure into account. Experimental results show that TwitterRank outperforms the one Twitter currently uses and other related algorithms, including the original PageRank and Topic-sensitive PageRank.

The Internet could change the lives of average citizens as much as did the telephone in the early part of the 20th century and television in the 1950s and 1960s. Researchers and social critics are debating whether the Internet is improving or harming participation in community life and social relationships. This research examined the social and psychological impact of the Internet on 169 people in 73 households during their first 1 to 2 years on-line. We used longitudinal data to examine the effects of the Internet on social involvement and psychological well-being. In this sample, the Internet was used extensively for communication. Nonetheless, greater use of the Internet was associated with declines in participants' communication with family members in the household, declines in the size of their social circle, and increases in their depression and loneliness. These findings have implications for research, for public policy and for the design of technology.

Vector embeddings of words have been shown to encode meaningful semantic relationships that enable solving of complex analogies. This vector embedding concept has been extended successfully to many different domains and in this paper we both create and visualize vector representations of an unstructured collection of online communities based on user participation. Further, we quantitatively and qualitatively show that these representations allow solving of semantically meaningful community analogies and also other more general types of relationships. These results could help improve community recommendation engines and also serve as a tool for sociological studies of community relatedness.

Social resources like trust and shared identity make it easier for people to work and play together. Such social resources are sometimes referred to as social capital. Thirty years ago, Americans built social capital as a side effect of participation in civic organizations and social activities, including bowling leagues. Today, they do so far less frequently (Putnam 2000). HCI researchers and practitioners need to find new ways for people to interact that will generate even more social capital than bowling together does. A new theoretical construct, SocioTechnical Capital, provides a framework for generating and evaluating technology-mediated social relations.

Internet development has fueled e-commerce firms’ globalization efforts, but many have met with only limited success. This often stems from the foreign firms’ limited understanding of a focal country’s local culture and idiosyncrasies. Foreign firms are usually viewed as out-group entities, which lowers consumers’ trust in them. The extent of such a phenomenon varies. In locations where people are more skeptical of out-groups, a critical question is whether it is possible to transform such foreign out-group firms into in-groups, specifically with the support of popular social networking media. Based on Social Identity Theory and Trust Transference Process, five strategies leveraging social grouping and social ties to build trust for foreign electronic commerce firms were proposed. A survey was conducted to examine their effectiveness. The results suggest that social-grouping strategies are useful for in-grouping foreign out-group entities to build trust, and the effectiveness of strategies is determined by the social similarity and psychological distance between the consumer and the endorser. This has important implications for scholars and practitioners, both local and abroad, to leverage social grouping to boost Internet sales. © 2013 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

"Blogging" is a Web-based form of communication that is rapidly becoming mainstream. In this paper, we report the results of an ethnographic study of blogging, focusing on blogs written by individuals or small groups, with limited audiences. We discuss motivations for blogging, the quality of social interactivity that characterized the blogs we studied, and relationships to the blogger's audience. We consider the way bloggers related to the known audience of their personal social networks as well as the wider "blogosphere" of unknown readers. We then make design recommendations for blogging software based on these findings.

This study investigates how the user’s exchanges affect people’s trust in electronic commerce and empower them to interact with foreign customers. Online exchanges often occur between strangers who cannot rely on past behavior or the prospect of future interactions to establish mutual trust. Game theorists have formalized this problem as a prisoner’s dilemma and predict mutual noncooperation. In this paper, we introduce a social network based model to promote the cooperation in the prisoner’s dilemma game. For this study, we implemented an agent-based simulation framework, which models different types of behaviors in online auctions. Agents who represent buyers or sellers are located in the nodes of a small world graph. Each link weight between the agent and its neighbor symbolizes how much it trusts this neighbor. A link with trust inferior to some cut-link threshold will be removed from the graph. Our results show that the evolved structure of the graph induces considerable variation in the level of cooperation and the profit in the e-commerce system. This shows that the outcome of our co-evolutionary game, in terms of cooperative behavior, strongly depends on topology but also on the update rule used in the trust between users. Co-evolution of game dynamics in interconnected networks is also studied, where two networks are interconnected, and players have interactions not only with others in the same network, but also with players in the other network. We will demonstrate that the interdependence between networks promotes the cooperation in both networks. But, the degree of promotion changes as a function of interdependence


Question: The influence of founders in establishing online communities.

