scholarly journals Reproductive success is predicted by social dynamics and kinship in managed animal populations

F1000Research ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
pp. 870
Author(s):  
Saul J. Newman ◽  
Simon Eyre ◽  
Catherine H. Kimble ◽  
Mauricio Arcos-Burgos ◽  
Carolyn Hogg ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Reproductive Success ◽  
Group Dynamics ◽  
Reproductive Output ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Breeding Programs ◽  
Group Interactions ◽  
Suricata Suricatta ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Animal Populations ◽  
The Individual

Kin and group interactions are important determinants of reproductive success in many species. Their optimization could, therefore, potentially improve the productivity and breeding success of managed populations used for agricultural and conservation purposes. Here we demonstrate this potential using a novel approach to measure and predict the effect of kin and group dynamics on reproductive output in a well-known species, the meerkat Suricata suricatta. Variation in social dynamics predicts 30% of the individual variation in reproductive success of this species in managed populations, and accurately forecasts reproductive output at least two years into the future. Optimization of social dynamics in captive meerkat populations doubles their projected reproductive output. These results demonstrate the utility of a quantitative approach to breeding programs informed by social and kinship dynamics. They suggest that this approach has great potential for improvements in the management of social endangered and agricultural species.

Conceptualizing intragroup and intergroup dynamics within a controlled crowd evacuation

2015 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Terra Elzie, ME ◽  
Erika Frydenlund, MS ◽  
Andrew J. Collins, PhD ◽  
R. Michael Robinson, PhD
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Group Dynamics ◽  
Social Factors ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Critical Role ◽  
Group Behavior ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Crowd Modeling ◽  
The Individual

Social dynamics play a critical role in successful pedestrian evacuations. Crowd modeling research has made progress in capturing the way individual and group dynamics affect evacuations; however, few studies have simultaneously examined how individuals and groups interact with one another during egress. To address this gap, the researchers present a conceptual agent-based model (ABM) designed to study the ways in which autonomous, heterogeneous, decision-making individuals negotiate intragroup and intergroup behavior while exiting a large venue. A key feature of this proposed model is the examination of the dynamics among and between various groupings, where heterogeneity at the individual level dynamically affects group behavior and subsequently group/group interactions. ABM provides a means of representing the important social factors that affect decision making among diverse social groups. Expanding on the 2013 work of Vizzari et al., the researchers focus specifically on social factors and decision making at the individual group and group/group levels to more realistically portray dynamic crowd systems during a pedestrian evacuation. By developing a model with individual, intragroup, and intergroup interactions, the ABM provides a more representative approximation of real-world crowd egress. The simulation will enable more informed planning by disaster managers, emergency planners, and other decision makers. This pedestrian behavioral concept is one piece of a larger simulation model. Future research will build toward an integrated model capturing decision-making interactions between pedestrians and vehicles that affect evacuation outcomes.

scholarly journals The polarization within and across individuals: the hierarchical Ising opinion model

2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Han L J van der Maas ◽  
Jonas Dalege ◽  
Lourens Waldorp
Keyword(s):  
Group Dynamics ◽  
Statistical Physics ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Opinion Dynamics ◽  
Individual Level ◽  
Bounded Confidence ◽  
The Social ◽  
Resistance To Persuasion ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Social Level

Abstract Polarization of opinions is a societal threat. It involves psychological processes as well as group dynamics, a popular topic in statistical physics. However, the interaction between the within individual dynamics of attitude formation and across person polarization is rarely studied. By modelling individual attitudes as Ising networks of attitude elements, and approximating this behaviour by the cusp singularity, we developed a fundamentally new model of social dynamics. In this hierarchical model, agents behave either discretely or continuously depending on their attention to the issue. At the individual level, the model reproduces the mere thought effect and resistance to persuasion. At the social level, the model implies polarization and the persuasion paradox. We propose a new intervention for escaping polarization in bounded confidence models of opinion dynamics.

scholarly journals Collective rhythm as an emergent property during human social coordination

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arodi Farrera ◽  
Gabriel Ramos-Fernandez
Keyword(s):  
Social Interactions ◽  
Group Dynamics ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Temporal Structure ◽  
Interpersonal Coordination ◽  
Cognitive Mechanisms ◽  
Social Coordination ◽  
The Social ◽  
Sociocultural Processes ◽  
The Individual

