Is There a “Right” Side of Communicating Friendship? Lateralization of Social Interactions in Zoo Barbary macaques (Macaca sylvanus)

Social laterality in non-human primates has started to attract attention in recent years. The positioning of individuals during social interactions could possibly suggest the nature of a relationship and the social ranking of the subjects involved. The subjects of the present study were 12 adult Barbary macaques (Macaca sylvanus) housed in a zoological garden. We carried out fourteen 210-min video-recorded sessions and we used a focal animal sampling method to collect the position of the subjects during different social interactions. Data on the position of each macaque during three types of social interactions were collected (approach, proximity and affiliative contacts). Moreover, we focused on the outcomes of dyadic agonistic encounters to build the hierarchy of the colony. For each social interaction, two conditions were considered: the side preference (being kept on the left or on the right) and the sagittal preference (being kept in front or on the rear). Bouts of preference of different positions were collected for different social interactions (approach, proximity and contacts). No group-level side preferences were found for any social interaction, suggesting that both hemispheres might be complemental and balance each other during intraspecific communication. For the sagittal preference, we found a group-level bias for proximity, with macaques being kept in front rather than on the rear by close conspecifics. This might be due to the need to detect emotions and intentions of conspecifics. Moreover, high-ranking individuals are kept more frontally than on the rear when in proximity with other macaques. More studies are needed to better investigate social laterality, possibly distinguishing more categories of social interaction, and detecting other variables that might influence the positioning preferences.

Introduction

The subject of the book is the history of citizenship in its twofold meaning: as a legally defined, formal status of belonging to a (nation) state, i.e. nationality, as well as a bundle of rights and obligations associated with the status of citizenship. The book reveals the transformation of citizenship by examining the connection between its two aspects and the struggles for belonging behind them. Citizenship in this broad sense is examined in its development since the beginning of the twentieth century while concentrating on five key questions: First, to what extent is citizenship a measuring rod for inclusion and exclusion? Second, does the change of politico-social constellations better explain the development of citizenship than idioms of nationhood? Third, does citizenship confirm the thesis of a legal development gap between Western and Eastern Europe? Fourth, how is citizenship in Europe shaped by repercussions of European colonialism? Fifth, how does citizenship serve as a legal tool to establish social ranking of groups, particularly of women and Jews, in European societies?

Firm Liability When Third Parties and Consumers Incur Cumulative Harm

This paper analyzes liability rules when consumers and third parties/the environment incur harm. Expected harm is convex in the level of output and modeled as a power function. We show that the social ranking of liability rules previously established for the case in which only consumers suffer harm (Strict Liability dominates No Liability and Negligence) may be reversed if harm to third parties or the environment is sufficiently important.

Post-Humanism, Mutual Aid

This chapter commences with an in-depth exploration of the way the concrete computations of AI become entrained with unfairness and neoliberal politics. It will traverse from the operations of loss functions and optimisers at a tensor level to the ensuing discrimination, social ranking and administrative violence, making visible the ways in which AI becomes productive of both supremacism and the means by which to enact it. The second half of the chapter will propose ways in which machine learning can be reclaimed for the purposes of non-fascist living. Looking to a post-AI politics, the text challenges representationalism via Barad’s agential realism and puts forward a practical recomposition based on people’s and workers councils. The aim is to transform the character of AI from paranoid targeting to prefigurative relationality.

On the manipulability of a class of social choice functions: plurality kth rules

In this paper we introduce the plurality kth social choice function selecting an alternative, which is ranked kth in the social ranking following the number of top positions of alternatives in the individual ranking of voters. As special case the plurality 1st is the same as the well-known plurality rule. Concerning individual manipulability, we show that the larger k the more preference profiles are individually manipulable. We also provide maximal non-manipulable domains for the plurality kth rules. These results imply analogous statements on the single non-transferable vote rule. We propose a decomposition of social choice functions based on plurality kth rules, which we apply for determining non-manipulable subdomains for arbitrary social choice functions. We further show that with the exception of the plurality rule all other plurality kth rules are group manipulable, i.e. coordinated misrepresentation of individual rankings are beneficial for each group member, with an appropriately selected tie-breaking rule on the set of all profiles.

