All sovereign societies on earth can be put roughly into two categories: developed and under-developed countries. The developed countries, including the United States, Canada, most of west Europe countries, Japan and Australia, are all free capitalist society with a well functioned democratic government and a free market economic system. The under-developed countries, including Russia and east ...

In this paper we report on a project for Corporate Technology of Siemens AG, Munich, which aimed at the use of a social network analysis approach for trend and trend shift detection over time in a technically oriented newsgroup on mobile phones. The analysis was based on the assumption that a trend shift is relevant only if relevant (central) members of the newsgroup initiated this shift. A shi...