CQA services are collaborative platforms where users ask and answer questions. We investigate the influence of national culture on people's online questioning and answering behavior. For this, we analyzed a sample of 200 thousand users in Yahoo Answers from 67 countries. We measure empirically a set of cultural metrics defined in Geert Hofstede's cultural dimensions and Robert Levine's Pace of Life and show that behavioral cultural differences exist in community question answering platforms. We find that national cultures differ in Yahoo Answers along a number of dimensions such as temporal predictability of activities, contribution-related behavioral patterns, privacy concerns, and power inequality.
Quercia @cite_33 used tests and measured happiness of 32,787 Facebook users from 12 countries (Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, UK, USA ). He found that despite comparative economic status, country-level happiness significantly varies across the countries and that it strongly correlates with official well-being scores.
@cite_33
2078120282
Social media sites have been used to track the expression of emotion words across nations. A question left unexplored is whether, at a similar scale, these sites can be used to collect reliable well-being data. To tackle this question, we collect Satisfaction With Life (SWL) test results from a Facebook application and show that aggregate country-level results significantly vary across twelve rich countries and strongly correlate with official well-being scores. To then show that collecting data on Facebook offers an informative look at the sociology of well-being, we study the impact of (un)happiness on the twelve countries by relating the test results on Facebook to reputable international indicators of social and health problems. We find that countries where happiness is lower have increased problems across the board: decreasing well-being is associated with increasing homicide, obesity, drug use, mental illness, and anxiety. In addition to offering these findings, this work hints at the conditions under which social media could be used for data-driven social science research. Aim: to illustrate demographic differences and recent trends in the provision and structure of long-term care systems in the 10 countries participating in the Resident Assessment Instrument studies (Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Japan, The Netherlands, Sweden, Switzerland, the UK and the USA). Method: data were assembled from government documents, statistical yearbooks and articles from journals; supplemental data on long-term care and nursing homes were solicited from colleagues. Results: All 10 countries are developed nations with high life-expectancies. Sweden has the oldest and Iceland the youngest population in this study, with Japan showing the highest ageing rates over the next three decades. Between 2 and 5 of elderly people reside in nursing homes. Interestingly, Iceland, as the youngest country' in this study, has the highest rate of institutionalization (living in residential or nursing homes), while the 'oldest country' (Sweden) has a low rate of institutionalization. In all countries the support ratio (number of elderly people per 100 younger adults) is high and increasing rapidly. Conclusions: no relation appears to exist between the ageing status of a country and the number of nursing home beds. Institutionalization rates among the nations studied differ even more, due at least in part to differences in the organization and financing of long-term care services, in the amount of responsibilit y assumed in the care for disabled elderly people by each sector and the availability of long-term care beds. Facing a rapid ageing of their population, many countries are in the process of health and social care reforms. The paper presents new A2iA bank check recognition systems designed to process handwritten and or printed checks issued in France, UK or USA. All the systems have identical architecture and design principles. However, each of them contains a country-specific part and is trained with country-specific data. Each system performs location, extraction, segmentation and recognition of courtesy and legal amounts in a document image, as well as deciding whether to accept or reject the check. The recognition rate is 80-90 . In the production mode, the check acceptance rate is 60-75 , with the misread rate corresponding to that of a human operator (close to 1 ). Recent empirical evidence suggests that the variance risk premium, or the difference between risk-neutral and statistical expectations of the future return variation, predicts aggregate stock market returns, with the predictability especially strong at the 2-4 month horizons. We provide extensive Monte Carlo simulation evidence that statistical finite sample biases in the overlapping return regressions underlying these findings can not “explain” this apparent predictability. Further corroborating the existing empirical evidence, we show that the patterns in the predictability across different return horizons estimated from country specific regressions for France, Germany, Japan, Switzerland and the U.K. are remarkably similar to the pattern previously documented for the U.S. Defining a “global” variance risk premium, we uncover even stronger predictability and almost identical cross-country patterns through the use of panel regressions that effectively restrict the compensation for world-wide variance risk to be the same across countries. Our findings are broadly consistent with the implications from a stylized two-country general equilibrium model explicitly incorporating the effects of world-wide time-varying economic uncertainty.