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The Zurich region frequently ranks among the top innovative and competitive regions in the world. This chapter explores the drivers of Zurich’s unique interplay of high competitiveness and innovativeness, distilling the important components of this far-reaching innovation ecosystem. The analysis not only evaluates the relative strengths of resources for economic activities, but also includes the institutional, political, and social characteristics of the Zurich region ecosystem.

The authors investigate the psychological aspect of creativity through the giftedness phenomenon and its manifestations in real activity. The article presents the content analysis results of students’ ideas about giftedness and creativity, obtained by the associative experiment method. According to the authors, implicit notions and the giftedness theory have a significant impact on attitudes towards gifted people. The methodology of hierarchical person’s image structure (HPIS) was used as a research tool. The purpose of this study is to identify the image of a gifted person based on implicit ideas of students of various specialities and universities. As a result of the study, it was revealed that the basis of the structure and content of the gifted person image is made up of intellectual characteristics, with the acquisitive characteristics being the most unpopular in the respondents’ answers. In the second place, in terms of occurrence frequency, there were social characteristics, which are more typical for the students of humanitarian specialities. This group is also characterized by a more frequent indication of the negative qualities of a gifted person, while students of the technical specialities used positively colored words more often. When describing a gifted person, names and qualities of activity were more often used in the group of technical students. The data obtained by the authors confirm the special extraordinary, creative nature of a gifted person in the implicit representations of people.

In this chapter Millennials, the target of the study (Chap. 10), are described, in terms of personal and social characteristics, and purchase behavior. This generation has been chosen due to their familiarity with technology and the aptitude toward hedonistic products and experiential consumptions. To better focus their peculiarities, a comparison among other generations over time has been provided.

Apart from victimhood, most vulnerability issues are defined around individual and social characteristics, which are linked but tangential to the core remit of policing. They remain, however, very relevant to the field of law enforcement, as some of these attributes have either been historically criminalised (over-policing of race, arrest on the grounds of sexual orientation), or because the manifestation of these attributes have, or seem to have, endangered the public. This chapter analyses how the fields of law enforcement and public health connect and how vulnerability sits at the very nexus of this interconnection.

The rapid development of internet technology has allowed video platforms to implement co-creative social media functions (SMFs). This study examined the impact of these co-creative SMFs on user relationships by analyzing the relationship between their social characteristics and user acquisition and retention on typical video platforms. The authors conducted structured questionnaires and non-structured interviews to examine the relation between SMFs and user relationships. Based on the results of the questionnaires and interviews, the authors conducted a correlation analysis on the relation between types of SMFs, social characteristics, and user relationships. The results show that the social characteristics of helping others and asking for help are correlated with user acquisition, and the social characteristic of information acquisition is strongly correlated with both user acquisition and user retention on video platforms. The knowledge obtained from this study will contribute to building desirable user relationships on video platforms through social media functions.

Today, for about five online communities promoting aggressive ideology are registered daily in the largest Russian social network Vkontakte. These youth communities advocate aggression and suicide. Community administrators are gradually forming a large group of young people for whom aggression is normal. Although there are a lot of studies on school shooting phenomenon, most of them are focused on media issues, the psychology of shooters, and a legal characteristics Current study was aimed to identify the real audience (followers) of school shooting online communities in the social network and their gender, age and social characteristics. Over the course of three months, we collected and analyzed data from 9 online communities. We found that school shooting community followers were mostly males aged 15 to 22. We suggested this age and gender group of young people the most vulnerable in front of the destructive information influence in social media. We also noted that the policy of banning school shooting communities for security reasons is effective as a barrier for spreading dangerous ideas among youth. Nevertheless, the rules and regulations including banning also make specific barriers for researchers, who investigate community content, behavior and characteristics of their followers.