This study delves into the intricate workings of viral marketing through the lens of a vast person-to-person recommendation network, encompassing 4 million individuals who made 16 million recommendations on over half a million products. By scrutinizing the spread of recommendations and the scale of cascading effects, we propose a straightforward stochastic model to elucidate these phenomena. We further explore variations in user behavior within communities delineated by the recommendation network. A notable feature is the 'long-tail' distribution of product purchases, where a considerable portion of sales are attributed to items with low sales volumes. We elucidate the network's temporal growth and its efficacy from the perspectives of both the recommendation giver and receiver. Despite the average ineffectiveness of recommendations in driving purchases and their limited dissemination, we introduce a model that adeptly identifies specific communities, products, and pricing segments where viral marketing proves to be remarkably potent.

**Question**: The impact of leadership style on employee engagement

**Documents**: The role of transformational leadership in employee engagement
Transformational leadership is considered one of the most effective leadership styles in today’s business environment. This study explores the relationship between transformational leadership and employee engagement in a sample of 200 employees working in various organizations. The results show a significant positive correlation between transformational leadership and employee engagement. Employees under transformational leaders reported higher levels of engagement, motivation, and job satisfaction compared to those under other leadership styles. The study also highlights the importance of individualized consideration and intellectual stimulation in enhancing employee engagement.

**Similar Documents**: This research investigates the pivotal role of transformational leadership in fostering employee engagement within a diverse organizational landscape. By analyzing data from 200 employees across multiple industries, the findings underscore the profound impact of transformational leadership on employee engagement. A strong positive association is evident, with employees under transformational leaders demonstrating markedly higher engagement, motivation, and job satisfaction levels relative to those under alternative leadership paradigms. The study emphasizes the critical role of individualized attention and intellectual provocation in amplifying employee engagement, underscoring the multifaceted benefits of transformational leadership in today's dynamic business climate.

Stack Overflow, a question and answer Web site, uses a reward system called badges to publicly reward users for their contributions to the community. Badges are used alongside a reputation score to reward positive behaviour by relating a user's site identity with their perceived expertise and respect in the community. A greater number of badges associated with a user profile in some way indicates a higher level of authority, leading to a natural incentive for users to attempt to achieve as many badges as possible. In this study, we examine the publicly available logs for Stack Overflow to examine three of these badges in detail. We look at the effect of one badge in context on an individual user level and at the global scope of three related badges across all users by mining user behaviour around the time that the badge is awarded. This analysis supports the claim that badges can be used to influence user behaviour by demonstrating one instance of an increase in user activity related to a badge immediately before it is awarded when compared to the period afterwards.

Purpose – Social commerce websites have emerged as new platforms which integrate social media features with traditional commerce aspects to enhance users’ purchasing experience. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of social factors such as trust toward site members in determining users’ trust and risk evaluations, and the role of social commerce use habit in attenuating users’ rational risk and trust considerations for developing purchase intentions. Design/methodology/approach – Relying on the risk deterrence perspective and rational decision-making models involving trust and habit, this study proposes a set of hypotheses which are tested through analyzing survey data using structural equation modeling techniques. Findings – Results show that commerce risk deters purchasing intentions; trust toward the social commerce website increases users’ purchasing intentions; and trust toward the site members indirectly increases purchasing intentions. Moreover, trust toward site members reduces perceived commerce risk. Findings also show that habit modulates trust and risk effects on use decisions in this context; habit moderates (weakens) the relationships between commerce risk and purchase intentions and between trust toward the social commerce site and purchase intentions. Originality/value – This study extends theories on decision making in social settings such as in the case of social commerce. It does so by accounting for unique modulating effects of habit in social settings in which social aspects such as trust in other members and risk are unique and important.

Participation in social networking sites has dramatically increased in recent years. Services such as Friendster, Tribe, or the Facebook allow millions of individuals to create online profiles and share personal information with vast networks of friends - and, often, unknown numbers of strangers. In this paper we study patterns of information revelation in online social networks and their privacy implications. We analyze the online behavior of more than 4,000 Carnegie Mellon University students who have joined a popular social networking site catered to colleges. We evaluate the amount of information they disclose and study their usage of the site's privacy settings. We highlight potential attacks on various aspects of their privacy, and we show that only a minimal percentage of users changes the highly permeable privacy preferences.

