SPEX: A Generic Framework for Enhancing Neural Social Recommendation

Social Recommender Systems (SRS) have attracted considerable attention since its accompanying service, social networks, helps increase user satisfaction and provides auxiliary information to improve recommendations. However, most existing SRS focus on social influence and ignore another essential social phenomenon, i.e., social homophily. Social homophily, which is the premise of social influence, indicates that people tend to build social relations with similar people and form influence propagation paths. In this article, we propose a generic framework Social PathExplorer (SPEX) to enhance neural SRS. SPEX treats the neural recommendation model as a black box and improves the quality of recommendations by modeling the social recommendation task, the formation of social homophily, and their mutual effect in the manner of multi-task learning. We design a Graph Neural Network based component for influence propagation path prediction to help SPEX capture the rich information conveyed by the formation of social homophily. We further propose an uncertainty based task balancing method to set appropriate task weights for the recommendation task and the path prediction task during the joint optimization. Extensive experiments have validated that SPEX can be easily plugged into various state-of-the-art neural recommendation models and help improve their performance. The source code of our work is available at: https://github.com/XMUDM/SPEX.

‘Clan’ and ‘Family’: Transformations of Sociality among the Wampar, Papua New Guinea

Changes in what anthropologists understand “clan” to refer to, and the social relations that many sociologists think of as constituting a “nuclear family” are at the centre of this article. It is based on ethnography among Wampar speakers in north-eastern Papua New Guinea (PNG). Among the Wampar, different, sometimes conflicting, transitions relevant to the emergence of the family as an accentuated social entity can be observed; yet all are a result of Christianisation and the local effects of capitalism. Nominally patrilineal clans (sagaseg), after a period when they seemed to have a somewhat diminished social significance, are again crucial social units: a result of the government’s requirement that statutory Incorporated Land Groups (ILGs) form the sole legal basis of compensation for land use. At the same time, there has been an increasing emphasis on the nuclear family, which, along with the aspiration for modern lifestyles (and their associated consumption patterns) and education for children, has reconfigured the gendered division of labour. Ideals of companionate marriage and values specific to the nuclear family have become much more critical to social practices. In some families, traditional notions of descent have lost importance to such an extent that some young people are no longer aware of their sagaseg membership. Wampar men and women discuss these conflicting tendencies and argue about the different values that ground them. Which argument prevails often depends on the specific position of the person confronting them.

The Concern of Energy Companies in Obtaining and Maintaining their Sustainable Value

The last years are distinguished by increasing the awareness of companies towards sustainable business, going beyond their traditional role of providing goods and services at competitive prices to meet customer requirements. Thus, companies will have to consider the effects of their best practices on the environment and society, in order to contribute to the progress of society and the protection of the environment, the essence of sustainable development being the coexistence of economic and social relations and environmental protection by implementing economic, social and environmental objectives. We can see that every company that seeks to become sustainable must consider approaches based on sustainable business practices geared to meeting customer needs. For companies listed on the stock market, the index that stands next to each company is the one that shows the level of sustainability, through corporate sustainability, long-term value is created for shareholders, taking into account all social factors, those related to the environment, as well as economic ones. All these considerations have led to the establishment of the general objective of the paper, through which the authors aim to explain and present the importance of sustainability/sustainable development in energy companies in conjunction with the UN guidelines on business and human rights, which will address with priority to the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030.

El Instituto Internacional de Agricultura: España y la «cuestión social», 1905-1923

In the agrarian context of the early 20th century, networks of experts and interest groups were created. These formed institutions across state borders to achieve prestige derived from their supranational character and ostensible technical and scientific capacity. The objective of this article is to analyse the impact in Spain of the International Institute of Agriculture (IIA), from the year of its creation until the advent of the Primo de Rivera dictatorship, through the lens of the “social question”: a concept that popularized the proposals and disagreements surrounding labour regulation. The research draws from the latest contributions in transnational history and internationalism, recent secondary sources about the IIA and primary sources that reflect how transnational IIA networks worked in and with Spain to address agricultural labour issues. The article concludes that the intensely transnational connections between agrarian elites, owners and technicians in the early 20th century transformed social relations in agriculture and agrarian public policies in Spain.

Manila

The focus of this article is on Metropolitan Manila (or simply Manila), a region spanning 619 square kilometers and comprising sixteen cities and one municipality: specifically, the cities of Caloocan, Las Piñas, Malabon, Manila, Mandaluyong, Marikina, Makati, Muntinlupa, Navotas, Quezon City, Parañaque, Pasay, Pasig, San Juan, Taguig, and Valenzuela, and the municipality of Pateros. Metro Manila was constituted by presidential decree in 1975, but its constituent cities are significantly older. It is the Philippines’ largest urban area, with a population of about thirteen million in 2015, as well as the country’s economic core, producing 37.5 percent of the national gross national product (GDP). Socially and spatially, however, it is not at all like the rest of the country, given its relative wealth and spectacular inequality—the latter owing less to the extent of inequality than to its spatial organization, a particularly intensive form of class segregation where upper- and middle-class residential and commercial enclaves abut the informal settlements of the urban poor as a general pattern. This landscape took shape as a result of four processes: rapid population growth beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, monumental city-building under the Marcos regime, democratization, and urban restructuring in the 1990s and 2000s. These processes constituted what are perhaps the city’s two main social actors, the urban poor and middle class. These labels are more conventional than accurate. Most of the “urban poor” are not poor by official standards, and the term “middle class” is much too vague. These groups find definition relationally, particularly in space, as “squatters” (slum dwellers) and “villagers” (enclave residents). This division, while fundamentally spatial, elaborated around the divide between formal and informal housing, has become the most important social division in the city since the late 20th century. Hence this article considers each group in some depth. While Metro Manila’s importance to the Philippines is clear, lamentably it has been largely overlooked as a source of urban theory. Manila provides an example par excellence of “late urbanization.” Analytically, it belongs with a set of cities in Latin America and Southeast Asia having undergone rapid population growth in the mid-20th century, resulting in urban landscapes distinguished by precarious work and informal housing. Second, it represents a particularly vivid case of urban space and social relations being restructured by market forces. The commodification of land and labor has proceeded relatively unimpeded in Manila, and class dynamics have crystallized in space relatively uncomplicated by racial and ethnic, religious, and other lines of division. As a result, class contention is especially intense, and class segregation is extreme. We might see in this landscape one possible urban future.

