scholarly journals COHESION, CONSENSUS AND EXTREME INFORMATION IN OPINION DYNAMICS

2013 ◽  
Vol 16 (06) ◽  
pp. 1350035 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALINA SÎRBU ◽  
VITTORIO LORETO ◽  
VITO D. P. SERVEDIO ◽  
FRANCESCA TRIA

Opinion formation is an important element of social dynamics. It has been widely studied in the last years with tools from physics, mathematics and computer science. Here, a continuous model of opinion dynamics for multiple possible choices is analyzed. Its main features are the inclusion of disagreement and possibility of modulating external information/media effects, both from one and multiple sources. The interest is in identifying the effect of the initial cohesion of the population, the interplay between cohesion and media extremism, and the effect of using multiple external sources of information that can influence the system. Final consensus, especially with the external message, depends highly on these factors, as numerical simulations show. When no external input is present, consensus or segregation is determined by the initial cohesion of the population. Interestingly, when only one external source of information is present, consensus can be obtained, in general, only when this is extremely neutral, i.e., there is not a single opinion strongly promoted, or in the special case of a large initial cohesion and low exposure to the external message. On the contrary, when multiple external sources are allowed, consensus can emerge with one of them even when this is not extremely neutral, i.e., it carries a strong message, for a large range of initial conditions.

2018 ◽  
Vol 24 (6) ◽  
pp. 2255-2276 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Doloreux ◽  
Richard Shearmur ◽  
Mercedes Rodriguez

This paper analyses the effect of internal R&D and of external sources of information on the innovation performance of Knowledge intensive business services (KIBS). The analysis is based on an establishment-level survey covering the period of 2011–2014 in Canada (Quebec). In order to determine the influence of different external information sources on innovation and the extent to which internal R&D and the use of external information sources are related to innovation, a series of logistic regressions are performed on four different measures of innovation. The results show that KIBS innovation is positively connected to market-related information sources (but not to research and academic sources), that KIBS innovation is positively associated with the performance of R&D, and that there are no synergies associated with the combined performance of R&D and external information gathering: their effects are independent and additive. These results share some similarities, but also some important differences, with those that have been obtained from the study of R&D and external information sourcing in manufacturing establishments.


Author(s):  
Jan Kreft ◽  
Mariana Petrova

Aggregation of media content comes as a popular form of media market activity which is supposed to facilitate access to information in the conditions of its excessive amount. It can be defined as selection and hierarchization of information and determination of its value. Aggregation can be performed with the direct participation of editorial teams, or it can be performed automatically, with the use of algorithms. The research conducted in April 2014 – April 2015 was to indicate the sources of information published by the news portals dominating on the Polish market, namely: Onet.pl and WP. pl. The research referred to the main section Wiadomosci (News). During the research 1829 sources of information were identified in Onet.pl and 2272 sources of information in WP.pl. Considering Onet.pl, there were 549 pieces of the portal news and 1239 pieces of news obtained from different sources. WP.pl presented 582 pieces of the portal news and 1690 pieces of news received from other sources. Thus, Onet.pl presented its original content more frequently. The scale of using external sources allows us to state that both portals are, first of all, the aggregators of medial contents, and they use external information sources, however the scale of the practice is differentiated. Generally, it is possible to state that only every third message placed in the most important section of both portals was created in their editorial offices.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (9) ◽  
pp. 3978
Author(s):  
Alejandro Mañas-García ◽  
José Alberto Maldonado ◽  
Mar Marcos ◽  
Diego Boscá ◽  
Montserrat Robles

This work presents methods to combine data from the Semantic Web into existing EHRs, leading to an augmented EHR. An existing EHR extract is augmented by combining it with additional information from external sources, typically linked data sources. The starting point is a standardized EHR extract described by an archetype. The method consists of combining specific data from the original EHR with contents from the external information source by building a semantic representation, which is used to query the external source. The results are converted into a standardized EHR extract according to an archetype. This work sets the foundations to transform Semantic Web contents into normalized EHR extracts. Finally, to exemplify the approach, the work includes a practical use case in which the summarized EHR is augmented with drug–drug interactions and disease-related treatment information.


