The process of opinion formation through synthesis and contrast of different viewpoints has been the subject of many studies in economics and social sciences. Today, this process manifests itself also in online social networks and social media. The key characteristic of successful promotion campaigns is that they take into consideration such opinion-formation dynamics in order to create a overa...

Online social networking sites have become popular platforms on which users can link with each other and share information, not only basic rating information but also information such as contexts, social relationships, and item contents. However, as far as we know, no existing works systematically combine diverse types of information to build more accurate recommender systems. In this paper, we...

Effects on adjustment of biological maturation and social timing were compared using data from a longitudinal sample of 335 young adolescents, who were followed from the sixth through eighth grades. Biological maturation was estimated from the relative timing of the adolescent growth spurt. Social timing was assessed by grade in school. Five adjustment constructs were examined: school achieveme...

The GroupFinder framework addresses the new problem of recommending the best group of friends with whom to enjoy a given item, e.g., a travel destination or a movie. Given a user, her social network and a recommended item that is relevant for the user, our novel recommendation task tries to maximize: i) the relevance of the recommended item for every member of the group, and ii) the intra-group...

this study investigated the utility of all of the above (aota) as a test option in multiple-choice items. it aimed at estimating item fit, item difficulty, item discrimination, and guess factor of such a choice. five reading passages of the key english test (ket, 2010) were adapted. the test was reconstructed in 2 parallel forms: test 1 did not include the abovementioned alternative, whereas te...

This paper presents standardized norms of child development in Shiraz (Iran). A birth cohort of317 randomly selected neonates born at the 14 maternity clinics of Shiraz during 2 random consecutive weeks in 1996 were followed at homes for 2 years at 12 designed occasions and their development examined by 2 trained public health officers and a community medicine expert. In gross-motor and per...

The goal was to examine the nature of social anhedonia using two validated measures and study their relationship to scores on the NEO-Five Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI). Nearly 1,900 college-aged participants completed the Chapman Revised Social Anhedonia Scale (RSAS), Anticipatory and Consummatory Interpersonal Pleasure Scale (ACIPS), and the NEO-FFI. Although both the RSAS and ACIPS were associa...