CQA services are collaborative platforms where users ask and answer questions. We investigate the influence of national culture on people's online questioning and answering behavior. For this, we analyzed a sample of 200 thousand users in Yahoo Answers from 67 countries. We measure empirically a set of cultural metrics defined in Geert Hofstede's cultural dimensions and Robert Levine's Pace of Life and show that behavioral cultural differences exist in community question answering platforms. We find that national cultures differ in Yahoo Answers along a number of dimensions such as temporal predictability of activities, contribution-related behavioral patterns, privacy concerns, and power inequality.
Quercia @cite_33 used tests and measured happiness of 32,787 Facebook users from 12 countries (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, UK, USA ). He found that despite comparative economic status, country-level happiness significantly varies across the countries and that it strongly correlates with official well-being scores.
@cite_33
2078120282
Social media sites have been used to track the expression of emotion words across nations. A question left unexplored is whether, at a similar scale, these sites can be used to collect reliable well-being data. To tackle this question, we collect Satisfaction With Life (SWL) test results from a Facebook application and show that aggregate country-level results significantly vary across twelve rich countries and strongly correlate with official well-being scores. To then show that collecting data on Facebook offers an informative look at the sociology of well-being, we study the impact of (un)happiness on the twelve countries by relating the test results on Facebook to reputable international indicators of social and health problems. We find that countries where happiness is lower have increased problems across the board: decreasing well-being is associated with increasing homicide, obesity, drug use, mental illness, and anxiety. In addition to offering these findings, this work hints at the conditions under which social media could be used for data-driven social science research. Aim: to illustrate demographic differences and recent trends in the provision and structure of long-term care systems in the 10 countries participating in the Resident Assessment Instrument studies (Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the USA). Method: data were assembled from government documents, statistical yearbooks and articles from journals; supplemental data on long-term care and nursing homes were solicited from colleagues. Results: All 10 countries are developed nations with high life-expectancies. Sweden has the oldest and Iceland the youngest population in this study, with Japan showing the highest ageing rates over the next three decades. Between 2 and 5 of elderly people reside in nursing homes. Interestingly, Iceland, as the youngest country' in this study, has the highest rate of institutionalization (living in residential or nursing homes), while the 'oldest country' (Sweden) has a low rate of institutionalization. In all countries the support ratio (number of elderly people per 100 younger adults) is high and increasing rapidly. Conclusions: no relation appears to exist between the ageing status of a country and the number of nursing home beds. Institutionalization rates among the nations studied differ even more, due at least in part to differences in the organization and financing of long-term care services, in the amount of responsibilit y assumed in the care for disabled elderly people by each sector and the availability of long-term care beds. Facing a rapid ageing of their population, many countries are in the process of health and social care reforms. The paper presents new A2iA bank check recognition systems designed to process handwritten and or printed checks issued in France, UK or USA. All the systems have identical architecture and design principles. However, each of them contains a country-specific part and is trained with country-specific data. Each system performs location, extraction, segmentation and recognition of courtesy and legal amounts in a document image, as well as deciding whether to accept or reject the check. The recognition rate is 80-90 . In the production mode, the check acceptance rate is 60-75 , with the misread rate corresponding to that of a human operator (close to 1 ). Recent empirical evidence suggests that the variance risk premium, or the difference between risk-neutral and statistical expectations of the future return variation, predicts aggregate stock market returns, with the predictability especially strong at the 2-4 month horizons. We provide extensive Monte Carlo simulation evidence that statistical finite sample biases in the overlapping return regressions underlying these findings can not “explain” this apparent predictability. Further corroborating the existing empirical evidence, we show that the patterns in the predictability across different return horizons estimated from country specific regressions for France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland and the U.K. are remarkably similar to the pattern previously documented for the U.S. Defining a “global” variance risk premium, we uncover even stronger predictability and almost identical cross-country patterns through the use of panel regressions that effectively restrict the compensation for world-wide variance risk to be the same across countries. Our findings are broadly consistent with the implications from a stylized two-country general equilibrium model explicitly incorporating the effects of world-wide time-varying economic uncertainty. This paper uses the Experience Sampling Method data drawn from a national sample of American youth. It examines the proximal environmental factors as well as behaviors and habits that correlate to personal happiness. Momentary-level scores show