An indicator-based approach to assess village-level social and biophysical vulnerability of agriculture communities in Uttarakhand,India

With the growing recognition to myriad forms of current and future threats in the mountain agriculture systems,there is a pressing need to holistically understand the vulnerability of mountain agriculture communities.The study aims to assess the biophysical and social vulnerability of agriculture communities using an indicator-based approach for the state of Uttarakhand,India.A total of 14 indicators were used to capture biophysical vulnerability and 22 for social vulnerability profiles of15285 villages.Vulnerability analysis was done at village level with weights assigned to each indicator using Analytical Hierarchical Process(AHP).The results of the study highlight the presence of very high biophysical vulnerability(0.82 ± 0.10) and high social vulnerability(0.65 ± 0.15) within the state.Based on the results,it was found that incidences of high biophysical vulnerability coincide with presence of intensified agriculture land and absence of dense forest.Higher social vulnerability scores were found in villages with an absence of local institutions(like Self Helping Groups(SHGs)),negligible infrastructure facilities and higher occupational dependence on agriculture.A contrast was observed in the vulnerability scores of villages present in the three different altitudinal zones in the study area,indicating respective vulnerability generating conditions existing in these three zones.Biophysical vulnerability was recorded to be highest in the villages falling in the lower zone and lowest in the upper zone villages;whereas,social vulnerability was found to be highest in the middle zone villages and lowest in lower zone villages.Our study aids policy makers in identifying areas for intervention to expedite agriculture adaptation planning in the state.Additionally,the adaptation programmes in the region need to be more context-specific to accommodate the differential altitudinal vulnerability profiles.

Understanding the factors influencing user intention to continue contributing knowledge in social Q&A communities

Purpose:A social question & answer(SQA) community's long-term sustainability depends on its members' willingness to stay and contribute their knowledge continuously in the community.This research aims to investigate the critical factors which influence users' intention to continue contributing knowledge in the SQA community.Design/methodology/approach:Grounded on information systems(IS) continuance theory,this study put forward a model of the factors that influence SQA community members' intention to continue contributing knowledge.Survey was conducted to gather data from knowledge contributors of four major Chinese SQA communities(Baidu Knows,Sina iAsk,Soso Ask and Yahoo! Knowledge).By using the partial least squares(PLS) technique,research hypotheses derived from the proposed model were empirically validated.Findings:Except enjoyment in helping others and knowledge self-efficacy,all other factors including extrinsic reward,reputation enhancement,realization of self-worth,perceived usefulness,attitude towards knowledge contribution,and satisfaction exert significant impacts on users' continuance intentions in an SQA community.Research limitations:First,important factors such as the ease of use of information systems which may influence users' continuance intentions were not investigated in the study.Second,the study sample needs to be enlarged,and users of smaller SQA communities should also be included,to make the results more representative.Practical implications:This study will help SQA community designers and managers develop or improve incentive mechanisms to attract more people to contribute their knowledge and promote the development of the SQA community.Originality/value:This study improves the previous research models and puts forward a model of user continuance intention to contribute knowledge in an SQA community.It will extend the understanding of SQA community users' intention to continue contributing knowledge by distinguishing these users' different roles and focusing only on knowledge contributors.

Evaluating Group Formation in Virtual Communities

In this paper, we are interested in answering the following research question: "Is it possible to form effective groups in virtual communities by exploiting trust information without significant overhead, similarly to real user communities?"In order to answer this question, instead of adopting the largely used approach of exploiting the opinions provided by all the users of the community(called global reputation), we propose to use a particular form of reputation, called local reputation. We also propose an algorithm for group formation able to implement the proposed procedure to form effective groups in virtual communities. Another interesting question is how to measure the effectiveness of groups in virtual communities. To this aim we introduce the index in a measure of the effectiveness of the group formation. We tested our algorithm by realizing some experimental trials on real data from the real world EPINIONS and CIAO communities, showing the significant advantages of our procedure w.r.t. another prominent approach based on traditional global reputation.

SAFT-VNDN: A Socially-Aware Forwarding Technique in Vehicular Named Data Detworking

Vehicular Social Networks(VSNs)is the bridge of social networks and Vehicular Ad-Hoc Networks(VANETs).VSNs are promising as they allow the exchange of various types of contents in large-scale through Vehicle-to-Vehicle(V2V)and Vehicle-to-Infrastructure(V2I)communication protocols.Vehicular Named Data Networking(VNDN)is an auspicious communication paradigm for the challenging VSN environment since it can optimize content dissemination by decoupling contents from their physical locations.However,content dissemination and caching represent crucial challenges in VSNs due to short link lifetime and intermittent connectivity caused by vehicles’high mobility.Our aim with this paper is to improve content delivery and cache hit ratio,as well as decrease the transmission delay between end-users.In this regard,we propose a novel hybrid VNDN-VSN forwarding technique based on social communities,which allows requester vehicles to easily find the most suitable forwarder or producer among the community members in their neighborhood area.Furthermore,we introduce an effective caching mechanism by dividing the content store into two parts,one for community private contents and the second one for public contents.Simulation results show that our proposed forwarding technique can achieve a favorable performance compared with traditional VNDN,in terms of data delivery ratio,average data delivery delay,and cache hit ratio.