In the WWW, people are engaging in interaction with more, and more diverse information than ever before, so there is an increasing need for information “filtering.” But because of the diversity of information resources, and the lack of traditional quality control on the WWW, the criteria of authority and quality of information that people have used for this purpose in past contexts may no longer be relevant. This paper reports on a study of people’s decision making with respect to quality and authority in the WWW. Seven facets of judgment of information quality were identified: source, content, format, presentation, currency, accuracy, and speed of loading. People mentioned source credibility with two levels: institutional level and individual level. Authority was identified as a underlying theme in source credibility. Institutional authority involved: institutional domain identified by URL; institution type; and institution reputation recognized by names. Individual authority involved: identification of creator/author; creator/author affiliation; and creator/author’s name. People were more or less concerned with evaluating information quality depending upon: the consequence of use of information; act or commitment based on information; and the focus of inquiry. It was also found that people believed that the web, as an institution, was less authoritative and less credible than other types of information systems.

Due to the social media revolution and the emergence of communities, social networks, and user generated content portals, prevalent branding concepts need to catch up with this reality. Given the importance of social ties, social interactions and social identity in the new media environment, there is a need to account for a relationship measure in marketing and branding. Based on the concept of social capital we introduce the concept of social brand value, defined as the perceived value derived by exchange and interactions with other users of the brand within a `community. Within a qualitative study marketing experts were interviewed and highlighted the importance towards social media activities, but also indicated that they do not have a clear picture on how strategies should look like and how their success can be measured. A second quantitative study was conducted which demonstrates the influence the social brand value construct has for consumers brand evangelism and willingness to pay a price premium and hence the value contribution of the social brand value for consumers.

This study focuses on the effect of website visitors' goal-oriented search mode on purchase intention in online environments. In a study of 874 respondents recruited from 13 online shops representing a diversity of product categories and customer segments, the effect of visitors' goal-oriented search mode on purchase intention is found to be moderated by product involvement and product risk. Furthermore, product involvement, product risk, product knowledge and Internet experience are found to have positive effects on the degree of goaloriented search mode of the visitors. Also, product knowledge and Internet experience are reported to have direct positive effects on purchase intention. The results point to the importance of understanding the characteristics of website visitors, and to customize the support and search services offered on the website to the characteristics and preferences of the individual visitor. Customization of this kind may partly be based on immediate visitor history (referrer) and may be used to increase purchase intention, and eventually online sales.

The growth of social networking sites (SNS), like Facebook, has caused many to rethink how we understand political activism and citizen engagement. In 2010, 43% of Internet users reported using social networking sites " several times a day, " a sizeable increase from 2009 where only 34% reported using social networking at the same rate (Pew 2010). Research on digital activism has emphasized the use of websites, listservs, and other forums by formal organizations to raise awareness for their specific causes (McCaughey and Ayers 2003; Van de Donk 2004). Information communication technologies (ICT's) have been regarded as particularly effective tools in mobilizing disparate, resource-poor counter-spheres in collective off-line activity (Van de Donk 2004). In recent years, scholars have moved away from viewing information communication technologies (ICT's) as simply a tool for formal activist organizations. Breindl (2010) argues that on-line digital activism has largely been examined through a classic " social movement paradigm. " She calls for scholarship that looks at how the meaning and structure of activism has been transformed by ICT's. One key way it has been transformed is by allowing for small scale, many-to-many forms of politically oriented communication, what I conceptualize as a new term: microactivism. Examples include the formation of political Facebook groups, re-tweeting of articles of political interest and sharing politically relevant videos on YouTube. These acts reflect micro-level intentions and are not necessarily geared towards mobilization like more traditional forms of digital activism. This microactivism has helped bring about a radical reformulation of the political arena. One major change that emerges from the ease of many-to-many communication brought about by SMS is the reduced incentive to join social movements (Earl and Schussman 2003). These new applications encourage movement entrepreneurs (Garrett 2006) not affiliated with formal social movements but interested in fomenting social change. The ease with which individuals can create content and connect with one another to share content is viewed by others as a harbinger of a more democratic and egalitarian society (Benkler 2006, Jenkins 2007, Shirky 2010). Salter (2005) argues that sites like SNS' provide new radical public spheres that provide additional spaces for voice cultivation and political citizenship formation. More importantly, in his view information technologies help shift political discourse to more informal venues that are less subject to elite control (Dahlberg 2004). Social critics like Morozov (2009) suggest, however, that microactivism might do more harm than good. Morozov (2009) refers …

