Multilingualism and speech-language competence in early childhood: Impact on academic and social-emotional outcomes at school

This large-scale longitudinal population study provided a rare opportunity to consider the interface between multilingualism and speech-language competence on children’s academic and social-emotional outcomes and to determine whether differences between groups at 4 to 5 years persist, deepen, or disappear with time and schooling. Four distinct groups were identified from the Kindergarten cohort of the Longitudinal Study of Australian Children (LSAC) (1) English-only + typical speech and language (n = 2,012); (2) multilingual + typical speech and language (n = 476); (3) English-only + speech and language concern (n = 643); and (4) multilingual + speech and language concern (n = 109). Two analytic approaches were used to compare these groups. First, a matched case-control design was used to randomly match multilingual children with speech and language concern (group 4, n = 109) to children in groups 1, 2, and 3 on gender, age, and family socio-economic position in a cross-sectional comparison of vocabulary, school readiness, and behavioral adjustment. Next, analyses were applied to the whole sample to determine longitudinal effects of group membership on teachers’ ratings of literacy, numeracy, and behavioral adjustment at ages 6 to 7 and 8 to 9 years. At 4 to 5 years, multilingual children with speech and language concern did equally well or better than English-only children (with or without speech and language concern) on school readiness tests but performed more poorly on measures of English vocabulary and behavior. At ages 6 to 7 and 8 to 9, the early gap between English-only and multilingual children had closed. Multilingualism was not found to contribute to differences in literacy and numeracy outcomes at school; instead, outcomes were more related to concerns about children’s speech and language in early childhood. There were no group differences for socio-emotional outcomes. Early evidence for the combined risks of multilingualism plus speech and language concern was not upheld into the school years.

Factors associated with health risk behavior among school children in urban Vietnam

Background Health risk behavior among young people is a public health problem in Vietnam. In addition, road traffic injuries are the leading cause of death for those aged 15–29 years. The consequences can be devastating for adolescents and their families, and can create a significant economic burden on society. Objective: The aim of this study was to identify protective and risk factors that may influence three health risk behaviors among school children: suicidal thinking (ST), drinking alcohol (DA), and underage motorbike driving (MD). Methods A cross-sectional survey of 972 adolescents (aged 12–15 years) was conducted in two secondary schools in Hanoi, Vietnam. The schools were purposely selected, one each from the inner city and a suburban area, from which classes (grade 6 to 8) were randomly selected. All students attending classes on survey days took part in the survey. The anonymous, self-completed questionnaire included measures of risk behavior, school connectedness, parental bonding, and other factors. Multivariable regression models were used to examine associations between the independent variables and the three health risk behaviors controlling for confounding factors. Results Young people in the inner city school reported a higher prevalence of all three risk behaviors than those in the suburban area (ST: 16.1% [95% confidence interval, or CI, 12.9–19.3] versus 4.6% [95% CI 2.7–6.5], p<0.001; DA: 20.3% [95% CI 16.8–23.8] versus 8.3% [95% CI 5.8–10.8], p<0.001, and MD: 10.1% [95% CI 7.4–12.8] versus 5.7% [95% CI 3.6–7.8], p<0.01). School connectedness and mother and father care appeared to be significant protective factors. For males, bullying in school was associated with suicidal thoughts, whereas for both males and females, school connectedness may be protective against suicidal ideation. Conclusion This study supports findings from other nations regarding suicidal thoughts and alcohol use, and appears to be one of the first to examine risk and protective factors forMD. Health promotion within schools should be introduced to improve students’ feelings of connectedness in combination with communication and education campaigns focusing on parental care and engaging teachers for the promotion of safer, supportive school environments.

Susceptibility to social engineering in social networking sites: The case of Facebook

Past research has suggested that social engineering poses the most significant security risk. Recent studies have suggested that social networking sites (SNSs) are the most common source of social engineering attacks. The risk of social engineering attacks in SNSs is associated with the difficulty of making accurate judgments regarding source credibility in the virtual environment of SNSs. In this paper, we quantitatively investigate source credibility dimensions in terms of social engineering on Facebook, as well as the source characteristics that influence Facebook users to judge an attacker as credible, therefore making them susceptible to victimization. Moreover, in order to predict users’ susceptibility to social engineering victimization based on their demographics, we investigate the effectiveness of source characteristics on different demographic groups by measuring the consent intentions and behavior responses of users to social engineering requests using a role-play experiment.

