Geographically Modified PageRank Algorithms: Identifying the Spatial Concentration of Human Movement in a Geospatial Network

A network approach, which simplifies geographic settings as a form of nodes and links, emphasizes the connectivity and relationships of spatial features. Topological networks of spatial features are used to explore geographical connectivity and structures. The PageRank algorithm, a network metric, is often used to help identify important locations where people or automobiles concentrate in the geographical literature. However, geographic considerations, including proximity and location attractiveness, are ignored in most network metrics. The objective of the present study is to propose two geographically modified PageRank algorithms—Distance-Decay PageRank (DDPR) and Geographical PageRank (GPR)—that incorporate geographic considerations into PageRank algorithms to identify the spatial concentration of human movement in a geospatial network. Our findings indicate that in both intercity and within-city settings the proposed algorithms more effectively capture the spatial locations where people reside than traditional commonly-used network metrics. In comparing location attractiveness and distance decay, we conclude that the concentration of human movement is largely determined by the distance decay. This implies that geographic proximity remains a key factor in human mobility.     

Communication Network Reflects Social Instability in a Wild Siamang (Symphalangus syndactylus) Population

International Journal of Primatology - Long-range signaling, such as acoustic communication, is best understood within the broader context of all potential receivers. Exactly what kind of...     

Communication and Cognition in Primate Group Movement

We here review the communicative and cognitive processes underpinning collective group movement in animals. Generally, we identify 2 major axes to explain the dynamics of decision making in animal or human groups or aggregations: One describes whether the behavior is largely determined by simple rules such as keeping a specific distance from the neighbor, or whether global information is also factored in. The second axis describes whether or not the individual constituents of the group have overlapping or diverging interests. We then review the available evidence for baboons, which have been particularly well studied, but we also draw from further studies on other nonhuman primate species. Baboons and other nonhuman primates may produce specific signals in the group movement context, such as the notifying behavior of male hamadryas baboons at the departure from the sleeping site, or clear barks that are given by chacma baboons that have lost contact with the group or specific individuals. Such signals can be understood as expressions of specific motivational states of the individuals, but there is no evidence that the subjects intend to alter the knowledge state of the recipients. There is also no evidence for shared intentionality. The cognitive demands that are associated with decision making in the context of group coordination vary with the amount of information and possibly conflicting sources of information that need to be integrated. Thus, selective pressures should favor the use of signals that maintain group cohesion, while recipients should be selected to be able to make the decision that is in their own best interest in light of all the available information.     

Altered Network Communication Following a Neuroprotective Drug Treatment

Preconditioning is defined as a range of stimuli that allow cells to withstand subsequent anaerobic and other deleterious conditions. While cell protection under preconditioning is well established, this paper investigates the influence of neuroprotective preconditioning drugs, 4-aminopyridine and bicuculline (4-AP/bic), on synaptic communication across a broad network of in vitro rat cortical neurons. Using a permutation test, we evaluated cross-correlations of extracellular spiking activity across all pairs of recording electrodes on a 64-channel multielectrode array. The resulting functional connectivity maps were analyzed in terms of their graph-theoretic properties. A small-world effect was found, characterized by a functional network with high clustering coefficient and short average path length. Twenty-four hours after exposure to 4-AP/bic, small-world properties were comparable to control cultures that were not treated with the drug. Four hours following drug washout, however, the density of functional connections increased, while path length decreased and clustering coefficient increased. These alterations in functional connectivity were maintained at four days post-washout, suggesting that 4-AP/bic preconditioning leads to long-term effects on functional networks of cortical neurons. Because of their influence on communication efficiency in neuronal networks, alterations in small-world properties hold implications for information processing in brain systems. The observed relationship between density, path length, and clustering coefficient is captured by a phenomenological model where connections are added randomly within a spatially-embedded network. Taken together, results provide information regarding functional consequences of drug therapies that are overlooked in traditional viability studies and present the first investigation of functional networks under neuroprotective preconditioning.     