The literature on social interactions has shown that participants coordinate not only at the behavioral but also at the physiological and neural levels, and that this coordination gives a temporal structure to the individual and to the social dynamics. However, it has not been fully explored whether such temporal patterns emerge during interpersonal coordination beyond dyads, whether this phenomenon arises from complex cognitive mechanisms or from relatively simple rules of behavior, or the sociocultural processes that underlie this phenomenon. We review the evidence for the existence of group-level rhythmic patterns that result from social interactions and argue that, by imposing a temporal structure at the individual and interaction levels, interpersonal coordination in groups leads to temporal regularities that cannot be predicted from the individual periodicities: a collective rhythm. Moreover, we use this interpretation of the literature to discuss how taking into account the sociocultural niche in which individuals develop can help explain the seemingly divergent results that have been reported on the social influences and consequences of interpersonal coordination. We make recommendations on further research to test these arguments and their relationship to the feeling of belonging and assimilation experienced during group dynamics.

The key to cultural innovation lies in the group dynamic rather than in the individual mind

2012 ◽  
Vol 35 (4) ◽  
pp. 237-238
Author(s):  
Sonia Ragir ◽  
Patricia J. Brooks
Keyword(s):  
Group Dynamics ◽  
Social Dynamics ◽  
Cultural Practices ◽  
Stone Age ◽  
Mental Function ◽  
Group Dynamic ◽  
Cultural Innovation ◽  
Late Stone Age ◽  
Causal Direction ◽  
The Individual

AbstractVaesen infers unique properties of mind from the appearance of specific cultural innovation – a correlation without causal direction. Shifts in habitat, population density, and group dynamics are the only independently verifiable incentives for changes in cultural practices. The transition from Acheulean to Late Stone Age technologies requires that we consider how population and social dynamics affect cultural innovation and mental function.

Group interactions and time: Using sequential analysis to study group dynamics in project meetings.

2016 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 209-222 ◽  
Author(s):  
Florian E. Klonek ◽  
Vicenç Quera ◽  
Manuel Burba ◽  
Simone Kauffeld
Keyword(s):  
Group Dynamics ◽  
Sequential Analysis ◽  
Study Group ◽  
Group Interactions

Using hidden Markov models to find discrete targets in continuous sociophonetic data

2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Daniel Duncan
Keyword(s):  
Hidden Markov Models ◽  
Markov Models ◽  
Hidden Markov ◽  
Abstract Representation ◽  
Language Variation And Change ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Single Target ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Individual Speaker

Abstract Advances in sociophonetic research resulted in features once sorted into discrete bins now being measured continuously. This has implied a shift in what sociolinguists view as the abstract representation of the sociolinguistic variable. When measured discretely, variation is variation in selection: one variant is selected for production, and factors influencing language variation and change are influencing the frequency at which variants are selected. Measured continuously, variation is variation in execution: speakers have a single target for production, which they approximate with varying success. This paper suggests that both approaches can and should be considered in sociophonetic analysis. To that end, I offer the use of hidden Markov models (HMMs) as a novel approach to find speakers’ multiple targets within continuous data. Using the lot vowel among whites in Greater St. Louis as a case study, I compare 2-state and 1-state HMMs constructed at the individual speaker level. Ten of fifty-two speakers’ production is shown to involve the regular use of distinct fronted and backed variants of the vowel. This finding illustrates HMMs’ capacity to allow us to consider variation as both variant selection and execution, making them a useful tool in the analysis of sociophonetic data.

scholarly journals Sexual Interference Behaviors in Male Adult and Subadult Tibetan Macaques (Macaca thibetana)

Animals ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 663
Author(s):  
Kui-Hai Pang ◽  
Amanda K. Rowe ◽  
Lori K. Sheeran ◽  
Dong-Po Xia ◽  
Lixing Sun ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Reproductive Success ◽  
Nonhuman Primate ◽  
Sampling Method ◽  
Mating Season ◽  
Macaca Thibetana ◽  
Subadult Male ◽  
Sexual Competition ◽  
Male Adult ◽  
Sexual Interference ◽  
The Individual

