scholarly journals Choosing inequality: how economic security fosters competitive regimes

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Lenger ◽  
Stephan Wolf ◽  
Nils Goldschmidt
Keyword(s):  
Social Preferences ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
Majority Voting ◽  
Equal Weight ◽  
Rigid Constraint ◽  
Low Incomes ◽  
Standard Scenario ◽  
Production Success

AbstractIn a novel experimental design, we study how social immobility affects the choice among distributional schemes in an experimental democracy. We design a two-period experiment in which subjects first choose a distributional scheme by majority voting (“social contract”). Then subjects engage in a competitive real-effort task to earn points. Based on production success, participants are ranked from best to worst. In combination with the initially chosen scheme, these ranks determine the final payout of the first round, leading to a pattern of societal stratification. Participants are informed individually about points and rank, before the same sequence of voting, production and payoff determination is repeated in a second round. To test the effect of social immobility on choosing distributional regimes the experiment is conducted with and without a social immobility factor, i.e. a different weighting of the two rounds. In our standard scenario, payoffs are simply added. In our “social immobility setting”, we alter the game as follows: the actual income in round 2 is calculated by adding 0.2 times the raw payoff from the second production game and 0.8 times the income from round 1. With the higher importance of round 1 success, we simulate the fact that economic movement upwards and downwards in societies (“social mobility”) is a de facto rigid constraint: high and low incomes tend to reproduce themselves. Our main findings are that in the Equal Weight Treatment, most groups opt for complete equality in both rounds, while in the unequal weight setting the initial choice of equality is followed by a shift to the most competitive regime. In both treatments, we observe that those performing well in round 1 tend to vote for unequal schemes in round 2, while low-performers develop an even stronger “taste for equality”. This supports a central Rawlsian idea: behind an (experimental) “veil of uncertainty”, the lack of idiosyncratic information is strong enough to let people decide as if driven by social preferences. The different group decisions in round 2 suggest that for this to happen, stakes need to be sufficiently high. To our surprise, other factors like gender, social background or real-life income have hardly any impact on unveiled decision making. We conclude that in our experimental democracy, competition based income allocation (a “market economy”) finds support only if people are sufficiently well off. Hence, increasing inequality perpetuated by social immobility is likely to undermine the general support for market-based systems.

scholarly journals Perspective influences eye movements during real-life conversation: Mentalising about self vs. others in autism

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mahsa Barzy ◽  
Heather Jane Ferguson ◽  
David Williams
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Relevant Information ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Social Attention ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Verbal Responses ◽  
Socially Relevant

Socio-communication is profoundly impaired among autistic individuals. Difficulties representing others’ mental states have been linked to modulations of gaze and speech, which have also been shown to be impaired in autism. Despite these observed impairments in ‘real-world’ communicative settings, research has mostly focused on lab-based experiments, where the language is highly structured. In a pre-registered experiment, we recorded eye movements and verbal responses while adults (N=50) engaged in a real-life conversation. Conversation topic either related to the self, a familiar other, or an unfamiliar other (e.g. "Tell me who is your/your mother’s/Marina’s favourite celebrity and why?”). Results replicated previous work, showing reduced attention to socially-relevant information among autistic participants (i.e. less time looking at the experimenter’s face, and more time looking around the background), compared to typically-developing controls. Importantly, perspective modulated social attention in both groups; talking about an unfamiliar other reduced attention to potentially distracting or resource demanding social information, and increased looks to non-social background. Social attention did not differ between self and familiar other contexts- reflecting greater shared knowledge for familiar/similar others. Autistic participants spent more time looking at the background when talking about an unfamiliar other vs. themselvesFuture research should investigate the cognitive mechanisms underlying this effect.

scholarly journals Exploring Daily Activity Patterns on the Typical Day of Older Adults for Supporting Aging-in-Place in China’s Rural Environment

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (22) ◽  
pp. 8416
Author(s):  
Ziqi Zhang ◽  
Zhi Qiu
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
Rural Areas ◽  
Rural China ◽  
Activity Patterns ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Working Hours ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
Paid Work ◽  
Definition Of