Social Environment and Feeding State Influence Movement Decisions in a Web-building Spider

It is well recognized that feeding rate has a major influence on the amount of movement between microhabitats for many animals. However, the role of other extrinsic and intrinsic factors, and particularly how these factors may interact, is not well understood. This three-part study examines the movement decisions of a web-building spider, Latrodectus hesperus , by assessing microhabitat tenacity in established spiders and by testing how the presence of conspecific neighbours and the combined influence of individual feeding state (determined by prior feeding experience) and neighbour presence influence microhabitat residence time in unestablished spiders. The results show that naturally established spiders did not leave their microhabitats readily, emphasizing the importance of choosing a profitable location. Unestablished spiders stayed longer in microhabitats occupied by conspecifics than in unoccupied ones, and there was practically no cannibalism even though neighbours shared webs. Furthermore, feeding state and neighbour presence showed an interactive effect on microhabitat residence time. When spiders were housed alone, microhabitat residence time increased with feeding state. However, in the presence of conspecifics, spiders had a low propensity to move, regardless of feeding state. Together, these results demonstrate the combined importance of grouping dynamics and feeding state in shaping movement decisions.     

水霉Saprolegnia菌丝内细胞颗粒运动的特征

水霉菌丝内细胞颗粒的运动有布朗运动和跳跃运动两种形式,跳跃运动的速度在０．０９至４μｍ／ｓ之间。细胞颗粒运动的速度时制改变．不是匀速运动。在同一根菌丝内细胞颗粒运动的速度与颗粒大小无明显相关性;在不同的菌丝内细胞颗粒运动的速度差异明显。细胞颗粒有共同的运动轨道,运动轨道弯曲,并与细胞长轴基本平行。在同一运动轨道上,不同细胞颗粒的运动速度不同。     