Is It Possible to Shift from Down to Top Rank? A Focus on the Mesolimbic Dopaminergic System and Cocaine Abuse

Impaired social behavior is a common feature of many psychiatric disorders, in particular with substance abuse disorders. Switching the preference of the substance-dependent individual toward social interaction activities remains one of the major challenges in drug dependence therapy. However, social interactions yield to the emergence of social ranking. In this review, we provide an overview of the studies that examined how social status can influence the dopaminergic mesolimbic system and how drug-seeking behavior is affected. Generally, social dominance is associated with an increase in dopamine D2/3 receptor binding in the striatum and a reduced behavioral response to drugs of abuse. However, it is not clear whether higher D2 receptor availability is a result of increased D2 receptor density and/or reduced dopamine release in the striatum. Here, we discuss the possibility of a potential shift from down to top rank via manipulation of the mesolimbic system. Identifying the neurobiology underlying a potential rank switch to a resilient phenotype is of particular interest in order to promote a positive coping behavior toward long-term abstinence from drugs of abuse and a protection against relapse to drugs. Such a shift may contribute to a more successful therapeutic approach to cocaine addiction.

Scythian Burials: The Problem of Localization of the Royal Mounds

The localization of the Scythian Gerros is still completely uncertain. The problems associated with it cover a wide range of currently unresolved topical issues due to both the state of preservation of rich burials and the lack of clear criteria for their definition, in particular, social ranking, i. e. issues related to the identification, number and location of the royal mounds. The study is based on the logic of the general scientific inductive and deductive method as the conceptual core of obtaining the initial and inferred knowledge about the object of our research – the localization of the mounds of the Scythian kings, the subject of which is the general cultural and archaeological signs of the Scythian kings’ mounds. We have come to the conclusion that the use of craniological studies of anthropological material from burial monuments located within the Scythian “square” of Herodotus, for their proximity to the Tuvan Okunevians will firstly allow us to identify and select the royal Scythians from the entire massif of Scythian material, then subsequent mapping of the data will make it possible to determine the area of their settlement. Secondly, with the help of craniological analysis, it will be possible to determine the burials of the Scythian kings, which should contain homogeneous anthropological material within the same burial room. Thirdly, in the process of searching for Scythian burials outside the steppe, we will also be helped by craniological studies of material that was not initially classified as “Scythian” due to the lack of clear criteria for its selection. Fourthly, the mapping of the burials of the royal Scythians and the systematization of all the signs of groups located in the same vector of their closest ties will bring us closer to solving an even more extensive problem – the definition of the concepts of “Scythian”, “Scythian culture” and “Scythian archaeological culture”. Keywords: Gerros, mound, localization, Scythian kings’ mounds, royal Scythians

A directed link prediction method using graph convolutional network based on social ranking theory

Graph convolutional networks (GCN) have recently emerged as powerful node embedding methods in network analysis tasks. Particularly, GCNs have been successfully leveraged to tackle the challenging link prediction problem, aiming at predicting missing links that exist yet were not found. However, most of these models are oriented to undirected graphs, which are limited to certain real-life applications. Therefore, based on the social ranking theory, we extend the GCN to address the directed link prediction problem. Firstly, motivated by the reciprocated and unreciprocated nature of social ties, we separate nodes in the neighbor subgraph of the missing link into the same, a higher-ranked and a lower-ranked set. Then, based on the three kinds of node sets, we propose a method to correctly aggregate and propagate the directional information across layers of a GCN model. Empirical study on 8 real-world datasets shows that our proposed method is capable of reserving rich information related to directed link direction and consistently performs well on graphs from numerous domains.

The Value of “Social” Reputation: The Protection of MNE Workers from the Consumer’s Perspective

The virtually immediate information propagation has reduced the gap of knowledge once existing between MNEs and customers (i.e. Rana Plaza collapse, 2013). Consumers begin playing an important role in supporting workers. Their growing social awareness has clear economic consequences. MNEs have tried to react to the loss of social reputation, mainly adopting (and imposing to their suppliers) codes of conduct and ethics providing a minimum standard for decent work standards. This article aims to analyze the social reputation and social sustainability that have recently attracted stakeholders’ interest, from different points of view (MNEs, consumers, government and non-government organizations, unions). Those “new” forms of social initiatives (code of conduct, social ranking, consumers campaign, boycotting) are informative and could help to spread ILO labour standards. Clearly, they can represent only an additional support for workers who are struggling in the typical conflict between Work and Capital. The tendency to use a single parameter for assessing the social sensitivity of the MNEs, valid both for the countries “in development” and for those “already developed” risks to lead to a “race to the bottom” trend.