5,885 research outputs found
Conflict and Computation on Wikipedia: a Finite-State Machine Analysis of Editor Interactions
What is the boundary between a vigorous argument and a breakdown of
relations? What drives a group of individuals across it? Taking Wikipedia as a
test case, we use a hidden Markov model to approximate the computational
structure and social grammar of more than a decade of cooperation and conflict
among its editors. Across a wide range of pages, we discover a bursty war/peace
structure where the systems can become trapped, sometimes for months, in a
computational subspace associated with significantly higher levels of
conflict-tracking "revert" actions. Distinct patterns of behavior characterize
the lower-conflict subspace, including tit-for-tat reversion. While a fraction
of the transitions between these subspaces are associated with top-down actions
taken by administrators, the effects are weak. Surprisingly, we find no
statistical signal that transitions are associated with the appearance of
particularly anti-social users, and only weak association with significant news
events outside the system. These findings are consistent with transitions being
driven by decentralized processes with no clear locus of control. Models of
belief revision in the presence of a common resource for information-sharing
predict the existence of two distinct phases: a disordered high-conflict phase,
and a frozen phase with spontaneously-broken symmetry. The bistability we
observe empirically may be a consequence of editor turn-over, which drives the
system to a critical point between them.Comment: 23 pages, 3 figures. Matches published version. Code for HMM fitting
available at http://bit.ly/sfihmm ; time series and derived finite state
machines at bit.ly/wiki_hm
Calibrating a System Dynamic Model Within an Integrative Framework to Test Foreign Policy Choices
Political science uses international relations (IR) theory to explain state-actor political behavior. Research suggests that this theoretical framework can inform a predictive model incorporating features of systems dynamics (SD) and agent based (AB) modeling. The Foreign Policy Model (ForPol) herein applies Alexander Y. Lubyansky\u27s (2014) SD model for macro-political behavior to represent behaviors between real systems and mental models. While verifying and validating the resulting SD/AB/IR holistic model requires an extensive comprehensive research agenda, the present work will take a closer examination at input parameter calibration and conducting typical runs of the SD portion of the model as a first step in the testing, verification and validation process of the proposed integrative model. This thesis proposes incorporating an AB paradigm drawn from work by Claudio Cioffi-Revilla (2009), Edward P. MacKerrow (2003), David L. Rousseau (2006), Joshua M. Epstein and Robert Axtell (1996) as a future hybrid extension. The model applies a SD approach for the modeling of macro-political aggregate behavior. Therefore, the deep analysis of the SD portion of ForPol is modeled and calibrated in Vensim, using empirical data from the 1967 Arab-Israeli Six Day War as a pilot. Interactions within the model actualize Choucri, et. al. (2006), definition of state stability and agent behavior aspects of Cioffi-Revilla\u27s (2009) SimPol polity model. Following calibration results discussion, the present work closes with consideration of future research directions
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