An Agent-Based Model of Status Construction in Task Focused Groups

Status beliefs link social distinctions, such as gender and race, to assumptions about competence and social worth. Recent modeling work in status construction theory suggests that interactions in small, task focused groups can lead to the spontaneous emergence and diffusion of such beliefs in larger populations. This earlier work has focused on dyads as the smallest possible groups in which status beliefs might emerge from face-to-face interaction. In today's societies, however, many task focused interactions take place in groups larger than dyads. In this article, we therefore develop an agent-based computational model that enables us to study the emergence of status beliefs in groups larger than dyads. With this model, we address questions such as: Do basic principles of task focused interaction systematically favor the emergence of status beliefs in groups larger than dyads? Does the time-frame over which small groups interact affect the likelihood with which status beliefs emerge? How does group size affect the emergence of status beliefs? Computational experimentation with the new model suggests that behavioral principles known to spontaneously create hierarchical differentiation between individual group members also tend to align these hierarchies with categorical differences and thereby facilitate the emergence of status beliefs. This tendency is stronger in smaller groups, and in groups that interact either for a very short or very long time

To get or to be? Use and acquisition of get- versus be- passives: evidence from children and adults

The use and acquisition of the get-passive has so far yielded a variety of accounts and suggestions. This paper presents new experimental evidence concerning the use and the acquisition of the get-passive by children, as well as adult judgments of get- and be-passives. Within a prototype approach to the passive, experiments investigated when 2–4-year-old British children produce get- as opposed to be-passives. The role of direct affectedness of the patient on get-passive production was investigated further in a follow-up experiment. In addition to the child data, ratings of get- and be-passives were obtained from British English adult speakers to investigate the acceptability of these passives and their relationship to developmental data. The first experiment showed that the chosen prototype approach clearly predicts children’s acquisition of be-passives with get-passives being more peripheral members of the category ‘passive’ than be-passives. The second study shows that even if the child herself is the affected patient in the play action, get-passives are only rarely produced. In contrast to American children, direct affectedness did not induce British children to produce a significant amount of getpassives. Last, adult ratings confirm that British English speakers rate be-passives consistently as better examples of passive sentences than get-passives. The evidence suggests that getpassives are more peripheral for British than for American children and adults. Implications for the possible role of parental input and the validity of existing accounts of the get-passive are discussed

Network Structure, Efficiency, and Performance in WikiProjects

The internet has enabled collaborations at a scale never before possible, but the best practices for organizing such large collaborations are still not clear. Wikipedia is a visible and successful example of such a collaboration which might offer insight into what makes large-scale, decentralized collaborations successful. We analyze the relationship between the structural properties of WikiProject coeditor networks and the performance and efficiency of those projects. We confirm the existence of an overall performance-efficiency trade-off, while observing that some projects are higher than others in both performance and efficiency, suggesting the existence factors correlating positively with both. Namely, we find an association between low-degree coeditor networks and both high performance and high efficiency. We also confirm results seen in previous numerical and small-scale lab studies: higher performance with less skewed node distributions, and higher performance with shorter path lengths. We use agent-based models to explore possible mechanisms for degree-dependent performance and efficiency. We present a novel local-majority learning strategy designed to satisfy properties of real-world collaborations. The local-majority strategy as well as a localized conformity-based strategy both show degree-dependent performance and efficiency, but in opposite directions, suggesting that these factors depend on both network structure and learning strategy. Our results suggest possible benefits to decentralized collaborations made of smaller, more tightly-knit teams, and that these benefits may be modulated by the particular learning strategies in use.Comment: 11 pages, 5 figures, to appear in ICWSM 201

Comprehensive Security Framework for Global Threats Analysis

Cyber criminality activities are changing and becoming more and more professional. With the growth of financial flows through the Internet and the Information System (IS), new kinds of thread arise involving complex scenarios spread within multiple IS components. The IS information modeling and Behavioral Analysis are becoming new solutions to normalize the IS information and counter these new threads. This paper presents a framework which details the principal and necessary steps for monitoring an IS. We present the architecture of the framework, i.e. an ontology of activities carried out within an IS to model security information and User Behavioral analysis. The results of the performed experiments on real data show that the modeling is effective to reduce the amount of events by 91%. The User Behavioral Analysis on uniform modeled data is also effective, detecting more than 80% of legitimate actions of attack scenarios

Application of Supercomputer Technologies for Simulation of Socio-Economic Systems

To date, an extensive experience has been accumulated in investigation of problems related to quality, assessment of management systems, modeling of economic system sustainability. The studies performed have created a basis for formation of a new research area — Economics of Quality. Its tools allow to use opportunities of model simulation for construction of the mathematical models adequately reflecting the role of quality in natural, technical, social regularities of functioning of the complex socioeconomic systems. Extensive application and development of models, and also system modeling with use of supercomputer technologies, on our deep belief, will bring the conducted researches of social and economic systems to essentially new level. Moreover, the current scientific research makes a significant contribution to model simulation of multi-agent social systems and that isn’t less important, it belongs to the priority areas in development of science and technology in our country. This article is devoted to the questions of supercomputer technologies application in public sciences, first of all, — regarding technical realization of the large-scale agent-focused models (AFM). The essence of this tool is that owing to increase in power of computers it became possible to describe the behavior of many separate fragments of a difficult system, as social and economic systems represent. The article also deals with the experience of foreign scientists and practicians in launching the AFM on supercomputers, and also the example of AFM developed in CEMI RAS, stages and methods of effective calculating kernel display of multi-agent system on architecture of a modern supercomputer will be analyzed. The experiments on the basis of model simulation on forecasting the population of St. Petersburg according to three scenarios as one of the major factors influencing the development of social and economic system and quality of life of the population are presented in the conclusion