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To evaluate the quality of public discussion about social movements on Twitter and to understand the structural features and evolution of longitudinal discussion networks, we analyze tweets about the Occupy Wall Street movement posted over the course of 16 days by investigating the relationship between inequality, emotion, and the stability of online discussion. The results reveal that (1) the discussion is highly unequal for both initiating discussions and receiving conversations; (2) the stability of the discussion is much higher for receivers than for initiators; (3) the inequality of online discussions moderates the stability of online discussions; and (4) on an individual level, there is no significant relationship between emotion and political discussion. The implications help evaluate the quality of public discussion, and to understand the relationship between online discussion and social movements.

AbstractThe goals of national energy security and sustainable development necessitate the role of renewable energy, of which biomass energy is an essential choice for realizing the strategic energy diversification and building a low-carbon energy system. Microbial conversion of flue-gas-derived CO2 for producing biodiesel and biogas has been considered a significant technology in new energy development. Microalgae carbon sequestration is a hot research direction for researchers. However, three fundamental problems relating to energy/mass transfer and conversion remain as follows: (1) contradictory relationship between high resistance of cell membrane micropores and high flux of flue-gas-derived CO2 limits mass transfer rate of CO2 molecules across cell membrane; (2) low biocatalytic activity of intracellular enzymes with high-concentration CO2 results in difficulties in directional carbon/hydrogen conversion; (3) competition between multiple intracellular reaction pathways and high energy barriers of target products hinder the desirable cascade energy transfer. Therefore, key scientific issues of microbial energy conversion lie in the understanding on directional carbon/hydrogen conversion and desirable cascade energy transfer. Multiple researches have established a theoretical foundation of microbial energy conversion which strengthens energy/mass transfer in microbial cells. The innovative results in previous studies have been obtained as follows: (1) Reveal mass transfer mechanism of vortex flow across cell membrane micropores. (2) Propose a strategy that directionally regulates enzyme activity. (3) Establish chain reaction pathways coupled with step changes.

In September 2015, the United Nations (UN) Member States subscribed the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) of the 2030 Agenda (General Assembly 2015). This work makes an analysis on how Knowledge Societies can effectively contribute for the achievements of the Agenda's 17 Sustainable Development Goals. Moreover, it will be presented the research overview conducted by UNU-EGOV for producing the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) Knowledge Societies Handbook (UNESCO/IFAP and UNU-EGOV 2016). In addition, three countries from three different Continents of Asia, Europe and Africa - China, Portugal and Uganda respectively - will be analyzed in the context of the knowledge societies architecture proposed in the handbook. For making that analysis a set of indicators collected from the "The World Bank" (The World Bank 2016) and "International Telecommunication Union" (ITU) (ITU 2015) databases have been selected. The indicators have been interpreted taking into consideration the socio-cultural, political, and economic context of each of the three countries.

AbstractThis study takes Xincun Village (to protect the privacy of the village, the name we are using is not the real name of the village) in the Golden Triangle of China's coal industry to conduct research focused on the frequent occurrence of anomic social actions by villagers after sudden wealth. Based on 160 days of structured and semistructured interviews, the results show that the anomic actions of suddenly wealthy groups mainly include self, other and socially oriented actions. The implication is that appropriate governance measures can weaken or prevent the occurrence of anomie and its devastating consequences.

The main purpose of this research is to find the relationship between market risk, Exchange rate, Interest rate, and bank stock returns in Pakistan. The KSE-100 index used as Market risk, US dollar against Pak rupees used as Exchange rate, three-month T-bill rate used as the interest rate and the continuously compounded return used as banks stock return. The time-series data from January 2007 to December 2018 is used in this study. The ordinary least square (OLS) method is used to check the relationship between bank stock return, market risk, interest rate, and Exchange rate. The result of this shows that market risk is positively significant, exchange rate rarely negatively significant, and the interest rate insignificant exempt of one bank. When the prices of the stock market are increasing the bank stock prices also increase. These empirical findings are helpful for the policymaker, investor, banking management as well as Government.