by the University of Michigan

ANN ARBOR, Michigan.— Do friends wear the same style of shoe or see the same movies because they have similar tastes, which is why they became friends in the first place? Or once a friendship is established, do individuals influence each other to adopt like behaviors?

Social scientists don’t know for sure. They’re still trying to understand the role social influence plays in the spreading of trends because the real world doesn’t keep track of how people acquire new items or preferences.

But the virtual world Second Life does. Researchers from the University of Michigan have taken advantage of this unique information to study how “gestures” make their way through this online community. Gestures are code snippets Second Life avatars must acquire in order to make motions such as dancing, waving or chanting.

Roughly half of the gestures the researchers studied made their way through the virtual world friend by friend.

“We could have found that most everyone goes to the store to buy gestures, but it turns out about 50 percent of gesture transfers are between people who have declared themselves friends. The social networks played a major role in the distribution of these assets,” said Lada Adamic, an assistant professor in the School of Information and the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

Adamic is an author of a paper on the research that graduate student Eytan Bakshy will present on July 7 at the Association for Computer Machinery’s Conference on Electronic Conference in Stanford, Calif. Bakshy is a doctoral student in the School of Information.

“There’s been a high correspondence between the real world and virtual worlds,” Adamic said. “We’re not saying this is exactly how people share in the real world, but we believe it does have some relevance.”

This study is one of the first to model social influence in a virtual world because of the rarity of having access to information about how information, assets or ideas propagate. In Second Life, the previous owner of a gesture is listed.

The researchers also found that the gestures that spread from friend to friend were not distributed as broadly as ones that were distributed outside of the social network, such as those acquired in stores or as give-aways.

And they discovered that the early adopters of gestures who are among the first 5-10 percent to acquire new assets are not the same as the influencers, who tend to distribute them most broadly. This aligns with what social scientists have found.

“In our study, we sought to develop a more rigorous understanding of social processes

that underlies many cultural and economic phenomena,” Bakshy said. “While some of our findings may seem quite intuitive, what I find most exciting is that we were actually able to test some rather controversial and competing hypotheses about the role of social networks in influence.”

The researchers examined 130 days worth of gesture transfers in late 2008 and early 2009. They looked at 100,229 users and ­106,499 gestures. They obtained the data from Linden Lab, the maker of Second Life. Personally-identifying information had been removed.

The paper is called, “Social Influence and the Diffusion of User-Created Content.” The research is funded by the National Science Foundation. Physics graduate student Brian Karrer is also a co-author.

by Marvin Ramírez

Horacio Domin­guez, of Honduras, protests the destitution of the honduran president. (photo by by Marvin Ramírez)

Protests around the U.S.A. have been held to denounce and reject the coup d’état in the Republic of Honduras that ousted down President Manuel Zelaya, whose mandate was elected by popular vote.

In San Francisco, several dozens people marched on the sidewalk of the building where the Consulate of Honduras is­ located on June 29, rejecting the new “government of facto ” instituted by the military after the removal of Zelaya, whose term in office ends in six months.

“The military coup that removed from power the elected president of Honduras, provoked unanimous repudiation on a global scale. But the response of some countries has been more reluctant than that of others and the ambivalence of Washington has begun to arouse suspicion about what really the American government is trying to accomplish in this situation,” wrote Mark Weisbrot for The Guardian Unlimited.

According to his comment, the first declarations from the White House in response to the coup d’ etat were weak and evasive.

In them the coup was not denounced, but rather it was calling to “all the political and social actors in Honduras to respect1the democratic norms, the Constitutional state and the principles of the Democratic Inter-American Letter.”

The neighbor governments of Guatemala, Nicaragua and El Salvador did the first warnings by announcing a suspension of commerce for 48 hours.

Meanwhile, the armed forces were still occupying the main arteries of the country, taking control of the press, paralyzing the country, while the Organization of American States was considering the expulsion of Honduras from this organization.

At this very moment, rifles M-16 paid with American dollars, and with labels “ Made in the USA,” point at thousands peaceful, wrote Weisbrot.

“General Romeo Vásquez and other military leaders, received training in counter-insurgency in the Institute for the Security and Hemispherical Cooperation previously known as the School of the Americas, which is responsible for the training of many who perpetrated atrocities in the Americas.”

Zelaya was removed from his house at gunpoint by soldiers and fl own to exile on June 25, after trying to lead a referendum that would permit reelection. At present a president only can be elected for a period of four years.

With the coup d’état, it has been unveiled the pretention that Latin America has stopped being a semicolony of the Yankee imperialism and that a series of diplomatic instances, like ­the Summit of Rio – the Unasur or even the ALBA -, has emancipated it from the tutelage of the fi nancial international capital, commented, Jorge Altamira, of the Working Press.

At press time of this edition, it was expected that President Zelaya would return to Honduras accompanied by several Latin-American presidents to reinstate himself in power, despite of threats from the military that he would be arrested and prosecuted.

by the El Reportero’s news services

Manuel Zelaya

At press time of this edition, thousands of Hondurans were in the streets protesting the coup d’etat in their country. They have been met with tear gas, anti-riot rubber bullets, tanks firing water mixed with chemicals, and clubs.

Police had moved in to break down barricades and soldiers used violence to push back protesters at the presidential residence, leaving an unknown number wounded.

“If the coup leaders were desperate when they decided to forcibly depose the elected president, they are even more desperate now,” said a Americas Program, release.

“Stripped of its pretense of legality by universal repudiation and faced with a popular uprising, the coup has turned to more violent means.”

