Formal features in children's science television: Sound effects,visual pace,and topic shifts

This study analyzes the auditory, visual, and information‐presentation pace of children's science television programs. These half‐hour programs averaged more than 19 sound effects per minute, 14 visual changes (cuts, wipes, and fades/dissolves) per minute, and more than 27 topic shifts per program. These results indicate that the current crop of programs presents content at a pace that may reduce their effectiveness.     

Investigating negative reviews and detecting negative influencers in Yelp through a multi-dimensional social network based model

In this paper, we propose an investigation of negative reviews and define the profile of negative influencers in Yelp. The methodology adopted to achieve this goal consists of two phases. The first one is theoretical and aims at defining a multi-dimensional social network based model of Yelp, three stereotypes of Yelp users, and a network based model to represent negative reviewers and their relationships. The second phase is experimental and consists in the definition of five hypotheses on negative reviews and reviewers in Yelp and their verification through an extensive data analysis campaign. This was performed on Yelp data represented by means of the models introduced during the first phase. Its most important result is the construction of the profile of negative influencers in Yelp. The main novelties of this paper are: (i) the definition of the two social network based models of Yelp and its users; (ii) the definition of three stereotypes of Yelp users and their characteristics; (iii) the construction of the profile of negative influencers in Yelp.     

The Relationship Between College Students' Self-Reports of Class Participation and Perceived Instructor Impressions

The purpose of this investigation was to identify the extent to which college students' self-reports of their in-class participation are related to their impressions of instructors (i.e., credibility, attractiveness, and homophily). Participants were 223 undergraduate students enrolled in an introductory communication course at a large Mid-Atlantic university. Students' self-reports of their in-class participation were positively correlated with perceived instructor social attractiveness, physical attractiveness, background homophily, and attititude homophily, but not with perceived instructor competence, character, caring, and task attractiveness. Furthermore, class size, perceived instructor social attractiveness, and perceived instructor background homophily emerged as significant predictors of in-class participation.     

Friendship similarities in internalizing problems in early childhood

A key factor identified in friendship formation and stability is similarity. Homophily of externalizing problems has been reported frequently, but less attention has been directed at homophily of internalizing problems. Whether young children who are friends resemble each other in their internalizing problems is thus largely unknown. In order to increase understanding of the social risk factors implicated in the etiology of internalizing problems, it is important to establish whether internalizing problems cluster in friendships. The present study examines homophily of internalizing problems while controlling for externalizing problems in a sample of children aged 4–8.     

Where do alliances come from?: The effects of upper echelons on alliance formation

Alliances with established organizations provide young firms with resources necessary for survival. We build on recent organizational research examining the effect of upper echelons on attracting powerful intermediaries to understand how young biotechnology firms establish alliances with established organizations. Drawing upon the concept of homophily, we test hypotheses regarding the extent to which young firms and partners match along specific homophily dimensions. Our findings from an event-history analysis of 3,200 career histories of managers who took biotechnology firms public between 1979 and 1996 show that alliance formation is related to status homophily and role-based homophily between young and established organizations.     

Exploring motivations for intercultural contact among host country university students: An Irish case study

This article is concerned primarily with university students’ motivations for voluntarily seeking out intercultural contact on campus. It is based on a larger qualitative research project conducted in an Irish university. This project used a grounded theory approach to explore intercultural relations among students specifically from the perspective of the host culture student cohort. The findings indicate that host students’ decision to engage in intercultural contact is based primarily on a perceived utility associated with such contact, which is based on an informal cost–benefit analysis. Other, less prevalent motivational drivers, such as concern for others and the idea of having a shared future are also identified. Although the study focuses on a higher education environment, many of the ideas and theories discussed and questions raised may be applied to broader intercultural environments. In particular the article aims to highlight the current gap in literature relating to motivations for engaging in intercultural contact and also seeks to highlight the potential value of social exchange theory (Thibaut & Kelley, 1959) to understanding the dynamics of intercultural contact. It also emphasises the relevance of the concept of ‘homophily’ (Lazarsfeld & Merton, 1954) to the field of intercultural studies. As such, the article seeks to combine empirical data with extant theory in order to gain a deeper understanding into the dynamics of intercultural contact.     

Mining user interests over active topics on social networks

Inferring users’ interests from their activities on social networks has been an emerging research topic in the recent years. Most existing approaches heavily rely on the explicit contributions (posts) of a user and overlook users’ implicit interests, i.e., those potential user interests that the user did not explicitly mention but might have interest in. Given a set of active topics present in a social network in a specified time interval, our goal is to build an interest profile for a user over these topics by considering both explicit and implicit interests of the user. The reason for this is that the interests of free-riders and cold start users who constitute a large majority of social network users, cannot be directly identified from their explicit contributions to the social network. Specifically, to infer users’ implicit interests, we propose a graph-based link prediction schema that operates over a representation model consisting of three types of information: user explicit contributions to topics, relationships between users, and the relatedness between topics. Through extensive experiments on different variants of our representation model and considering both homogeneous and heterogeneous link prediction, we investigate how topic relatedness and users’ homophily relation impact the quality of inferring users’ implicit interests. Comparison with state-of-the-art baselines on a real-world Twitter dataset demonstrates the effectiveness of our model in inferring users’ interests in terms of perplexity and in the context of retweet prediction application. Moreover, we further show that the impact of our work is especially meaningful when considered in case of free-riders and cold start users.     

Relational mechanisms governing multifaceted collaborative behavior of academic scientists in six fields of science and engineering

Norms of academic science and engineering are moving in the direction of broader applicability and transferability of knowledge beyond the borders of the university. In response, scientists are expected to engage in collaboration that includes both basic and applied collaborative activities. More specifically, the norms of science are beginning to change to allow for novel forms of collaboration that involve sharing of research ideas on multiple facets of collaborative work. This paper examines the extent to which multifaceted collaboration is attributable to relational aspects of individuals’ networks. Specifically, we ask the question: what relational aspects of social capital determine multifaceted collaboration among scientists in six fields of science and engineering? Borrowing literature from social capital and science and technology (S&T) human capital, this paper develops a multi-level model of multifaceted collaboration and presents a set of testable hypotheses. Then using data from a national survey of men and women faculty in six fields, we analyze the multi-level data: relationship or dyad level (level 1) and ego level (level 2) with hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to predict multifaceted collaboration of academic scientists. Findings show that some relational characteristics explain multifaceted collaborative behavior as predicted, while others behave in unexpected ways. Conclusions place the findings in context for theory and policy.     

The formation and development of co-operations among South African universities

Organizational collaboration is “en vogue”, especially in higher education. So far, little is known about the mechanisms that explain co-operation formation and their impact on the social structure of the research systems. By examining co-authored research papers written at South African universities between 1966 and 2006, co-operation structures are visualized and analyzed from a social network perspective. Regression analysis indicates that status homophily and geographical proximity help to explain attachment processes among universities. Policy makers looking to overcome the steep status hierarchies among South African institutions of higher education need to provide incentives for establishing a stronger research culture in previously disadvantaged institutions. This will enhance their attractiveness for co-operation with reputable organizations and contribute to more equality among institutions.