ON THE CHURCHNESS OF THE POPULATION OF THE KALININ REGION IN 1930-1950 (FROM MEMORIES OF «CHILDREN OF WAR»)

В статье представлены предварительные результаты исследования в рамках проекта: «Церковная жизнь в советском обществе в 1940-1950-гг.: религиозные практики населения в Калининской области в воспоминаниях «детей войны». Обыденная религиозность рассматривается сквозь призму восприятия представителей постреволюционного поколения, рожденных в СССР в 1928-1945 гг. и проживающих в настоящее время на территории Тверской области. Для анализа их религиозного опыта привлекались материалы анкетирования, которые содержат социокультурные характеристики респондентов, отражают их личные воспоминания, семейные предания. Показано, что в условиях упадка церковной жизни семья приобретает черты социального звена, которое имеет сакральное значение: в его пределах протекает религиозная жизнь, совершаются религиозные ритуалы. He article presents the preliminary results of the study accordingly the project: «Church life in the Soviet society in 1940-1950: the religious practices of the population of the Kalinin region in the memories of «children of war». Ordinary religiousness was examined through the prism of perceptions of the postrevolutionary generation, born in the USSR in 1928-1945 and lived on the territory of the Tver Region at present. In order to analyze their religious experience the materials of the questionnaires, which contain sociocultural characteristics of the respondents, reflect their personal memories and family traditions, were used. It is shown that in the conditions of the decline of parochial life a family acquires the features of a social link that has a sacral meaning: religious life and rituals take place within it.

Link Recommendation for Social Influence Maximization

Social link recommendation systems, like “People-you-may-know” on Facebook, “Who-to-follow” on Twitter, and “Suggested-Accounts” on Instagram assist the users of a social network in establishing new connections with other users. While these systems are becoming more and more important in the growth of social media, they tend to increase the popularity of users that are already popular. Indeed, since link recommenders aim to predict user behavior, they accelerate the creation of links that are likely to be created in the future and, consequently, reinforce social bias by suggesting few (popular) users, giving few chances to most users to create new connections and increase their popularity. In this article, we measure the popularity of a user by means of her social influence, which is her capability to influence other users’ opinions, and we propose a link recommendation algorithm that evaluates the links to suggest according to their increment in social influence instead of their likelihood of being created. In detail, we give a factor approximation algorithm for the problem of maximizing the social influence of a given set of target users by suggesting a fixed number of new connections considering the Linear Threshold model as model for diffusion. We experimentally show that, with few new links and small computational time, our algorithm is able to increase by far the social influence of the target users. We compare our algorithm with several baselines and show that it is the most effective one in terms of increased influence.

Unifying Online and Offline Preference for Social Link Prediction

Recent advances in network representation learning have enabled significant improvement in the link prediction task, which is at the core of many downstream applications. As an increasing amount of mobility data become available because of the development of location-based technologies, we argue that this resourceful mobility data can be used to improve link prediction tasks. In this paper, we propose a novel link prediction framework that utilizes user offline check-in behavior combined with user online social relations. We model user offline location preference via a probabilistic factor model and represent user social relations using neural network representation learning. To capture the interrelationship of these two sources, we develop an anchor link method to align these two different user latent representations. Furthermore, we employ locality-sensitive hashing to project the aggregated user representation into a binary matrix, which not only preserves the data structure but also improves the efficiency of convolutional network learning. By comparing with several baseline methods that solely rely on social networks or mobility data, we show that our unified approach significantly improves the link prediction performance. Summary of Contribution: This paper proposes a novel framework that utilizes both user offline and online behavior for social link prediction by developing several machine learning algorithms, such as probabilistic factor model, neural network embedding, anchor link model, and locality-sensitive hashing. The scope and mission has the following aspects: (1) We develop a data and knowledge modeling approach that demonstrates significant performance improvement. (2) Our method can efficiently manage large-scale data. (3) We conduct rigorous experiments on real-world data sets and empirically show the effectiveness and the efficiency of our proposed method. Overall, our paper can contribute to the advancement of social link prediction, which can spur many downstream applications in information systems and computer science.

Heidegger and Lacan

Lacanian psychoanalysis cannot disregard its debts to philosophy, especially continental philosophy. Lacan’s conception of language is derived from multiple philosophical sources (i.e., Plato, Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard) including Heidegger’s philosophy of language and pride of place. Heidegger’s view of language prepares the ground for reversing the relationship between language and human beings, overcoming common sense about language and the communicative model of language. Language is much more than a set of labels; it shapes the human world and structures social relations themselves. In addition, language acts as a social link. The function of language as a social link allows us to think of it in relation to the Law and the very function of this human subjectivity. In reference to the Other of the Law and language, the subject finds her recognition, and this implies that the language is not reducible to communication. The process of technical-scientific domination of Western institutions leads to a reduction of their functions to the formal aspects, which may lead to a reification of the human as well as a state of alienation.