Setting the Agenda: Different strategies of a Mass Media in a model of cultural dissemination

Day by day, people exchange opinions about a given new with relatives, friends, and coworkers. In most cases, they get informed about a given issue by reading newspapers, listening to the radio, or watching TV, i.e., through a Mass Media (MM). However, the importance of a given new can be stimulated by the Media by assigning newspaper's pages or time in TV programs. In this sense, we say that the Media has the power to "set the agenda", i.e., it decides which new is important and which is not. On the other hand, the Media can know people's concerns through, for instance, websites or blogs where they express their opinions, and then it can use this information in order to be more appealing to an increasing number of people. In this work, we study different scenarios in an agent-based model of cultural dissemination, in which a given Mass Media has a specific purpose: To set a particular topic of discussion and impose its point of view to as many social agents as it can. We model this by making the Media has a fixed feature, representing its point of view in the topic of discussion, while it tries to attract new consumers, by taking advantage of feedback mechanisms, represented by adaptive features. We explore different strategies that the Media can adopt in order to increase the affinity with potential consumers and then the probability to be successful in imposing this particular topic.Comment: 23 pages, 7 figure

Symmetry Aspects in Nonrelativistic Multi-Scalar Field Models and Application to a Coupled Two-Species Dilute Bose Gas

We discuss unusual aspects of symmetry that can happen due to entropic effects in the context of multi-scalar field theories at finite temperature. We present their consequences, in special, for the case of nonrelativistic models of hard core spheres. We show that for nonrelativistic models phenomena like inverse symmetry breaking and symmetry non-restoration cannot take place, but a reentrant phase at high temperatures is shown to be possible for some region of parameters. We then develop a model of interest in studies of Bose-Einstein condensation in dilute atomic gases and discuss about its phase transition patterns. In this application to a Bose-Einstein condensation model, however, no reentrant phases are found.Comment: 8 pages, 1 eps figure, IOP style. Based on a talk given by R. O. Ramos at the QFEXT05 workshop, Barcelona, Spain, September 5-9, 2005. One reference was update

The 2d Gross-Neveu Model at Finite Temperature and Density with Finite Corrections

We use the linear $\delta$ expansion, or optimized perturbation theory, to evaluate the effective potential for the two dimensional Gross-Neveu model at finite temperature and density obtaining analytical equations for the critical temperature, chemical potential and fermionic mass which include finite $N$ corrections. Our results seem to improve over the traditional large-N predictions.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figure