Search results for "SOCIAL NETWORK"

Place Attachment and Its Consequence for Landscape-Scale Management and Readiness to Participate: Social Network Complexity in the Post-Soviet Rural …

2019

This paper uses the tripartite place attachment framework to examine six rural parishes across Estonia and Latvia. Existing analyses/frameworks on participatory processes often neglect the complexity of relationships that rural residents have to their local environments. From a qualitative analysis of face-to-face, semi-structured interviews with case study area inhabitants (23 interviews in Estonia and 27 in Latvia), we depict varying degrees of attachment of individuals to each other and to the place in which they live and their readiness to participate in terms of willingness and ability to participate in a landscape-scale management process. Attachment to the local area was strongest wh…

IN SEARCH OF BLACK ENTREPRENEURSHIP: WHY IS THERE A LACK OF ENTREPRENEURIAL ACTIVITY AMONG THE BLACK POPULATION IN SOUTH AFRICA?

2012

Compared to other ethnic groups, the black population of South Africa has a low participation rate in entrepreneurship activities. The research question of this article is to explain this empirical fact. Based on twenty-four expert interviews, five patterns of explanation are presented and elaborated: a historical apartheid explanation, a financial resources explanation, a human capital explanation, a traits and mindset explanation and a social capital and network explanation. The historical apartheid explanation cannot be qualified independently of the other explanations as a distinctive explanation of its own. Although missing financial resources and shortages of human capital are the fa…

Violent Conflict and Online Segregation: An Analysis of Social Network Communication Across Ukraine's Regions

2016

Does the intensity of a social conflict affect political division? Traditionally, social cleavages are seen as the underlying cause of political conflicts. It is clear, however, that a violent conflict itself can shape partisan, social, and national identities. In this paper, we ask whether social conflicts unite or divide the society by studying the effects of Ukraine's military conflict with Russia on online social ties between Ukrainian provinces (oblasts). In order to do that, we collected original data on the cross-regional structure of politically relevant online communication among users of VKontakte social networking site. We analyze the panel of provinces spanning the most active p…

Efficient Graph Models for Retrieving Top-k News Feeds from Ego Networks

2012

A key challenge of web platforms like social networking sites and services for news feed aggregation is the efficient and targeted distribution of new content items to users. This can be formulated as the problem of retrieving the top-k news items out of the d-degree ego network of each given user, where the set of all users producing feeds is of size n, with n >> d >> k and typically k

“From Trust to Travel: the Role of Electronic Word of Mouth through Tourist Social Networks”

2013

A Data-Driven Approach to Dynamically Learn Focused Lexicons for Recognizing Emotions in Social Network Streams

2016

Opinion Mining aims at identifying and classifying subjective information in a collection of documents. A variety of approach exists in literature, ranging from Supervised Learning to Unsupervised Learning. Currently, one of the biggest opinion resource of opinionated texts existing on the Web is represented by Social Networks. Networks are not only a vast collection of documents but they also represent a dynamic evolving resource as the users keep posting their own opinions. We based our work relying on this idea of dynamicity, building an evolving model that updates itself in real time as users submit their posts. This is done through a set of supervised techniques based on a Lexi- con of…

The Role of Social and Collaborative Networks in the Development of in-House Multimedia Language Learning Materials

2012

The development of in-house language learning materials has being going on for many decades. In the past, it was difficult for language teachers worldwide to share their in-house materials with other teachers, and so was having access to the materials developed by others. This often produced a feeling of isolation and, very frequently, provoked a duplication of efforts and a bigger investment of time. However, thanks to the Web 2.0 teachers and practitioners worldwide can communicate with each other and share experiences and materials. While this aspect of the so-called Social Web has being successfully exploded in the past few decades, especially in the case of online communities of teache…

Into the world of e-waste: mobility among e-scrappers in Nigeria

2017

AbstractIn the management of e-waste, mobility of e-scrappers plays a pivotal role, especially in e-waste acquisition and sales of extracted materials. This research examines the relationship between e-scrappers and the locations of their work by analysing the influence of environmental and social factors on their mobility behaviour in Nigeria. A qualitative analysis of video material collected from 29 male e-scrappers in Nigeria between 2014 and 2015 reveals that e-waste has inherent properties that intermittently mobilise e-scrappers to search for recyclable and valuable electronic trash. Applying the new mobilities paradigm and the new materialism theory, we present that e-scrappers’ mob…

Facilitating Elements for the Transmission of the Entrepreneurial Spirit in the Classroom

2014

There have been countless tests made to confirm that creativity is a critical skill for entrepreneurs and their entrepreneurial training (Schmidt, J. et al. 2012), even more, practices on divergent thinking increases the entrepreneurial skills of students to generate a greater number and range of ideas, but not, their approaches to solve problems in a creative way. This situation raises a number of questions that should be analyzed before adding creativity and techniques to improve the training of creative thinking to studies (classes), about and in entrepreneurship, as a training channel, improvement or even to the generation of entrepreneurs. Our goal is to show that entrepreneurship is a…

Guanxi, performance and innovation in entrepreneurial service projects

2013

PurposeThis paper aims to analyze the role played by two dimensions of entrepreneurs' private social capital in the survival, growth and innovativeness of entrepreneurial service ventures: local size and preferential attachment degree.Design/methodology/approachData were collected by a questionnaire, the unit of investigation being the private entrepreneur in the service sector in the city of Shanghai. The questionnaire allows the authors to identify the social network of the entrepreneurs, estimate the empirical degree distribution for the entire sample, and estimate local size and preferential attachment degree.FindingsThere is empirical evidence that entrepreneurs do not create social ne…