Severe aging in rural China is prompting communities to promote support for older people to age in place. The study of the daily life of older adults in rural areas is conducive to understanding their real life and demands, as well as the way they interact with their environment, to develop feasible strategies. In this study, 171 older adults over 60 years old in two different types of villages in Northern Zhejiang Province were investigated and analyzed in terms of the temporal and spatial features of daily activities, as well as their relationship with population attributes, personal competence, and subjective demands. The results show that: (1) significant association can be seen between working hours and the demand for health services, housework hours and gender and age, as well as leisure hours and ADL and the demand for recreational services. (2) The older adults appear to have inter-group homogeneity in some aspects: basic living activities, leisure hours, the gender difference in housework hours, and recreational preference, while they have higher average paid work hours and fewer leisure alternatives than their urban counterparts. Their definitions of paid work, housework, and leisure activities are vague. (3) The definition of home by the older adults in rural places sometimes seems to go beyond the scope of their own house, and the extensive definition of home may change their recognitions of some activities. They also inclined to assign meaning to a place through frequent use rather than through external definitions. (4) The weak consciousness on buying services and deteriorated financial situation hinders the older adults in rural communities from expressing their real demands. Unspoken demands include economic security, recreational choices, and assistance in housework. The results will help to provide references for the improvement of eldercare services and the community environment.

VEHICLE TYPE AND MAKE RECOGNITION BY COMBINED FEATURES AND ROTATION FOREST ENSEMBLE

2012 ◽  
Vol 26 (03) ◽  
pp. 1250004 ◽  
Author(s):  
BAILING ZHANG ◽  
YIFAN ZHOU
Keyword(s):  
Real Life ◽  
Curvelet Transform ◽  
Majority Voting ◽  
Vehicle Classification ◽  
Multilayer Perceptrons ◽  
Analysis Tool ◽  
Rotation Forest ◽  
Vehicle Type ◽  
Combined Features ◽  
Composite Feature

Vehicle type/make recognition based on images captured by surveillance cameras is a challenging task in intelligent transportation system and automatic surveillance. In this paper, we comparatively studied two feature extraction methods for image description, i.e. a new multiresolution analysis tool called Fast Discrete Curvelet Transform and the pyramid histogram of oriented gradients (PHOG). Curvelet Transform has better directional and edge representation abilities than widely used wavelet transform, which is particularly appropriate for the description of images rich with edges. PHOG represents the local shape by a histogram of edge orientations computed for each image sub-region, quantized into a number of bins, thus has the ascendency in its description of more discriminating information. A composite feature description from PHOG and Curvelet can further increase the accuracy of classification by taking their complementary information. We also investigated the applicability of the Rotation Forest (RF) ensemble method for vehicle classification based on the combined features. The RF ensemble contains a set of base multilayer perceptrons which are trained using principal component analysis to rotate the original axes of combined features of vehicle images. The class label is assigned by the ensemble via majority voting. Experimental results using more than 600 images from 21 makes of cars/vans show the effectiveness of the proposed approach. The composite feature is better than any single feature in the classification accuracy and the ensemble model produces better performance compared to any of the individual neural network base classifier. With a moderate ensemble size of 20, the Rotation Forest ensembles offers a classification rate close to 96.5%, exhibiting promising potentials for real-life applications.

scholarly journals Yogmaya: Historical Reality in the Fictional Existence

2019 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-11
Author(s):  
Anupa Wagle
Keyword(s):  
Social Background ◽  
Historical Background ◽  
New Historicism ◽  
Equal Weight ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Fictional World ◽  
Social Phenomena ◽  
Historical Approach ◽  
Historical Reality ◽  
Free Translation

 The aim of this article is to analyze the novel Yogmaya to find out the balance between the fictional world presented in it and the history related to it. Written as a novel on the background of Rana Period in Nepal, my endeavour is to find out whether the novel is successful to portray the contemporary Nepalese society. In order to analyze the novel this study draws insight from new historicism that demands the equal weight for literary foreground and historical background. For this, the study is limited within some aspects of New Historical approach and fictional world related to social phenomena presented in the novel. Finally, this article includes the major finding of this study that the fictional foregrounding of the novel successfully portrays the contemporary social background of the concerned time and place. Free translation is used while citing texts from the novel since it is in Nepali.

