Competition and Selection Among Conventions

In many domains, a latent competition among different conventions determines which one will come to dominate. One sees such effects in the success of community jargon, of competing frames in political rhetoric, or of terminology in technical contexts. These effects have become widespread in the online domain, where the data offers the potential to study competition among conventions at a fine-grained level. In analyzing the dynamics of conventions over time, however, even with detailed on-line data, one encounters two significant challenges. First, as conventions evolve, the underlying substance of their meaning tends to change as well; and such substantive changes confound investigations of social effects. Second, the selection of a convention takes place through the complex interactions of individuals within a community, and contention between the users of competing conventions plays a key role in the convention's evolution. Any analysis must take place in the presence of these two issues. In this work we study a setting in which we can cleanly track the competition among conventions. Our analysis is based on the spread of low-level authoring conventions in the eprint arXiv over 24 years: by tracking the spread of macros and other author-defined conventions, we are able to study conventions that vary even as the underlying meaning remains constant. We find that the interaction among co-authors over time plays a crucial role in the selection of them; the distinction between more and less experienced members of the community, and the distinction between conventions with visible versus invisible effects, are both central to the underlying processes. Through our analysis we make predictions at the population level about the ultimate success of different synonymous conventions over time--and at the individual level about the outcome of "fights" between people over convention choices.Comment: To appear in Proceedings of WWW 2017, data at https://github.com/CornellNLP/Macro

Ouachita Office of Communication earns five national awards from Baptist Communicators Association

Ouachita Baptist University’s Office of Communications staff earned five national awards, including a pair of first place honors in marketing and design, during Baptist Communicators Association’s 2017 Wilmer C. Fields Awards Competition. The winners were announced at an awards banquet held in conjunction with BCA’s annual workshop in Fort Lauderdale, Fla. Baptist Communicators Association is the professional development organization of professional communicators serving at Baptist universities, mission boards, state conventions, newspapers, children’s homes and related ministry organizations. The annual awards competition “is designed to encourage professional excellence among association members and to recognize those members who have done exemplary work,” according to the BCA website

Trends of Radicalization among the Ranks of the Afghan National Police

This study examines and compares trends of radicalization among the ranks of Afghan National Police (ANP) force across eleven provinces in Afghanistan. This is the first part of an ongoing series of papers dedicated to examining the evolving trends in radicalization among the Afghan National Defense and Security Force (ANDSF). Since the formation of the defense and security in 2002, various potential manifestations of radicalization, including insider attacks, dereliction of duty, and desertion have plagued its ranks. Radicalization is broadly defined as constraints on both the perspective of individuals and their tolerance to ideology and practices which diverge and differentiate from their own political, religious and social beliefs. Making the distinction between political deviance (PD), religious extremism (RE), and social intolerance (SI), 1498 uniformed rank and file personnel, 151 commissioned officers, and 8 uniformed religious leaders from among the ANP were surveyed on their views toward the political system in Afghanistan, anti-government elements including the Taliban, democracy in light of Islamic values, and women and human rights

Modeling Adoption and Usage of Competing Products

The emergence and wide-spread use of online social networks has led to a dramatic increase on the availability of social activity data. Importantly, this data can be exploited to investigate, at a microscopic level, some of the problems that have captured the attention of economists, marketers and sociologists for decades, such as, e.g., product adoption, usage and competition. In this paper, we propose a continuous-time probabilistic model, based on temporal point processes, for the adoption and frequency of use of competing products, where the frequency of use of one product can be modulated by those of others. This model allows us to efficiently simulate the adoption and recurrent usages of competing products, and generate traces in which we can easily recognize the effect of social influence, recency and competition. We then develop an inference method to efficiently fit the model parameters by solving a convex program. The problem decouples into a collection of smaller subproblems, thus scaling easily to networks with hundred of thousands of nodes. We validate our model over synthetic and real diffusion data gathered from Twitter, and show that the proposed model does not only provides a good fit to the data and more accurate predictions than alternatives but also provides interpretable model parameters, which allow us to gain insights into some of the factors driving product adoption and frequency of use

How Markets Work: The Lawyer’s Version

In this article, we combine two sources of data to shed light on the nature of transactional legal work. The first consists of stories about contracts that circulate widely among elite transactional lawyers. Surprisingly, the stories portray lawyers as ineffective market actors who are uninterested in designing superior contracts, who follow rather than lead industry standards, and who depend on governments and other outside actors to spur innovation and correct mistakes. We juxtapose these stories against a dataset of sovereign bond contracts produced by these same lawyers. While the stories suggest that lawyers do not compete or design innovative contracts, their contracts suggest the contrary. The contracts, in fact, are entirely consistent with a market narrative in which lawyers engage in substantial innovation despite constraints inherent in sovereign debt legal work. This raises a puzzle: Why would lawyers favor stories that paint them in a negative light and deny them a potent role as market actors? We conclude with some conjectures as to why this might be so. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the conference on Socializing Economic Relationships: New Perspectives and Methods for Transnational Risk Regulation, at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies at the University of Oxford, April 2010

Sensory Competition in the Face Processing Areas of the Human Brain

The concurrent presentation of multiple stimuli in the visual field may trigger mutually suppressive interactions throughout the ventral visual stream. While several studies have been performed on sensory competition effects among non-face stimuli relatively little is known about the interactions in the human brain for multiple face stimuli. In the present study we analyzed the neuronal basis of sensory competition in an event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study using multiple face stimuli. We varied the ratio of faces and phase-noise images within a composite display with a constant number of peripheral stimuli, thereby manipulating the competitive interactions between faces. For contralaterally presented stimuli we observed strong competition effects in the fusiform face area (FFA) bilaterally and in the right lateral occipital area (LOC), but not in the occipital face area (OFA), suggesting their different roles in sensory competition. When we increased the spatial distance among pairs of faces the magnitude of suppressive interactions was reduced in the FFA. Surprisingly, the magnitude of competition depended on the visual hemifield of the stimuli: ipsilateral stimulation reduced the competition effects somewhat in the right LOC while it increased them in the left LOC. This suggests a left hemifield dominance of sensory competition. Our results support the sensory competition theory in the processing of multiple faces and suggests that sensory competition occurs in several cortical areas in both cerebral hemispheres