Social skills, expectancies, and drinking in adolescents

Research in the field of teenage drinking behavior has shown relationships between both social skills and drinking and alcohol expectancies and drinking. The present research investigated the comparative power of both of these sets of variables in predicting teenage drinking behavior, as well as looking at the contribution of more global cognitive structures. It was hypothesised that adolescents with high alcohol involvement would be discriminated from those with low involvement on the basis of social skills, cognitive structures, and alcohol expectancies. Seven hundred thirty-two adolescents participated in the study. Results indicated that adolescent alcohol involvement was associated with social skills deficits, positive alcohol expectancies, and negative cognitive structures concerning parents and teachers. The results revealed that, although the bulk of the variance in drinking behavior was explained by the independent effects of social skills and expectancies, the interaction of the two constructs explained an additional and significant proportion of the variance. Implications for preventive and treatment programs are discussed.

Social perception and cognition : processing of gestures, postures and facial expressions in the human brain

Humans are a social species with the internal capability to process social information from other humans. To understand others behavior and to react accordingly, it is necessary to infer their internal states, emotions and aims, which are conveyed by subtle nonverbal bodily cues such as postures, gestures, and facial expressions. This thesis investigates the brain functions underlying the processing of such social information. Studies I and II of this thesis explore the neural basis of perceiving pain from another person s facial expressions by means of functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) and magnetoencephalography (MEG). In Study I, observing another s facial expression of pain activated the affective pain system (previously associated with self-experienced pain) in accordance with the intensity of the observed expression. The strength of the response in anterior insula was also linked to the observer s empathic abilities. The cortical processing of facial pain expressions advanced from the visual to temporal-lobe areas at similar latencies (around 300 500 ms) to those previously shown for emotional expressions such as fear or disgust. Study III shows that perceiving a yawning face is associated with middle and posterior STS activity, and the contagiousness of a yawn correlates negatively with amygdalar activity. Study IV explored the brain correlates of interpreting social interaction between two members of the same species, in this case human and canine. Observing interaction engaged brain activity in very similar manner for both species. Moreover, the body and object sensitive brain areas of dog experts differentiated interaction from noninteraction in both humans and dogs whereas in the control subjects, similar differentiation occurred only for humans. Finally, Study V shows the engagement of the brain area associated with biological motion when exposed to the sounds produced by a single human being walking. However, more complex pattern of activation, with the walking sounds of several persons, suggests that as the social situation becomes more complex so does the brain response. Taken together, these studies demonstrate the roles of distinct cortical and subcortical brain regions in the perception and sharing of others internal states via facial and bodily gestures, and the connection of brain responses to behavioral attributes.

I know what you did this summer: Users' behavior on internet

Human age is surrounded by assumed set of rules and behaviors imposed by local culture and the society they live in. This paper introduces software that counts the presence of a person on the Internet and examines the activities he/she conducts online. The paper answers questions such as how "old" are you on the Internet? How soon will a newbie be exposed to adult websites? How long will it take for a new Internet user to know about social networking sites? And how many years a user has to surf online to celebrate his/her first "birthday" of Internet presence? Paper findings from a database of 105 school and university students containing their every click of first 24 hours of Internet usage are presented. The findings provide valuable insights for Internet Marketing, ethics, Internet business and the mapping of Internet life with real life. Privacy and ethical issues related to the study have been discussed at the end. © Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010.

Influencing customers through customers: Simulation of herd behavior in supermarkets

This work proposes a supermarket optimization simulation model called Swarm-Moves is based on self organized complex system studies to identify parameters and their values that can influence customers to buy more on impulse in a given period of time. In the proposed model, customers are assumed to have trolleys equipped with technology like RFID that can aid the passing of products' information directly from the store to them in real-time and vice-versa. Therefore, they can get the information about other customers purchase patterns and constantly informing the store of their own shopping behavior. This can be easily achieved because the trolleys "know" what products they contain at any point. The Swarm-Moves simulation is the virtual supermarket providing the visual display to run and test the proposed model. The simulation is also flexible to incorporate any given model of customers' behavior tailored to particular supermarket, settings, events or promotions. The results, although preliminary, are promising to use RFID technology for marketing products in supermarkets and provide several dimensions to look for influencing customers via feedback, real-time marketing, target advertisement and on-demand promotions. ©2009 IEEE.