Distance to hazard: an environmental policy with income heterogeneity

2016 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 51-65
Author(s):  
Minoru Nakada
Keyword(s):  
Environmental Policy ◽  
Median Voter ◽  
Pollution Abatement ◽  
Pollution Source ◽  
Majority Voting ◽  
Tax Rate ◽  
Residential Proximity ◽  
Income Levels ◽  
Emissions Tax ◽  
Low Incomes

AbstractThis study examines whether voting by individuals of different income levels affects the stringency of environmental policy if their residential proximity to a pollution source is considered. A location model with heterogeneous agents is extended to include a single environmentally hazardous site at the edge of a linear city and the degree of damage from pollution is assumed to depend on the distance from this emissions site. The analysis demonstrates through majority voting that the equilibrium emissions tax rate is higher when the income level of the median voter is lower, because residents with low incomes reside near the hazardous site and thus benefit more from pollution abatement than residents with higher incomes.

scholarly journals Criteria for Classification of Economic Security Indicators

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (7) ◽  
pp. 120
Author(s):  
Karimov Narboy ◽  
Khamidova Faridakhon ◽  
Saydullaev Shakhzod
Keyword(s):  
Goal Setting ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
Economic Consequences ◽  
Economic Systems ◽  
Clear Understanding ◽  
National Economic ◽  
Complex Procedure ◽  
Security Indicators

In modern conditions, the importance of ensuring national economic security is increasing due to the increasing multivariance and alternativeness of goal-setting and ways to achieve goals. One cannot give preference to one or another option for forecasting economic development, making investments, forming the country’s budget without assessing their socio-economic consequences in the form of criteria and indicators of security. In this paper, it is proposed to systematize indicators of economic security according to several criteria. The development of a classification of objects, phenomena and systems of real life is a very complex procedure, especially when it comes to economic security at various levels of management. However, this task remains very relevant to this day, since the analysis, forecasting and management of economic systems are practically impossible without a clear understanding of their structure. This paper considers the main criteria (indicators) of economic security and options for their definition, as well as examples for all criteria.

Hybrid Avatar-Agent Technology – A Conceptual Step Towards Mediated “Social” Virtual Reality and its Respective Challenges

i-com ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 107-114 ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Roth ◽  
Marc Erich Latoschik ◽  
Kai Vogeley ◽  
Gary Bente
Keyword(s):  
Virtual Reality ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Social Dimension ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Social Signals ◽  
Starting Point ◽  
The Social

AbstractDriven by large industry investments, developments of Virtual Reality (VR) technologies including unobtrusive sensors, actuators and novel display devices are rapidly progressing. Realism and interactivity have been postulated as crucial aspects of immersive VR since the naissance of the concept. However, today’s VR still falls short from creating real life-like experiences in many regards. This holds particularly true when introducing the “social dimension” into the virtual worlds. Apparently, creating convincing virtual selves and virtual others and conveying meaningful and appropriate social behavior still is an open challenge for future VR. This challenge implies both, technical aspects, such as the real-time capacities of the systems, but also psychological aspects, such as the dynamics of human communication. Our knowledge of VR systems is still fragmented with regard to social cognition, although the social dimension is crucial when aiming at autonomous agents with a certain social background intelligence. It can be questioned though whether a perfect copy of real life interactions is a realistic or even meaningful goal of social VR development at this stage. Taking into consideration the specific strengths and weaknesses of humans and machines, we propose a conceptual turn in social VR which focuses on what we call “hybrid avatar-agent systems”. Such systems are required to generate i) avatar mediated interactions between real humans, taking advantage of their social intuitions and flexible communicative skills and ii) an artificial social intelligence (AIS) which monitors, and potentially moderates or transforms ongoing virtual interactions based on social signals, such as performing adaptive manipulations of behavior in intercultural conversations. The current article sketches a respective base architecture and discusses necessary research prospects and challenges as a starting point for future research and development.

scholarly journals Perspective influences eye movements during real-life conversation: Mentalising about self versus others in autism

Autism ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 24 (8) ◽  
pp. 2153-2165
Author(s):  
Mahsa Barzy ◽  
Heather J Ferguson ◽  
David M Williams
Keyword(s):  
Eye Movements ◽  
Social Information ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Mental States ◽  
Social Attention ◽  
Developmental Trajectory ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Typically Developing ◽  
Autistic Adults