The Mesh of Civilizations in the Global Network of Digital Communication

Conflicts fueled by popular religious mobilization have rekindled the controversy surrounding Samuel Huntington’s theory of changing international alignments in the Post-Cold War era. In The Clash of Civilizations, Huntington challenged Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis that liberal democracy had emerged victorious out of Post-war ideological and economic rivalries. Based on a top-down analysis of the alignments of nation states, Huntington famously concluded that the axes of international geo-political conflicts had reverted to the ancient cultural divisions that had characterized most of human history. Until recently, however, the debate has had to rely more on polemics than empirical evidence. Moreover, Huntington made this prediction in 1993, before social media connected the world’s population. Do digital communications attenuate or echo the cultural, religious, and ethnic “fault lines” posited by Huntington prior to the global diffusion of social media? We revisit Huntington''s thesis using hundreds of millions of anonymized email and Twitter communications among tens of millions of worldwide users to map the global alignment of interpersonal relations. Contrary to the supposedly borderless world of cyberspace, a bottom-up analysis confirms the persistence of the eight culturally differentiated civilizations posited by Huntington, with the divisions corresponding to differences in language, religion, economic development, and spatial distance.Have social media created a global village that spans cultural differences and traditional borders? For most of the postwar period, research on international alignments was informed by World Systems Theory, an approach that emphasized the influence of North-South economic divisions and East-West ideological divisions [1]. Following the collapse of the Soviet Union, Fukuyama [2] proposed that those divisions had culminated in the triumph of liberal democratic systems, signaling the “end of history.” In The Clash of Civilizations [3], Fukuyama’s mentor, Samuel Huntington, acknowledged that “the fundamental source of conflict in this new world will not be primarily ideological or primarily economic,” but he challenged Fukyama’s prediction of global consensus:The great divisions among humankind and the dominating source of conflict will be cultural. Nation states will remain the most powerful actors in world affairs, but the principal conflicts of global politics will occur between nations and groups of different civilizations. The clash of civilizations will dominate global politics. The fault lines between civilizations will be the battle lines of the future.The world has undergone substantial changes since Huntington made this prediction in 1993, including rapid economic growth in South Asia and South America and global diffusion of social media connecting the world’s population. Moreover, the evidence for Huntington''s theory of international global alignment was largely top-down, based on the political and economic relations among culturally differentiated nation states. The growing availability of digital traces of human communications now makes it possible to revisit Huntington''s thesis by taking a bottom-up view, based on interpersonal interactions among millions of individuals instead of the alignments of state actors. Have these online interactions created a global village that spans not only the old Cold War divisions but Huntington’s cultural fault lines as well?To find out, we used hundreds of millions of anonymized email and Twitter communications among tens of millions of worldwide users to map global patterns of transnational interpersonal communication. We measure the density, not the content, of interpersonal communication, and our findings do not address Huntington’s highly controversial warning of the potential for conflict between cultures. Nevertheless, the observed patterns provide a unique angle on changing global alignments in the Post-Cold War era.Our work builds on a study by Leskovec and Horvitz of the global flows of online Instant Messaging (IM) [4], extending that research in four important ways. First, we measure the density of social ties, not the density of message traffic. The “fault lines of civilizations” are indicated not by the number of messages two people exchange across borders but by the number of individuals in each country who exchange messages with one another. Second, we measure the density of social ties after taking into account differences in language, geo-location, Cold War alignment, economic development, and religion. (NB: In addition to analyzing communication densities between country pairs, Leskovec and Horvitz also measured global properties of the social network among pairs of individuals, but they did not use the latter to analyze social densities between country pairs. They also found that between-country communication densities were highly correlated with language and spatial distance, but they did not measure communication densities relative to the expected density given similarities of language and geo-location.) Third, we use multiple platforms (Yahoo! email and Twitter) to provide greater robustness and to avoid the possibility that our results are artifacts of the idiosyncrasies of a particular service. Twitter differs from email in two ways that are relevant to our study: most email exchanges are dyadic while Twitter messages are publicly visible, and the Twitter platform makes it much easier for users to discover one another, thereby reducing the tendency for online interactions to reflect pre-existing relationships. Fourth, we correct for internet access and market penetration, without which online traffic flows confound the strength of interpersonal ties with the popularity of a given communication medium. By taking into account differences in Internet access and market penetration, we are able to estimate the global network of social ties derived from the interpersonal flows of Internet communications.We measured communication density based on the number of observed bi-directed ties between users in two countries, relative to the maximum possible number of such ties, given the number of users in each country and the number of people with Internet access. (NB: The email analysis was based on anonymized geo-tagged edge lists. Prior to the analysis, the edge lists were anonymized as follows: Individual email accounts were assigned a random numeric identifier, after which the original email addresses were deleted. The email message content was not accessed or used for this study. Other than country, the edge lists we analyzed contained no individually identifiable information. The project was approved by the Cornell University IRB. The Twitter dataset was provided to us already anonymized by the team that collected it [5]. Scripts for the processing of that dataset are available from http://dx.doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.1304572.)A bi-directed email tie exists between two users if at least two messages are exchanged, one in each direction. A bi-directed Twitter tie exists if two users each follow the other. We defined pairwise communication density as the ratio between the observed number of bi-directed ties and the number of expected ties, given the number of subscribers and the number of Internet users.We obtained qualitatively similar results for email and Twitter communication densities and therefore report only the combined density measures for the two platforms. We also measured densities net of geographic proximity, shared language, population size, economic development, and colonial history.     

Rivalry between Stink Bug Females in a Vibrational Communication Network

In the field, male pheromone attracts stink bugs to meet on the same plant and triggers females to call a male by the emission of the calling song. As first among Pentatomidae we describe female rivalry in Chinavia impicticornis, C. ubica and Euschistus heros. Rivalry starts in C. impicticornis by synchronized exchange of the first type of the female calling song pulse trains and proceeds by one of them either to change pulse trains from the first to the second type or to produce readily repeated single pulses. Both reactions either inhibit calling of the rival female or trigger her to respond by alternation with the second type of the calling song pulse trains. Female rivalry in C. ubica differs by the emission of the rival song that replaces alternation with the second type of the calling song typical for C. impicticornis. E. heros females synchronize pulses of the calling song duets and induce emission of the female rival song by one of them that partly inhibits singing of the other. These competitive interactions in Chinavia species reduce the proportion of couples when compared with single couples on a plant. Contrary to both Chinavia species, E. heros female rivalry does not inhibit male response, male signals overlap female emissions and create complex vibrations with modified amplitude modulation pattern caused by interference.     