that reported happiness varies significantly both by day of week and time of day. Furthermore, particular activities are associated with varying degrees of happiness. School activities rate below average scores in happiness, while social, active and passive leisure activities are above average. Particular companions also correlate to differing level of happiness. Being alone rates the lowest levels of happiness, while being with friend corresponds to the highest. Person-level averages of happiness suggest that both higher social class and age correlate with lower levels of happiness, while gender and race do not. Paradoxically, youth who spend more time in school and social activities are happier than those who spend less. Unexpectedly, students who spend more time pleasure reading report lower levels of happiness. Finally, feeling good about the self, excited, proud, sociable, active as well as being in the conditions for flow experience are the strongest predictors of trait happiness. Governments and other organisations often rely on data collected by household surveys and censuses to identify areas in most need of regeneration and development projects. However, due to the high cost associated with the data collection process, many developing countries conduct such surveys very infrequently and include only a rather small sample of the population, thus failing to accurately capture the current socio-economic status of the country's population. In this paper, we address this problem by means of a methodology that relies on an alternative source of data from which to derive up to date poverty indicators, at a very fine level of spatio-temporal granularity. Taking two developing countries as examples, we show how to analyse the aggregated call detail records of mobile phone subscribers and extract features that are strongly correlated with poverty indexes currently derived from census data. We ask whether stock returns in France, Germany, Japan, the UK and the US are predictable by three instruments: the dividend yield, the earnings yield and the short rate. The predictability regression is suggested by a present value model with earnings growth, payout ratios and the short rate as state variables. We use this model imposing a constant risk premium to examine the finite sample evidence on predictability. Not only do we find the short rate to be a relevant state variable theoretically, it is also the only robust short-run predictor of equity returns. The evidence in Lamont (1998) on earnings and dividend yield predictability is not robust to our increased sample period, does not survive finite sample corrections and does not extend to other countries. We find no evidence of long-horizon predictability once we account for finite sample influence. Finally, cross-country predictability appears stronger than predictability using local instruments. This paper analyzes a corpus of Nigerian Tweets collected during the run-up to the 2011 Nigerian Presidential election and compares it with official election returns and polling data. We found that counts of the mentions on Twitter of the two major candidates correlated strongly with polling and election results when compared across the country's geopolitical regions, though the same data over represented two other candidates who did not fare as well in the polls or at the ballot box. Sentiment extracted from Twitter was less accurate in capturing mean levels of support for the two major candidates and, in particular, showed a strong negativity bias against the incumbent president. Twitter sentiment did mirror regional trends in the polling and election results though not as strongly as seen for mention counts. We demonstrate methodologically how to sample these data, extract sentiment, and compare this sentiment with ground-truth polling data and election results. Although social media clearly capture opinion about contentious issues, our results suggest that the opinion represented there may not always accurately reflect true public opinion. This paper presents a detailed analysis of the Google+ social network. We identify the key differences and similarities with other popular networks like Facebook and Twitter, in order to determine whether Google+ is a new paradigm or yet another social network. This work is based on large-scale crawls of over 27 million user profiles that represented nearly 50 of the entire network in 2011. We observe that the average path length between users is slightly higher than other networks, possibly because Google+ is a new system where relationships are still rapidly growing. Google+ shows a higher level of reciprocity than Twitter, which also has directed social links. The newly available "places lived" field could be used to study how users are distributed around the world and how aggressively the service has been adopted in different countries. We find that Google+ is popular in countries with relatively low Internet penetration rate. Based on the amount and types of information publicly shared in user profiles, we also find that the notion of privacy varies significantly across different cultures. This paper describes a recently created image database, TID2013, intended for evaluation of full-reference visual quality assessment metrics. With respect to TID2008, the new database contains a larger number (3000) of test images obtained from 25 reference images, 24 types of distortions for each reference image, and 5 levels for each type of distortion. Motivations for introducing 7 new types of distortions and one additional level of distortions are given; examples of distorted images are presented. Mean opinion scores (MOS) for the new database have been collected by performing 985 subjective experiments with volunteers (observers) from five countries (Finland, France, Italy, Ukraine, and USA). The availability of MOS allows the use of the designed database as a fundamental tool for assessing the