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The politics of crowds : an alternative history of sociology
\"When sociology emerged as a discipline in the late nineteenth century, the problem of crowds constituted one of its key concerns. It was argued that crowds shook the foundations of society and led individuals into all sorts of irrational behaviour. Yet crowds were not just something to be fought in the street, they also formed a battleground over how sociology should be demarcated from related disciplines, most notably psychology. In The Politics of Crowds, Christian Borch traces sociological debates on crowds and masses from the birth of sociology until today, with a particular focus on the developments in France, Germany and the USA. The book is a refreshing alternative history of sociology and modern society, observed through society's other, the crowd. Borch shows that the problem of crowds is not just of historical interest: even today the politics of sociology is intertwined with the politics of crowds\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Revolutionary waves : the crowd in modern China
\"Revolutionary Waves analyzes the centrality of the crowd in modern Chinese cultural and political imaginary and its global resonances. Bringing together literary studies, intellectual history, critical theory, and scientific history, it highlights unexplored interactions between emerging forms of knowledge, new aesthetic modes of representation, and changing political imperatives\"--Provided by publisher.
Book
Pixel-Wise Crowd Understanding via Synthetic Data
Crowd analysis via computer vision techniques is an important topic in the field of video surveillance, which has wide-spread applications including crowd monitoring, public safety, space design and so on. Pixel-wise crowd understanding is the most fundamental task in crowd analysis because of its finer results for video sequences or still images than other analysis tasks. Unfortunately, pixel-level understanding needs a large amount of labeled training data. Annotating them is an expensive work, which causes that current crowd datasets are small. As a result, most algorithms suffer from over-fitting to varying degrees. In this paper, take crowd counting and segmentation as examples from the pixel-wise crowd understanding, we attempt to remedy these problems from two aspects, namely data and methodology. Firstly, we develop a free data collector and labeler to generate synthetic and labeled crowd scenes in a computer game, Grand Theft Auto V. Then we use it to construct a large-scale, diverse synthetic crowd dataset, which is named as “GCC Dataset”. Secondly, we propose two simple methods to improve the performance of crowd understanding via exploiting the synthetic data. To be specific, (1) supervised crowd understanding: pre-train a crowd analysis model on the synthetic data, then fine-tune it using the real data and labels, which makes the model perform better on the real world; (2) crowd understanding via domain adaptation: translate the synthetic data to photo-realistic images, then train the model on translated data and labels. As a result, the trained model works well in real crowd scenes.Extensive experiments verify that the supervision algorithm outperforms the state-of-the-art performance on four real datasets: UCF_CC_50, UCF-QNRF, and Shanghai Tech Part A/B Dataset. The above results show the effectiveness, values of synthetic GCC for the pixel-wise crowd understanding. The tools of collecting/labeling data, the proposed synthetic dataset and the source code for counting models are available at https://gjy3035.github.io/GCC-CL/.
Journal Article
Crowds : ethnographic encounters
\"What exactly is a crowd? How do crowds differ from other large gatherings of people? And how do they transform people's emotions, politics, or faith? In Crowds: Ethnographic Encounters, ten ethnographers draw on their experiences and expertise to reflect on encounters with crowds. Each author examines a particular crowd or conception of crowdedness to provide an analysis of how, when, where - and with whom - crowds form in different contexts, as well as their purpose and the practical effect the experience has on both the participants and their environment. The wide selection of case studies ranges from the crowds that form every year during the Hajj, to New Year celebrations in China, commuters on the Delhi metro, public prayer in Nigeria, online mobs in Bangladesh, and the crowds that have emerged during protest movements in Thailand and Syria. Crowds makes a key contribution to establishing an anthropological theory of crowds and will be an essential read for both students and researchers\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Market Mechanisms in Online Peer-to-Peer Lending
Online peer-to-peer lending (P2P lending) has emerged as an appealing new channel of financing in recent years. A fundamental but largely unanswered question in this nascent industry is the choice of market mechanisms, i.e., how the supply and demand of funds are matched, and the terms (price) at which transactions will occur. Two of the most popular mechanisms are auctions (where the “crowd” determines the price of the transaction through an auction process) and posted prices (where the platform determines the price). While P2P lending platforms typically use one or the other, there is little systematic research on the implications of such choices for market participants, transaction outcomes, and social welfare. We address this question both theoretically and empirically. We first develop a game-theoretic model that yields empirically testable hypotheses, taking into account the incentive of the platform. We then test these hypotheses by exploiting a regime change from auctions to posted prices on one of the largest P2P lending platforms. Consistent with our hypotheses, we find that under platform-mandated posted prices, loans are funded with higher probability, but the preset interest rates are higher than borrowers’ starting interest rates and contract interest rates in auctions. More important, all else equal, loans funded under posted prices are more likely to default, thereby undermining lenders’ returns on investment and their surplus. Although platform-mandated posted prices may be faster in originating loans, auctions that rely on the crowd to discover prices are not necessarily inferior in terms of overall social welfare.
This paper was accepted by Chris Forman, information systems
.
Journal Article
The criminal crowd and other writings on mass society
\"The Criminal Crowd and Other Writings on Mass Society is the first English collection of writings by Italian jurist, sociologist, cultural and literary critic Scipio Sighele. Sighele is largely responsible for providing post-unification Italy with a new outlook on issues ranging from the blurring line between individual and collective accountability, the role of urbanization in the development of criminality, and the emancipation of women. This work draws a multifaceted portrait of a provocative thinker and public intellectual caught between tradition and modernity during the European fin de siلecle. Containing a comprehensive introduction by the editor, The Criminal Crowd and Other Writings on Mass Society includes Sighele's seminal work, The Criminal Crowd, as well as his formative studies on group behaviour. Nicoletta Pireddu contextualizes Sighele's contribution to the so-called 'age-of crowds,' from the fierce polemic with his French rivals Gustave LeBon and Gabriel Tarde to the scientific, literary, and cultural developments of his conceptualization of mass behaviours as a legitimate object of psychological investigation into a new century.\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
A Conceptual Framework for Understanding Crowdfunding
Crowdfunding is a rapidly growing technology-enabled process that has the potential to disrupt the capital market space. In order for this process to work efficiently, it is important to clarify the issues surrounding the phenomenon from the founders’, the backers’, and the technology providers’ viewpoints. We begin with an ecosystem view to understand the stakeholders and their roles in the crowdfunding process. We review the literature with a focus on how current research fits into the overall crowdfunding phenomenon. Guided by typology and classification research approaches, we identify six distinct crowdfunding business models: private equity, royalty, microfinance, peer-to-peer lending, rewards, and donation. Based on identified roles and crowdfunding business models, we propose a conceptual research framework. We conclude by showing how current research fits into our proposed framework and offer suggestions for future research directions.
Journal Article
