Individual robots or agents will often need to form coalitions to accomplish shared tasks, e.g.,in sensor networks or markets. Furthermore, in most real systems it is infeasible for entities to interact with all peers. The presence of a social network can alleviate this problem by providing a neighborhood system within which entities interact with a reduced number of peers. Previous research ha...

The concept of self-organized criticality (SOC) has been evoked by Bak, Tang and Wiesenfeld (BTW) as a possible unifying framework to describe a vast class of dynamically driven systems which evolve spontaneously toward a critical stationary state with no characteristic time or length scale. In this essay we will discuss SOC models that have been studied and to what extent they are related to r...

Real progress in understanding how the natural world works only truly began with the Enlightenment, with its guiding principle that the truth is to be found not by appeal to authority but by experimental tests and evidence. Unfortunately, but understandably, science is too often seen--in school, in university and especially on quiz shows--as certainty. In fact, science (including social science...

In the present study we address the question of how persons or families occupy specific locations according to an attractiveness function between persons and flats. We suggest a mathematically formulated model in order to find optimal distributions of persons over flats. The model maximizes the global attractiveness of the ensemble and accounts for various conflicting situations. Its solutions ...

We study bureaucratic corruption in a model in which a constituency sets required levels for a given set of activities. Each activity is carried out by an external provider, and its realization is supervised by a bureaucrat. While bureaucrats are supposed to act on behalf of the constituency, they can decide to be corrupt and allow providers to deliver lower activity levels than contracted in e...

It is shown in this note that some matching-related properties of graphs, such as their factor-criticality, regularizability and the existence of perfect 2-matchings, are preserved when iterating Mycielski’s construction.

Designing for orchestration needs an emphasis on the criticality of the teacher’s agency, skills and understanding of pedagogies and technologies in orchestrating the classroom beyond the provision of material scripts and technological supports. Drawing on data from the collaborative classrooms that use a collaborative technology called GroupScribbles (GS), we share the work of a teacher who su...

Many software projects fail because they commit to a set of plans and specifications with little evidence that if these are used on the project, they will lead to a feasible system being developed within the project’s budget and schedule. An effective way to avoid this is to make the evidence of feasibility a first-class developer deliverable that is reviewed by independent experts and key deci...