Back to the Cave

While the individual fallout shelter provided a new space for imagining the family unit in the context of broader social forces, the cave shelter stressed the animal nature of modern man. Whether fighting for survival in a savage postnuclear world, evolving into a new species, or devolving into animal behavior, the inhabitants of cave shelters display a feral identity. The cave has long carried this resonance regardless of whether composed of natural formations, human or machine-excavated tunnels and mines, or some combination of the two. As a postwar bunker space, the cave’s particular affordances are non-technologized shelter, an exposed passage to the outside world, and the animal survival of the dominant individual. Sometimes, we find a reduced and childless family unit, generally the male and his mate or mates; at others a lone wolf hidden from and pitted against a hostile world. In the cave, any remaining social structure is troped as animalistic or otherwise non-human and often a threat to the surviving individuals. The cave-space presumes not the home shelter’s projection of a strong and paternalistic government but the Hobbesian specter of the loss of any kind of humane community, homo homini lupus, the bunkered mentality that would eventually emerge in the 1980s as survivalism.

American Magazines and the Cultural Production of Blackness

Eurie Dahn’s Jim Crow Networks (2021) and E. James West’s Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr. (2020) offer compelling examples of the two main literary historical approaches to periodical studies: A survey of several different types of magazines in relation to the social networks through which they were produced, distributed, and read, and a deep dive into the editorial orientation of a particular magazine, as shaped by a dominant individual presence. Both studies present detailed accounts of how these periodicals’ publics and counterpublics resisted (and sometimes reinforced) prevailing conceptions of racialized identity at important points in the twentieth century. But the material circumstances of those productions risk being misrepresented by the model of the network, so this review essay argues for the Bakhtinian chronotope as a more expressive metaphor for the temporal dimension of the magazine experience. This approach enables a more fully historicist understanding of how the various important literary figures represented here were perceived by their original periodical readers.

Heterarchy Reveals Social Organization of a Smooth Stingray (Bathytoshia brevicaudata) Population in a Provisioned Food Context

The advent of new technologies and statistical analyses has provided valuable insights into chondrichthyan social behavior. It has become apparent that sharks and rays lead more complex social lives than previously believed. Heterarchy combines hierarchy and social network theory and although it is not a new concept, it is rarely applied to animal social interactions. Here, we applied heterarchy to a case study involving smooth stingrays foraging for fish scraps at boat ramp in Jervis Bay, NSW Australia. We took advantage of their attraction to this site to examine their social behavior during agonistic interactions over the provisioned resource. We observed a stable, relatively linear but shallow dominance hierarchy that was highly transitive dominated by a single individual. Social network analysis revealed a non-random social network centered on the dominant individual. Contrary to previous research, size did not predict dominance, but it was correlated with network centrality. The factors determining dominance of lower ranks were difficult to discern, which is characteristic of despotic societies. This study provides the first heterarchical assessment of stingray sociality, and suggests this species is capable of complex social behavior. Given higher dominance and centrality relate to greater access to the provisioned resource, the observed social structure likely has fitness implications.

Entrepreneurship as Networking

This book presents entrepreneurship as networking as a perspective. Persistent problems around the dominant “individual-opportunity” approach in the entrepreneurship field motivated the authors to focus on the social-interactive aspects and action orientation of entrepreneurship. The work promises to address the challenge of providing a more integrated account in which the entrepreneur’s agency is combined with a greater emphasis on the social environment. The importance of social relations and the associated interactions between entrepreneurs and their environment give insight into key entrepreneurial processes. The authors address the guiding questions of what a viable network is for (nascent) entrepreneurs and how networking activities affect their entrepreneurial endeavors. Therefore, they first create a synthesis of key network mechanisms and networking dynamics. This allows them (a) to shed new light on the origins of opportunities and improve understanding of how entrepreneurs access resources and subsequently mobilize and deploy them, and (b) to explain how entrepreneurs build legitimacy, facilitating them to act on perceived new combinations and thereby exploit their potential. Thus, this book highlights how networking is a central constitutive force in entrepreneurship. Previous work showed how networks can or will lead to entrepreneurial action as a facilitator. Going one step further, the authors posit that networking is entrepreneurial action, and entrepreneurial action is networking, thereby opening an entirely new research agenda.

Making Marketplaces Safe: Dominant Individual Rationality and Applications to Market Design

Often market designers cannot force agents to join a marketplace rather than using pre-existing institutions. We propose a new desideratum for marketplace design that guarantees the safety of participation: dominant individual rationality (DIR). A marketplace is DIR if every pre-existing strategy is weakly dominated by some strategy within the marketplace. We study applications to the design of labor markets and the sharing economy. We also provide a general construction to achieve approximate DIR across a wide range of marketplace designs. This paper was accepted by Yan Chen, decision analysis.

