Bootstrap methods for the empirical study of decision-making and information flows in social systems

Abstract: We characterize the statistical bootstrap for the estimation of information theoretic quantities from data, with particular reference to its use in the study of large-scale social phenomena. Our methods allow one to preserve, approximately, the underlying axiomatic relationships of information theory—in particular, consistency under arbitrary coarse-graining—that motivate use of these quantities in the first place, while providing reliability comparable to the state of the art for Bayesian estimators. We show how information-theoretic quantities allow for rigorous empirical study of the decision-making capacities of rational agents, and the time-asymmetric flows of information in distributed systems. We provide illustrative examples by reference to ongoing collaborative work on the semantic structure of the British Criminal Court system and the conflict dynamics of the contemporary Afghanistan insurgency

Mobility, Sedentism, and Intensification: Organizational Responses to Environmental and Social Change Among the San of Southern Africa

HUNTER-GATHERER ADAPTATIONS included mobility strategies that were geared toward mapping people on to both resources and other people. There are factors that condition the ways in which people position themselves on the landscape and move over it. Mobility strategies are organizational responses to the structural properties of the natural and social environments (Binford 1980, 2001). The logistical component of a settlement system, in which task-specific groups range out from residential locations for purposes of obtaining food, raw materials, or information, is related to the organization of production of a society as well as to the distribution of critical resources in the environment. Anthropologists and archaeologists are concerned about the organization of human actions. Mobility, or the movement from one place to another by a group or individual, is an important aspect of human behavior, in part because it has important influences on social systems and ecosystems. Mobility is a characteristic feature of human adaptive strategies. Movements are undertaken for a variety of purposes, some of them relating to the need to exploit spatially and temporally variable resources and others for social, political, and ideological purposes

Criminal Lives 1780-1925: Punishing Old Bailey Convicts

Between 1700 and 1900 the British government stopped punishing the bodies of London’s convicts and increasingly sought to exile them and/or reform their minds. From hanging, branding and whipping the response to crime shifted to transportation and imprisonment. By the nineteenth century, judges chose between two contrasting forms of punishments: exile and forced labour in Australia, or incarceration in strictly controlled ‘reformatory’ prisons at home. This exhibition, based on material from London Metropolitan Archives and the AHRC funded Digital Panopticon research project, traces the impact of punishments on individual lives. It follows the men, women and children convicted in London from their crimes and trials through to their experiences of punishment and their subsequent lives.This exhibition was contracted by and displayed at the London Metropolitan Archives. It received additional funding from the AHRC Digital Panopticon network as well as specific impact and engagement funding from The University of Sheffield and The University of Sussex

2008 The Grantmaking Report: Foundation and Corporate Giving in the San Diego Region

This study focused on philanthropic organizations that are engaged in organized grantmaking in San Diego County. The bulk of the organizations studied are classified as private foundations; data that describe other important grantmaking organizations—i.e., San Diego’s community foundations, selected corporate giving programs, and the United Way of San Diego—also were analyzed.https://digital.sandiego.edu/npi-foundations/1001/thumbnail.jp

Ishi and the California Indian Genocide as Developmental Mass Violence

Ishi represents a form of sentimental folk reductionism. But he can be a teaching tool for the California Indian Genocide, John Sutter also. His mill was where gold was discovered – setting off a frenzied settlement in which Indians were legally enslaved and slaughtered, finally ending a decade after the Emancipation Proclamation. They had already experienced wholesale devastation under Spanish and Mexican colonization. The mission system itself was inhumane and genocidal. It codified enslavement and trafficking of Indians as economically useful and morally purposeful. Mexican administration paid lip service to Indian emancipation but exploited them ruthlessly as peons. The California genocide typifies an expanded understanding of genocide and how it operates in a developmental paradigm. We then turn to a related model of the indigenous experience. Using developmental genocide in a gangland “democracy” and Andrew Woolford’s ontologies of destruction, a 500-year wholesale assault, we champion genocide as generic while including specific modes mediated by economic or civil destruction and challenging the unmediated model – direct mass killing – as the archetypical form. Allied with this, a model mediated by civil war also helps explain genocide in the Americas, including California. Genocide of native peoples operates through a cultural and moral reductionism that allows them to be manipulated (and destroyed) as objects