We analyze the dynamics of the behavior known as 'unfollow' in Twitter. We collected daily snapshots of the online relationships of 1.2 million Korean-speaking users for 51 days as well as all of their tweets. We found that Twitter users frequently unfollow. We then discover the major factors, including the reciprocity of the relationships, the duration of a relationship, the followees' informativeness, and the overlap of the relationships, which affect the decision to unfollow. We conduct interview with 22 Korean respondents to supplement the quantitative results.
 They unfollowed those who left many tweets within a short time, created tweets about uninteresting topics, or tweeted about the mundane details of their lives. To the best of our knowledge, this work is the first systematic study of the unfollow behavior in Twitter.

Large-scale social networks emerged rapidly in recent years. Social networks have become complex networks. The structure of social networks is an important research area and has attracted much scientific interest. Community is an important structure in social networks. In this paper, we propose a community detection algorithm based on influential nodes. First, we introduce how to find influential nodes based on random walk. Then we combine the algorithm with order statistics theory to find community structure. We apply our algorithm in three classical data sets and compare to other algorithms. Our community detection algorithm is proved to be effective in the experiments. Our algorithm also has applications in data mining and recommendations.


Question: The influence of founders in establishing online communities.

This paper delves into the strategic use of viral marketing within the framework of knowledge-sharing platforms, where customers actively engage in product reviews and offer advice to peers. Viral marketing, by leveraging the inherent networks of influence among consumers, can achieve significant behavioral shifts at a relatively low cost. Our study aims to enhance the effectiveness of viral marketing by extracting network patterns from data, constructing probabilistic models to represent these networks, and utilizing these models to devise optimal viral marketing strategies. Knowledge-sharing sites, given their rich data on customer interactions, serve as an ideal ground for such data mining endeavors. Building upon our earlier methodologies, we have significantly reduced the computational complexity and applied these techniques to a real-world knowledge-sharing site dataset. In our approach, we prioritize optimizing the allocation of marketing resources per customer, moving beyond the binary decision of targeting or ignoring a potential customer. Recognizing the limitations in fully understanding the network dynamics, we incorporate the costs associated with gathering network knowledge into our model. The outcomes of our analysis highlight the resilience and practical value of our viral marketing strategy.

**Question**: The impact of leadership styles on employee engagement in the tech industry

**Documents**: The role of transformational leadership in promoting employee engagement
Transformational leadership has been found to be a significant predictor of employee engagement. This study aims to examine the relationship between transformational leadership and employee engagement in the context of the tech industry. The study adopts a quantitative research design and collects data through a survey of 300 employees working in tech companies. The results show that transformational leadership positively influences employee engagement. Specifically, the study finds that inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, individualized consideration, and idealized influence are the key components of transformational leadership that contribute to employee engagement. The study also finds that employee engagement is positively associated with job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and performance. The findings of this study have important implications for the tech industry. They suggest that tech companies should focus on developing transformational leadership skills among their managers to enhance employee engagement. This, in turn, can lead to improved job satisfaction, organizational commitment, and performance.

**Similar Documents**: This research paper investigates the pivotal role that transformational leadership plays in fostering employee engagement, particularly within the technology sector. Transformational leadership is identified as a critical factor that significantly correlates with heightened levels of employee engagement. To explore this relationship, the study employs a quantitative research methodology, gathering insights from a survey of 300 employees within the tech industry. The analysis reveals that transformational leadership exerts a positive impact on employee engagement.