BACKGROUND: Improving care for high-cost patients is increasingly important for improving the value of healthcare. Most prior research has focused on identifying patients with high costs, but the extent to which these costs are potentially preventable remains unclear. OBJECTIVE: To identify patients with persistent preventable utilization and compare their characteristics with high-cost patients. DESIGN: Descriptive analysis using Medicare claims data from 2013 to 2014. PARTICIPANTS: Medicare fee-for-service and dual-eligible beneficiaries (N = 515,689) from the New York metropolitan area who were continuously enrolled in Medicare Parts A and B in 2013 and 2014. MAIN MEASURES: The primary analysis focuses on patients with persistent preventable utilization (at least one preventable emergency department visit, hospitalization, or 30-day readmission in both 2013 and 2014) and high-cost patients in 2014 (top 10% of total annual spending). We compared demographic, medical, behavioral, and social characteristics and total and preventable healthcare utilization between these two groups. KEY RESULTS: Patients with persistent preventable utilization accounted for 4.8% of the overall patient population, 13.4% of overall costs, but 46.2% of preventable costs among all Medicare patients. Compared with high-cost patients, patients with persistent preventable utilization had lower median healthcare costs ($33,383 vs. $56,552), but their median potentially preventable costs were seven times higher ($7151 vs. $928). We also found that 1.9% of patients could be categorized in both the persistent preventable utilization group and the high-cost group. This subset of patients had the highest median Medicare costs and preventable costs and represented over 30% of total preventable spending and 9.4% of overall costs among all Medicare patients. CONCLUSION: Designing and targeting interventions for patients with persistent preventable utilization may offer an important opportunity to reduce unnecessary utilization and promote high-value care. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (10.1007/s11606-020-06068-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

This chapter examines administrative data published by the Scottish Government and the Department for Education to examine the social characteristics of children identified as having special and additional support needs (SEN)/(ASN), the nature of the categorisation systems, the use of statutory support plans to underpin the new rights and access to dispute resolution mechanisms to challenge local authority decisions. The central question in this chapter is whether current SEN/ASN systems are likely to promote or inhibit the realisation of the rights of children and young people. In both England and Scotland, a very low proportion of children identified as having additional support needs have the protection of a statutory support plan, which acts as a passport to the realisation of many rights. In Scotland, where 31% of children have ASN, only 0.2% of all pupils currently have a CSP. The reluctance of local authorities to issue CSPs helps to explain why the Scottish tribunal is relatively little used compared with the English equivalent, and why only a handful of children have to date been able to use their new appeal rights. In England, there has been a deliberate squeeze on the number of children identified as having SEN, but a significant increase in the number of children with EHCPs. There has also been an increase in appeals to the tribunal by parents rather than young people, indicating growing stress within the system as a decade of austerity continues to have a negative impact on the educational provision.

The term Autistic Spectrum Disorder (ASD) has been increasingly studied by researchers and disseminated by scientific media. People with ASD exhibit peculiar social characteristics that often interferes in their communication with other people. Therefore the need to offer new possibilities to pursue better communication for these people trough assistive technologies. The present article aims to identify what national and international scientific productions, published between 2013 and 2018 have revealed about the use of augmented reality and alternative communication of people with ASD. The results shows that assistive technology contributes to increase or expand functional abilities of people with disabilities and therefore promotes independent life and inclusion. Otherwise it is observed that unknowing the disorder and lacking specified strategy for it may cause small impact upon the learning process of ASD population.