Human Capital of Family and Social Mobility in Rural Areas-Evidence from China

This research focuses on the impact of family＇s human capital on social mobility in China＇s rural community.Empirical research is conducted based on data from surveying a typical rural community in the past 20 yr.The study indicates that social mobility in rural area is active in the past 20 yr,and the human capital of family,represented by primary labor＇s education level,has played an essential role in mobility of low social class.Meanwhile,socio-economic development and the change of supply and demand in labor market dims the signaling role of degree education,but the impact of occupational training is increasingly remarkable.Therefore,the change from sole degree education to multi-leveled education including occupational education and training is a main way for China＇s rural families in low class to realize social mobility.

ComRank： Joint Weight Technique for the Identification of Influential Communities

Recently, the community analysis has seen enormous research advancements in the field of social networks. A large amount of the current studies put forward different models and algorithms about most influential people. However, there is little work to shed light on how to rank communities while considering their levels that are determined by the quality of their published contents. In this paper, we propose solution for measuring the influence of communities and ranking them by considering joint weight composed of internal and external influence of communities. To address this issue, we design a novel algorithm called Com Rank: a modification of Page Rank, which considers the joint weight in order to identify impact of each community and ranking them. We use real-world data trace in citation network and perform extensive experiments to evaluate our proposed algorithm. The comparative results depict significant improvements by our algorithm in community ranking due to the inclusion of proposed weighting feature.

The Challenges of the European Union＇s Migration and Integration Policy-The Road to a Common Immigration Policy

This study is about the main problem of the European Union arising from the social status of migrant or migrant background population. It is trying to reveal the real causes, why migrants have difficulties in adapting to the conventions of the receiver countries. The study also focuses on three main questions： the social status of women, public education, and the anomalies of the labour market. It is also trying to find the possible way for the EU communities how to establish and develop a common immigration policy, which can solve the problem in an integrated package system and also fit into the characteristic features of the member-states. This paper is going to give an overview on issues affecting both migrant and migrant-originated communities and is going to analyse cause-reason connections. We also must find efficient responses adequate for applying as strategies for tackling challenges of this nature, which Hungary performs its EU Presidency in first term of the year 2011.

The Social Governance Community in Transforming Neighborhoods:A Spatial Reconstruction Perspective

The strategies of rapid urbanization and rural revitalization have fostered the emergence of transforming neighborhoods. Using a framework integrating multiple spatial attributes that embeds the administrative nature of space in its social nature and raises the level of its governance, this paper provides theoretical generalizations for the social governance communities of transforming neighborhoods on the basis of a typology that divides them into four types: social governance communities of individually constructed neighborhoods, social governance communities in post-demolition constructed neighborhoods, social governance communities in immigrant constructed neighborhoods, and social governance communities in collectively constructed neighborhoods. Social governance communities of transforming neighborhoods emerge in the course of spatial reconstruction and redevelopment of production. At the stage of space reconstruction, the administrative nature of space plays its part in developing differentiated spatial governance features, while the social nature of space takes effect through the establishment of four types of social governance community social networks: the loosely connected network, the multiple components network, the close interest network and the highly associated network. At the stage of space production, the social nature of space is embedded in governance and takes effect through the integration of top-down administrative control and bottom-up resident autonomy. Consequently, we see the generation of four governance strategies of administration that adjust the autonomy of social governance communities: 'control-superficial governance,' 'guidance-deliberative governance,' 'support-collaborative governance,' and 'leading-governance by the people.' In terms of theory, this study conducts a theoretical dialogue with the existing 'controlled autonomy' and 'autonomy with administrative elimination,' and in terms of practice, it has implications for strengthening popular rule by neighborhood social governance communities and filling the ability gap in such communities.

A Community of Social Governance

Building a society where everyone contributes and shares benefits The Chinese society of 1.4 billion citizens is a large one.How is this society run?The Fourth Plenary Session of the 1 9th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China (CPC) in October 2019,which made a major decision on howto uphold and improve the system of socialism with Chinese characteristics and advance the modernization of China’s governance system and its capacity,throws light on this.

A Sociological Analysis of the “Strong Central,Weak Local” Pattern of Trust in Government:Based on Three Stage Tracking Data after the Wenchuan Earthquake

Individual and community social capital have had a significant impact on the gap between trust in higher-level governments and trust in local governments.A model including data from thirty villages gathered after the Wenchuan earthquake discovered that ＂the size of the Spring Festival（Chinese New Year） greeting network,＂ ＂the size of the official network at/above township level,＂ and ＂trust in fellow villagers＂ all had a considerable negative effect on the gap between trust in higher-level and local governments.Building individual and community social capital is conducive to establishing a balance between trust in different layers of government;individuals and communities who cooperate with each other have more channels for solving their economic and livelihood issues.Social capital can lead to a significant improvement in the effectiveness of resource matching and utilization involving governments and other sectors of society as well as increasing interaction with government.This can enhance trust in local governments and narrow the gap between trust in higher-level and local governments.