Male nonhuman primate sexual interference, which includes copulation interruption and copulation harassment, has been related to reproductive success, but its significance has been challenging to test. Copulation interruption results in the termination of a copulation before ejaculation, whereas copulation harassment does not. We conducted this study using the all-occurrence behavior sampling method on sexual interference behaviors of seven adult and four subadult male Tibetan macaques (Macaca thibetana) in mating and non-mating seasons at Mt. Huangshan, China, from August 2016 to May 2017. Our results showed that males’ individual proportion of copulation interruption and harassment was higher during the mating season than during the non-mating season. In addition, dominant males more often performed interruption, whereas subordinate males more often performed harassment. We found no difference in the individual proportion of copulation interruption or harassment between adult and subadult males. Adult and subadult males both directed copulation interruption and harassment more often toward the mating male than toward the mating female. Lastly, the post-ejaculation phase of copulation was shorter when copulation harassment occurred than when it did not. Our results suggest that sexual interference may be an important mating tactic that adult and subadult males use in male–male sexual competition.

scholarly journals HPM: A Hybrid Model for User’s Behavior Prediction Based on N-Gram Parsing and Access Logs

2020 ◽  
Vol 2020 ◽  
pp. 1-18
Author(s):  
Sonia Setia ◽  
Verma Jyoti ◽  
Neelam Duhan
Keyword(s):  
Web Mining ◽  
Contextual Information ◽  
Hybrid Approach ◽  
Web Pages ◽  
Continuous Growth ◽  
Novel Approach ◽  
Content Mining ◽  
Long Access ◽  
N Gram ◽  
The Individual

The continuous growth of the World Wide Web has led to the problem of long access delays. To reduce this delay, prefetching techniques have been used to predict the users’ browsing behavior to fetch the web pages before the user explicitly demands that web page. To make near accurate predictions for users’ search behavior is a complex task faced by researchers for many years. For this, various web mining techniques have been used. However, it is observed that either of the methods has its own set of drawbacks. In this paper, a novel approach has been proposed to make a hybrid prediction model that integrates usage mining and content mining techniques to tackle the individual challenges of both these approaches. The proposed method uses N-gram parsing along with the click count of the queries to capture more contextual information as an effort to improve the prediction of web pages. Evaluation of the proposed hybrid approach has been done by using AOL search logs, which shows a 26% increase in precision of prediction and a 10% increase in hit ratio on average as compared to other mining techniques.

scholarly journals Decentralised sweetpotato (Ipomoea batatas) vine multiplication in Lake Zone, Tanzania: Five years later

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 677-689
Author(s):  
Margaret A. McEwan ◽  
Conny J. M. Almekinders ◽  
Moses S. Matui ◽  
Dorothy Lusheshanija ◽  
Mariana Massawe ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Group Dynamics ◽  
Ipomoea Batatas ◽  
Water Access ◽  
Qualitative And Quantitative ◽  
Factors Influencing ◽  
Lake Zone ◽  
Norms And Values ◽  
Group Members ◽  
Market Factors ◽  
The Individual

AbstractFarmer-based seed multiplication is widely promoted by development practitioners, but there is limited understanding of the individual or collective motivations of farmers to engage or disengage in specialised seed production. The objective of this study is to understand the factors influencing the continuity of sweetpotato vine multiplication enterprises in the Lake Zone of Tanzania, five years after support from a project ended. A total of 81 out of 88 trained group or individual decentralised vine multipliers (DVMs) were traced to assess their vine multiplication activities. Qualitative and quantitative data were collected through telephone and field interviews. Our data showed that 40% of the 81 DVMs had sold vines in the year prior to the study and 20% had maintained the improved varieties for their own use. Some group members had continued vine sales as individuals. The DVMs’ reasons for abandoning vine multiplication included climatic and water access issues, market factors and group dynamics. The DVMs did not engage in high volumes of commercial sales. Socio-economic norms and values underpin the transactions of sweetpotato vines. These norms may undermine the emergence of commercially viable enterprises yet seem navigable for a substantial number of the DVMs. Group DVMs seem less commercially successful than individuals.

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