1 The article describes the foundations of a new theory of communication as the generative core of cultural systems. We define the concepts of meaning and information in terms of complex systems theory; communication is considered as the interplay of social and cognitive dynamics, i.e., interactions between speakers and receivers, which are determined by social and cognitive rules. The theory i...

—Evolutionary computation is a generic term used to make reference to the solution of computational problems planned and implemented based on models of an evolutionary process. Most of the evolutionary algorithms propose biological paradigms, and the concepts of natural selection, mutation and reproduction. However, other paradigms that can be adopted in the creation of evolutionary algorithms ...

background: recently, botulinum neurotoxin (bont)-derived recombinant proteins have been suggested as potential botulism vaccines. here, with concentrating on bont type e (bont/e), we studied two of these binding domain-based recombinant proteins: a multivalent chimer protein, which is composed of bont serotypes a, b and e binding subdomains, and a monovalent recombinant protein, which contains...

B ecause art is inherently visual, the use of imaging has long been an important way to understand its structure, form, and history. Recently, new ways of engaging with objects from our shared cultural heritage are possible with advances in computation and imaging that allow scientists to analyze art noninvasively, historians to pose new social questions about the art, and the public to explore...

! An Interdisciplinary Approach to Agent-Based Modeling of Conflict in Eastern Africa By Ian Skoggard and William G. Kennedy Introduction Over the past four years, a team of computational social scientists at the Center for Social Complexity at George Mason University (GMU) in collaboration with anthropologists from the Human Relations Area Files (HRAF) at Yale University have been developing a...

Optimization problems arise in many real-world applications. Cultural Algorithms are a class of computational models derived from observing the cultural evolution process in nature, compared with genetic algorithm the cultural algorithms have high convergence speed. Aiming at the disadvantages of basic cultural algorithms like being trapped easily into a local optimum, this paper improves the b...

Computational social science methodologies are increasingly being viewed as critical for modeling complex individual and organizational behaviors in dynamic, real world scenarios. However, many challenges for identifying, representing and incorporating appropriate socio-cultural behaviors remain. Social theories provide rules, which have strong theoretic underpinnings and have been empirically ...

Individual differences inherent in human perceptual and behavioral data pose challenges for researchers who aim to develop standardized models of phenomena and procedures for normative assessment. A common approach used when modeling individual variation is to adopt criteria for identifying and excluding the individual data of outliers. We present investigations that use an alternative approach...