People's Trust in Authorities as a Phenomenon of Parasocial Relations in Modern Russian Society

The article features the concept of trust as a phenomenon of parasocial relations. Parasocial relationship is one-sided because its object is sometimes unaware of its subject. The phenomenon of people's trust in social institutions still remains largely understudied. The research was based on the sociocognitive approach developed by R. Falcone and C. Castelfranchi and the theory of social representations by S. Moscovici and D. Jodelet. In Russia, population's trust in authorities has always been low, and the COVID-19 pandemic is affecting it even more. The study revealed two forms of institutional trust, one based on social relations and the other based on parasocial relations. The institutional trust in modern Russia combines social and parasocial forms. They are closely interconnected, and the first can transform into the second. The deficit of social relations between Russian population and authorities in the conditions of declining institutional trust may lead to their replacement by less stable parasocial relations.

Structure, meanings and functions make from colors of personal nouns in ede in Vietnam

In linguistics, when studying nouns, specialists often divide them into two large groups, common nouns, and proper nouns. Based on general meaning, common nouns are divided into smaller groups, such as nouns with generalizing meaning, nouns without generalizing meaning. Nouns with generalizing meaning can be divided: nouns of units, nouns of people, nouns of objects, etc. Nouns for people include nouns denoting kinship relations, social relations. These are general nouns of people. They take up a sizeable amount and are an important word class of nouns. Nouns of people indicate not only people but also expressive nuances, cultural expressions of individuals or communities. The article clarifies the characteristics of structures, semantics, and functions as Ede vocative addressing words in Vietnam, thereby explaining the Ede people's cultural characteristics through nouns of people.

Patterns of Saliency and Semantic Features Distinguish Gaze of Expert and Novice Viewers of Surveillance Footage

When viewing the actions of others, we not only see patterns of body movements, but we also "see" the intentions and social relations of people, enabling us to understand the surrounding social environment. Previous research has shown that experienced forensic examiners, Closed Circuit Television (CCTV) operators, convey superior performance in identifying and predicting hostile intentions from surveillance footages than novices. However, it remains largely unknown what visual content CCTV operators actively attend to when viewing surveillance footage, and whether CCTV operators develop different strategies for active information seeking from what novices do. In this study, we conducted computational analysis for the gaze-centered stimuli captured by experienced CCTV operators and novices' eye movements when they viewed the same surveillance footage. These analyses examined how low-level visual features and object-level semantic features contribute to attentive gaze patterns associated with the two groups of participants. Low-level image features were extracted by a visual saliency model, whereas object-level semantic features were extracted by a deep convolutional neural network (DCNN), AlexNet, from gaze-centered regions. We found that visual regions attended by CCTV operators versus by novices can be reliably classified by patterns of saliency features and DCNN features. Additionally, CCTV operators showed greater inter-subject correlation in attending to saliency features and DCNN features than did novices. These results suggest that the looking behavior of CCTV operators differs from novices by actively attending to different patterns of saliency and semantic features in both low-level and high-level visual processing. Expertise in selectively attending to informative features at different levels of visual hierarchy may play an important role in facilitating the efficient detection of social relationships between agents and the prediction of harmful intentions.

Las redes son dinámicas: explorando cómo las relaciones sociales se entrelazan con la vida

Coincidiendo con la reciente publicación por Cambridge University Press de la versión inglesa del libro de Claire Bidart, Alain Degenne y Michel Grossetti (2020) Living in Networks. The Dynamics of Social Relations presentamos una reseña actualizada de las importantes aportaciones realizadas por los autores tanto para la literatura sobre el ciclo de vida desde una perspectiva relacional como para las perspectivas longitudinales del análisis de redes personales.

Contributions of Ethnography to Gendered Sociology: the French Jazz World

In the last few years a number of studies have explored the epistemological uses of the ethnographer’s gender in sociological research and the effects of gender on research results. These studies aim either to analyze how ethnographers can use their “gender” to open up observational possibilities, or to analyze observations made while maintaining as much control as possible over the conditions of their sociological interpretation. But relatively few papers discuss using ethnography to study gendered social relations. This article applies that approach to the observations made in our field study of the “world” of French jazz. We present here three of the main ways that the epistemological enrichment offered by ethnography may in turn enrich analysis of gender relations: access to “invisible” practices, analysis in terms of “the arrangement between the sexes", the possibility of generalization.