How do two people become friends? What role does homophily play in bringing two people closer to help them forge friendship? Is the similarity between two friends different from the similarity between any two people? How does the similarity between a friend of a friend compare to similarity between direct friends? In this work, our goal is to answer these questions. We study the relationship between semantic similarity of user profile entries and the social network topology. A user profile in an on-line social network is characterized by its profile entries. The entries are termed as user keywords. We develop a model to relate keywords based on their semantic relationship and define similarity functions to quantify the similarity between a pair of users. First, we present a ‘forest model’ to categorize keywords across multiple categorization trees and define the notion of distance between keywords. Second, we use the keyword distance to define similarity functions between a pair of users. Third, we analyze a set of Facebook data according to the model to determine the effect of homophily in on-line social networks. Based on our evaluations, we conclude that direct friends are more similar than any other user pair. However, the more striking observation is that except for direct friends, similarities between users are approximately equal, irrespective of the topological distance between them.

Twidale Open source communities have successfully developed a great deal of software although most computer users only use proprietary applications. The usability of open source software is often regarded as one reason for this limited distribution. In this paper we review the existing evidence of the usability of open source software and discuss how the characteristics of open source development influence usability. We describe how existing human-computer interaction techniques can be used to leverage distributed networked communities, of developers and users, to address issues of usability.

How do social networks affect the spread of behavior? A popular hypothesis states that networks with many clustered ties and a high degree of separation will be less effective for behavioral diffusion than networks in which locally redundant ties are rewired to provide shortcuts across the social space. A competing hypothesis argues that when behaviors require social reinforcement, a network with more clustering may be more advantageous, even if the network as a whole has a larger diameter. I investigated the effects of network structure on diffusion by studying the spread of health behavior through artificially structured online communities. Individual adoption was much more likely when participants received social reinforcement from multiple neighbors in the social network. The behavior spread farther and faster across clustered-lattice networks than across corresponding random networks.

We have analyzed the fully-anonymized headers of 362 million messages exchanged by 4.2 million users of Facebook, an online social network of college students, during a 26 month interval. The data reveal a number of strong daily and weekly regularities which provide insights into the time use of college students and their social lives, including seasonal variations. We also examined how factors such as school affiliation and informal online “friend” lists affect the observed behavior and temporal patterns. Finally, we show that Facebook users appear to be clustered by school with respect to their temporal messaging patterns.

Social networks form the backbone of social and economic life. Until recently, however, data have not been available to study the social impact of a national network structure. To that end, we combined the most complete record of a national communication network with national census data on the socioeconomic well-being of communities. These data make possible a population-level investigation of the relation between the structure of social networks and access to socioeconomic opportunity. We find that the diversity of individuals' relationships is strongly correlated with the economic development of communities.

In this paper we propose a new two-phase algorithm for overlapping community detection (OCD) in social networks. In the first phase, called disassortative degree mixing, we identify nodes with high degrees through a random walk process on the row-normalized disassortative matrix representation of the network. In the second phase, we calculate how closely each node of the network is bound to the leaders via a cascading process called network coordination game. We implemented the algorithm and four additional ones as a Web service on a federated peer-to-peer infrastructure. Comparative test results for small and big real world networks demonstrated the correct identification of leaders, high precision and good time complexity. The Web service is available as open source software.

Online prostitution has flourished due to presence of online intermediaries. Despite the illegality of selling sexual services online, the Section 230 of Communications Decency Act shields websites from liability for unlawful postings by third parties. Consequently, the websites like Craigslist have become a haven for prostitution-related ads. In this paper, we quantify the economic impact of Craigslist’s entry on prostitution incidence, and identify potential pathways in which the website affects the sex industry. Using a national panel data for 1,796 U.S. counties from 1999 to 2008, our results suggest that entry of Craigslist to a county is related to 26.61 percent increase in prostitution cases. In addition, our analyses investigates four key market mechanisms, namely the relationship to commercial vice, geographical trends, spillover effects, and enhanced policing efficacy. Our results contributes broadly to the emerging literature that researches the societal challenges associated with online intermediaries and Internet penetration.

Posting comments on the news is one of the most popular forms of user participation in online newspapers, and there is great potential for public discourse that is associated with this form of user communication. However, this potential arises only when several users participate in commenting and when their communication becomes interactive. Based on an adaption of Galtung and Ruge’s theory of newsworthiness, we hypothesized that a news article’s news factors affect both participation levels and interactivity in a news item’s comments section. The data from an online content analysis of political news are consistent with the hypotheses. This article explores the ways in which news factors affect participation levels and interactivity, and it discusses the theoretical, normative, and practical implications of those findings.