effectiveness of visual quality. Furthermore, existing visual quality metrics have been tested with the proposed database and the collected results have been analyzed using rank order correlation coefficients between MOS and considered metrics. These correlation indices have been obtained both considering the full set of distorted images and specific image subsets, for highlighting advantages and drawbacks of existing, state of the art, quality metrics. Approaches to thorough performance analysis for a given metric are presented to detect practical situations or distortion types for which this metric is not adequate enough to human perception. The created image database and the collected MOS values are freely available for downloading and utilization for scientific purposes. We have created a new large database.This database contains larger number of distorted images and distortion types.MOS values for all images are obtained and provided.Analysis of correlation between MOS and a wide set of existing metrics is carried out.Methodology for determining drawbacks of existing visual quality metrics is described. Increasingly, scholars are examining the ways in which the Internet allows the hate movement to retrench and reinvent itself as a viable collective. The many electronic means available to the movement – blogs, newsgroups, ’zines, etc. – allow an ease of communication and dissemination of their views never before possible. While there are obvious points of convergence across the various Klan groups, or identity churches, or skinhead organizations, the hate movement has historically been varied and, in fact, fractured. Internet communication facilitates the creation of the collective identity that is so important to movement cohesiveness. Clearly, this has strengthened the domestic presence of these groups in countries like the United States, Germany and Sweden. Yet relatively less attention has been paid to the way in which the Web facilitates the consolidation of a global movement. Internet communication knows no national boundaries. Consequently, it allows the hate movement to extend its collective ident... We present the results of an online survey of smartphone unlocking (N=8,286) that we conducted in eight different countries. The goal was to investigate differences in attitudes towards smartphone unlocking between different national cultures. Our results show that there are indeed significant differences across a range of categories. For instance, participants in Japan considered the data on their smartphones to be much more sensitive than those in other countries, and respondents in Germany were 4.5 times more likely than others to say that protecting data on their smartphones was important. The results of this study shed light on how motivations to use various security mechanisms are likely to differ from country to country. Policy makers are calling for new socio-economic measures that reflect subjective well-being, to complement traditional measures of material welfare as the Gross Domestic Product (GDP). Self-reporting has been found to be reasonably accurate in measuring one's well-being and conveniently tallies with sentiment expressed on social media (e.g., those satisfied with life use more positive than negative words in their Facebook status updates). Social media content can thus be used to track well-being of individuals. A question left unexplored is whether such content can be used to track well-being of entire physical communities as well. To this end, we consider Twitter users based in a variety of London census communities, and study the relationship between sentiment expressed in tweets and community socio-economic well-being. We find that the two are highly correlated: the higher the normalized sentiment score of a community's tweets, the higher the community's socio-economic well-being. This suggests that monitoring tweets is an effective way of tracking community well-being too. Individual happiness is a fundamental societ al metric. Normally measured through self-report, happiness has often been indirectly characterized and overshadowed by more readily quantifiable economic indicators such as gross domestic product. Here, we examine expressions made on the online, global microblog and social networking service Twitter, uncovering and explaining temporal variations in happiness and information levels over timescales ranging from hours to years. Our data set comprises over 46 billion words contained in nearly 4.6 billion expressions posted over a 33 month span by over 63 million unique users. In measuring happiness, we construct a tunable, real-time, remote-sensing, and non-invasive, text-based hedonometer. In building our metric, made available with this paper, we conducted a survey to obtain happiness evaluations of over 10,000 individual words, representing a tenfold size improvement over similar existing word sets. Rather than being ad hoc, our word list is chosen solely by frequency of usage, and we show how a highly robust and tunable metric can be constructed and defended. Over the years, the Internet has democratized the flow of information. Unfortunately, in parallel, authoritarian regimes and other entities (such as ISPs) for their vested interests have curtailed this flow by partially or fully censoring the web. The policy, mechanism, and extent of this censorship varies from country to country. We present the first study of the cause, effect, and mechanism of web censorship in Pakistan. Specifically, we use a publicly available list of blocked websites and check their accessibility from multiple networks within the country. Our results indicate that the censorship mechanism varies across websites: some are blocked at the DNS level while others at the HTTP level. Interestingly, the government shifted to a centralized, Internet exchange level censorship system during the course of our study, enabling our findings to compare