In response to failures of central planning, the Chinese government has experimented not only with free-market trade zones, but with allowing non-profit foundations to operate in a decentralized fashion. A network study shows how these foundations have connected together by sharing board members, in a structural parallel to what is seen in corporations in the United States. This board interlock...

The explosive growth of Internet users, the increased user demand for bandwidth, and the declining cost of technology have all resulted in the emergence of new classes of high-speed distributed IP-router architectures with packet-forwarding rates on the order of gigabits, or even terabits, per second. This paper develops an analytical framework for modeling and analyzing the impact of technolog...

The nature and status of psychological laws are a long-standing controversy. I will argue that part of the controversy stems from the distinctive nature of an important subset of those laws, which I’ll call “supple laws.” An emergent-model strategy taken by the new interdisciplinary field of artificial life provides a strikingly successful understanding of analogously supple laws in biology. So...

This article addresses the emergence of “lowest-low” fertility in some countries, primarily in Southern Europe and East Asia, and poses the question of why we find such large differences in birth rates across postindustrial societies. A set of macro– micro mechanisms are identified, which are examined empirically using comparative data for seven countries from the Gender and Generations Survey....

In this paper, we consider the effects of trust and conventions on the evolution of a multi-agent system. To do so, we provide a simulation in which agents are able to use a trust mechanism to select interaction partners, and a learning mechanism that leads to convention emergence. We examine the impacts on the system of: different network topologies; the presence or absence of malicious agents...

The role of agriculture as an instrument for industrialization had been rigorously conceptualized in the 1960s and 1970s under the classical paradigm of development economics. After many implementation failures under import substitution industrialization policies and protracted neglect of agriculture under the policies of the Washington Consensus that followed the debt crisis, agriculture has g...

Introduction In December 2013, an emergence of chikungunya was observed in the French Caribbean region. Starting on the Saint-Martin island, the epidemic of chikungunya spread in Martinique on December 2013. The first cases were then observed in Guadeloupe in December 2013 and in January 2014 in the French Guyana [1]. A specific surveillance system has been implemented based on a sentinel gener...

Acoustics is an inherently interdisciplinary science that has evolved in a mature discipline field occupied in the study and solution of hot social topics. This is, precisely, the strength and the challenge of the Acoustics in the XXI century. On the other side, nowadays it is out of discussion that universities have a crucial role in knowledge generation with social responsibility towards a mo...

The emergence of the Internet as the global, ubiquitous networking infrastructure, and the accompanying Internet computing model, where much of the computing takes place on servers rather than local machines, is driving a new class of Internet service applications. While these services promise unprecedented computing power, connectivity, convenience, and low cost, their construction is a challe...