Introduction to \u3ci\u3eEndangered Peoples of Africa and the Middle East : Struggles to Survive and Thrive\u3c/i\u3e

Endangered Peoples of Africa and the Middle East: Struggles to Survive and Thrive is about human populations residing in Africa and the Middle East, a diverse region that is connected geographically, culturally, and historically. The African continent is vast and covers 11.7 million square miles, or an area slightly larger than the combined area of the United States and South America (Table 1). Today, the African continent is home to some 771 million people distributed within fifty-four separate countries. Of the world\u27s continents, Africa is by far the most diverse culturally. In Sudan, for example, there are over 200 ethnic groups speaking some 134 languages, while in Nigeria there are some 600 or more ethnic groups who speak as many as 505 different languages. The Middle East, for purposes of this volume, is taken to include fifteen countries, ranging from Afghanistan in the east to Turkey and Syria in the west. Together, these countries cover a total of 2,704,730 square miles and support a population of 254,428,629 (Table 2). The Middle East includes large, petroleum-rich countries (e.g., Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia) and small countries such as Bahrain (an island monarchy) and a federation of seven small monarchies (the United Arab Emirates)

Introduction to \u3ci\u3eEndangered Peoples of Africa and the Middle East : Struggles to Survive and Thrive\u3c/i\u3e

Endangered Peoples of Africa and the Middle East: Struggles to Survive and Thrive is about human populations residing in Africa and the Middle East, a diverse region that is connected geographically, culturally, and historically. The African continent is vast and covers 11.7 million square miles, or an area slightly larger than the combined area of the United States and South America (Table 1). Today, the African continent is home to some 771 million people distributed within fifty-four separate countries. Of the world\u27s continents, Africa is by far the most diverse culturally. In Sudan, for example, there are over 200 ethnic groups speaking some 134 languages, while in Nigeria there are some 600 or more ethnic groups who speak as many as 505 different languages. The Middle East, for purposes of this volume, is taken to include fifteen countries, ranging from Afghanistan in the east to Turkey and Syria in the west. Together, these countries cover a total of 2,704,730 square miles and support a population of 254,428,629 (Table 2). The Middle East includes large, petroleum-rich countries (e.g., Iraq, Iran, Saudi Arabia) and small countries such as Bahrain (an island monarchy) and a federation of seven small monarchies (the United Arab Emirates)

Grounded Theory Ethnography: Merging Methodologies for Advancing Naturalistic Inquiry

This inquiry explores the history and potential of blending grounded theory and ethnography for conducting qualitative research in education and the social sciences. We argue that grounded theory ethnography can be an effective strategy for bridging the research-to-practice gap particularly in practitioner-based fields such as adult education

Automatic speech recognition research at NASA-Ames Research Center

A trainable acoustic pattern recognizer manufactured by Scope Electronics is presented. The voice command system VCS encodes speech by sampling 16 bandpass filters with center frequencies in the range from 200 to 5000 Hz. Variations in speaking rate are compensated for by a compression algorithm that subdivides each utterance into eight subintervals in such a way that the amount of spectral change within each subinterval is the same. The recorded filter values within each subinterval are then reduced to a 15-bit representation, giving a 120-bit encoding for each utterance. The VCS incorporates a simple recognition algorithm that utilizes five training samples of each word in a vocabulary of up to 24 words. The recognition rate of approximately 85 percent correct for untrained speakers and 94 percent correct for trained speakers was not considered adequate for flight systems use. Therefore, the built-in recognition algorithm was disabled, and the VCS was modified to transmit 120-bit encodings to an external computer for recognition