Emergent social cohesion for coping with community disruptions in disasters

Natural disasters and indicators of social cohesion

Do adversarial environmental conditions create social cohesion? We provide new answers to this question by exploiting spatial and temporal variation in exposure to earthquakes across Chile. Using a variety of methods and controlling for a number of socio-economic variables, we find that exposure to earthquakes has a positive effect on several indicators of social cohesion. Social cohesion incre...

Emergent Community Structure in Social Tagging Systems

A distributed classification paradigm known as collaborative tagging has been widely adopted in new web applications designed to manage and share online resources. Users of these applications organize resources (web pages, digital photographs, academic papers) by associating with them freely chosen text labels, or tags. Here we leverage the social aspects of collaborative tagging and introduce ...

Social interaction, inclusion and community cohesion

Green infrastructure (GI) can help bring people together, engaging individuals from different social groupings that may not normally interact. Green space offers possibilities: increasing social activity, improving community cohesion, developing local attachment and lowering crime levels, particularly in deprived communities (Bell et al., 2008; Weldon et al., 2007). Certain groups in society ar...

Community-Centred Agents and Emergent Social Conventions

In this paper, we examine techniques by which a community of autonomous agents can reach global agreement upon the use of social conventions in coordination and cooperation games. The merits of examining such convention acquisition is twofold: it can help us learn more about how humans behave in social systems, and it can explain how agents should behave in artificial social systems. We notice ...

Indicators for Social Cohesion