Gender and energy in the North is an under-researched area. Most of the work to date has focused on making the case that a gender dimension in energy exists – with a significant emphasis on promoting women working in the sector. This chapter aims to extend our understanding of gender in energy focusing on energy poverty, also an issue not widely recognised as existing within the Global North. However, it is estimated that more than 54 million people in Europe have difficulty paying their energy bills or have limited access to high quality energy because of low incomes. Even less well recognised is the fact that there is a gender dimension to this issue. Due to their lower average income, women are at a greater risk of energy poverty than men. As part of a growing recognition of this problem, in December 2016, the European Parliament (EP) adopted a resolution on access to energy which called for the EU to include a gender dimension in all its energy policies. The question is: to what extent is gender already taken into account in EU energy law and policy? And where are the gaps in the normative frameworks at the EU and Member-State level? This chapter analyses existing EU energy poverty law and policy related through a gender lens. The methodology used is a mix of literature review, desk review of policy documents (both on EU and national level) combined with mapping and a case study approach of gender and energy poverty in seven EU Member States (Bulgaria, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain, Sweden and the UK). The findings are combined with the insights from interviews with key informants conducted in 2017-2018. This chapter will start with insights into energy poverty as experienced by women and men, mediated by social characteristics, within the European Union. One of the challenges of exploring the gender dimension of energy poverty in the EU, is that there is no agreed definition of energy poverty. Furthermore, deriving such a definition is hampered by the limited data available which tend to be qualitative. The chapter summarizes definitions of energy poverty that have been developed by both researchers and public institutions and proposes a metric for assessing the gender dimension of energy poverty. We survey the normative framework in seven Member States with respect to gender and energy services. We examine how existing EU legislation is interpreted and implemented at the national level. Also, any initiatives in the case study countries which provide positive examples of addressing issues related to gender and energy poverty are identified. In this context, the study explores the recommendation of a definition of energy poverty which reflects the context across member states but is suitable for cross-comparison, to define indicators of energy poverty to enable tracking of progress and support measures. We argue that a more gender-aware energy policy is needed to address energy poverty. A starting point for the process of creating a more gender-aware energy policy is raising awareness of the issues. Therefore the next section uses the conceptual map of the drivers, causes and effects of energy poverty developed by Trinomics (2016) to explore these issue and to make recommendations on how energy poverty can be addressed with gender equitable outcomes. Within this conceptual framework, the gender gaps are identified. There are gender dimensions to the drivers, factors and outcomes of energy. Gender and energy poverty in the EU member states, is analysed from three interlinked perspectives: economic : e.g. Women with low incomes are disproportionately found as heads of households either as single parent families or, due to their greater longevity than men, living alone at pensionable age biological/physiological : e.g. Age is a significant factor in dealing with heat and cold stress, with young children and older people being particularly vulnerable. Women are also considered to be more sensitive to ambient temperature than men. socio-cultural : women’s energy needs and consumption patterns differ compare to men but also among women, factors like marital status and employment influence energy consumption. The chapter concludes with recommendations for the EU and member states on the way forward to addressing gender and energy poverty.

The protection of critical infrastructures at a national level is not a trivial task. In involves various steps such as the indentation, the prioritization and the protection of those infrastructures and services that are vital for the wellbeing of the society. Although some sectors, subsectors and services seem to be very important for all countries, others may differ in their significance based on the specific economic, environmental and social characteristics of each country. In this chapter we review existing methodologies and national strategies for critical infrastructure protection. We examine methodologies for identifying and assessing critical sectors and services, relying on top-down and bottom-up administrative approaches. We examine common practices that have been applied in various countries to identify critical infrastructures and to establish national protection plans. Finally, we describe a set of goals that are commonly found in different methodologies and best practices for critical infrastructure protection.

Etiologic factors of facial fracture are variable and depend on regional and social characteristics.

While considering regionalism as a political and social international phenomenon, several avenues for research are being explored: the relational dimension (interactions), the social characteristics and collective beliefs of agents, and their practices. To achieve that purpose, regional organizations are understood as places where the emergence of a regional political space can be examined, along with a multiplicity of actors and complex configurations of interactions.

The methodological side of comparative regionalism has often been minimized. The adoption of a political sociology approach involves rethinking the research strategy in depth and drawing a more qualitative, even inductive, framework of research. That enables us to start from the ground up to better understand the functioning, outputs and outcomes of regionalism. The data-collection effort on actors’ relationships, their social characteristics, collective beliefs as well as daily practices, is at stake in this chapter.

