11,768 research outputs found
Social Influence of Competing Groups and Leaders in Opinion Dynamics
Publication history: Accepted - 11 September 2020; Published online - 19 September 2020.This paper explores the infuence of two competing stubborn agent groups on the
opinion dynamics of normal agents. Computer simulations are used to investigate
the parameter space systematically in order to determine the impact of group size
and extremeness on the dynamics and identify optimal strategies for maximizing
numbers of followers and social infuence. Results show that (a) there are many
cases where a group that is neither too large nor too small and neither too extreme
nor too central achieves the best outcome, (b) stubborn groups can have a moderating, rather than polarizing, efect on the society in a range of circumstances, and (c)
small changes in parameters can lead to transitions from a state where one stubborn
group attracts all the normal agents to a state where the other group does so. We also
explore how these fndings can be interpreted in terms of opinion leaders, truth, and
campaign
Opinion dynamics of social learning with a conflicting source
Publication history: Received in revised form - 17 September 2020; Published online - 27 October 2020.The way in which agents are influenced by the truth and/or a conflicting source can have
a significant effect on the extent to which social learning is successful. We investigate
these influences via several variations of the Hegselmann–Krause model of opinion
dynamics. First, we compare two ways of modelling the influence of truth in the absence
of a conflicting source and find that in a model where access to the truth is more
restricted, increasing the proportion of truth seekers in the society has little effect
on convergence to the truth. Second, we investigate the same models of truth in the
presence of a conflicting source, which could represent the opinions of a radical group,
opinion leader or media source. The results show that a consensus on the truth can be
reached in certain cases in both models, but also that in a wide range of cases both
models give rise to the same partition of the society into truth seekers and non-truth
seekers
A simple model for DNA denaturation
Following Poland and Scheraga, we consider a simplified model for the
denaturation transition of DNA. The two strands are modeled as interacting
polymer chains. The attractive interactions, which mimic the pairing between
the four bases, are reduced to a single short range binding term. Furthermore,
base-pair misalignments are forbidden, implying that this binding term exists
only for corresponding (same curvilinear abscissae) monomers of the two chains.
We take into account the excluded volume repulsion between monomers of the two
chains, but neglect intra-chain repulsion. We find that the excluded volume
term generates an effective repulsive interaction between the chains, which
decays as . Due to this long-range repulsion between the chains, the
denaturation transition is first order in any dimension, in agreement with
previous studies.Comment: 10 page
- …