two generations of blocking systems. Furthermore, we report the outcome of a controlled survey to ascertain the mechanisms that are being actively employed by people to circumvent censorship. Finally, we discuss some simple but surprisingly unexplored methods of bypassing restrictions. Distributional methods have proven to excel at capturing fuzzy, graded aspects of meaning (Italy is more similar to Spain than to Germany). In contrast, it is difficult to extract the values of more specific attributes of word referents from distributional representations, attributes of the kind typically found in structured knowledge bases (Italy has 60 million inhabitants). In this paper, we pursue the hypothesis that distributional vectors also implicitly encode referential attributes. We show that a standard supervised regression model is in fact sufficient to retrieve such attributes to a reasonable degree of accuracy: When evaluated on the prediction of both categorical and numeric attributes of countries and cities, the model consistently reduces baseline error by 30 , and is not far from the upper bound. Further analysis suggests that our model is able to “objectify” distributional representations for entities, anchoring them more firmly in the external world in measurable ways. Previous studies have established the link between one's actions (e.g., engaging with others vs. minding one's own business) and one's national culture (e.g., collectivist vs. individualistic), and such actions have been shown to be important as they are collectively affiliated with a country's economic outcomes (e.g., Gross Domestic Product). Hitherto there has not been any systematic study of whether one's action on Twitter (e.g., deciding when to post messages) is linked to one's culture (e.g., country's Pace of Life). To fix that, we build different network snapshots starting from 55,000 seed users on Twitter, and we do so for 10 weeks across 30 countries (after filtering those with low penetration rates) for a total of 2.34 M profiles. Based on Hofstede's theory of cultural dimensions and Levine's Pace of Life theory, we consider three behavioral patterns on Twitter (i.e., temporal predictability of tweets, engaging with others, and supporting others who are less popular) and associate them with three different dimensions derived from the two theories: Pace of Life, Individualism and Power Distance. We find the following strong correlations: activity predictability negatively correlates with Pace of Life (r=-0.62), tweets with mentions negatively correlates with Individualism (r = -0.55), and power (e.g, Twitter popularity) imbalance in relationships (between, for example, two users mentioning each other) is correlated with Power Distance (r=0.62). These three cultural dimensions matter because they are associated with a country's socio-economic aspects - with GDP per capita, income inequality, and education expenditure. Several countries in Europe have recently adopted obligatory language and country-knowledge requirements for settlement, naturalisation and immigration. Integration tests, courses and contracts are only a few examples of the new ‘civic integration policies’ states are using to promote individual autonomy and common values for newcomers. Are these requirements in response to concrete problems of immigrant integration? Do they enable, or actually inhibit, integration? This paper examines the various pressures behind attaching mandatory integration requirements to status acquisition. To systematically examine these policies, I develop a civic integration index (CIVIX) to measure language, country-knowledge and value-commitment requirements across the EU-15. While there is a general shift toward civic requirements across Europe, evidence reveals important differences in the degree of policy change. Finally, I explore how new civic requirements complement or challenge existing citizenship practices, identifyin... Feminist news researchers have long argued that in the macho culture of most newsrooms, journalists’ daily decisions about what is newsworthy remain firmly based on masculine news values. As such, issues and topics traditionally seen to be particularly relevant to women tend to be pushed to the margins of the news where the implicit assumption is that they are less important than those which interest men. In so doing, men’s views and voices are privileged over women’s, thereby contributing to the ongoing secondary status of women’s participation as citizens. In this article, we draw upon data we collected from the UK and the Republic of Ireland as part of the larger, 108-country study, which comprised the 2010 Global Media Monitoring Project (GMMP). We argue that while there have been some positive improvements in women’s representation as news actors, sources and journalists in the British and Irish news media since the first GMMP day of monitoring in 1995, women’s voices, experiences and expertise conti... In recent years, numerous surveys have been conducted to assess attitudes about privacy in the United States, Australia, Canada, and the European Union. Very little information has been published about privacy attitudes in India. As India is becoming a leader in business process outsourcing, increasing amounts of personal information from other countries is flowing into India. Questions have been raised about the ability of Indian companies to adequately protect this information. We conducted an exploratory study to gain an initial understanding of attitudes about privacy among the Indian high tech workforce. We carried out a written survey and one-on-one interviews to assess the level of awareness about privacy-related issues and concern about privacy among a sample of educated people in India. Our results demonstrate an overall lack of awareness of privacy issues and less concern about privacy in India than has been found in similar studies conducted in the United States.