2012 ◽  
Vol 12 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 659-679 ◽  
Author(s):  
THOMAS EITER ◽  
MICHAEL FINK ◽  
THOMAS KRENNWALLNER ◽  
CHRISTOPH REDL

AbstractAnswer Set Programming (ASP) is a well-known problem solving approach based on nonmonotonic logic programs and efficient solvers. To enable access to external information,hex-programs extend programs withexternal atoms, which allow for a bidirectional communication between the logic program and external sources of computation (e.g., description logic reasoners and Web resources). Current solvers evaluatehex-programs by a translation to ASP itself, in which values of external atoms are guessed and verified after the ordinary answer set computation. This elegant approach does not scale with the number of external accesses in general, in particular in presence of nondeterminism (which is instrumental for ASP). In this paper, we present a novel, native algorithm for evaluatinghex-programs which uses learning techniques. In particular, we extend conflict-driven ASP solving techniques, which prevent the solver from running into the same conflict again, from ordinary tohex-programs. We show how to gain additional knowledge from external source evaluations and how to use it in a conflict-driven algorithm. We first target the uninformed case, i.e., when we have no extra information on external sources, and then extend our approach to the case where additional meta-information is available. Experiments show that learning from external sources can significantly decrease both the runtime and the number of considered candidate compatible sets.


2020 ◽  
Vol 38 (15_suppl) ◽  
pp. e24166-e24166
Author(s):  
Rushad Patell ◽  
David Johnson Einstein ◽  
Eric James Miller ◽  
Jennifer Halleck ◽  
Laura Dodge ◽  
...  

e24166 Background: Patients receiving palliative cancer treatment frequently misperceive likelihood of benefits/toxicity. Physicians fear that external sources of information regarding treatment enhance misperceptions and complicate decision-making. We investigated the sources of external information used, how much it affects patients' misperception and influences their treatment choices. Methods: We prospectively surveyed patients with advanced solid cancers and their oncologists regarding benefits/risks of palliative therapies including likelihood of tumor response and toxicity. Patients reported information-seeking behavior pre-treatment. We compared patients’ perceptions of benefits/risks to that of their oncologists. Results: Across four disease groups, 119 eligible patients enrolled. Their median age was 65 years (range 59–73), 55% were male, and 56% had undergone prior treatment. Treatments included chemotherapy (61%), targeted therapy (15%), and immunotherapy (24%). Over two thirds, 69% of participants stated that they wanted as much as possible information from their oncologist, and nearly all (95%) stated that they felt the amount of information provided by their clinician was “just right.” However, 60% wanted at least a moderate amount of information from external sources, and 58% reported obtaining information from sources other than their oncologist. The most common external sources of information used by participants were printed materials (35%), word of mouth (26%), the American Cancer Society (24%), and WebMD (21%). Nearly one in 3 (31%) of participants felt the information from external sources influenced their decisions more than a small amount. There was no correlation between self-education and misperception of tumor response (coefficient -0.04 p = 0.6) or of treatment toxicity (coefficient 0.05, p = 0.6) relative to their treating physicians’ estimates. Conclusions: While many patients sought information from external sources, most felt they were not substantially influenced by this information. Almost all felt their oncologists provided them with adequate information. Information-seeking behavior was not associated with greater misperception regarding the treatment goals/expectations. Thus, despite a common concern about misinformation in external information sources, oncologists should support patients who seek such sources and discuss their findings.


Author(s):  
Harald Schoen ◽  
Sigrid Roßteutscher ◽  
Rüdiger Schmitt-Beck ◽  
Bernhard Weßels ◽  
Christof Wolf

After a brief review of the scholarly discussion about the idea that context affects political behavior, this chapter proposes a model for the analysis of contextual effects on opinion formation and voting behavior. It highlights theoretical issues in the interplay of various contextual features and voter predispositions in bringing about contextual effects on voters. This model guides the analyses of contextual effects on voter behavior in Germany in the early twenty-first century. These analyses draw on rich data from multiple voter surveys and various sources of information about contextual features. The chapter also gives an overview of different methodological approaches and challenges in the analysis of contextual effects on voting behavior.


2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (03) ◽  
pp. 151-161 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sebastian Doeltgen ◽  
Stacie Attrill ◽  
Joanne Murray

AbstractProficient clinical reasoning is a critical skill in high-quality, evidence-based management of swallowing impairment (dysphagia). Clinical reasoning in this area of practice is a cognitively complex process, as it requires synthesis of multiple sources of information that are generated during a thorough, evidence-based assessment process and which are moderated by the patient's individual situations, including their social and demographic circumstances, comorbidities, or other health concerns. A growing body of health and medical literature demonstrates that clinical reasoning skills develop with increasing exposure to clinical cases and that the approaches to clinical reasoning differ between novices and experts. It appears that it is not the amount of knowledge held, but the way it is used, that distinguishes a novice from an experienced clinician. In this article, we review the roles of explicit and implicit processing as well as illness scripts in clinical decision making across the continuum of medical expertise and discuss how they relate to the clinical management of swallowing impairment. We also reflect on how this literature may inform educational curricula that support SLP students in developing preclinical reasoning skills that facilitate their transition to early clinical practice. Specifically, we discuss the role of case-based curricula to assist students to develop a meta-cognitive awareness of the different approaches to clinical reasoning, their own capabilities and preferences, and how and when to apply these in dysphagia management practice.


