The impact of human activity patterns on asymptomatic infectious processes in complex networks

The study of the impact of human activity patterns on network dynamics has attracted a lot of attention in recent years. However, individuals’ knowledge of their own physical states has rarely been incorporated into modeling processes. In real life, for certain infectious processes, infected agents may not have any visible or physical signs and symptoms; therefore, they may believe that they are uninfected even when they have been infected asymptomatically. This infection awareness factor is covered neither in the classical epidemic models such as SIS nor in network propagation studies. In this article, we propose a novel infectious process model that differentiates between the infection awareness states and the physical states of individuals and extend the SIS model to deal with both asymptomatic infection characteristics and human activity patterns. With regards to the latter, we focus particularly on individuals’ testing action, which is to determine whether an individual is infected by an epidemic. The simulation results show that less effort is required in controlling the disease when the transmission probability is either very small or large enough and that Poisson activity patterns are more effective than heavy-tailed patterns in controlling and eliminating asymptomatic infectious diseases due to the long-tail characteristic.     

Multi-scaling mix and non-universality between population and facility density

The distribution of facilities is closely related to our social economic activities. Recent studies have reported a scaling relation between population and facility density, with the exponent depending on the type of facility. In this paper, we show that generally this exponent is not universal for a specific type of facility. Instead, by using Chinese data, we find that it increases with per capita gross domestic product (GDP). Thus our observed scaling law is actually a mixture of several multi-scaling relations. This result indicates that facilities may change their public or commercial attributes according to the outside environment. We argue that this phenomenon results from an unbalanced regional economic level, and suggest a modification of a previous model by introducing the consuming capacity. The modified model reproduces most of our observed properties.     

Feedback between node and network dynamics can produce real-world network properties

Real-world networks are characterized by common features, including among others a scale-free degree distribution, a high clustering coefficient and a short typical distance between nodes. These properties are usually explained by the dynamics of edge and node addition and deletion.     

Optimal and equilibrium balking strategies in the single server Markovian queue with catastrophes

We consider a Markovian queue subject to Poisson generated catastrophes. Whenever a catastrophe occurs, all customers are forced to abandon the system, the server is rendered inoperative and an exponential repair time is set on. We assume that the arriving customers decide whether to join the system or balk, based on a natural reward-cost structure. We study the balking behavior of the customers and derive the corresponding Nash equilibrium and social optimal strategies.     

Continuous and discontinuous opinion dynamics with bounded confidence

In this paper, we study a continuous-time version of the Hegselmann-Krause opinion dynamics, which models bounded confidence by a discontinuous interaction. Intending solutions in the sense of Krasovskii, we provide results of existence, completeness and convergence to clusters of agents sharing a common opinion. For a deeper understanding of the role of the mentioned discontinuity, we study a class of continuous approximating systems, and their convergence to the original one. Our results indicate that their qualitative behavior is similar, and we argue that discontinuity is not an essential feature in bounded confidence opinion dynamics.     

中国农民收入水平、受教育程度及其社会地位的实证研究

“三农”问题是我国相当长阶段内的社会问题,而所有的问题中最突出的是人的问题,即农民问题。本文主要通过四个部分对中国农民的收入水平、受教育程度及其社会地位进行了实证研究。在找出各种影响因素之后,通过建立经济学模型深入研究各个因素对农民收入水平、受教育程度的贡献大小,进而分析了农民社会地位的影响因素,最后对所得结论逐一分析探讨,提出了解决农民问题的一些途径。     

From social welfare ordering to acyclic aggregation of preferences

One way to overcome Arrow's impossibility theorem is to drop the requirement that the collective preference be transitive. If it is quasi-transitive (strict preferences are transitive) an oligarchy emerges. If it is only acyclic, many non-oligarchic aggregation rules are available, yet the resulting decision rules are poorly decisive: Nakamura's theorem characterizes acyclic and neutral Arrowian aggregators. We propose a parallel characterization of acyclic and anonymous aggregation methods.     

Analysis and identification of a social interaction model

In this paper, we present a model of social interaction systems. By comparing it with existing analytical models, and using simulations, we focus on dynamical behavior and interaction properties of this nonlinear time-varying system. The system's behavior can be predicted if we have sufficient knowledge of system parameters such as the connection matrix. Observation of system behavior can be useful to recover the unknown or insufficiently known levels of interaction strength. Furthermore, if proper sampling can be carried out, the system can be identified. This model is suitable for investigating social phenomena such as the fashion phenomenon.     

On the structure of competitive societies

We model the dynamics of social structure by a simple interacting particle system. The social standing of an individual agent is represented by an integer-valued fitness that changes via two offsetting processes. When two agents interact one advances: the fitter with probability p and the less fit with probability 1-p. The fitness of an agent may also decline with rate r. From a scaling analysis of the underlying master equations for the fitness distribution of the population, we find four distinct social structures as a function of the governing parameters p and r. These include: (i) a static lower-class society where all agents have finite fitness; (ii) an upwardly-mobile middle-class society; (iii) a hierarchical society where a finite fraction of the population belongs to a middle class and a complementary fraction to the lower class; (iv) an egalitarian society where all agents are upwardly mobile and have nearly the same fitness. We determine the basic features of the fitness distributions in these four phases.     

Dynamic domain networks

A model for a dynamic network consisting of changing local interactions is presented in this work. While the network maintains solely local connections, certain properties known only to Small World Networks may be extracted due to the dynamic nature of the model. At each time step the individuals are grouped into clusters creating neighborhoods or domains of fully connected agents. The boundaries of these domains change in time, corresponding to a situation where the links between individuals are dynamic only throughout the history of the network. A question that we pose is whether our model, which maintains a local structure such that diffusion calculations are possible, might lead to analytic or conceptual advances for the much more complicated case of diffusion on a static disordered network that exhibits the same macroscopic properties as our dynamic ordered network. To answer this, we compare certain properties which characterize the dynamic domain network to those of a Small World Network, and then analyze the diffusion coefficients for three possible domain mutations. We close with a comparison and confirmation of previous epidemiological work carried out on networks.