As key roles of online social networks, influential users in micro-blogging have the ability to influence the attitudes or behaviour of others. When it comes to marketing, the users’ influence should be associated with a certain topic or field on which people have different levels of preference and expertise. In order to identify and predict influential users in a specific topic more effectively, users’ actual influential capability on a certain topic and potential influence unlimited by topics is combined into a novel comprehensive framework named “ACQR” in this research. ACQR framework depicts the attributes of the influentials from four aspects, including activeness (A), centrality (C), quality of post (Q) and reputation (R). Based on this framework, a data mining method is developed for discovering and forecasting the top influentials. Empirical results reveal that our ACQR framework and the data mining method by TOPSIS and SVMs (with polynomial and RBF kernels) can perform very well in identifying and predicting influential users in a certain topic (such as iPhone 5). Furthermore, the dynamic change processes of users’ influence from longitudinal perspective are analysed and suggestions to the sales managers are provided.


Question: The influence of founders in establishing online communities.

This paper delves into the significance of community structure within social and biological networks, a topic that has garnered substantial attention in recent studies. These investigations have predominantly centered on identifying common properties across diverse networks, including the small-world phenomenon, power-law degree distributions, and network transitivity. Herein, we introduce an additional and equally crucial characteristic: community structure. This feature is characterized by the formation of tightly connected clusters among network nodes, interconnected by comparatively fewer and weaker ties. We propose a novel methodology for identifying these communities, grounded in the utilization of centrality indices to pinpoint community borders. To validate the efficacy of our approach, we conduct experiments on both synthetic and real-world graphs, for which the community structure is already established. Our findings reveal that the method accurately and consistently detects this known structure. Additionally, we apply our technique to two networks with less understood community structures—a collaboration network and a food web—uncovering significant and insightful community divisions in both instances.

**Question**: The impact of climate change on water resources

**Documents**: Climate change and water resources in the Mediterranean region.
The Mediterranean region is particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change due to its semi-arid climate and high population density. This study aims to analyze the effects of climate change on water resources in the Mediterranean region using a set of climate model simulations. The results indicate that the region will experience a decrease in water availability due to reduced precipitation and increased evaporation. The impacts will be more severe in the southern and eastern parts of the region. In addition, the study highlights the need for adaptation measures to cope with the expected changes in water resources. Such measures include water demand management, water conservation, and the development of alternative water sources.

**Similar Documents**:  The vulnerability of the Mediterranean region to climate change is exacerbated by its semi-arid conditions and significant human population. This research focuses on assessing the repercussions of climate change on water resources within this area through a series of climate model simulations. Our findings reveal a projected decline in water availability, attributed to diminishing precipitation levels and heightened evaporation rates. The southern and eastern sectors of the region are anticipated to bear the brunt of these effects. Moreover, the necessity for adaptive strategies to address the anticipated alterations in water resources is underscored. Potential adaptations encompass managing water demand, fostering water conservation efforts, and exploring supplementary water sources to ensure resilience against the impending climate challenges.

We show how online social networks such as Facebook can be used in Behavioral Game Theory research. We report the deployment of a Facebook application ‘Project Waterloo’ that allows users to play the Colonel Blotto game against their friends and strangers. Unlike conventional studies performed in the laboratory environment, which rely on monetary incentives to attract human subjects to play games, our framework does not use money and instead relies on reputation and entertainment incentives. We describe the Facebook application we created for conducting this experiment, and perform a preliminary analysis of the data collected in the game. We conclude by discussing the advantages of our approach and list some ideas for future work.

