Physicists, stamp collectors, human mobility forecasters

One of the two reviewers studied in high school to be a physicist. In the end, he became something else, but he never lost his awe of physics. The other reviewer never intended to become a physicist, but he sometimes asks himself why he didn’t become one. Today, they are both sociologists who practice their science on an action theory basis and believe that regularities exist in the world of social actions which can be perceived, understood, explained – and even used for making predictions

Managing Trust: Translating and the Network Economy

In order to understand recent developments in the field of professional translation, we focus in this article on the contemporary network-based translation industry using Albert-Lázsló Barabási’s model of real-world networks and combining it with sociological studies of social capital and trust. According to Barabási, networks are scale-free and therefore fundamentally undemocratic. Barabási’s findings can be used not only by researchers in explaining the topology and organizing principles of production networks but also by professional translators as a conceptual tool in making sense of their current working environment. We use empirical evidence from interviews with six Finnish translators, relating what we discover to be the roles of trust, loyalty, and social capital in networks. The findings suggest that (a lack of) trust may be the Achilles’ heel of these economic networks.À partir de la théorie des réseaux d’Albert-Lázsló Barabási et des concepts sociologiques de capital social et de confiance, cet article propose une analyse de l’industrie de la traduction afin de rendre compte des changements qui affectent depuis peu la profession. Selon Barabási, les réseaux n’ont pas d’échelle et sont donc foncièrement non démocratiques. Les conclusions de Barabási invitent les chercheurs à dresser une typologie des principes qui régissent l’organisation des réseaux de production et offre du même coup aux professionnels la possibilité de développer des outils conceptuels qui leur permettront de saisir leur environnement de travail. Sur la base de données empiriques recueillies par voie d’entretiens auprès de six traducteurs professionnels finlandais, cet article met en évidence l’importance des relations de confiance, de loyauté et du capital social dans le fonctionnement des réseaux, et suggère donc indirectement que la confiance – ou son absence – pourrait bien être le talon d’Achille de ces réseaux

Spatial Complex Network Analysis and Accessibility Indicators: the Case of Municipal Commuting in Sardinia, Italy

In this paper a contribution is presented with respect to accessibility indicators modelling for commuters moving through the municipalities of Sardinia, in Italy. In this case, spatial complex network analysis is integrated into the construction of accessibility measures: one of the most relevant outcomes of the first tool –the detection of shortest road paths and distances- is adopted as an input for the second in modelling accessibility indicators. Instead of Euclidean distances often adopted in the literature, shortest road distances are chosen, as commuting implies movements that are usually repeated daily and very likely subjected, even unconsciously, to space and time minimization strategies. In particular, two commuter accessibility indicators are constructed according to approaches based on a travel cost and a spatial interaction model with impedance function calibrated in exponential and in power form. The accessibility indicators are confronted each other and with relevant socio-economic and infrastructure characteristics of Sardinia. In addition, they are described, with respect to their spatial distribution and their different implications, when adopted in decision-making and planning. The travel cost based accessibility indicator has a municipal spatial distribution strongly influenced by the main road infrastructure of the Island. By contrast, spatial interaction model based accessibility indicators are more reliable, with respect to their capacity to confirm a leading socio-economic role of the municipalities comprehended in the metropolitan area of the capital town Cagliari

Connections between the Sznajd Model with General Confidence Rules and graph theory

The Sznajd model is a sociophysics model, that is used to model opinion propagation and consensus formation in societies. Its main feature is that its rules favour bigger groups of agreeing people. In a previous work, we generalized the bounded confidence rule in order to model biases and prejudices in discrete opinion models. In that work, we applied this modification to the Sznajd model and presented some preliminary results. The present work extends what we did in that paper. We present results linking many of the properties of the mean-field fixed points, with only a few qualitative aspects of the confidence rule (the biases and prejudices modelled), finding an interesting connection with graph theory problems. More precisely, we link the existence of fixed points with the notion of strongly connected graphs and the stability of fixed points with the problem of finding the maximal independent sets of a graph. We present some graph theory concepts, together with examples, and comparisons between the mean-field and simulations in Barab\'asi-Albert networks, followed by the main mathematical ideas and appendices with the rigorous proofs of our claims. We also show that there is no qualitative difference in the mean-field results if we require that a group of size q>2, instead of a pair, of agreeing agents be formed before they attempt to convince other sites (for the mean-field, this would coincide with the q-voter model).Comment: 15 pages, 18 figures. To be submitted to Physical Revie