Nowcasting Entrepreneurship: Urban Third Place versus the Creative Class

Researchers have long debated whether entrepreneurship policy should focus on place or people. In this paper, we extend the place-based versus people-based theories using contemporaneous and geographically granular web-user online activity data to predict a region’s proclivity for entrepreneurship. We compare two theoretical hypotheses: the urban third places—informal gathering locations—that facilitate social interaction and entrepreneurship, in contrast to the creative class which fosters entrepreneurial energy and opportunity in a region. Specifically, we assess whether business formation has a stronger statistical relationship with the browsing behavior of individuals visiting websites associated with third place locations—e.g., restaurants or bars—or the concentration of web browsing behavior associated with “the creative class”. Using U.S. county-level data, we find that both urban third places and the creative class can predict about 70% of the variations in regional business formation, with the creative class having a slight competitive edge.

EscapeWine!

In the last year, lectures have been forced to adapt teaching to a virtual mode. The loss of face-to-face teaching has generated a detriment in active collaborative learning and has worsened the sharing of concepts. Although gamification has been widely used to improve the quality of teaching and the interest of the students, there is still a need for more interactive alternatives in teaching-learning systems to motivate students in remote lessons. EscapeWine! is an online activity designed for students of the Enology Degree to help them contextualize concepts from different disciplines and to strengthen their transversal skills in a motivating environment while providing the lectures with an online evaluation tool. Students must solve different riddles presented as tasks in Moodle platform to make a high-quality wine and not “get fired.” The results showed that the activity has the potential to be implemented as an innovative environment in virtual lessons.

Parental internet activity and communication through the new media - literature review

Global economic and social transformations, as well as technological progress, require people to modify used methods of communication. Traditional forms of information exchange have given way to the so-called new media enabling trouble-free communication using the Internet. These changes also affected family life. Digitization, appearing at each stage of the functioning of the family system, is to some extent based on remote communication processes, allowing its individual members to carry out their development tasks. According to the theory of social learning, parents constitute the basic pattern of behavior that children derive from and reproduce. Therefore, parental functioning in the virtual world is important for the later adaptive use of the Web by representatives of the younger generation. In addition, online communication acts as a source of information and a normalizer of social relations, fosters building interpersonal competencies and identity, and modifies the way of fulfilling the parental role. Based on the above-mentioned aspects, this article characterizes the process of digitization of motherhood and fatherhood, showing the basic ways and consequences of using the Internet by parents, and systematizing the knowledge about communication functions in the context of mothers and fathers online activity.

A Pipeline for Graph-Based Monitoring of the Changes in the Information Space of Russian Social Media during the Lockdown

With the COVID-19 outbreak and the subsequent lockdown, social media became a vital communication tool. The sudden outburst of online activity influenced information spread and consumption patterns. It increases the relevance of studying the dynamics of social networks and developing data processing pipelines that allow a comprehensive analysis of social media data in the temporal dimension. This paper scopes the weekly dynamics of the information space represented by Russian social media (Twitter and LiveJournal) during a critical period (massive COVID-19 outbreak and first governmental measures). The approach is twofold: 1) build the time series of topic similarity indicators by identifying COVID-related topics in each week and measuring user contribution to the topic space, and 2) cluster user activity and display user-topic relationships on graphs in a dashboard application. The paper describes the development of the pipeline, explains the choices made and provides a case study of the adaptation to virus control measures. The results confirm that social processes and behavior in response to pandemic-triggered changes can be successfully traced in social media. Moreover, the adaptation trends revealed by psychological and sociological studies are reflected in our data and can be explored using the proposed method.

Online Educational Activities of Students: Readiness and Self-Efficacy

Introduction. The widespread use of telelearning raises the issue of ensuring its effectiveness. Researchers consider various factors, but student readiness for such learning has not yet become the subject of systemic research in domestic science. The objectives of the article are: to reveal personality predictors of online learning success, to identify the components of student readiness for such learning (on the basis of foreign works); to characterize the readiness and self-efficacy of students’ online educational activities drawing on empirical data. Materials and Methods The researchers utilized the methods of theoretical analysis of the problem and the survey method. The author’s questionnaire was used to collect the data on the online activity of the students, self-assessment of readiness and effectiveness of online learning. 252 first- and second-year IT-students participated in the survey. Results. Five components of students’ readiness for online learning have been identified: attitude towards online learning, self-directed learning, time management, communicative competence, and technical competence. The students’ attitudes towards online learning are ambivalent. The students understand the importance of such training, but they are not willing to invest enough time and effort into it. Two interrelated components (self-directed learning and time management) contribute most to the overall online learning readiness. Online learning self-efficacy is related to technical competence and attitudes towards online learning. Discussion and Conclusion. The results will be useful for further research of the factors and ways improving online learning effectiveness. The research prospects are the development of psychodiagnostic tools for assessing the online learning experience and readiness of students and the diversification of the sampling by adding students from different programme tracks and with different experiences in online educational activities.