Knowledge Sharing in Multinational Corporations - A Social Captal Perspective (summary section only)

Multinational corporations (MNCs) are commonly perceived as networks of differentiated units, dependent for their competitive edge on the sharing of different kinds of internal resources. This ‘differentiated network’ view of the MNC strongly emphasizes the crucial role of interunit knowledge sharing, the topic of this thesis. The five essays presented here contribute to the research on interunit knowledge sharing in MNCs by focusing on the roles played by language, identity, and feedback seeking in the knowledge sharing process. While these factors have occasionally been brought up in previous research as potentially relevant for interunit knowledge sharing, they have so far been subject to limited empirical examination – an important omission which this thesis is an effort to redress. Furthermore, the treatment of the topic is anchored in a theoretical framework based on social capital. This perspective contributes to MNC research by providing a comprehensive framework for examining the significance of social relationships in interunit interaction. The findings can be summarized in two main points. Firstly, language skills and shared identity appear to promote the accumulation of interunit social capital. Secondly, high levels of interunit social capital seem to promote interunit knowledge sharing and feedback seeking. These observations raise a number of both theoretical and practical issues of considerable relevance for MNC management.

Social Life of Captive Asian Elephants (Elephas maximus) in Southern India: Implications for Elephant Welfare

Asian elephants in the wild live in complex social societies; in captivity, however, management often occurs in solitary conditions, especially at the temples and private places of India. To investigate the effect of social isolation, this study assessed the social group sizes and the presence of stereotypies among 140 captive Asian elephants managed in 3 captive systems (private, temple, and forest department) in Tamil Nadu, India, between 2003 and 2005. The majority of the facilities in the private (82%) and temple (95%) systems held a single elephant without opportunity for social interaction. The forest department managed the elephants in significantly larger groups than the private and temple systems. Among the 3 systems, the proportion of elephants with stereotypies was the highest in temple (49%) followed by private system (26%) and the forest department facility (6%); this correlates with the social isolation trend observed in the 3 systems and suggests a possible link between social isolation and abnormal elephant behavior separate from other environmental factors. The results of this study indicate it would be of greater benefit to elephant well being to keep the patchily distributed solitary temple and private elephants who are socially compatible and free from contagious diseases in small social groups at ocommon elephant houseso for socialization.

A Shapley Value-Based Approach to Discover Influential Nodes in Social Networks

Our study concerns an important current problem, that of diffusion of information in social networks. This problem has received significant attention from the Internet research community in the recent times, driven by many potential applications such as viral marketing and sales promotions. In this paper, we focus on the target set selection problem, which involves discovering a small subset of influential players in a given social network, to perform a certain task of information diffusion. The target set selection problem manifests in two forms: 1) top-k nodes problem and 2) lambda-coverage problem. In the top-k nodes problem, we are required to find a set of k key nodes that would maximize the number of nodes being influenced in the network. The lambda-coverage problem is concerned with finding a set of k key nodes having minimal size that can influence a given percentage lambda of the nodes in the entire network. We propose a new way of solving these problems using the concept of Shapley value which is a well known solution concept in cooperative game theory. Our approach leads to algorithms which we call the ShaPley value-based Influential Nodes (SPINs) algorithms for solving the top-k nodes problem and the lambda-coverage problem. We compare the performance of the proposed SPIN algorithms with well known algorithms in the literature. Through extensive experimentation on four synthetically generated random graphs and six real-world data sets (Celegans, Jazz, NIPS coauthorship data set, Netscience data set, High-Energy Physics data set, and Political Books data set), we show that the proposed SPIN approach is more powerful and computationally efficient. Note to Practitioners-In recent times, social networks have received a high level of attention due to their proven ability in improving the performance of web search, recommendations in collaborative filtering systems, spreading a technology in the market using viral marketing techniques, etc. It is well known that the interpersonal relationships (or ties or links) between individuals cause change or improvement in the social system because the decisions made by individuals are influenced heavily by the behavior of their neighbors. An interesting and key problem in social networks is to discover the most influential nodes in the social network which can influence other nodes in the social network in a strong and deep way. This problem is called the target set selection problem and has two variants: 1) the top-k nodes problem, where we are required to identify a set of k influential nodes that maximize the number of nodes being influenced in the network and 2) the lambda-coverage problem which involves finding a set of influential nodes having minimum size that can influence a given percentage lambda of the nodes in the entire network. There are many existing algorithms in the literature for solving these problems. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm which is based on a novel interpretation of information diffusion in a social network as a cooperative game. Using this analogy, we develop an algorithm based on the Shapley value of the underlying cooperative game. The proposed algorithm outperforms the existing algorithms in terms of generality or computational complexity or both. Our results are validated through extensive experimentation on both synthetically generated and real-world data sets.

