Category: Collection

Review by Lawrence Phillips, Chase Dowling, Kyle Shaffer, Nathan Hodas and Svitlana Volkov: “Social media (SM) data provides a vast record of humanity’s everyday thoughts, feelings, and actions at a resolution previously unimaginable. Because user behavior on SM is a reflection of events in the real world, researchers have realized they can use SM in order to forecast, making predictions about the future. The advantage of SM data is its relative ease of acquisition, large quantity, and ability to capture socially relevant information, which may be difficult to gather from other data sources. Promising results exist across a wide variety of domains, but one will find little consensus regarding best practices in either methodology or evaluation. In this systematic review, we examine relevant literature over the past decade, tabulate mixed results across a number of scientific disciplines, and identify common pitfalls and best practices. We find that SM forecasting is limited by data biases, noisy data, lack of generalizable results, a lack of domain-specific theory, and underlying complexity in many prediction tasks. But despite these shortcomings, recurring findings and promising results continue to galvanize researchers and demand continued investigation. Based on the existing literature, we identify research practices which lead to success, citing specific examples in each case and making recommendations for best practices. These recommendations will help researchers take advantage of the exciting possibilities offered by SM platforms….(More)”

Mujb Mashal the New York Times: “These are some of the terms Afghan men use to refer to their wives in public instead of their names, the sharing of which they see as a grave dishonor worthy of violence: Mother of Children, My Household, My Weak One or sometimes, in far corners, My Goat or My Chicken.

Women also may be called Milk-sharer or Black-headed. The go-to word for Afghans to call a woman in public, no matter her status, is Aunt.

But a social media campaign to change this custom has been percolating in recent weeks, initiated by young women. The campaign comes with a hashtag in local languages that addresses the core of the issue and translates as #WhereIsMyName.

The activists’ aim is both to challenge women to reclaim their most basic identity, and to break the deep-rooted taboo that prevents men from mentioning their female relatives’ names in public….

Like many social media efforts, this one began small, with several posts out of Herat Province in the west. Since then, more activists have tried to turn it into a topic of conversation by challenging celebrities and government officials to share the names of their wives and mothers.

The discussion has now made it to the regular media, with articles in newspapers and conversations on television and radio talk shows.

Members of the Parliament, senior government officials and artists have come forward in support, publicly declaring the identities of the female members of their families….(More)”