Threshold models try to explain the consequences of social influence like the spread of fads and opinions. Along with models of epidemics, they constitute a major theoretical framework of social spreading processes. In threshold models on static networks, an individual changes her state if a certain fraction of her neighbors has done the same. When there are strong correlations in the temporal ...

Preferences in popular music among teen-age girls vary according to the neighborhood in which a girl lives and her relative popularity among her peers. Highly popular girls are shown to conform more closely than the less popular to the prevailing neighborhood norms in popular music. Musical tastes and preferences for particular songs and for particular disk jockeys are found to be anchored in r...

We offer a model in which sequences of individuals often converge upon poor decisions and are prone to fads, despite communication of the payoff outcomes from past choices. This reflects both direct and indirect action-based information externalities. In contrast with previous cascades literature, cascades here are spontaneously dislodged and in general have a probability less than one of lasti...

Estimating the abundance of pelagic fish species is a challenging task, due to their vast and remote habitat. Despite the development of satellite, archival and acoustic tagging techniques that allow the tracking of marine animals in their natural environments, these technologies have so far been underutilized in developing abundance estimations. We developed a new method for estimating the abu...

Purse seiners operating in the Pacific Ocean catch large quantities, in various proportions, of skipjack, yellowfin, and bigeye tunas associated with floating objects, in particular fish-aggregating devices (FADs). There is concern about the high fishing mortality rates on small bigeye and yellowfin tunas associated with floating objects from purse-seine fisheries, and the negative impact on su...

2 Background The Pacific Tuna Tagging Programme (PTTP) is a joint research project being implemented by the Oceanic Fisheries Programme (OFP) of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community (SPC), the PNG National Fisheries Authority (NFA) and the members and participating non‐members of the Western and Central Pacific Fisheries Commission (WCPFC). The goal of the PTTP is to improve stock assessmen...

For the last decade and a half the business community has seen what appears to be one fad after another. To a surprising (and greatly under-recognized) degree, however, those fads, that these enthusiasms are facets of, constitute one major theme – the importance of information and its skillful use to the success of the modern corporation. Librarianship is about the organization and the use of i...