Before reaping transaction cost savings from the Internet, online sellers must credibly communicate the quality of their goods or their reliability of delivery. We use baseball cards as an example to address (1) whether consumers fully understand the risk of online trading, (2) the extent to which consumers employ seller reputation and professional grading to alleviate the risk they are exposed to, and (3) the impact of online trading on the retail market and supporting industries. An experiment is carried out to obtain actual baseball cards from both online and retail markets whose quality is then professionally graded and compared to the prices paid by online buyers for goods with similar claims. Our findings indicate that some uninformed online buyers are misled by non-credible claims of quality; they pay higher prices but do not receive better quality and in fact are defrauded more often. Although a combination of professional grading and reputation mechanisms appear to have the potential to solve the problem, they have only had limited success so far. Data on structural changes in the baseball card industry suggest the problems stemming from buyer misconception may have far-reaching consequences, extending beyond the immediate losses of defrauded consumers to influencing producer and supply decisions. Our findings also suggest that empirical studies using online price data should be careful of what assumptions they are making of online users and what behaviors of buyers and sellers are likely to drive the price data. Department of Economics, University of Maryland, 3115 G Tydings, College Park, MD 20742. Contact Email: jin@econ.umd.edu. We thank Seth Sanders, John List, John Shea, Dan Vincent, David Lucking-Reiley, Larry Ausubel, Peter Cramton, V. Joseph Hotz, Jimmy Chan, Vincent Crawford, attendants in Johns Hopkins UMD conference and participants of UCLA,UCSD and FTC seminars for constructive advice and suggestions. We are grateful to 8 friends who acted as our agents in purchasing baseball cards in retail markets, and numerous sports card store owners for their time and insights regarding the sports card industry. Excellent research assistance from Randy Alexander Moore and Krzysztof Fizyta is gratefully acknowledged. Any remaining errors are ours.

Available online 15 August 2008 Within the cultural context of MySpace, this study explores the ways emerging adults experience social networking. Through focus group methodology, the role of virtual peer interaction in the development of personal, social, and gender identities was investigated. Findings suggest that college students utilize MySpace for identity exploration, engaging in social comparison and expressing idealized aspects of the selves they wish to become. The public nature of self and relationship displays introduce feedback mechanisms by which emerging adults can legitimize images as associated with the self. Also, male–female differences in self-presentation parallel, and possibly intensify, gender norms offline. Our study suggests that social networking sites provide valuable opportunities for emerging adults to realize possible selves; however, increased pressure for female sexual objectification and intensified social comparison may also negatively impact identity development. A balanced view, presenting both opportunities and drawbacks, should be encouraged in policies regarding youth participation in social networking sites. Published by Elsevier Inc.

Social network analysis (SNA) is not a formal theory in sociology but rather a strategy for investigating social structures. As it is an idea that can be applied in many fields, we study, in particular, its influence in the information sciences. Information scientists study publication, citation and co-citation networks, collaboration structures and other forms of social interaction networks. Moreover, the Internet represents a social network of an unprecedented scale. We are convinced that in all these studies social network analysis can successfully be applied. SNA is further related to recent theories concerning the free market economy, geography and transport networks. The growth of SNA is documented and a co-author network of SNA is drawn. Centrality measures of this network are calculated. * To whom all correspondence should be addressed.

Social commerce has taken the e‐tailing world by storm. Business‐to‐consumer sites and, more important, intermediaries that facilitate shopping experience, continue to offer more and more innovative technologies to support social interaction among like‐ minded community members or friends who share the same shopping interests. Among these technologies, reviews, ratings, and recommendation systems have become some of the most popular social shopping platforms due to their ease of use and simplicity in sharing buying experience and aggregating evaluations. This paper studies the effect of electronic word of mouth (eWOM) communication among a closed community of book readers. We studied the entire market of Amazon Shorts e‐books, which are digital mi‐ croproducts sold at a low and uniform price. With the minimal role of price in the buying decision, social discussion via eWOM becomes a collective signal of reputation, and ultimately a significant demand driver. Our empirical study suggests that eWOM can be used to convey the reputation of the product (e.g., the book), the reputation of the brand (i.e., the author), and the reputation of complementary goods (e.g., books in the same category). Until newer social shopping technologies gain acceptance, eWOM technolo‐ gies should be considered by both e‐tailers and shoppers as the first and perhaps primary source of social buying experience.

Open-source software, usually created by volunteer programmers dispersed worldwide, now competes with that developed by software firms. This achievement is particularly impressive as open-source programmers rarely meet. They rely heavily on electronic media, which preclude the benefits of face-to-face contact that programmers enjoy within firms. In this paper, we describe findings that address this paradox based on observation, interviews and quantitative analyses of two open-source projects. The findings suggest that spontaneous work coordinated afterward is effective, rational organizational culture helps achieve agreement among members and communications media moderately support spontaneous work. These findings can imply a new model of dispersed collaboration.

