Integrating social power into the decision-making of cognitive agents

AbstractSocial power is a pervasive feature with acknowledged impact in a multitude of social processes. However, despite its importance, common approaches to social power interactions in multi-agent systems are rather simplistic and lack a full comprehensive view of the processes involved. In this work, we integrated a comprehensive model of social power dynamics into a cognitive agent architecture based on an operationalization of different bases of social power inspired by theoretical background research in social psychology. The model was implemented in an agent framework that was subsequently used to generate the behavior of virtual characters in an interactive virtual environment. We performed a user study to assess users' perceptions of the agents and found evidence supporting both the social power capabilities provided by the model and their value for the creation of believable and interesting scenarios. We expect that these advances and the collected evidence can be used to support the development of agent systems with an enriched capacity for social agent simulation

The Shame of Buried Giants and the Courage to Dig Them Up

Sammendrag Når gruppen din begår en handling som du ser på som moralsk feil, kan du enten ta eierskap av det moralske nederlaget og beklage, aktivt prøve å gjemme bevis og unngå tema, eller ikke gjøre noe som helst. Vi replikerte studier på gruppe-basert skam som skiller skam inn i to forskjellige emosjonskalaer, rykte skam og moralsk skam. En konfirmatorisk faktoranalyse viste at gruppe-basert skam var best operasjonalisert som to separate emosjonskalaer, istedenfor en omnibus skam skala. Vi undersøkte også tre relevante variabler som kan påvirke motivasjon for individer til å handle prososialt (for eksempel å signere en begjæring), når gruppen din har begått en moralsk overtredelse: (1) gruppe-basert moralsk skam, (2) moralske overbevisninger, og (3) moralsk mot. Spesifikt er det et kunnskaps gap når det kommer til moralsk mot og dens plass i studier om kollektive handlinger. Vi brukte strukturell ligningsmodellering og testet vår modell (N = 269), men den konvergerte ikke. Resultater fra en alternativ modell, med god egnethet, basert på teori, viste at sterke moralske overbevisninger betydelig predikerte moralsk skam og moralsk mot. Og både moralsk skam og moralsk mot betydelig predikerte restitusjon til tross for en opplevd motstand fra gruppen sin. Resultatene støtter ideen om at når sterke moralske overbevisninger blir brutt vil individer være motivert til å handle prososialt gjennom moralsk skam og moralsk mot. Teoretiske implikasjoner, begrensninger, og praktiske implikasjoner for varsling-intervensjoner blir diskutert. Nøkkelord: Moralsk skam, rykte skam, moralske overbevisninger, moralsk mot, restitusjon, motstand fra sin egen grupp

Nerd Ecology: Defending the Earth with Unpopular Culture

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. Drawing on a wide range of examples from literature, comics, film, television and digital media, Nerd Ecology is the first substantial ecocritical study of nerd culture’s engagement with environmental issues. Exploring such works as Star Trek, Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, The Matrix, Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Firefly, the fiction of Thomas Pynchon, The Hunger Games, and superhero comics such as Green Lantern and X-Men, Anthony Lioi maps out the development of nerd culture and its intersections with the most fundamental ecocritical themes. In this way Lioi finds in the narratives of unpopular culture - narratives in which marginalised individuals and communities unite to save the planet - the building blocks of a new environmental politics in tune with the concerns of contemporary ecocritical theory and practice

Sustainable consumption: towards action and impact. : International scientific conference November 6th-8th 2011, Hamburg - European Green Capital 2011, Germany: abstract volume

This volume contains the abstracts of all oral and poster presentations of the international scientific conference „Sustainable Consumption – Towards Action and Impact“ held in Hamburg (Germany) on November 6th-8th 2011. This unique conference aims to promote a comprehensive academic discourse on issues concerning sustainable consumption and brings together scholars from a wide range of academic disciplines. In modern societies, private consumption is a multifaceted and ambivalent phenomenon: it is a ubiquitous social practice and an economic driving force, yet at the same time, its consequences are in conflict with important social and environmental sustainability goals. Finding paths towards “sustainable consumption” has therefore become a major political issue. In order to properly understand the challenge of “sustainable consumption”, identify unsustainable patterns of consumption and bring forward the necessary innovations, a collaborative effort of researchers from different disciplines is needed

Incentive-driven QoS in peer-to-peer overlays

A well known problem in peer-to-peer overlays is that no single entity has control over the software, hardware and configuration of peers. Thus, each peer can selfishly adapt its behaviour to maximise its benefit from the overlay. This thesis is concerned with the modelling and design of incentive mechanisms for QoS-overlays: resource allocation protocols that provide strategic peers with participation incentives, while at the same time optimising the performance of the peer-to-peer distribution overlay. The contributions of this thesis are as follows. First, we present PledgeRoute, a novel contribution accounting system that can be used, along with a set of reciprocity policies, as an incentive mechanism to encourage peers to contribute resources even when users are not actively consuming overlay services. This mechanism uses a decentralised credit network, is resilient to sybil attacks, and allows peers to achieve time and space deferred contribution reciprocity. Then, we present a novel, QoS-aware resource allocation model based on Vickrey auctions that uses PledgeRoute as a substrate. It acts as an incentive mechanism by providing efficient overlay construction, while at the same time allocating increasing service quality to those peers that contribute more to the network. The model is then applied to lagsensitive chunk swarming, and some of its properties are explored for different peer delay distributions. When considering QoS overlays deployed over the best-effort Internet, the quality received by a client cannot be adjudicated completely to either its serving peer or the intervening network between them. By drawing parallels between this situation and well-known hidden action situations in microeconomics, we propose a novel scheme to ensure adherence to advertised QoS levels. We then apply it to delay-sensitive chunk distribution overlays and present the optimal contract payments required, along with a method for QoS contract enforcement through reciprocative strategies. We also present a probabilistic model for application-layer delay as a function of the prevailing network conditions. Finally, we address the incentives of managed overlays, and the prediction of their behaviour. We propose two novel models of multihoming managed overlay incentives in which overlays can freely allocate their traffic flows between different ISPs. One is obtained by optimising an overlay utility function with desired properties, while the other is designed for data-driven least-squares fitting of the cross elasticity of demand. This last model is then used to solve for ISP profit maximisation

