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NetSci2020 Political Communication Networks

Online 18/09/2020

The aim of the PCNet20 satellite is to provide a forum where qualitative and quantitative methods in political communication studies can interact and mutually cross-fertilize.

Traditionally, news media served as an interface between citizens and politics, eventually influencing the political behaviour together with the context and social networks embeddedness.

In the information age, both politics and communication are transformed. The popularity of online social platforms has increased the number of actors able to spread political, commercial and other messages to a massive number of potential recipients. In this workshop, we want to explore and characterize such phenomena through the lens of network science.

Topics

Networked Collective Political Identities
Context collapse
Online Culture Wars
Diffusion of News and Misinformation
Selective Exposure, Echo Chambers and Polarization
Emergence of leaderships
Digital Parties Platform Communication
Data based propaganda
Populism (operative definition / quantification)
The Rise of the far right

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS:

The extended deadline for abstract submission is July 15th, 2020.
Notifications of acceptance will be sent via e-mail by July 20th, 2020.

Submit via Easy Chair

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Trobades Virtuals de la VI Festa de la Ciència

UB products 29/07/2020

Adjuntem en aquesta llista les Trobades Virtuals que es van fer per la VI Festa de la Ciència: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vqC1l3M4ZN0&list=PL4St1S6pcSAP4tJjLxJPAsCerEL9SFz0n&index=6&t=2347s Aquesta activitat virtual ha estat fruit de la celebració el 8 de maig del 2020 de la VI Festa de la Ciència de la UB en format virtual com a conseqüència de la pandèmia pel Coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. La Festa, com cada any, ha buscat la connexió entre els grups de recerca de la Universitat de Barcelona i la societat, inclús en moments de distància social. Els vídeos amb tallers i propostes per fer des de casa publicats amb motiu de la Festa 2020 han donat pas, en alguns casos, a trobades virtuals en directe per generar el diàleg tan valuós que es produïa a les activitats presencials. En especial podràs trobar a la llista el Taller Virtual "Descobrint els sistemes complexos" on va participar, el membre CEIPAC i també membre del UBICS, en Jordi Perez Gonzalez. A continuació adjuntem el resum del Taller. Es compleixen 30 anys de l'inici de les excavacions a Testaccio, turó artificial de la zona portuària de l'antiga Roma formada per restes de milions d'àmfores de fang que es feien servir per transportar oli d'oliva. Aquest abocador romà és un singular jaciment d’on cada any s’extreu nou material. Entre d'altres troballes cal destacar els epígrafs amb informació sobre per exemple el comerciant, l'origen de l'oli, el seu transport, etc. Gràcies a aquestes dades s'ha incrementat el coneixement de l'economia i la societat antiga. Aquesta enorme quantitat d’informació es gestiona amb la base de dades d'epigrafia de l'CEIPAC (Centre per l’Estudi de la Interdependència provincial de l’antiguitat clàssica). Jordi Pérez González ens guia per aquest abocador d'època antiga i ens fa conèixer als personatges involucrats en el comerç de l’oli d’oliva. També explica com l’anàlisi i la interpretació de la gran quantitat de dades obtingudes d’aquestes excavacions es du a terme per especialistes de diversos àmbits.

Webinars Complex Systems and Covid-19 on Youtube

UBICS products 22/07/2020

"Complex Systems and COVID-19" : Cicle de Webinars sobre Sistemes Complexos enfocats en el COVID-19 organitzat per l'UBICS i complexitat.cat. Enfocat per a tothom interessat en els Sistemes Complexos i els seus actuals camps d’aplicació. Ara pots trobar tots els videos aquí: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53tEodkCv0c&list=PLf7A47_ENtnLkXJ8QPspRIT5a0zz-1nPd&index=5

Webinar by Ernesto Estrada

UBICS projects 13/07/2020

Date: 16 July, 16h (CET, GMT+2, Barcelona/Madrid/Paris/Berlin) Speaker: Ernesto Estrada, IUMA, Universidad de Zaragoza Title: “Fractional diffusion on the human proteome as an alternative explanation to the multi-organ damage of SARS CoV-2" Link to the video of the webinar: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=53tEodkCv0c&list=PLf7A47_ENtnLkXJ8QPspRIT5a0zz-1nPd&index=5 Abstract: SARS CoV-2 is the new coronavirus causing the pandemic known as COVID-19. This respiratory disease is characterized by multi-organ and systemic damages in patients. The abundance of ACE2 on human organs has been claimed as responsible for such multi-organ spread of the virus damages. However, once on circulation the virus could spread to practically every organ in the human body as ACE2 is ubiquitous on endothelia and smooth muscle cells of virtually all organs. Contrastingly, SARS CoV-2 only damages selectively a few organs. Here, we develop the hypothesis that the effects of the SARS CoV-2 virus can be spread through the human protein-protein interaction (PPI) network in a subdiffusive way. We then elaborate a time-fractional diffusion model on networks which allow us to study this phenomenon. Starting the diffusion from the SARS CoV-2 Spike protein to the human PPI network we show here that the pertubations can spread across the whole network in very few steps. Consequently, we discover a few potential routes of propagation of these perturbations from proteins mainly expressed in the lungs to proteins mainly expressed in other different tissues, such as the heart, cerebral cortex, thymus, lymph node, testis, prostate, liver, small intestine, duodenum, kidney, among others already reported as damaged by COVID-19.

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Evaluating the effect of gamification on the deployment of digital cultural probes for children

Rodriguez, I ; Puig, A ; Tellols, D; Samso, K

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF HUMAN-COMPUTER STUDIES 137 UNSP 102395 (2020)

abstract

This research proposes a digital Cultural Probe (CP) for children in the context of energy use and awareness. A CP is a user research method that allows participants to self-report by means of tools, artefacts, and tasks that they complete at their own pace. Our CP aims to gather data about the energy related habits and knowledge of the children and their families and also aims to provoke reflection and raise their awareness of energy and environmental issues. It is well known that the main drawback of CPs is their low completion rate and the consequent lack of gathered data. Based on the impact of gamification on users' motivation and engagement, we aim to test the hypothesis that "Gamification may encourage an active and fruitful participation of children in Cultural Probes". CP consists of four tasks designed to gather information about the children and their families' electric consumption and saving habits. We developed the CP as an Android app which was evaluated with children from two primary schools in Barcelona, who interacted with two different app versions (gamified and non-gamified). We designed a comparative experiment that gathered data on CP completion rate, CP task completion rate, and the time required to complete the CP. To our surprise, we found a slight difference in favour of the non-gamified app in all of these measures, though this difference was not statistically significant. However, the difference in the children's awareness of and attitude to energy consumption before and after the realisation of the CP was significant as measured by the Wilcoxon signed-rank test. This was not the case for the effect on energy awareness of the children's relatives. The lessons we learned, which may also prove to be useful for researchers that aim to design cultural probes, are that user research methods for children can be effective enough when designed to be interactive and dynamic (i.e. digital CPs) and that the number of CP tasks may also be a factor to take into account. When the number of tasks is low, the CP is likely to achieve a high completion rate and the additional effort of gamifying the application may be not worthwhile. Then, gamification may support a CP with a large number of tedious tasks. When designers want children to reflect on key issues, the CP should be thoughtfully designed because it is not easy to foster children's reflection and reasoning.