The role of committed minorities in shaping public opinion has been recently addressed with the help of multiagent models. However, previous studies focused on homogeneous populations where zealots stand out only for their stubbornness. Here we consider the more general case in which individuals are characterized by different propensities to communicate. In particular, we correlate commitment w...

Seventy-three married couples were studied in 1983 and 1987. To identify marital processes associated with dissolution, a balance theory of marriage was used to generate 1 variable for dividing couples into regulated and nonregulated groups. For studying the precursors of divorce, a "cascade" model of marital dissolution, which forms a Guttman-like scale, received preliminary support. Compared ...

Science is expected to be objective: however, since practiced and produced by humans, it has to reflect human flows - prejudices, stubbornness, malice, and the tendency to be misused. No wonder an excellent scientist like John Eccles proclaimed science to be among the most personal activities he had known. By analysing a few examples from the history of science (in particular the intellectual d...

The mixed Hegselmann-Krause (HK) model consists of a finite number agents characterized by their opinion, vector in $ {\bf{R^d}} $. For the deterministic case, each agent updates its opinion rule: decide degree stubbornness and mix with average neighbors, whose differs at most some confidence threshold from time step. is studied deterministically [22]. In this paper, we study it nondeterministi...

A popular technique for tolerating malicious faults in open distributed systems is to establish small groups of participants, each of which has a non-faulty majority. These groups are used as building blocks to design attack-resistant algorithms. Despite over a decade of active research, current constructions require group sizes of O(logn), where n is the number of participants in the system. T...

In this work we study opinion formation in a population participating in a public debate with two distinct choices. We consider three distinct mechanisms of social interactions and individuals' behavior: conformity, nonconformity, and inflexibility. The conformity is ruled by the majority-rule dynamics, whereas the nonconformity is introduced in the population as an independent behavior, implyi...

This paper discusses the apparent stubbornness of immobility that exists in the European Union. It starts from the observation that the apparent abolishing of borders has not led to the supposed increase in crossborder interaction. Two concepts are introduced, indifference and unfamiliarity, this way trying to understand border effects, especially in Europe and the European Union. From this it ...

Based on the heuristics that maintaining presumptions can be beneficial in uncertain environments, we propose a set of basic requirements for learning systems to incorporate the concept of prejudice. The simplest, memoryless model of a deterministic learning rule obeying the axioms is constructed, and shown to be equivalent to the logistic map. The system’s performance is analysed in an environ...

Privacy in data publishing has received much attention recently. The key to defining privacy is to model knowledge of the attacker – if the attacker is assumed to know too little, the published data can be easily attacked, if the attacker is assumed to know too much, the published data has little utility. Previous work considered either quite ignorant adversaries or nearly omniscient adversarie...