Unmet goals of tracking: within-track heterogeneity of students' expectations for

Educational systems are often characterized by some form(s) of ability grouping, like tracking. Although substantial variation in the implementation of these practices exists, it is always the aim to improve teaching efficiency by creating homogeneous groups of students in terms of capabilities and performances as well as expected pathways. If students’ expected pathways (university, graduate school, or working) are in line with the goals of tracking, one might presume that these expectations are rather homogeneous within tracks and heterogeneous between tracks. In Flanders (the northern region of Belgium), the educational system consists of four tracks. Many students start out in the most prestigious, academic track. If they fail to gain the necessary credentials, they move to the less esteemed technical and vocational tracks. Therefore, the educational system has been called a 'cascade system'. We presume that this cascade system creates homogeneous expectations in the academic track, though heterogeneous expectations in the technical and vocational tracks. We use data from the International Study of City Youth (ISCY), gathered during the 2013-2014 school year from 2354 pupils of the tenth grade across 30 secondary schools in the city of Ghent, Flanders. Preliminary results suggest that the technical and vocational tracks show more heterogeneity in student’s expectations than the academic track. If tracking does not fulfill the desired goals in some tracks, tracking practices should be questioned as tracking occurs along social and ethnic lines, causing social inequality

For whom the consumer retorts: Consumer identity, cultural conditions, and the ramification and re-integration of the market through co-optation

Co-optation theory has evolved such that the cultural friction between consumer agency and the market provides an eternal source of marketing opportunities for marketers to culturally rejuvenate their businesses. The relevant literature studying consumer identity, however, precludes docile consumers from the analyses and theorization process. Given the theoretical incompleteness, this dissertation first expounds the nature of consumer agency by studying consumer cultural conditions cultivated and entrenched since modern epoch. Consumers‘ varied levels of ability to signify and their urge for distinctiveness are two cultural conditions that can capture the quintessence of consumer agency. Second, this study delves into the possibility that consumers overcome the given cultural quality, employ different (re)presentations of consumer culture for their identity projects, and consequently contribute to the market dynamics. Ethnographic data collected from the context of X Games help explicate the elements of consumer cultural quality based on emerging themes of ability to signify and urge for distinctiveness. The themes of the construct of ability to signify demonstrate that dialectical negotiation of identity contributes much less than postulated in the literature to the performance of consumer identity project in terms of true presentation of idiosyncratic self-identity. In addition, consumers in the context tend to be iconoclastic, narcissistic, and naturalistic distinction-makers with their new currency for distinction: cool. The consumer-market dynamics impeccably operates based upon interactions and mutual facilitations among four theoretically and empirically distinct groups of consumers: pragmatic, stigmatized, distinction-oriented, and self-normalizing consumers. The historic conflict between consumers and the market steeped in Hegelian dialectics is again contested in the dynamics due to the switch of modes(arts) of being(consumption) made by individual consumers who respectively participate in the system through presentation and representation. Accordingly, a new perspective of consumers as cyborgs, based on posthumanism, is discussed. Some theoretical considerations of gender and race issues in such dynamics are also proposed

Taking control: citizens, corruption and collective civic action in Africa

With the failure of state-focused anti-corruption reform packages to reduce systemic corruption, the role of citizens in anti-corruption efforts has gained traction in academia and policy-making quarters. Yet, some of the emerging literature questions the prospect of citizens’ demand for accountability in places where corruption is entrenched. In such settings, high perceptions of corruption can reinforce the notion that most people are likely to act corruptly, undermining belief in the ability and willingness of citizens as well as government to tackle corruption. Nevertheless, some of the countries perceived to be highly corrupt have experienced frequent episodes of collective resistance to abuses of power. This has raised a possibility that exposure to corruption can in fact provoke the willingness to get involved in efforts to bring it under control. Furthermore, it seems that there are contextual conditions (other than country-level corruption) that shape the impact of subjective perceptions as well as direct experience of corruption on propensity to engage in anti-corruption tactics based on collective action. Using analysis of nationally representative public opinion data covering 35 African countries, this dissertation examines individual and contextual level conditions under which perceptions of corruption and personal experiences of bribery might encourage ordinary people to support citizen-centred and collective action methods of curbing corruption. It is the first study to utilise a data set of this magnitude to study the mobilisation potential of exposure to corruption in the African context. One of the key findings is that across different statistical conditions, an increasing experience of paying bribes fosters the support for the use of citizen-centred and collective action methods of anti-corruption. Importantly, there is strong evidence that an increasing frequency of paying bribes is likely to have the same impact in different countries. The effect of the perception of corruption is more ambiguous and indeed strongly influenced by observed and unobserved country-level conditions. These contextual factors include country-level poverty and state-level clientelism. Apart from a focus on the effects of individual-level corruption, the analysis zeroes-in on the extent to which the collective action that arises in highly clientelistic societies represents a demand for impartiality — a lynchpin of good governance and anti-corruption civic engagement