This paper addresses the role of marketing in hypermedia computer-mediated environments (CMEs). Our approach considers hypermedia CMEs to be large-scale (i.e. national or global) networked environments, of which the World Wide Web on the Internet is the first and current global implementation. We introduce marketers to this revolutionary new medium, and propose two structural models of consumer behavior in a CME. Then we examine the set of consequent testable research propositions and marketing implications that flow from the models. Marketing in Hypermedia Computer-Mediated Environments: Conceptual Foundations 1) Introduction Firms communicate with their customers through various media. Traditionally, these media follow a passive one-to-many communication model whereby a firm reaches many current and potential customers, segmented or not, through marketing efforts that allow only limited forms of feedback on the part of the customer. For several years now, a revolution has been developing that is dramatically altering this traditional view of advertising and communication media. This revolution is the Internet, the massive global network of interconnected packet-switched computer networks, and as a new marketing medium, has the potential to radically change the way firms do business with their customers. The Internet operationalizes a model of distributed computing that facilitates interactive multimedia many-to-many communication. As such, the Internet supports discussion groups (e.g. USENET news and moderated and unmoderated mailing lists), multi-player games and communications systems (e.g. MUDs, irc, chat, MUSEs), file transfer, electronic mail, and global information access and retrieval systems (e.g. archie, gopher, and the World Wide Web). The business implications of this model "[where] the engine of democratization sitting on so many desktops is already out of control, is already creating new players in a new game" (Carroll 1994), will be played out in as yet unknown ways for years to come. This paper is concerned with the marketing implications of commercializing hypermedia computer-mediated environments (CMEs), of which the World Wide Web (Berners-Lee et. al. 1992, 1993) on the Internet is the first and current networked global implementation. While we provide a formal definition subsequently, at this point we informally define a hypermedia CME as a distributed computer network used to access and provide hypermedia content (i.e., multimedia content connected across the network with hypertext links). Though other CMEs are relevant to marketers, including private bulletin board systems (Bunch 1994); public conferencing systems such as the WELL (Figallo 1993; Rheingold 1992, 1993) and ECHO; and commercial online services such as America On-Line, Prodigy, and CompuServe, we restrict our current focus to marketing activities in hypermedia CMEs accessible via the "Web" on the Internet. The Internet is an important focus for marketers because consumers and firms are conducting business on the Internet in proportions that dwarf the commercial provider base of the other CMEs combined. There are over 21,700 commercial Internet addressess (Verity and Hof 1994), and an increasing percentage of these commercial addresses are providing Web services. As of December 28, 1994, 1465 firms were listed in Open Market’s (1994) directory of "Commercial Services on the Net," and there were 6370 entries in the "Business/Corporations" directory of the Yahoo Guide to WWW (Filo and Yang 1994). The central thesis driving this research is that hypermedia CMEs, such as but not limited to the World Wide Web on the Internet, require the development and application of new marketing concepts and models. This is because hypermedia CMEs possess unique characteristics, including machine-interactivity, telepresence, hypermedia, and network navigation, which distinguish them from traditional media and some interactive multimedia, on which conventional concepts and models are based. Hoffman & Novak (1995), "Marketing in Hypermedia CMEs: Conceptual Foundations" page 1

"Blogging" is a Web-based form of communication that is rapidly becoming mainstream. In this paper, we report the results of an ethnographic study of blogging, focusing on blogs written by individuals or small groups, with limited audiences. We discuss motivations for blogging, the quality of social interactivity that characterized the blogs we studied, and relationships to the blogger's audience. We consider the way bloggers related to the known audience of their personal social networks as well as the wider "blogosphere" of unknown readers. We then make design recommendations for blogging software based on these findings.

Given the amount of perceived risk involved in Internet shopping, many potential Internet shoppers tend to wait and observe the experiences of others who have tried it before considering adopting it. This study explores how positive informational social influence affects consumers’ decision of Internet shopping using a laboratory experiment. The research results reveal that positive informational social influence reinforces the relationships between perceived ease of use and consumer attitude toward Internet shopping, as well as attitude and their intention to shop. Implications for the current investigation and future research directions are provided.