An isolated President Manuel Zelaya left the presidential palace on June 26, having suggested that the country’s “oligarchy”, with the support of Congress and the Supreme Court, had attempted a technical coup d’etat against him.

Honduran Foreign Minister Patricia Rodas called on the people to take to the streets to resist the coup perpetrated early Sunday against President Manuel Zelaya.

Also, the Attorney General, Luis Alberto Rubí affi rmed that the ex president Manuel Zelaya will be arrested at his arrival in Honduras”immediately” after being charged with varios crimes committed against the State.

Meanwhile, the World Bank and Interamerican Development Bank announced on Tuesday the freezing temporarily of their operations in Honduras.

Sharp fall in Colombian coca cultivation is less impressive than it seems

Coca cultivation fell sharply in Colombia in 2008, while increasing in Peru and Bolivia. That was the headline-grabbing conclusion of the annual report released by the United Nations Offi ce on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) this week, heralded by some as a vindication of the USsponsored counter-narcotics and counter-insurgency initiative Plan Colombia.

production was the lowest inAttention to the detail of the report shows, however, that coca cultivation in Colombia merely returned to a steady average maintained between 2003 and 2006 after an anomalous spike in 2007, although the UNODC report argues that potential cocaine a decade.

Convulsion in the Amazon shakes Peru’s García

Peru’s police force suffered the greatest number of casualties ever in one single day in early June. This did not come about as a result of an engagement with Sendero Luminoso guerrillas but rather in a violent clash with indigenous protesters in the northern department of Amazonas.

The government initially blamed indigenous groups for the scale of the violence but later conceded that the protests were a direct result of its failure to consult them about its plans to open up the area to private investment. President Alan García’s indecisive and inconsistent response to the violence has exposed his government as weak, and left his much-touted development strategy in tatters.

Canada’s leaders to skip out on developing nations’ summit

UNITED NATIONS — Canada is among Western countries whose leaders have spurned invitations to attend a United Nations “summit” opening Wednesday on how the world body can help solve the global fi nancial crisis.

UN General Assembly president Miguel d’Escoto Brockmann, a former Nicaraguan revolutionary, had asked all 192 member states to attend at the “highest level.”

But many developed countries fear the three-day gathering will descend into a raucous denunciation of the capitalist system, western diplomats say.

Radical members of the anachronistically named Group of 77 developing ­countries, which has more than 130 members, have largely developed the agenda.

What’s more, some of the world’s harshest critics of capitalism are among the 14 heads of state and government who are turning up. Among them are presidents Hugo Chavez of Venezuela, Evo Morales of Bolivia and Rafael Correa of Ecuador.

by Adolfo Flores

California State Senator Gil Cedillo, who fought a long losing battle with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger to permit undocumented immigrants the right to apply for driver’s licenses, has lost his bid to replace Hilda Solís in the 32nd U.S. Congressional District.

As Solís moved on to serve in President Obama’s Cabinet as Secretary of Labor, Cedillo was eliminated in the district’s Democratic primary of a May 19 special election by State Board of Equalization vicepresident Judy Chu.

The former Mayor of Monterey Park, who is Chinese-American, gained 15,338 votes, Cedillo 11,244, and another Latino candidate, Emanuel Pleitez 6,509. Nearly half of the registered voters in the heavily Democratic district are Latino and 13 percent Asian. Only 6 percent of its registered voters cast ballots.

Bolstered by support from Los Angeles Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa, Chu picked up a third of the Hispanic vote.

Leland Saito, associate professor at the University of Southern California who has written extensively about Chinese-American and Latino relations, explained Villaraigosa’s failure to back a Latino political colleague, pointing out that if Villaraigosa runs for governor next year, he already has the Latino vote locked up. “Villaraigosa is eyeing the Asian community for fundraising as opposed to the vote,” he said.

He added, “When Latinos voted for Judy Chu, they were aware that the two groups share interest in many of the same issues.

They have some parallel life experiences when dealing with discrimination in housing, education and employment.”

Both communities stress the need for multilingual and diverse curricula in public schools, Saito said. In the 1950s both battled restrictive housing covenants in Monterey Park and neighboring Montebello.

Chu is expected to face only light opposition from Republican and Libertarian foes in the July 14 runoff. In the primary, precincts heavily populated by Hispanics voted by clear margins for Cedillo, who has a record of aggressive Latino advocacy.

He helped guide California’s DREAM Act, which would have made thousands of undocumented Hispanic and other immigrant students eligible for in-state tuition and allowed them access to certain financial aid programs. It passed the Democratic-controlled state legislature but was vetoed by Schwarzenegger, who is term-limited from running again.

The federal DREAM Act was reintroduced in both houses of Congress in March. It may be merged into a comprehensive immigration bill if and when that legislation is introduced again.

Summing up Cedillo’s campaign for Congress, Latino Caucus spokesperson Xochitl Arellano in Sacramento stated, “We achieved more than people thought we would. He’s absolutely back 100% as Senator at the state capitol giving a voice to those who don’t have one.”

Undocumented Decline

The number of immigrants caught entering or within the United States without documents, 724,840, has dropped for a third consecutive year. In 2007, there were 876,803 apprehensions; in 2006, 1,089,096.

The figure for 2008 was the lowest since 1973. ­Homeland Securirty reported 97% of the cases were on the Southwest border, with 91 percent involving Mexicans. The Pew Hispanic Center said jobs are the main reason Mexicans emigrate. Now, said spokesperson Jeff Passel, “There aren’t any.” Hispanic Link.