The Strategy of Agriculture Land Management at Gunungsari Area, Kucur Village, Dau, Malang

The purpose of this study is to describe the structure of land ownership and agricultural land management strategies in the Gunungsari region and explore the socio-economic and ecological conditions that drive the selection of existing land management strategies. The case study was chosen as a research design with Gunungsari agricultural land area as the case. Data collection was carried out through in-depth interviews with key informants, semi-structured interviews with sample farmers, field observations and documents. Data were analyzed descriptively qualitatively. The results of the study illustrate that dominant individual agricultural land ownership is fragmented into different plot locations with an area of less than 0.5 hectares. Perennial crop monoculture, annual intercropping, perennial crop intercropping, and mixed gardens are available agricultural land management strategies. Perennial crops as the main crops as well as edge crops are still the dominant choice of farm families, according to the internal uniqueness of each family in their interactions with external factors. This choice has consequences for the current land cover of the Gunungsari region. The actor approach that places social practice as a result of dynamic interactions between the actor's internal conditions and the context of his social-ecological environment is seen as relevant.

Deficit in Propriety? Cooperative Learning and Group Self-evaluation in Higher Education

The aim of the article is to unveil how the application of the collaborative learning strategy in higher education (HE) setting combines self-assessment of group activities with peer-to-group and teacher evaluation. The results reveal that the groups’ self-evaluation is considerably more positively than evaluation by the teacher or peers. The antecedents of these results are likely embedded in 1) the cultural context with dominant individual values; 2) impact of business study as discipline, and: 3) challenges in implementing a collaborative learning strategy in the HE sector.

A Competitive Memory Paradigm for Multimodal Optimization Driven by Clustering and Chaos

Evolutionary Computation Methods (ECMs) are proposed as stochastic search methods to solve complex optimization problems where classical optimization methods are not suitable. Most of the proposed ECMs aim to find the global optimum for a given function. However, from a practical point of view, in engineering, finding the global optimum may not always be useful, since it may represent solutions that are not physically, mechanically or even structurally realizable. Commonly, the evolutionary operators of ECMs are not designed to efficiently register multiple optima by executing them a single run. Under such circumstances, there is a need to incorporate certain mechanisms to allow ECMs to maintain and register multiple optima at each generation executed in a single run. On the other hand, the concept of dominance found in animal behavior indicates the level of social interaction among two animals in terms of aggressiveness. Such aggressiveness keeps two or more individuals as distant as possible from one another, where the most dominant individual prevails as the other withdraws. In this paper, the concept of dominance is computationally abstracted in terms of a data structure called “competitive memory” to incorporate multimodal capabilities into the evolutionary operators of the recently proposed Cluster-Chaotic-Optimization (CCO). Under CCO, the competitive memory is implemented as a memory mechanism to efficiently register and maintain all possible optimal values within a single execution of the algorithm. The performance of the proposed method is numerically compared against several multimodal schemes over a set of benchmark functions. The experimental study suggests that the proposed approach outperforms its competitors in terms of robustness, quality, and precision.

Household Behavior and Response to the Participative Institutional Model for the Program of Handling Drainage of Productive Cows

The research survey aimed to observe the households behavior and response to the participatory institution model of the preventing of the productive cows exploitation. The sample technique to select of the domestic cattle farmer (DCF) as the unit of analysis using the multiple stages cluster sampling and then sample allocation was equal for three districts. Structural equation model consisted of 5 behavior equations drawn up from the 5 endogenous and 13 exogenous variables. The research results showed that the rate of release of productive cows about 19.23 percent. The institutional model to handling of the drain at least productive cows have four major components, were members (DCFs), the management, micro-finance institutions (MFIs) and buffer-stock. The household motivation to develop the business scale and maintain the productive heifer shaped by land ownership and livestock scale expected factors. Then both types of motivation were not significantly associated with DCF's motivation to engage in institutional, as the more dominant individual as shaped by the farmer age. The other hand, the confidence level of participatory institutional effectiveness significantly shaped by the perception of institutional and potential release of productive heifer compared the potential release of motivation factors and correlated positively with the economic conditions.

Dominance relationships and coalitionary aggression against conspecifics in female carrion crows

Cooperation is a prevailing feature of many animal systems. Coalitionary aggression, where a group of individuals engages in coordinated behaviour to the detriment of conspecific targets, is a form of cooperation involving complex social interactions. To date, evidence has been dominated by studies in humans and other primates with a clear bias towards studies of male-male coalitions. We here characterize coalitionary aggression behaviour in a group of female carrion crows consisting of recruitment, coordinated chase, and attack. The individual of highest social rank liaised with the second most dominant individual to engage in coordinated chase and attack of a lower ranked crow on several occasions. Despite active intervention by the third most highly ranked individual opposing the offenders, the attack finally resulted in the death of the victim. All individuals were unrelated, of the same sex, and naïve to the behaviour excluding kinship, reproduction, and social learning as possible drivers. Instead, the coalition may reflect a strategy of the dominant individual to secure long-term social benefits. Overall, the study provides evidence that members of the crow family engage in coordinated alliances directed against conspecifics as a possible means to manipulate their social environment.