Spread of Academic Success in a High School Social Network

Application of social network analysis to education has revealed how social network positions of K-12 students correlate with their behavior and academic achievements. However, no study has been conducted on how their social network influences their academic progress over time. Here we investigated correlations between high school students’ academic progress over one year and the social environment that surrounds them in their friendship network. We found that students whose friends’ average GPA (Grade Point Average) was greater (or less) than their own had a higher tendency toward increasing (or decreasing) their academic ranking over time, indicating social contagion of academic success taking place in their social network.     

Social Network Analysis and Mining to Monitor and Identify Problems with Large-Scale Information and Communication Technology Interventions

The published literature reveals several arguments concerning the strategic importance of information and communication technology (ICT) interventions for developing countries where the digital divide is a challenge. Large-scale ICT interventions can be an option for countries whose regions, both urban and rural, present a high number of digitally excluded people. Our goal was to monitor and identify problems in interventions aimed at certification for a large number of participants in different geographical regions. Our case study is the training at the Telecentros.BR, a program created in Brazil to install telecenters and certify individuals to use ICT resources. We propose an approach that applies social network analysis and mining techniques to data collected from Telecentros.BR dataset and from the socioeconomics and telecommunications infrastructure indicators of the participants’ municipalities. We found that (i) the analysis of interactions in different time periods reflects the objectives of each phase of training, highlighting the increased density in the phase in which participants develop and disseminate their projects; (ii) analysis according to the roles of participants (i.e., tutors or community members) reveals that the interactions were influenced by the center (or region) to which the participant belongs (that is, a community contained mainly members of the same region and always with the presence of tutors, contradicting expectations of the training project, which aimed for intense collaboration of the participants, regardless of the geographic region); (iii) the social network of participants influences the success of the training: that is, given evidence that the degree of the community member is in the highest range, the probability of this individual concluding the training is 0.689; (iv) the North region presented the lowest probability of participant certification, whereas the Northeast, which served municipalities with similar characteristics, presented high probability of certification, associated with the highest degree in social networking platform.     

Place-Based Attributes Predict Community Membership in a Mobile Phone Communication Network

Social networks can be organized into communities of closely connected nodes, a property known as modularity. Because diseases, information, and behaviors spread faster within communities than between communities, understanding modularity has broad implications for public policy, epidemiology and the social sciences. Explanations for community formation in social networks often incorporate the attributes of individual people, such as gender, ethnicity or shared activities. High modularity is also a property of large-scale social networks, where each node represents a population of individuals at a location, such as call flow between mobile phone towers. However, whether or not place-based attributes, including land cover and economic activity, can predict community membership for network nodes in large-scale networks remains unknown. We describe the pattern of modularity in a mobile phone communication network in the Dominican Republic, and use a linear discriminant analysis (LDA) to determine whether geographic context can explain community membership. Our results demonstrate that place-based attributes, including sugar cane production, urbanization, distance to the nearest airport, and wealth, correctly predicted community membership for over 70% of mobile phone towers. We observed a strongly positive correlation (r = 0.97) between the modularity score and the predictive ability of the LDA, suggesting that place-based attributes can accurately represent the processes driving modularity. In the absence of social network data, the methods we present can be used to predict community membership over large scales using solely place-based attributes.     

趋磁细菌运动特性的研究进展

细菌的运动性是影响其生存及致病的一个关键条件,同时也为合成和开发仿生运动体、微型机器人等提供了有效的模型.趋磁细菌具有胞内磁小体从而能够感知磁场的变化,进而影响其运动行为.目前,这种外部磁场与生物体的远程响应模式已在环境、医疗、材料等领域有广泛应用.因此,聚焦于趋磁细菌的运动特性,综述了趋磁细菌运动行为的表征、运动机理...     

