Linking pattern to process in cultural evolution: explaining material culture diversity among the Northern Khanty of Northwest Siberia

Book description: This volume offers an integrative approach to the application of evolutionary theory in studies of cultural transmission and social evolution and reveals the enormous range of ways in which Darwinian ideas can lead to productive empirical research, the touchstone of any worthwhile theoretical perspective. While many recent works on cultural evolution adopt a specific theoretical framework, such as dual inheritance theory or human behavioral ecology, Pattern and Process in Cultural Evolution emphasizes empirical analysis and includes authors who employ a range of backgrounds and methods to address aspects of culture from an evolutionary perspective. Editor Stephen Shennan has assembled archaeologists, evolutionary theorists, and ethnographers, whose essays cover a broad range of time periods, localities, cultural groups, and artifacts

Predictive trend mining for social network analysis

This thesis describes research work within the theme of trend mining as applied to social network data. Trend mining is a type of temporal data mining that provides observation into how information changes over time. In the context of the work described in this thesis the focus is on how information contained in social networks changes with time. The work described proposes a number of data mining based techniques directed at mechanisms to not only detect change, but also support the analysis of change, with respect to social network data. To this end a trend mining framework is proposed to act as a vehicle for evaluating the ideas presented in this thesis. The framework is called the Predictive Trend Mining Framework (PTMF). It is designed to support "end-to-end" social network trend mining and analysis. The work described in this thesis is divided into two elements: Frequent Pattern Trend Analysis (FPTA) and Prediction Modeling (PM). For evaluation purposes three social network datasets have been considered: Great Britain Cattle Movement, Deeside Insurance and Malaysian Armed Forces Logistic Cargo. The evaluation indicates that a sound mechanism for identifying and analysing trends, and for using this trend knowledge for prediction purposes, has been established

Visualisation of Origins, Destinations and Flows with OD Maps

We present a new technique for the visual exploration of origins (O) and destinations (D) arranged in geographic space. Previous attempts to map the flows between origins and destinations have suffered from problems of occlusion usually requiring some form of generalisation, such as aggregation or flow density estimation before they can be visualized. This can lead to loss of detail or the introduction of arbitrary artefacts in the visual representation. Here, we propose mapping OD vectors as cells rather than lines, comparable with the process of constructing OD matrices, but unlike the OD matrix, we preserve the spatial layout of all origin and destination locations by constructing a gridded two‐level spatial treemap. The result is a set of spatially ordered small multiples upon which any arbitrary geographic data may be projected. Using a hash grid spatial data structure, we explore the characteristics of the technique through a software prototype that allows interactive query and visualisation of 105‐106 simulated and recorded OD vectors. The technique is illustrated using US county to county migration and commuting statistics

Exploring research trends with Rexplore

Current systems for exploring scholarly data exhibit a number of shortcomings in their ability to facilitate the identification of research trends and identify 'interesting' connections between researchers. To address these issues we have developed Rexplore, a novel system which combines statistics, human-computer interaction, and semantic technologies, to support knowledge-based exploration and visualization of scholarly data. In this paper we focus on the functionalities provided by Rexplore for visualizing research trends and we use as an example research in "Social Networks", which has experienced dramatic growth in the years 2000-2010

Dynamic data placement and discovery in wide-area networks

The workloads of online services and applications such as social networks, sensor data platforms and web search engines have become increasingly global and dynamic, setting new challenges to providing users with low latency access to data. To achieve this, these services typically leverage a multi-site wide-area networked infrastructure. Data access latency in such an infrastructure depends on the network paths between users and data, which is determined by the data placement and discovery strategies. Current strategies are static, which offer low latencies upon deployment but worse performance under a dynamic workload. We propose dynamic data placement and discovery strategies for wide-area networked infrastructures, which adapt to the data access workload. We achieve this with data activity correlation (DAC), an application-agnostic approach for determining the correlations between data items based on access pattern similarities. By dynamically clustering data according to DAC, network traffic in clusters is kept local. We utilise DAC as a key component in reducing access latencies for two application scenarios, emphasising different aspects of the problem: The first scenario assumes the fixed placement of data at sites, and thus focusses on data discovery. This is the case for a global sensor discovery platform, which aims to provide low latency discovery of sensor metadata. We present a self-organising hierarchical infrastructure consisting of multiple DAC clusters, maintained with an online and distributed split-and-merge algorithm. This reduces the number of sites visited, and thus latency, during discovery for a variety of workloads. The second scenario focusses on data placement. This is the case for global online services that leverage a multi-data centre deployment to provide users with low latency access to data. We present a geo-dynamic partitioning middleware, which maintains DAC clusters with an online elastic partition algorithm. It supports the geo-aware placement of partitions across data centres according to the workload. This provides globally distributed users with low latency access to data for static and dynamic workloads.Open Acces

Immigration as a Divisive Topic: Clusters and Content Diffusion in the Italian Twitter Debate

In this work, we apply network science to analyse almost 6 M tweets about the debate around immigration in Italy, collected between 2018 and 2019, when many related events captured media outlets’ attention. Our aim was to better understand the dynamics underlying the interactions on social media on such a delicate and divisive topic, which are the actors that are leading the discussion, and whose messages have the highest chance to reach out the majority of the accounts that are following the debate. The debate on Twitter is represented with networks; we provide a characterisation of the main clusters by looking at the highest in-degree nodes in each one and by analysing the text of the tweets of all the users. We find a strongly segregated network which shows an explicit interplay with the Italian political and social landscape, that however seems to be disconnected from the actual geographical distribution and relocation of migrants. In addition, quite surprisingly, the influencers and political leaders that apparently lead the debate, do not necessarily belong to the clusters that include the majority of nodes: we find evidence of the existence of a `silent majority’ that is more connected to accounts who expose a more positive stance toward migrants, while leaders whose stance is negative attract apparently more attention. Finally, we see that the community structure clearly affects the diffusion of content (URLs) by identifying the presence of both local and global trends of diffusion, and that communities tend to display segregation regardless of their political and cultural background. In particular, we observe that messages that spread widely in the two largest clusters, whose most popular members are also notoriously at the opposite sides of the political spectrum, have a very low chance to get visibility into other clusters

TRAILS OF AN INDIAN COMMUNITY IN PADOVA. Chasing the invisible migration of Indian students (re)shaping spaces in this Italian medium city.