Ovarian development in a primitively eusocial wasp: Social interactions affect behaviorally dominant and subordinate wasps in opposite directions relative to solitary females

In many primitively eusocial wasp species new nests are founded either by a single female or by a small group of females. In the single foundress nests, the lone female develops her ovaries, lays eggs as well as tends her brood. In multiple foundress nests social interactions, especially dominance-subordinate interactions, result in only one `dominant' female developing her ovaries and laying eggs. Ovaries of the remaining `subordinate' cofoundresses remain suppressed and these individuals function as workers and tend the dominant's brood. Using the tropical, primitively eusocial polistine wasp Ropalidia marginata and by comparing wasps held in isolation and those kept as pairs in the laboratory, we demonstrate that social interactions affect ovarian development of dominant and subordinate wasps among the pairs in opposite directions, suppressing the ovaries of the subordinate member of the pair below that of solitary wasps and boosting the ovaries of dominant member of the pair above that of solitary females. In addition to being of physiological interest, such mirror image effects of aggression on the ovaries of the aggressors and their victims, suggest yet another mechanism by which subordinates can enhance their indirect fitness and facilitate the evolution of worker behavior by kin selection. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Social optimum in social groups with give-and-take criterion

We consider a Social Group' of networked nodes, seeking a universe' of segments. Each node has a subset of the universe and access to an expensive resource for downloading data. Nodes can also acquire the universe by exchanging copies of segments among themselves, at low cost, using inter-node links. While exchanges over inter-node links ensure minimum cost, some nodes in the group try to exploit the system. We term such nodes as non-reciprocating nodes' and prohibit such behavior by proposing the give-and-take' criterion, where exchange is allowed if each node has segments unavailable with the other. Under this criterion, we consider the problem of maximizing the number of nodes with the universe at the end of local exchanges. First, we present a randomized algorithm that is shown to be optimal in the asymptotic regime. Then, we present greedy links algorithm, which performs well for most of the scenarios and yields an optimal result when the number of nodes is four. The polygon algorithm is proposed, which yields an optimal result when each of the nodes has a unique segment. After presenting some intuitive algorithms (e.g., greedy incremental algorithm and rarest first algorithm), we compare the performances of all proposed algorithms with the optimal. Copyright (c) 2015 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Turnout Intention and Social Networks

How can networking affect the turnout in an election? We present a simple model to explain turnout as a result of a dynamic process of formation of the intention to vote within Erdös-Renyi random networks. Citizens have fixed preferences for one of two parties and are embedded in a given social network. They decide whether or not to vote on the basis of the attitude of their immediate contacts. They may simply follow the behavior of the majority (followers) or make an adaptive local calculus of voting (Downsian behavior). So they either have the intention of voting when the majority of their neighbors are willing to vote too, or they vote when they perceive in their social neighborhood that elections are "close". We study the long run average turnout, interpreted as the actual turnout observed in an election. Depending on the combination of values of the two key parameters, the average connectivity and the probability of behaving as a follower or in a Downsian fashion, the system exhibits monostability (zero turnout), bistability (zero turnout and either moderate or high turnout) or tristability (zero, moderate and high turnout). This means, in particular, that for a wide range of values of both parameters, we obtain realistic turnout rates, i.e. between 50% and 90%.

Altruism in the (Social) Network

This paper explores the role of social integration on altruistic behavior. To this aim, we develop a two-stage experimental protocol based on the classic Dictator Game. In the first stage, we ask a group of 77 undergraduate students in Economics to elicit their social network; in the second stage, each of them has to unilaterally decide over the division of a fixed amount of money to be shared with another anonymous member in the group. Our experimental design allows to control for other variables known to be relevant for altruistic behavior: framing and friendship/acquaintance relations. Consistently with previous research, we find that subjects favor their friends and that framing enhances altruistic behavior. Once we control for these effects, social integration (measured by betweenness, a standard centrality measure in network theory) has a positive effect on giving: the larger social isolation within the group, the more likely it is the emergence of selfish behavior. These results suggest that information on the network structure in which subjects are embedded is crucial to account for their behavior.