Geographies of an Online Social Network

How is online social media activity structured in the geographical space? Recent studies have shown that in spite of earlier visions about the “death of distance”, physical proximity is still a major factor in social tie formation and maintenance in virtual social networks. Yet, it is unclear, what are the characteristics of the distance dependence in online social networks. In order to explore this issue the complete network of the former major Hungarian online social network is analyzed. We find that the distance dependence is weaker for the online social network ties than what was found earlier for phone communication networks. For a further analysis we introduced a coarser granularity: We identified the settlements with the nodes of a network and assigned two kinds of weights to the links between them. When the weights are proportional to the number of contacts we observed weakly formed, but spatially based modules resemble to the borders of macro-regions, the highest level of regional administration in the country. If the weights are defined relative to an uncorrelated null model, the next level of administrative regions, counties are reflected.     

Surveying Hard-to-Reach Groups Through Sampled Respondents in a Social Network

The sampling frame in most social science surveys misses members of certain groups, such as the homeless or individuals living with HIV. These groups are known as hard-to-reach groups. One strategy for learning about these groups, or subpopulations, involves reaching hard-to-reach group members through their social network. In this paper we compare the efficiency of two common methods for subpopulation size estimation using data from standard surveys. These designs are examples of mental link tracing designs. These designs begin with a randomly sampled set of network members (nodes) and then reach other nodes indirectly through questions asked to the sampled nodes. Mental link tracing designs cost significantly less than traditional link tracing designs, yet introduce additional sources of potential bias. We examine the influence of one such source of bias using simulation studies. We then demonstrate our findings using data from the General Social Survey collected in 2004 and 2006. Additionally, we provide survey design suggestions for future surveys incorporating such designs.     

Social Structure of a Semi-Free Ranging Group of Mandrills (Mandrillus sphinx): A Social Network Analysis

The difficulty involved in following mandrills in the wild means that very little is known about social structure in this species. Most studies initially considered mandrill groups to be an aggregation of one-male/multifemale units, with males occupying central positions in a structure similar to those observed in the majority of baboon species. However, a recent study hypothesized that mandrills form stable groups with only two or three permanent males, and that females occupy more central positions than males within these groups. We used social network analysis methods to examine how a semi-free ranging group of 19 mandrills is structured. We recorded all dyads of individuals that were in contact as a measure of association. The betweenness and the eigenvector centrality for each individual were calculated and correlated to kinship, age and dominance. Finally, we performed a resilience analysis by simulating the removal of individuals displaying the highest betweenness and eigenvector centrality values. We found that related dyads were more frequently associated than unrelated dyads. Moreover, our results showed that the cumulative distribution of individual betweenness and eigenvector centrality followed a power function, which is characteristic of scale-free networks. This property showed that some group members, mostly females, occupied a highly central position. Finally, the resilience analysis showed that the removal of the two most central females split the network into small subgroups and increased the network diameter. Critically, this study confirms that females appear to occupy more central positions than males in mandrill groups. Consequently, these females appear to be crucial for group cohesion and probably play a pivotal role in this species.     

Social Network Analysis for Program Implementation

This paper introduces the use of social network analysis theory and tools for implementation research. The social network perspective is useful for understanding, monitoring, influencing, or evaluating the implementation process when programs, policies, practices, or principles are designed and scaled up or adapted to different settings. We briefly describe common barriers to implementation success and relate them to the social networks of implementation stakeholders. We introduce a few simple measures commonly used in social network analysis and discuss how these measures can be used in program implementation. Using the four stage model of program implementation (exploration, adoption, implementation, and sustainment) proposed by Aarons and colleagues [1] and our experience in developing multi-sector partnerships involving community leaders, organizations, practitioners, and researchers, we show how network measures can be used at each stage to monitor, intervene, and improve the implementation process. Examples are provided to illustrate these concepts. We conclude with expected benefits and challenges associated with this approach.