Recent years have seen a surge of research on social recommendation techniques for improving recommender systems due to the growing influence of social networks to our daily life. The intuition of social recommendation is that users tend to show affinities with items favored by their social ties due to social influence. Despite the extensive studies, no existing work has attempted to distinguis...

In response to health problems, individuals may strategically activate their social network ties to help manage crisis and uncertainty. While it is well-established that social relationships provide a crucial safety net, little is known about who is chosen to help during an episode of illness. Guided by the Network Episode Model, two aspects of consulting others in the face of mental illness ar...

OBJECTIVE  To examine the association between the presence of individual principal investigators' financial ties to the manufacturer of the study drug and the trial's outcomes after accounting for source of research funding. DESIGN  Cross sectional study of randomized controlled trials (RCTs). SETTING  Studies published in "core clinical" journals, as identified by Medline, between 1 Januar...

The computer represents a new resource in developing social capital that previously did not exist among migrants. The relationship between physical space and cyberspace is discussed using the experience of migrants from Newfoundland who, although dispersed from their homeland, use the computer to maintain ties with both their homeland and others in diaspora. Three phases in the migration cycle ...

Background : Controlling global epidemics in the real world and accelerating information propagation in the artificial world are of great significance, which have activated an upsurge in the studies on networked spreading dynamics. Lots of efforts have been made to understand the impacts of macroscopic statistics (e.g., degree distribution and average distance) and mesoscopic structures (e.g., ...