“All play means something” Johann Huizinga (Huzinga,J, 1949, page 7) In this paper I discuss the strategic and discursive implementation of interactive play in motivating positive social behavior within children and young adults. Central to my discussion is the social role of play and the roles of the players, as described by play theorists Johannes Huzinga (Salen, K et al, 2004, page 465) and ...

The Girls' Circle is a support group for adolescent girls developed by Beth Hossfeld and Giovanna Taormina as a unique program that addresses the needs of girls by focusing on increasing connections, building empathic skills, and developing resiliency. The present study evaluates the effectiveness of the Girls' Circle intervention on improving social support, body image, locus of control, self-...

Traditional models of cascades in social networks are based on the idea that individuals become “activated” once a certain number of their friends are active. However, some recent work has suggested that in some cases individuals become active based on the receipt of social signals from circles of their friends. In this paper, we introduce a deterministic model of this circle-based activation p...

We examine the problem of identifying social circles, or sets of cohesive and mutually-aware nodes surrounding an initial query set, in directed graphs where the complete graph is not known beforehand. This problem differs from local community mining, in that the query set defines the circle of interest. We explicitly handle edge direction, as in many cases relationships are not symmetric, and ...

Network science has released its talents in social network analysis based on the information of static topologies. In reality social contacts are dynamic and evolve concurrently in time. Nowadays they can be recorded by ubiquitous information technologies, and generated into temporal social networks to provide new sights in social reality mining. Here, we define circle link to measure contextua...