Social-communication is profoundly impaired among autistic individuals. Difficulties representing others’ mental states have been linked to modulations of gaze and speech, which have also been shown to be impaired in autism. Despite these observed impairments in ‘real-world’ communicative settings, research has mostly focused on lab-based experiments, where the language is highly structured. In a pre-registered experiment, we recorded eye movements and verbal responses while adults ( N = 50) engaged in a real-life conversation. Using a novel approach, we also manipulated the perspective that participants adopted by asking them questions that were related to the self, a familiar other, or an unfamiliar other. Results replicated previous work, showing reduced attention to socially relevant information among autistic participants (i.e. less time looking at the experimenter’s face and more time looking around the background), compared to typically developing controls. Importantly, perspective modulated social attention in both groups; talking about an unfamiliar other reduced attention to potentially distracting or resource-demanding social information and increased looks to non-social background. Social attention did not differ between self and familiar other contexts, reflecting greater shared knowledge for familiar/similar others. Autistic participants spent more time looking at the background when talking about an unfamiliar other versus themselves. Future research should investigate the developmental trajectory of this effect and the cognitive mechanisms underlying it. Lay abstract Previous lab-based studies suggest that autistic individuals are less attentive to social aspects of their environment. In our study, we recorded the eye movements of autistic and typically developing adults while they engaged in a real-life social interaction with a partner. Results showed that autistic adults were less likely than typically developing adults to look at the experimenter’s face, and instead were more likely to look at the background. Moreover, the perspective that was adopted in the conversation (talking about self versus others) modulated the patterns of eye movements in autistic and non-autistic adults. Overall, people spent less time looking at their conversation partner’s eyes and face and more time looking at the background, when talking about an unfamiliar other compared to when talking about themselves. This pattern was magnified among autistic adults. We conclude that allocating attention to social information during conversation is cognitively effortful, but this can be mitigated when talking about a topic that is familiar to them.

scholarly journals Application of Graph Analytics for Simulations of Electronic Money Turnover: Solutions, Evaluations, Forecasts

2019 ◽  
Vol 224 ◽  
pp. 06006
Author(s):  
Olga E. Pyrkina ◽  
Sergey A. Zadadaev
Keyword(s):  
System Analysis ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Graph Model ◽  
Economic Security ◽  
Centrality Measures ◽  
Electronic Money ◽  
Graph Models ◽  
Graph Analytics ◽  
Network Nodes ◽  
Graph Metric

The graph model for electronic money turnover developed in this paper considers the system of electronic money turnover as a technological complex network. This network includes systems of electronic money payments, communications between bank and its clients, and interbank communications. The application of the graph models is based on its essential advantages such as an opportunity to expand this system to arbitrary size and visualization of the system links. While graph plotting provides us with the opportunity of carrying out qualitative (visual) system analysis, e computations of the graph metric allows performing a more quantitative analysis. The composite metric, created on the base of graph centrality measures and giving us possibilities of estimating and ranking potential risks, is considered as a foundation for methods of stability, quality and economic security control for systems of the electronic money turnover. A validity of this classification has been investigated and supported by the so-called crash tests, which simulate the random consecutive deleting of graph nodes represented in the real life by communication network nodes, for example, banks or other members of electronic money turnover system, and also by the analysis of the overall performance of the system.

scholarly journals Research on the Construction of Intelligent Fire Protection Virtual Simulation Teaching Platform Based on Internet of Things

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (10) ◽  
pp. 450-455
Author(s):  
Guiling Sun ◽  
◽  
Sirui Wang ◽  
Hai Wang ◽  
Yi Gao
Keyword(s):  
Internet Of Things ◽  
Data Storage ◽  
Fire Protection ◽  
Real Life ◽  
Social Background ◽  
Virtual Simulation ◽  
The Internet ◽  
Wireless Sensor Node ◽  
Teaching Platform ◽  
The Internet Of Things

Aiming at the teaching challenge of cultivating integrated talents of Internet of things worldwide, and combining with the social background of fire rescue and management problems, We propose a virtual simulation teaching platform for the Internet of Things under the background of intelligent fire protection application. Based on the overall structure of the Internet of Things, different fire scenarios that cannot be simulated in real life are constructed through virtual simulation technology. OMNet++ technology is adopted to carry out virtual deployment of fire nodes for the overall structure of the building, and experiments such as cluster routing simulation, communication transmission simulation and wireless sensor node data acquisition simulation are designed. Meanwhile, a 3D fire data model is established using big data to simulate the best fire extinguishing scheme and the best escape strategy. From aspects of the Internet of Things system design and development, sensor principle and application, Internet of Things communication technology and Internet of Things data storage and application, we have realized the efficiency, innovation and challenge of the Internet of Things teaching.The virtual simulation teaching platform we built has been deployed and put into practical teaching, which has received positive response from students and achieved excellent teaching effect.

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