Mining International Political Norms from the GDELT Database

Researchers have long been interested in the role that norms can play in governing agent actions in multi-agent systems. Much work has been done on formalising normative concepts from human society and adapting them for the government of open software systems, and on the simulation of normative processes in human and artificial societies. However, there has been comparatively little work on applying normative MAS mechanisms to understanding the norms in human society. This work investigates this issue in the context of international politics. Using the GDELT dataset, containing machine-encoded records of international events extracted from news reports, we extracted bilateral sequences of inter-country events and applied a Bayesian norm mining mechanism to identify norms that best explained the observed behaviour. A statistical evaluation showed that the normative model fitted the data significantly better than a probabilistic discrete event model.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figures, pre-print for International Workshop on Coordination, Organizations, Institutions, Norms and Ethics for Governance of Multi-Agent Systems (COINE), co-located with AAMAS 202

The price of corporate social responsibility: the case of black economic empowerment transactions in South Africa

Since the demise of apartheid in South Africa, corporations have been encouraged to participate in the governmental goal of increasing corporate ownership by the black majority population. One vehicle that has arisen to help facilitate an increase in corporate ownership has been black economic empowerment (BEE) transactions. BEE transactions are essentially private placements of equity. Firms that have taken this socially activist position of selling portions of their equity, usually at a substantial discount, to black empowerment groups have received positive media attention in the name of “good corporate citizenship.” ; This study investigates the market performance of these BEE transactions, specifically addressing three questions. The first question is whether BEE transactions create or destroy wealth. To address this question we use an event study methodology to calculate the cumulative abnormal returns (CARs) associated with public announcements of BEE transactions. The second question is whether specific types of BEE transactions did better or worse than others. We address this question by analyzing the cross-sectional variation in the CARs associated with public announcements of BEE transactions. The third question is whether firms that engage in BEE transactions experience negative post-announcement price performance. This last question is motivated by popular press accounts of the exploitation of black empowerment groups by white-owned South African corporations. To address this question, we test whether BEE transactions have benefited white corporate South Africa at the expense of the participating black empowerment groups.

Solar Intranetwork Magnetic Elements: bipolar flux appearance

The current study aims to quantify characteristic features of bipolar flux appearance of solar intranetwork (IN) magnetic elements. To attack such a problem, we use the Narrow-band Filter Imager (NFI) magnetograms from the Solar Optical Telescope (SOT) on board \emph{Hinode}; these data are from quiet and an enhanced network areas. Cluster emergence of mixed polarities and IN ephemeral regions (ERs) are the most conspicuous forms of bipolar flux appearance within the network. Each of the clusters is characterized by a few well-developed ERs that are partially or fully co-aligned in magnetic axis orientation. On average, the sampled IN ERs have total maximum unsigned flux of several 10^{17} Mx, separation of 3-4 arcsec, and a lifetime of 10-15 minutes. The smallest IN ERs have a maximum unsigned flux of several 10^{16} Mx, separations less than 1 arcsec, and lifetimes as short as 5 minutes. Most IN ERs exhibit a rotation of their magnetic axis of more than 10 degrees during flux emergence. Peculiar flux appearance, e.g., bipole shrinkage followed by growth or the reverse, is not unusual. A few examples show repeated shrinkage-growth or growth-shrinkage, like magnetic floats in the dynamic photosphere. The observed bipolar behavior seems to carry rich information on magneto-convection in the sub-photospheric layer.Comment: 26 pages, 14 figure

Infant as idea : the birth of a new composite person

"The purpose of this thesis is to discuss the evolution of "infant" as a composite person in the first decade of the twentieth century. Data for this inquiry comes from the New York Times and the Washington Post newspapers. A content analysis was performed on articles containing infant as their main subject in these two venues between 1900 and 1910. Infant, it appears, emerged as a distinct category of being in the world by 1910. During this decade the "infant" was given a soul, their own category in mortality statistics, and additional legislation protecting their well-being. Prior to this time religious, scientific, political and other status holders were likely to use "infant", "baby" and "child" interchangeably. By 1910 the infant was becoming solidly abstract scientific and statistical idea while baby was coming to refer to the flesh and blood entity only."--Abstract from author supplied metadata

The Processing of Verb-Argument Constructions is Sensitive to Form, Function, Frequency, Contingency, and Prototypicality.

Peer Reviewedhttps://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/139741/1/CognitiveLinguisticsUMichOffprint.pd

International technology transfer, innovation and economic development of European Union countries in 2008-2017

Purpose: The article aims to assess the extent to which International Technology Transfer (ITT) can influence the innovation level of European Union (EU) countries and, as a result, accelerate their economic development. This is vital from the point of view of the developing countries which are striving to narrow the development gap as rapidly as possible. Design/Methodology/Approach: The study uses a soft modelling method which makes it possible to measure and analyse the dependencies between variables than cannot be directly observed, i.e. latent variables. The soft model consists of two sub-models: an internal one, describing the relationships between the latent variables, and an external one, characterising the latent variables by means of observable variables. The statistical data used for estimating the model come from Eurostat, the World Bank, and the European Innovation Scoreboard database and span the years 2008-2017. Findings: The results of the modelling indicated a positive impact of ITT on innovation levels in EU countries and a positive impact on both ITT and innovation levels on the economic development of the studied countries in the period 2008-2017. The influence of innovation levels on economic development proved to be stronger than the influence of ITT. Practical Implications: The results of the conducted study can have a practical application and serve as an instrument of innovation policies, industrial policies, or as a tool helpful in creating conditions for innovation systems. Originality/Value: The article points to the methods and extent of gaining knowledge and technologies as prerequisites of higher innovativeness of EU countries, which constitutes an original approach to technological processes as a component of economic development.peer-reviewe

Evolvability signatures of generative encodings: beyond standard performance benchmarks

Evolutionary robotics is a promising approach to autonomously synthesize machines with abilities that resemble those of animals, but the field suffers from a lack of strong foundations. In particular, evolutionary systems are currently assessed solely by the fitness score their evolved artifacts can achieve for a specific task, whereas such fitness-based comparisons provide limited insights about how the same system would evaluate on different tasks, and its adaptive capabilities to respond to changes in fitness (e.g., from damages to the machine, or in new situations). To counter these limitations, we introduce the concept of "evolvability signatures", which picture the post-mutation statistical distribution of both behavior diversity (how different are the robot behaviors after a mutation?) and fitness values (how different is the fitness after a mutation?). We tested the relevance of this concept by evolving controllers for hexapod robot locomotion using five different genotype-to-phenotype mappings (direct encoding, generative encoding of open-loop and closed-loop central pattern generators, generative encoding of neural networks, and single-unit pattern generators (SUPG)). We observed a predictive relationship between the evolvability signature of each encoding and the number of generations required by hexapods to adapt from incurred damages. Our study also reveals that, across the five investigated encodings, the SUPG scheme achieved the best evolvability signature, and was always foremost in recovering an effective gait following robot damages. Overall, our evolvability signatures neatly complement existing task-performance benchmarks, and pave the way for stronger foundations for research in evolutionary robotics.Comment: 24 pages with 12 figures in the main text, and 4 supplementary figures. Accepted at Information Sciences journal (in press). Supplemental videos are available online at, see http://goo.gl/uyY1R