25,489 research outputs found

    Public Security vs. Private Self-Protection: Optimal Taxation and the Social Dynamics of Fear

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    In this paper, we develop a simple model of social dynamics governing the evolution of strategic self-protection choices of boundedly rational potential victims facing the threat of prospective offenders in a large population with random matching. We prove that individual (and socially transmitted) fear of exposure to criminal threats may actually condition choices even in the face of objective evidence of declining crime rates, and thereby cause the eventual selection of Pareto inefficient equilibria with self-protection. We also show that a suitable strategy of provision of public security financed through discriminatory taxation of self-protective expenses may actually overcome this problem, and drive the social dynamics toward the efficient no protection equilibrium. In our model, we do not obtain, as in Cressman et al. (1998), a crowding-out result such that the net impact of public spending on the actual social dynamics is neutral and the economy keeps on cycling between phases of high and low criminal activity with varying levels of self-protection; quite to the contrary, it can be extremely effective in implementing the social optimum, in that it acts primarily on the intangible dimension, that is, on the social dynamics of fear. We claim that this kind of result calls for more interdisciplinary research on the socio-psycho-economic determinants of fear of crime, and for consequent advances in modelling approaches and techniques.Self-Protection, Fear of Crime, Cultural Selection Dynamics, Replicator Dynamics

    Modeling Individual Cyclic Variation in Human Behavior

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    Cycles are fundamental to human health and behavior. However, modeling cycles in time series data is challenging because in most cases the cycles are not labeled or directly observed and need to be inferred from multidimensional measurements taken over time. Here, we present CyHMMs, a cyclic hidden Markov model method for detecting and modeling cycles in a collection of multidimensional heterogeneous time series data. In contrast to previous cycle modeling methods, CyHMMs deal with a number of challenges encountered in modeling real-world cycles: they can model multivariate data with discrete and continuous dimensions; they explicitly model and are robust to missing data; and they can share information across individuals to model variation both within and between individual time series. Experiments on synthetic and real-world health-tracking data demonstrate that CyHMMs infer cycle lengths more accurately than existing methods, with 58% lower error on simulated data and 63% lower error on real-world data compared to the best-performing baseline. CyHMMs can also perform functions which baselines cannot: they can model the progression of individual features/symptoms over the course of the cycle, identify the most variable features, and cluster individual time series into groups with distinct characteristics. Applying CyHMMs to two real-world health-tracking datasets -- of menstrual cycle symptoms and physical activity tracking data -- yields important insights including which symptoms to expect at each point during the cycle. We also find that people fall into several groups with distinct cycle patterns, and that these groups differ along dimensions not provided to the model. For example, by modeling missing data in the menstrual cycles dataset, we are able to discover a medically relevant group of birth control users even though information on birth control is not given to the model.Comment: Accepted at WWW 201

    As the Cursor Blinks: Electronic Scholarship and Undergraduates in the Library

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    published or submitted for publicatio

    Organizational time: a dialectical view

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    We present twelve propositions constituting a contribution to a contingency view of time in organizations and synthesize apparently opposite perspectives of time. To articulate them, we relate the planning, action and improvisation strategic orientations to the dependent, independent and interdependent perspectives of the environment. Then, we relate these strategic orientations related to approaches to the problems of scheduling, synchronization and time allocation. Action strategies rely on event time to handle scheduling, use entrainment to synchronize with their environment and view time as linear. Planning strategies use even time to handle scheduling, impose their internal pacing upon the environment and view time as cyclic. Improvisation strategies use even-event time to handle scheduling, synchronize via internal-external pacing and hold a spiral view of time. Our argument strengthens the case for a more deliberate approach to time in organizations and favors a dialectical view of organizational phenomena.action, contingency, dialectics, improvisation, planning, synthesis, time

    Graph Signal Processing: Overview, Challenges and Applications

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    Research in Graph Signal Processing (GSP) aims to develop tools for processing data defined on irregular graph domains. In this paper we first provide an overview of core ideas in GSP and their connection to conventional digital signal processing. We then summarize recent developments in developing basic GSP tools, including methods for sampling, filtering or graph learning. Next, we review progress in several application areas using GSP, including processing and analysis of sensor network data, biological data, and applications to image processing and machine learning. We finish by providing a brief historical perspective to highlight how concepts recently developed in GSP build on top of prior research in other areas.Comment: To appear, Proceedings of the IEE