2021 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-34
Author(s):  
Rediet Abebe ◽  
T.-H. HUBERT Chan ◽  
Jon Kleinberg ◽  
Zhibin Liang ◽  
David Parkes ◽  
...  

A long line of work in social psychology has studied variations in people’s susceptibility to persuasion—the extent to which they are willing to modify their opinions on a topic. This body of literature suggests an interesting perspective on theoretical models of opinion formation by interacting parties in a network: in addition to considering interventions that directly modify people’s intrinsic opinions, it is also natural to consider interventions that modify people’s susceptibility to persuasion. In this work, motivated by this fact, we propose an influence optimization problem. Specifically, we adopt a popular model for social opinion dynamics, where each agent has some fixed innate opinion, and a resistance that measures the importance it places on its innate opinion; agents influence one another’s opinions through an iterative process. Under certain conditions, this iterative process converges to some equilibrium opinion vector. For the unbudgeted variant of the problem, the goal is to modify the resistance of any number of agents (within some given range) such that the sum of the equilibrium opinions is minimized; for the budgeted variant, in addition the algorithm is given upfront a restriction on the number of agents whose resistance may be modified. We prove that the objective function is in general non-convex. Hence, formulating the problem as a convex program as in an early version of this work (Abebe et al., KDD’18) might have potential correctness issues. We instead analyze the structure of the objective function, and show that any local optimum is also a global optimum, which is somehow surprising as the objective function might not be convex. Furthermore, we combine the iterative process and the local search paradigm to design very efficient algorithms that can solve the unbudgeted variant of the problem optimally on large-scale graphs containing millions of nodes. Finally, we propose and evaluate experimentally a family of heuristics for the budgeted variant of the problem.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (14) ◽  
pp. 7908
Author(s):  
Lucía Mejía-Dorantes ◽  
Lídia Montero ◽  
Jaume Barceló

The spatial arrangement of a metropolis is of utmost importance to carry out daily activities, which are constrained by space and time. Accessibility is not only shaped by the spatial and temporal dimension, but it is also defined by individual characteristics, such as gender, impairments, or socioeconomic characteristics of the citizens living or commuting in this area. This study analyzes mobility trends and patterns in the metropolitan area of Barcelona before and after the COVID-19 pandemic outbreak, with special emphasis on gender and equality. The study draws on multiple sources of information; however, two main datasets are analyzed: two traditional travel surveys from the transport metropolitan area of Barcelona and two coming from smartphone data. The results show that gender plays a relevant role when analyzing mobility patterns, as already highlighted in other studies, but, after the pandemic outbreak, some population groups were more likely to change their mobility patterns, for example, highly educated population groups and those with higher income. This study also highlights that e-activities may shape new mobility patterns and living conditions for some population segments, but some activities cannot be replaced by IT technologies. For all these reasons, city and transport planning should foster sustainable development policies, which will provide the maximum benefit for society.


Mathematics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (15) ◽  
pp. 1765
Author(s):  
Adán J. Serna-Reyes ◽  
Jorge E. Macías-Díaz

This manuscript studies a double fractional extended p-dimensional coupled Gross–Pitaevskii-type system. This system consists of two parabolic partial differential equations with equal interaction constants, coupling terms, and spatial derivatives of the Riesz type. Associated with the mathematical model, there are energy and non-negative mass functions which are conserved throughout time. Motivated by this fact, we propose a finite-difference discretization of the double fractional Gross–Pitaevskii system which inherits the energy and mass conservation properties. As the continuous model, the mass is a non-negative constant and the solutions are bounded under suitable numerical parameter assumptions. We prove rigorously the existence of solutions for any set of initial conditions. As in the continuous system, the discretization has a discrete Hamiltonian associated. The method is implicit, multi-consistent, stable and quadratically convergent. Finally, we implemented the scheme computationally to confirm the validity of the mass and energy conservation properties, obtaining satisfactory results.


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