21st Century Social Genesis

The modern adaptations of technology have shifted the pendulum of human life. Its positive strides and challenges have evolved human behavior with new social, spatial and cultural genesis today. The modern human life today is monitored, interacted with, and immediately immersed into new age technology the second life starts. This shift in behavioral acceptance can distinctively be recognized when compared to life fifty years ago. A frequent awareness and understanding of such rapid technological shifts necessitate a place where people become more aware and be educated on the innovative strides that research and progressive technology offers in order to anticipate and improve everyday life. My thesis investigations aim at designing a Modern Technology Exhibition and Research Center and a Park highlighting the attributes of technology --a reservoir of the most up to date documentation and exhibition of modern technology innovations allowing the public to make more educated decisions on the impacts of modern technology in their daily lives

Spatial but not verbal cognitive deficits at age 3 years in persistently antisocial individuals

Previous studies have repeatedly shown verbal intelligence deficits in adolescent antisocial individuals, but it is not known whether these deficits are in place prior to kindergarten or, alternatively, whether they are acquired throughout childhood. This study assesses whether cognitive deficits occur as early as age 3 years and whether they are specific to persistently antisocial individuals. Verbal and spatial abilities were assessed at ages 3 and 11 years in 330 male and female children, while antisocial behavior was assessed at ages 8 and 17 years. Persistently antisocial individuals (N = 47) had spatial deficits in the absence of verbal deficits at age 3 years compared to comparisons (N = 133), and also spatial and verbal deficits at age 11 years. Age 3 spatial deficits were independent of social adversity, early hyperactivity, poor test motivation, poor test comprehension, and social discomfort during testing, and they were found in females as well as males. Findings suggest that early spatial deficits contribute to persistent antisocial behavior whereas verbal deficits are developmentally acquired. An early-starter model is proposed whereby early spatial impairments interfere with early bonding and attachment, reflect disrupted right hemisphere affect regulation and expression, and predispose to later persistent antisocial behavior

Evolution of Helping and Harming in Viscous Populations When Group Size Varies

Funding: Balliol College and the Royal Society.Recent years have seen huge interest in understanding how demographic factors mediate the evolution of social behavior in viscous populations. Here we study the impact of variation in group size on the evolution of helping and harming behavior. Although variation in group size influences the degree of relatedness and the degree of competition between groupmates, we find that these effects often exactly cancel, so as to give no net impact of variation in group size on the evolution of helping and harming. Specifically, (1) obligate helping and harming are never mediated by variation in group size, (2) facultative helping and harming are not mediated by variation in group size when this variation is spatial only, (3) facultative helping and harming are mediated by variation in group size only when this variation is temporal or both spatial and temporal, and (4) when there is an effect of variation in group size, facultative helping is favored in big groups and facultative harming is favored in little groups. Moreover, we find that spatial and temporal heterogeneity in individual fecundity may interact with patch-size heterogeneity to change these predictions, promoting the evolution of harming in big patches and of helping in little patches.Publisher PDFPeer reviewe

The space-time budget method in criminological research

This article reviews the Space-Time Budget method developed by Wikström and colleagues and particularly discusses its relevance for criminological research. The Space-Time Budget method is a data collection instrument aimed at recording, retrospectively, on an hour-by-hour basis, the whereabouts and activities of respondents during four days in the week before the interview. The method includes items about criminologically relevant events, such as offending and victimization. We demonstrate that the method can be very useful in criminology, because it enables the study of situational causes of crime and victimization, because it enables detailed measurement of theoretical concepts such as individual lifestyles and individual routine activities, and because it enables the study of adolescents’ whereabouts, which extends the traditional focus on residential neighborhoods. The present article provides the historical background of the method, explains how the method can be applied, presents validation results based on data from 843 secondary school students in the Netherlands and describes the methods’ strengths and weaknesses. Two case studies are summarized to illustrate the usefulness of the method in criminological research. The article concludes with some anticipated future developments and recommendations on further readings

Government-Assisted Housing and Electoral Participation in New York City, 2000-2001

For a representative democracy to function optimally, citizens from all walks of life should have equal chances to express their preferences through the electoral process. In practice, we know that the actual rate of electoral participation varies greatly depending on individual circumstances and social settings. Better off, better educated, non-Hispanic white citizens are more likely to vote; poor, less educated, and minority individuals are much less likely to do so. Gaining a better understanding of why and how this might be so is crucial for moving toward a more democratic polity

A double-edged sword: Benefits and pitfalls of heterogeneous punishment in evolutionary inspection games

As a simple model for criminal behavior, the traditional two-strategy inspection game yields counterintuitive results that fail to describe empirical data. The latter shows that crime is often recurrent, and that crime rates do not respond linearly to mitigation attempts. A more apt model entails ordinary people who neither commit nor sanction crime as the third strategy besides the criminals and punishers. Since ordinary people free-ride on the sanctioning efforts of punishers, they may introduce cyclic dominance that enables the coexistence of all three competing strategies. In this setup ordinary individuals become the biggest impediment to crime abatement. We therefore also consider heterogeneous punisher strategies, which seek to reduce their investment into fighting crime in order to attain a more competitive payoff. We show that this diversity of punishment leads to an explosion of complexity in the system, where the benefits and pitfalls of criminal behavior are revealed in the most unexpected ways. Due to the raise and fall of different alliances no less than six consecutive phase transitions occur in dependence on solely the temptation to succumb to criminal behavior, leading the population from ordinary people-dominated across punisher-dominated to crime-dominated phases, yet always failing to abolish crime completely.Comment: 9 two-column pages, 5 figures; accepted for publication in Scientific Report