Individualization as driving force of clustering phenomena in humans

One of the most intriguing dynamics in biological systems is the emergence of clustering, the self-organization into separated agglomerations of individuals. Several theories have been developed to explain clustering in, for instance, multi-cellular organisms, ant colonies, bee hives, flocks of birds, schools of fish, and animal herds. A persistent puzzle, however, is clustering of opinions in human populations. The puzzle is particularly pressing if opinions vary continuously, such as the degree to which citizens are in favor of or against a vaccination program. Existing opinion formation models suggest that "monoculture" is unavoidable in the long run, unless subsets of the population are perfectly separated from each other. Yet, social diversity is a robust empirical phenomenon, although perfect separation is hardly possible in an increasingly connected world. Considering randomness did not overcome the theoretical shortcomings so far. Small perturbations of individual opinions trigger social influence cascades that inevitably lead to monoculture, while larger noise disrupts opinion clusters and results in rampant individualism without any social structure. Our solution of the puzzle builds on recent empirical research, combining the integrative tendencies of social influence with the disintegrative effects of individualization. A key element of the new computational model is an adaptive kind of noise. We conduct simulation experiments to demonstrate that with this kind of noise, a third phase besides individualism and monoculture becomes possible, characterized by the formation of metastable clusters with diversity between and consensus within clusters. When clusters are small, individualization tendencies are too weak to prohibit a fusion of clusters. When clusters grow too large, however, individualization increases in strength, which promotes their splitting.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figure

MULTILINGUAL EDUCATION – A STEP INTO THE BETTER FUTURE

Contemporary globalizing processes are often associated with plurilingualism, translanguaging and multiliteracies that foster the implementation of multilingual education in the countries facing an increasing diversity: the mass migration of population, the growing number of refugees, settlements of ethnic minorities. The paper deals with the presentation of the latest state policies directed towards the implementation of multilingual education in Georgia – in the post-Soviet country, which has undergone drastic changes during the last decades. In the Soviet epoch, mastering Georgian or Russian was a prerequisite of a rightful citizenship. After the dissolution of the USSR, mastering Georgian started being obligatory for occupying positions in governmental institutions, organizations, etc. This fact marginalized those representatives of ethnic minorities, who had a poor knowledge of the state language. The government initiated the implementation of multilingual educational policies preventing marginalization of ethnic minorities and facilitating the rearing of plurilingual citizens sharing equal rights and responsibilities. The paper presents certain insights into the multilingual education and makes specific proposals regarding the:usage of innovative teaching methods, models and approaches (CLIL approach, heteroglossic approach);creation of an appropriate lesson design;implementation of intensive training-courses focused on the acquisition of intercultural and cross-national skills, etc.The methodology of research includes observation, analysis and evaluation of ongoing processes.

Policy on language education in Japan: Beyond nationalism and linguicism

The spread of English has produced serious problems for affected countries. From the perspective of English linguistic imperialism (Phillipson, 1992), the world is “characterized by inequality” (p. 46) in that power is being maintained by the structure of the Center, the major English speaking countries, and the Periphery, the affected countries, have become subordinate inter-state actors within this power relationship. This power structure (re)produces cultural, scientific, media and educational imperialism and is analogous to racism and sexism. Ricento (2000) finds the “control and dissemination of culture worldwide to be a greater threat to independence than was colonialism itself” (p. 17). In view of these theoretical concepts, I am going to suggest an alternative policy for language education in Japan. My position is that, to resist linguistic imperialism, Japan’s language policy in education should not be based on nationalistic/expansionistic or laissez-faire tendencies, but should promote minority languages and discontinue obligatory English education

Modelling the role of inter-cultural contact in the motivation of learning English as a foreign language.

The research reported in this paper explores the effect of direct and indirect cross-cultural contact on Hungarian school children's attitudes and motivated behaviour by means of structural equation modelling. Our data are based on a national representative survey of 1,777 13/14-year-old learners of English and German in Hungary; 237 of the students learning English with the highest level of inter-cultural contact were selected for analysis. Our model indicates that for our participants, motivated behaviour is determined not only by language-related attitudes but also by the views the students hold about the perceived importance of contact with foreigners. The results of our study also reveal that the perceived importance of contact was not related to students’ direct contact experiences with target language speakers but was influenced by the students’ milieu and indirect contact. Among the contact variables, it was only contact through media products that had an important position in our model, whereas direct contact with L2 speakers played an insignificant role in affecting motivated behaviour and attitudes

A Tool-Supported Approach for Concurrent Execution of Heterogeneous Models

International audienceIn the software and systems modeling community, research on domain-specific modeling languages (DSMLs) is focused on providing technologies for developing languages and tools that allow domain experts to develop system solutions efficiently. Unfortunately, the current lack of support for explicitly relating concepts expressed in different DSMLs makes it very difficult for software and system engineers to reason about information spread across models describing different system aspects [4]. As a particular challenge, we investigate in this paper relationships between, possibly heterogeneous, behavioral models to support their concurrent execution. This is achieved by following a modular executable metamodeling approach for behavioral semantics understanding, reuse, variability and composability [5]. This approach supports an explicit model of concurrency (MoCC) [6] and domain-specific actions (DSA) [10] with a well-defined protocol between them (incl., mapping, feedback and callback) reified through explicit domain-specific events (DSE) [12]. The protocol is then used to infer a relevant behavioral language interface for specifying coordination patterns to be applied on conforming executable models [17]. All the tooling of the approach is gathered in the GEMOC studio, and outlined in the next section. Currently, the approach is experienced on a systems engineering language provided by Thales, named Capella 7. The goal and current state of the case study are exposed in this paper. 7 Cf. https://www.polarsys.org/capella

International Entrepreneurship: An Introduction, Framework and Research Agenda

This paper provides an introduction into the field of international entrepreneurship. A definition of international entrepreneurship and associated key concepts is given and the research domain of international entrepreneurship is described. A substantial part of the international entrepreneurship literature concentrates on the internationalization of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and new ventures. Based on an analysis of the existing literature the current paper provides a framework for the study of antecedents and outcomes of SME and new venture internationalization and presents a number of avenues for future research.