In France, festival audiences offer a space in which to examine the transformations of cultural practices in the last 20 years, besides the national quantitative surveys on these issues. The sociological survey that we undertook during the 2011 edition of the Les Correspondances de Manosque festival1 aimed to explore this new form of cultural mediation in the reading sector and its role in the literary field Indeed, this festival enables different types of mediation between the literary market and audiences who, on the whole, are endowed with a considerable amount of cultural capital - both reading a great deal as well as frequently going out - but whose types of cultural capital and practices differ. This research, drawing on an MCA based on festivalgoers’ practices, tastes and social characteristics, thus allows us to distinguish a specific kind of cultural capital: literary capital, that festivals uphold and help flourish.

The paper is devoted to the study of linear and structural orders in the syntactic constructions of colloquial Russian speech. The quantitative and structural characteristics of predicate groups in the replicas of oral speech are examined with the aim of revealing their typical structures and further analysis in the sociolinguistic aspect. The paper contains the description of typical structures of predicate groups, presents their quantitative analysis and concerns correlation with speakers’ social characteristics. The study was based on the material of speech corpus ʻOne Day of Speechʼ, which is the largest resource for studying spoken language, being developed at St. Petersburg State University. 11 macro episodes of everyday communication for 10 respondents were analyzed, including 5 men and 5 women, who are representatives of 6 different professional groups. Manual syntactic and automatic morphological annotation of predicate groups was carried out and their analysis was conducted. The data obtained were verified using statistical methods and mathematically reliable conclusions were found, such as: (1) the size of predicate groups do not depend on the sex of the speaker; (2) the average size of predicate groups in speech of young people is greater than in that of the middle-aged; (3) the size of predicate groups is changed primarily due to the left distance; (4) the size of the most ranked POS-tagged syntactic structures is only 1–2 elements; (5) the number of verbal predicate groups in the female speech is 8% greater than that in the male.

In post-socialist cities of Central and Eastern Europe, large housing estates became dominant features of post-war housing development. Unlike in Western Europe, these neighbourhoods were not developed for immigrants and the poorest segment of society. Instead, they provided homes for lower middle class and working class families with stable incomes. After the change of regime, however, these neighbourhoods experienced different development trajectories not only on the international but also on national and city levels. With regard to contemporary developments of housing estates, Budapest provides a typical post-socialist case where housing estates are continuously re-evaluated by the people and the market, while socialist legacies leave their imprints on the actual socio-economic developments. This chapter focuses on the development of large housing estates in Budapest and in Hungary before and after the transition. Today, one-fifth of the Hungarian population and one-third of Budapest’s residents live in housing estate neighbourhoods. The main objectives of the study are to display the spatial distribution of different generations of housing estates at the national and city level with special emphasis on their physical and social characteristics. The chapter also sheds light on the consequences of the post-socialist transition on the recent developments of housing estates in Budapest. After almost three decades of transition, debates about housing estates and their future possibilities are still relevant in Hungary and Budapest, because some of these neighbourhoods are experiencing a renaissance in the housing market, attracting younger and better off strata, whereas others show symptoms of socio-economic decline.

Evaluation of Human–Computer Interaction (HCI) in a textual way is a recent type of evaluation, demanding studies of techniques to improve it. This work aims to investigate the automatic classification of the polarity of opinion in postings related to the use of the system. We analyzed 1,345 postings of an academic system with social characteristics and performed two investigations: one uses an automatic classifier and the other applies Data Mining algorithms. As results, we present the most relevant words of each polarity, their characteristics and a discussion about the investigations carried out.

Over the past decade, clinical, epidemiological and biological research has provided strong evidence for the role of sleep health as a fundamental component of health and well-being (Jackson et al., Annu Rev Public Health 36:417–440, 2015). Emerging research has identified the influences of personal and social stress, family relationships, and neighborhood environmental and social characteristics on sleep. Sleep typically occurs in the context of family behaviors and family schedules. For family scholars, there are valuable opportunities to incorporate consideration of social, psychological, and environmental/contextual factors into sleep study models, and to explicitly assess individual, family, and larger contextual mediators and moderators. Family scholars are especially well positioned to advance understanding of and develop new models that elucidate risk factors and outcomes related to sleep health and that address contextual factors, family relationships, and life course issues.

