Related papers: Broadband Internet and Social Capital
Two important aspects of the Internet, namely the properties of its topology and the characteristics of its data traffic, have attracted growing attention of the physics community. My thesis has considered problems of both aspects. First I…
The evolution of a thematic area undergoes various changes of perspective and adopts new theoretical approaches that arise from the interactions of the community and a wide range of social needs. The advent of digital technologies, such as…
Nearly half the world remains offline, and capital scarcity stalls new network buildouts. Sharing existing mobile towers could accelerate connectivity. We assemble data on 107 tower-sharing deals in 28 low-income countries (2008-20) and…
We analyse the recent rapid growth of 'binge' drinking in the UK. This means the consumption of large amounts of alcohol, especially by young people, leading to serious anti-social and criminal behaviour in urban centres. We show how a…
Now that so much of collective action takes place online, web-generated data can further understanding of the mechanics of Internet-based mobilisation. This trace data offers social science researchers the potential for new forms of…
In this study, we looked at the effect of promotion in the speed and width of spread of information on the Internet by tracking the diffusion of news articles over a social network. Speed of spread means the number of readers that the news…
Social media are now a routine part of political campaigns all over the world. However, studies of the impact of campaigning on social platform have thus far been limited to cross-sectional datasets from one election period which are…
A movement for a more transparent and decentralized Internet is globally attracting more attention. People are becoming more privacy-aware of their online identities and data. The Internet is constantly evolving. Web2 focused on companies…
Like many other social phenomena, prostitution is increasingly coordinated over the Internet. The online behavior affects the offline activity; the reverse is also true. We investigated the reported sexual contacts between 6,624 anonymous…
With the advance of the Internet, ordinary users have created multiple personal accounts on online social networks, and interactions among these social network users have recently been tagged with location information. In this work, we…
We study how the graph structure of the Internet at the Autonomous Systems (AS) level evolved during a decade. For each year of the period 2008-2017 we consider a snapshot of the AS graph and examine how many features related to structure,…
Every day millions of users are connected through online social networks, generating a rich trove of data that allows us to study the mechanisms behind human interactions. Triadic closure has been treated as the major mechanism for creating…
How far and how fast does information spread in social media? Researchers have recently examined a number of factors that affect information diffusion in online social networks, including: the novelty of information, users' activity levels,…
The growing awareness that human communications and social interactions are assuming a stratified structure, due to the availability of multiple techno-communication channels, including online social networks, mobile phone calls, short…
In the present work we investigate the effects of spatial constraints on the efficiency of task execution in systems underlain by geographical complex networks where the probability of connection decreases with the distance between the…
Both theoretical models and empirical findings suggest that the intensity of communication among groups of people declines with their degree of geographical separation. There is some evidence that rather than decaying uniformly with…
Here, we review the research we have done on social contagion. We describe the methods we have employed (and the assumptions they have entailed) in order to examine several datasets with complementary strengths and weaknesses, including the…
The decentralized architecture of Internet sparkled techno-utopian visions of a virtual freedom space for humanity. Peer-to-peer systems, collaborative creation (wikipedia), open source software (Linux), universal shared knowledge, and the…
We study a simple model of information propagation in social networks, where two quantities are introduced: the spread factor, which measures the average maximal fraction of neighbors of a given node that interchange information among each…
We model the evolution of the Internet at the Autonomous System level as a process of competition for users and adaptation of bandwidth capability. We find the exponent of the degree distribution as a simple function of the growth rates of…