Another analytic view about quantifying social forces

Montroll had considered a Verhulst evolution approach for introducing a notion he called "social force", to describe a jump in some economic output when a new technology or product outcompetes a previous one. In fact, Montroll's adaptation of Verhulst equation is more like an economic field description than a "social force". The empirical Verhulst logistic function and the Gompertz double exponential law are used here in order to present an alternative view, within a similar mechanistic physics framework. As an example, a "social force" modifying the rate in the number of temples constructed by a religious movement, the Antoinist community, between 1910 and 1940 in Belgium is found and quantified. Practically, two temple inauguration regimes are seen to exist over different time spans, separated by a gap attributed to a specific "constraint", a taxation system, but allowing for a different, smooth, evolution rather than a jump. The impulse force duration is also emphasized as being better taken into account within the Gompertz framework. Moreover, a "social force" can be as here, attributed to a change in the limited need/capacity of some population, coupled to some external field, in either Verhulst or Gompertz equation, rather than resulting from already existing but competing goods as imagined by Montroll.Comment: 4 figures, 29 refs., 15 pages; prepared for Advances in Complex System

Happiness, environmental protection and market economy

The manufacturing sector is leaving the West for Asia’s low wages and good working culture. Europe would be better off keeping these manufacturing activities, slowing down wage inflation and what is more, letting a young, cheaper workforce from the East settle down within their borders. This would aid in preserving the diverse economic structure which has been characteristic for Europe.Beside the economic growth there are two more concepts which have turned into the “holy cows” of economics during the last fifty years. One is the need to constantly improve labor productivity and the other is increasing competitiveness of nations. The high labor productivity of some countries, induces severe unemployment in the globalized world. In the other hand it is high time we understood that it is not competition, but cooperation that brings more happiness to humanity.Should we still opt for “happiness” and “sanity”, it is quite obvious that we all should, in economists’ terms, define our individual welfare functions corresponding to our own set of values, staying free from the influence of media, advertisements and fashion. The cornerstone to all this is the intelligent citizen who prefers local goods and services

Demanding stories: television coverage of sustainability, climate change and material demand

This paper explores the past, present and future role of broadcasting, above all via the medium of television, in shaping how societies talk, think about and act on climate change and sustainability issues. The paper explores these broad themes via a focus on the important but relatively neglected issue of material demand and opportunities for its reduction. It takes the outputs and decision-making of one of the world’s most influential broadcasters, the BBC, as its primary focus. The paper considers these themes in terms of stories, touching on some of the broader societal frames of understanding into which they can be grouped. Media decision-makers and producers from a range of genres frequently return to the centrality of ‘story’ in the development, commissioning and production of an idea. With reference to specific examples of programming, and drawing on interviews with media practitioners, the paper considers the challenges of generating broadcast stories that can inspire engagement in issues around climate change, and specifically material demand. The concluding section proposes actions and approaches that might help to establish material demand reduction as a prominent way of thinking about climate change and environmental issues more widely. This article is part of the themed issue ‘Material demand reduction’

Family name distributions: Master equation approach

Although cumulative family name distributions in many countries exhibit power-law forms, there also exist counterexamples. The origin of different family name distributions across countries is discussed analytically in the framework of a population dynamics model. Combined with empirical observations made, it is suggested that those differences in distributions are closely related with the rate of appearance of new family names.Comment: 7 pages, 8 figure

Noise driven unlimited population growth

Demographic noise causes unlimited population growth in a broad class of models which, without noise, would predict a stable finite population. We study this effect on the example of a stochastic birth-death model which includes immigration, binary reproduction and death. The unlimited population growth proceeds as an exponentially slow decay of a metastable probability distribution (MPD) of the population. We develop a systematic WKB theory, complemented by the van Kampen system size expansion, for the MPD and for the decay time. Important signatures of the MPD is a power-law tail (such that all the distribution moments, except the zeroth one, diverge) and the presence in the solution of two different WKB modes.Comment: 4 pages, 2 figure

Integrating Integrated Water Management

© 2014, Thomas Telford Services Ltd. All rights reserved. The water cycle is a contiguous system interconnected with human activities. Management has tended to be fragmented across anthropocentrically defined disciplines, potentially generating unintended negative consequences. The ecosystem approach and the ecosystem services framework emphasise interlinked, albeit often overlooked, benefits that the natural environment provides for people. This enables recognition and avoidance of potential ‘negative externalities’, identification of solutions optimising benefits across multiple services, and participation of wider constituencies of stakeholders. Systemic, outcome-based approaches are inherently economically efficient, yielding greater cumulative benefits for lower transaction costs by working with natural processes. The ecosystem approach establishes geographical and socio-economic contexts for management ecosystem service outcomes, providing a broader context in which to nest established water resource management methods. The ecosystem approach can also be applied at different scales and to diverse societal activities, internalising into them the value of natural processes. It is amenable to integration into catchment-scale considerations, yet does not present these activities as subsidiary to river basin planning. The addition of ecosystem services for options appraisal in preexisting decision-support tools adapts them to better address multi-benefit goals. Shifts are required in the policy and economic environment, but engineers have an important role in promoting, applying and innovating multibenefit solutions

Landowning, Status and Population Growth

This paper considers the effects of the landowning and land reforms on economic and demographic growth by a family-optimization model with endogenous fertility and status-seeking. A land reform provides the peasant with strong incentives to limit their family size and to improve the productivity of the land. Even though the income effect due to the land reform tends to raise fertility, a strong enough status-effect outweighs it, thus generating a decrease in population growth. The European demographic history provides supporting anecdotal evidence for this theoretical result

The plight of the sense-making ape

This is a selective review of the published literature on object-choice tasks, where participants use directional cues to find hidden objects. This literature comprises the efforts of researchers to make sense of the sense-making capacities of our nearest living relatives. This chapter is written to highlight some nonsensical conclusions that frequently emerge from this research. The data suggest that when apes are given approximately the same sense-making opportunities as we provide our children, then they will easily make sense of our social signals. The ubiquity of nonsensical contemporary scientific claims to the effect that humans are essentially--or inherently--more capable than other great apes in the understanding of simple directional cues is, itself, a testament to the power of preconceived ideas on human perception

Quiescence: early evolutionary origins and universality do not imply uniformity

Cell cycle investigations have focused on relentless exponential proliferation of cells, an unsustainable situation in nature. Proliferation of cells, whether microbial or metazoan, is interrupted by periods of quiescence. The vast majority of cells in an adult metazoan lie quiescent. As disruptions in this quiescence are at the foundation of cancer, it will be important for the field to turn its attention to the mechanisms regulating quiescence. While often presented as a single topic, there are multiple forms of quiescence each with complex inputs, some of which are tied to conceptually challenging aspects of metazoan regulation such as size control. In an effort to expose the enormity of the challenge, I describe the differing biological purposes of quiescence, and the coupling of quiescence in metazoans to growth and to the structuring of tissues during development. I emphasize studies in the organism rather than in tissue culture, because these expose the diversity of regulation. While quiescence is likely to be a primitive biological process, it appears that in adapting quiescence to its many distinct biological settings, evolution has diversified it. Consideration of quiescence in different models gives us an overview of this diversity