The idea of a ‘Crisis of Civilization’ pivots around the goal of understanding human activity as a whole. It is premised on the fact that as a single biological species, human beings share common individual and social characteristics through which they interact with each other, with other species, and with the biophysical environment.

Service crowdsourcing follows typical social collaboration processes with stochastic and dynamic characteristics. In this paper, the “bug-fix” social collaboration on GitHub is used as a case scenario of crowdsourcing, and 53,475 issues in 10 OSS projects are collected to conduct an empirical study on features and patterns of service crowdsourcing. Seven collaboration features (CFs) are proposed to delineate social characteristics of crowdsourcing. In terms of these CFs, social collaboration processes are clustered and results show that these features have significant distinguishability. An extended Generalized Sequential Pattern (GSP) algorithm is put forward to identify two types of collaboration patterns called participant-oriented pattern (PP) and role-oriented pattern (RP), and the richness and individualized degree of collaboration patterns in different OSS projects are analyzed and compared.

The paper investigates how the annotators personality affects the result of their segmentation of unscripted speech into sentences. This task is inherently ambiguous and the disagreement between the annotators may result from a variety of factors – from speech disfluencies and linguistic properties of the text to social characteristics and the individuality of a speaker. While some boundaries are marked by the majority of annotators, there is also a substantial number of boundaries marked only by one or several experts.

Mobile social networks (MSNs) consist of many mobile users (individuals) with social characteristics, that provide a variety of data delivery services involving the social relationship among mobile individuals. Because mobile users move around based on their common interests and contact with each other more frequently if they have more social features in common in MSNs. In this paper, we first propose the first-priority relation graph, say FPRG, of MSNs. However, some users in MSNs may be malicious. Malicious users can break the data delivery through terminating the data delivery or tampering with the data. Therefore, malicious users will be detected in the process of looking for the data delivery routing to obtain efficient and reliable data delivery routing along the first-priority relation graph. Secondly, we propose one hamiltonian cycle decomposition of FPRG-based adaptive detection algorithm based on in MSNs under the PMC detection model (the system-level detection model).

As illustrated in Chap. 3, the most recent research on human associated DTNs uses social information to improve performance, thus demonstrating social characteristics are important factors to improve performance. However, little has been done concerning the privacy issue in DTNs. With increasing use of social information, more and more social characteristics related data is disclosed without permission. Due to the privacy issue, most trace providers do not want to release data with meaningful social information, that may be used to identify the data entered especially for a large dataset. For example, AOL published a query logs but quickly removed it due to the re-identification issues addressed in [1]. Consequently, researchers are trying to find ways to anonymize personal information while maintaining network functioning.

Mobile social networks (MSNs) are a kind of delay tolerant network that consists of lots of mobile nodes with social characteristics. Recently, many social-aware algorithms have been proposed to address routing problems in MSNs. However, it also brings more security and privacy concerns. In this paper, we discuss a specific type of Sybil attack in MSNs, which few researches has been focused on. We proposed a security mechanism to detect Sybil nodes and eliminate them to ensure the routing security while routing forwarding. It needs to cooperate by two sides, which is, respectively measuring distance in client side and eliminating Sybil nodes in server side. We also demonstrate the solution is correct and analyze its energy costs.

The paper describes the corpus of Russian spontaneous monologues and the results of its expert manual annotation. The corpus is balanced with respect to speakers' social characteristics and a text genre. The analysis of manual labelling of transcriptions reveals experts' disagreement in sentence boundary detection. The paper demonstrates that labelled boundaries may have different status. We also show that speakers' social characteristics gender and speech usage and a text genre influence inter-labeller agreement.