    The Realm of Things Culinary. Anthropological Recipes

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    The text is a presentation of an anthropological project of research on culinaries constructed in such a way to be accessible also to practitioners of other disciplines of the humanities. The proposed range of topics was embedded in four general discourses: the temporal discourse, the spatial discourse, the discourse of identity and the discourse of cultural trends. These discourses may fulfill the role of cultural categories (as interpreted by Gurevich),and thus be descriptive and interpretative tools. Investigation of the cultural phenomenon of things culinary does not pertain only to those them; it also reveals various “faces” of culture in the era of fluid modernity

    The rationale for increasing the theoretical understanding on the basic concepts of economic theory

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    The issues dealing with the process of making rational decisions in the production and consumption, an accurate assessment of results and costs in the economy have been the focus of attention for many generations of economists. Assessment of results and costs in the economy are always associated with consideration of the prices for different types of resources. However, some underlying aspects of prices still require further comprehensive consideration. By now, the economic essence of such basic concepts of economic theory as money, price, and utility have not been studied thoroughly, on an appropriate theoretical level. Therefore, one cannot provide a monistic theoretical justification for many economic phenomena such economic processes as forecasting prices for economic resources, optimization of the market economy operation according to the theories of economic welfare, social (collective) choice, general equilibrium, etc. This study aims to increase the theoretical understanding of the basic concepts of economic theory, which would enable to eliminate inconsistencies and contradictions in their interpretation at the fundamental and applied levels of research. The methods of scientific abstraction, system and comparative analysis of mathematical models aiming to establish their possible inconsistency and incompatibility, a logical method, as well as economic and mathematical modeling were used as a methodological basis of the research. Upon conducting a comparative analysis of economic and mathematical models that describe the foundations of the economy, we identified their logical inconsistency and discrepancies with the underlying nature of prices, money and utility. Having analyzed utility functions and the “function of social or aggregated utility”, we proved the need for changing the traditional form of these functions, the need to introduce new phenomena, both individual utility functions and social utility functions that consider the system (emergent) characteristics of the economy. The authors propose considering the system (emergent) characteristics of the economy as: the matrix structure of the economy and the limited cyclic-temporal potential of its lifespan. We believe that the focus on the system (emergent) content characteristic of the nature of prices will allow a more accurate prediction and regulation of their future dynamics, and this will also enable to overcome one of the main contradictions of economic theory between the theoretical basis of consumer choices that are made according to utility values and the practical basis of these choices which are always made according to cost parameters.peer-reviewe

    Evolutionary consequences of behavioral diversity

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    Iterated games provide a framework to describe social interactions among groups of individuals. Recent work stimulated by the discovery of "zero-determinant" strategies has rapidly expanded our ability to analyze such interactions. This body of work has primarily focused on games in which players face a simple binary choice, to "cooperate" or "defect". Real individuals, however, often exhibit behavioral diversity, varying their input to a social interaction both qualitatively and quantitatively. Here we explore how access to a greater diversity of behavioral choices impacts the evolution of social dynamics in finite populations. We show that, in public goods games, some two-choice strategies can nonetheless resist invasion by all possible multi-choice invaders, even while engaging in relatively little punishment. We also show that access to greater behavioral choice results in more "rugged " fitness landscapes, with populations able to stabilize cooperation at multiple levels of investment, such that choice facilitates cooperation when returns on investments are low, but hinders cooperation when returns on investments are high. Finally, we analyze iterated rock-paper-scissors games, whose non-transitive payoff structure means unilateral control is difficult and zero-determinant strategies do not exist in general. Despite this, we find that a large portion of multi-choice strategies can invade and resist invasion by strategies that lack behavioral diversity -- so that even well-mixed populations will tend to evolve behavioral diversity.Comment: 26 pages, 4 figure
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