Social Dynamics

THE sprawling expanse of Dadaab constitutes the largest refugee camp in the world by population, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees （UNHCR）. Situated in Kenya＇s Garissa County near the border with Somalia, this camp has been a city of exiles since 1993 and currently hosts almost 257,000 refugees who mainly come from Somalia. To put it into perspective, if Dabaab were a normal urban settlement, it would be Kenya＇s fourth largest city by population with an economy worth about $100 million, a result of donor funds delivered here every year.

CONSENSUS FORMATION OF TWO-LEVEL OPINION DYNAMICS

Opinion dynamics have received significant attention in recent years. This paper proposes a bounded confidence opinion model for a group of agents with two different confidence levels. Each agent in the population is endowed with a confidence interval around her opinion wiih radius αd or （1 - α）d, where α∈ （0, 1/2] represents the differentiation of confidence levels. We analytically derived the critical confidence bound dc = 1/（4α） for the two-level opinion dynamics on Z. A single opinion cluster is formed with probability 1 above this critical value regardless of the ratio p of agents with high/low confidence. Extensive numerical simulations are performed to illustrate our theoretical results. Noticed is a clear impact of p on the collective behavior： more agents with high confidence lead to harder agreement. It is also experimentally revealed that the sharpness of the threshold dc increases with a but does not depend on p.

A new collision avoidance model for pedestrian dynamics

The pedestrians can only avoid collisions passively under the action of forces during simulations using the social force model, which may lead to unnatural behaviors. This paper proposes an optimization-based model for the avoidance of collisions, where the social repulsive force is removed in favor of a search for the quickest path to destination in the pedestrian＇s vision field. In this way, the behaviors of pedestrians are governed by changing their desired walking direction and desired speed. By combining the critical factors of pedestrian movement, such as positions of the exit and obstacles and velocities of the neighbors, the choice of desired velocity has been rendered to a discrete optimization problem. Therefore,it is the self-driven force that leads pedestrians to a free path rather than the repulsive force, which means the pedestrians can actively avoid collisions. The new model is verified by comparing with the fundamental diagram and actual data. The simulation results of individual avoidance trajectories and crowd avoidance behaviors demonstrate the reasonability of the proposed model.

On Dynamic Social Factors for Development of China’s Human Rights Theory

China＇s mainstream human rights theory has undergone tremendous changes since the reform-and-opening scheme was kicked off in the early 1980s. ＂Human rights,＂ which used to be seen as a concept of capitalist ideology, is now an important part of the Chinese system of socialist values.

Formidable females redux:male social integration into female networks and the value of dynamic multilayer networks

The development of multilayer network techniques is a boon for researchers who wish to understand how different interaction layers might influence each other,and how these in turn might influence group dynamics.Here,we investigate how integration between male and female grooming and aggression interaction networks influences male power trajectories in vervet monkeys Chlorocebus pygerythrus.Our previous analyses of this phenomenon used a monolayer approach,and our aim here is to extend these analyses using a dynamic multilayer approach.To do so,we constructed a temporal series of male and female interaction layers.We then used a multivariate multilevel autoregression model to compare cross-lagged associations between a male's centrality in the female grooming layer and changes in male Elo ratings.Our results confirmed our original findings:changes in male centrality within the female grooming network were weakly but positively tied to changes in their Elo ratings.However,the multilayer network approach offered additional insights into this social process,identifying how changes in a male's centrality cascade through the other network layers.This dynamic view indicates that the changes in Elo ratings are likely to be short-lived,but that male centrality within the female network had a much stronger impact throughout the multilayer network as a whole,especially on reducing intermale aggression(i.e.,aggression directed by males toward other males).We suggest that multilayer social network approaches can take advantage of increased amounts of social data that are more commonly collected these days,using a variety of methods.Such data are inherently multilevel and multilayered,and thus offer the ability to quantify more precisely the dynamics of animal social behaviors.

Finite Size Effects in the Dynamics of Opinion Formation

For some models of relevance in the social sciences we review some exam-ples in which system size plays an important role in the final outcome of the dynamics.We discuss the conditions under which changes of behavior can appear only when the number of agents in the model takes a finite value.Those changes of behavior can be related to the apparent phase transitions that appear in some physical models.We show examples in the Galam's model of opinion transmission and the Axelrod's model of culture formation stressing the role that the network of interactions has on the main results of both models.Finally,we present the phenomenon of system-size stochastic resonance by which a forcing signal(identified as an advertising agent)is optimally amplified by a population of the right(intermediate)size.Our work stresses the role that the system size has in the dynamics of social systems and the inappropriateness of taking the thermodynamic limit for these systems.

The biogeography of group sizes in humpback dolphins(Sousa spp.)

Humpback dolphins(Sousa spp.)are obligate shallow-water and resident species,and they typically live in fission–fusion societies composed of small-sized groups with changeable membership.However,we have scant knowledge of their behavioral ecology,starting with potential factors influencing inter-population variability of their group sizes.Here,we compiled a new global dataset of humpback dolphin group sizes based on 150 published records.Our data indicated an inter-specific consistency of group-living strategy among the 4 species in the Sousa genus,as these species preferred living in small-sized groups with a mean size of mostly no more than 10,a minimum size of single individual or small pairs,and a maximum size of several tens or≈100.In addition,we clearly showed the geographic variations in group sizes of humpback dolphins at a global scale.We found that the geographic variations in humpback dolphin group sizes were primarily associated with the latitude,sea surface temperature,and abundance.To conclude,our findings provide insights into social dynamics and socioecological trade-offs of humpback dolphins,and help better understand how these resident animals adapted to their shallow-water habitats from the perspectives of biogeography and socioecology.