L\u2019Italia viene spesso considerata come un paese che ospita o riceve migranti poco qualificati (per lo pi\uf9 illegali), cos\uec nel corso degli anni mi sono trovata a spiegare in pi\uf9 occasioni che anche migranti altamente qualificati sono attratti dall\u2019Italia, e che addirittura vi giungono grazie ad accordi internazionali stipulati da paesi che sono tra loro in competizione \u2018soft power\u2019 per la ricerca di talenti, con lo scopo di aumentare il proprio potere a livello globale, ovviamente attraverso vie legali. Gli studenti internazionali costituiscono una categoria di migranti che fino agli anni duemila non ha ricevuto molta attenzione in ambito accademico [Piguet et al., 2017]. Tuttavia, la migrazione per motivi di studio si pu\uf2 far risalire al 1190, e, forse ancora pi\uf9 precisamente, al periodo coloniale tra il XVII e il XIX secolo [Leucci et al., 2018]. A questo proposito, la presente tesi ha evidenziato come il flusso di studenti indiani verso l\u2019Italia sia largamente incoraggiato da politiche internazionali che rimangono per lo pi\uf9 sconosciute. Tra queste politiche figurano vari accordi bilaterali firmati dal Governo italiano per attirare studenti indiani di livello universitario che vogliano \u201cinvestire il proprio talento\u201d nelle Universit\ue0 italiane. La tesi riesce a coniugare, attraverso un case study sulla citt\ue0 di Padova \u2013 citt\ue0 di \u2018media\u2019 dimensione che sta guadagnando importanza nel panorama internazionale grazie alla sua Universit\ue0, fondata 800 anni fa - due livelli di analisi (locale e globale) in un\u2019unica discussione sulle interdipendenze tra l\u2019andamento e la struttura dei flussi migratori degli studenti indiani e la loro spazializzazione in Italia quale nazione di destinazione. La tesi presentata contribuisce quindi ad evidenziare un flusso migratorio rilevante ma inesplorato dalla letteratura accademica in Italia: la migrazione degli studenti internazionali. Allo stesso tempo, un focus sugli studenti universitari indiani, considerati come studenti-migranti dotati di conoscenze e capacit\ue0 intellettuali, aiuter\ue0 a delineare il variegato mosaico dell\u2019attuale migrazione indiana in Italia. In effetti, l\u2019analisi della migrazione degli indiani in Italia resta attualmente limitata a migranti con bassi o medi livelli di specializzazione come, ad esempio, gli indiani Sikh impiegati in agricoltura. In linea generale, la migrazione di lavoratori altamente qualificati e con alti livelli di istruzione non \ue8 stata studiata in modo approfondito n\ue9 in Italia, n\ue9 in altri paesi europei [Piguet, 2016; McGuill, 2013; King and Raghuram, 2013]. Pertanto, richiamo la necessit\ue0 di definire un diverso modo di pensare, interpretare e agire che superi l\u2019approccio limitante alla migrazione generalmente associato ai soli irregolari [Ambrosini, 2011, 2017; Panichella & Ambrosini, 2018]. La tesi colma inoltre un\u2019importante lacuna, valutando gli impatti negativi del processo di studentificazione di una citt\ue0 come Padova che ricerca il proprio riconoscimento a livello internazionale, aldil\ue0 del suo patrimonio storico noto globalmente per la basilica di Sant\u2019Antonio. In questo contesto, ci tengo a sottolineare come il ruolo illustre dell\u2019Universit\ue0 e il suo spazio fisico fungano da \u201cponte\u201d, o da crocevia e punto di convergenza dell\u2019interculturalit\ue0 della citt\ue0. Nel complesso, la presente tesi di ricerca fornisce un quadro dettagliato e ricco di sfumature sui vari profili degli studenti indiani presenti in uno stesso territorio, cio\ue8 la citt\ue0 di Padova. Questa ricerca mira invece a portare il lettore ad una nuova visione di co-abitazione in uno spazio locale limitato, grazie all\u2019esempio della citt\ue0 di Padova e del suo interessante desiderio di internazionalizzazione che coinvolge l\u2019Universit\ue0 nel processo

Geomatics Applications to Contemporary Social and Environmental Problems in Mexico

Trends in geospatial technologies have led to the development of new powerful analysis and representation techniques that involve processing of massive datasets, some unstructured, some acquired from ubiquitous sources, and some others from remotely located sensors of different kinds, all of which complement the structured information produced on a regular basis by governmental and international agencies. In this chapter, we provide both an extensive revision of such techniques and an insight of the applications of some of these techniques in various study cases in Mexico for various scales of analysis: from regional migration flows of highly qualified people at the country level and the spatio-temporal analysis of unstructured information in geotagged tweets for sentiment assessment, to more local applications of participatory cartography for policy definitions jointly between local authorities and citizens, and an automated method for three dimensional (3D) modelling and visualisation of forest inventorying with laser scanner technology

Studying Networks Geographically: World Political Regionalization in the United Nations General Assembly (1985–2010)

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