GENDER DIFFERENCE IN LANGUAGE USE AND LANGUAGE ATTITUDES IN ONLINE FACEBOOK POSTS OF UKRAINIAN MIGRANTS IN GERMANY

This article studies the gender difference in language use and language attitudes of Ukrainian communities in Germany in online social media. Since 2014, the conflict in the East of Ukraine has led to a remarkably intense flow of Ukrainian migrants to Western Europe giving rise to longstanding issues of identity formation, language use, and attitudes both within Ukraine and inside Ukrainian diaspora communities. This article will examine the Ukrainian diaspora in Germany on the subject of language ideologies, language use, and attitudes by analyzing its linguistic online activity. To do so, our analysis will draw on a range of interdisciplinary methodologies, including studies of linguistic identity positioning, gender in migration, imagined migrant communities, and studies of discursive constructions of nationhood, which explore language indexing in relation to national identity.

Authorship Attribution of Social Media and Literary Russian-Language Texts Using Machine Learning Methods and Feature Selection

Authorship attribution is one of the important fields of natural language processing (NLP). Its popularity is due to the relevance of implementing solutions for information security, as well as copyright protection, various linguistic studies, in particular, researches of social networks. The article is a continuation of the series of studies aimed at the identification of the Russian-language text’s author and reducing the required text volume. The focus of the study was aimed at the attribution of textual data created as a product of human online activity. The effectiveness of the models was evaluated on the two Russian-language datasets: literary texts and short comments from users of social networks. Classical machine learning (ML) algorithms, popular neural networks (NN) architectures, and their hybrids, including convolutional neural network (CNN), networks with long short-term memory (LSTM), Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT), and fastText, that have not been used in previous studies, were applied to solve the problem. A particular experiment was devoted to the selection of informative features using genetic algorithms (GA) and evaluation of the classifier trained on the optimal feature space. Using fastText or a combination of support vector machine (SVM) with GA reduced the time costs by half in comparison with deep NNs with comparable accuracy. The average accuracy for literary texts was 80.4% using SVM combined with GA, 82.3% using deep NNs, and 82.1% using fastText. For social media comments, results were 66.3%, 73.2%, and 68.1%, respectively.

Young people's use and experience of the Internet during the COVID-19 lockdown:

No studies we are aware of have explored youth’s experiences of the association between their Internet use and well-being during the COVID-19 lockdown. To fill this void, we used survey data of a representative sample (N = 734) of young Norwegians (16–26 years) collected a few weeks into the lockdown in May 2020. Findings show a substantial increase in use of several Internet activities—in particular, video calls and streaming services. Snapchat and Messenger were the most important services to keep in touch with friends. Online social support significantly predicts higher well-being, while heavy Internet use during a regular lockdown day significantly predicts low well-being, particularly among the older females. Analysis of free text responses shows that excessive Internet use during lockdown has led to poor well-being among many, both mentally (38 percent) and physically (17 percent). Many describe purposeless online scrolling or interactions as problematic. We conclude that future research on online well-being should focus more on perceived level of meaningful online activity.

Development of Online Child Support Activities by Older Adults; An Action Research During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Japanese communities have been attempting a novel type of childcare support, wherein community-dwelling older adults form a specialized group (support group) that aims to provide child support activities. Before the COVID-19 pandemic, the group gathered children and mothers in community spaces and conducted events. However, on-site support had to be halted due to the pandemic. In this study, we report a case of action research aimed at shifting the activities online. First, a suitable online support plan was explored by hosting several discussions with child-rearing mothers. A questionnaire survey was then conducted to determine the most-sought intervention contents (N=19). Finally, based on the results, an intervention was conducted. As a result of the discussions, the hosting of online programs was set as the main goal. Out of the ten activities studied, the three most popular activities were programming (n=17), English conversation (n=16), and science workshop (n=15). Based on the results, an online science workshop that built a Bottleium, a small aquarium using a bottle, was hosted. Eight children participated in the event. A post-activity survey revealed that all participants attended the online activity for the first time, and the parents were happy to have joined the activity that entertained their child during the quarantine period. Furthermore, focus group interviews were conducted with the support group; they reported being satisfied with the outcome and recognized the importance of their role as member of support group. The results suggest the positive effect of this project on both older adults and the children.