No Arabic abstract
A finite-time singularity accompanied by log-periodic oscillations shaped the war dynamics and development of the International System during the period 1495 - 1945. The identification of this singularity provides us with a perspective to penetrate and decode the dynamics of the International System. Various regularities in the dynamics of the International System can be identified. These regularities are remarkably consistent, and can be attributed to the connectivity and the growth of connectivity of the International System.
Online news can quickly reach and affect millions of people, yet we do not know yet whether there exist potential dynamical regularities that govern their impact on the public. We use data from two major news outlets, BBC and New York Times, where the number of user comments can be used as a proxy of news impact. We find that the impact dynamics of online news articles does not exhibit popularity patterns found in many other social and information systems. In particular, we find that a simple exponential distribution yields a better fit to the empirical news impact distributions than a power-law distribution. This observation is explained by the lack or limited influence of the otherwise omnipresent rich-get-richer mechanism in the analyzed data. The temporal dynamics of the news impact exhibits a universal exponential decay which allows us to collapse individual news trajectories into an elementary single curve. We also show how daily variations of user activity directly influence the dynamics of the article impact. Our findings challenge the universal applicability of popularity dynamics patterns found in other social contexts.
The International System develops according to a clear logic: By means of systemic wars organisational innovations are periodically introduced, contributing to a process of social expansion and integration, and to wealth creation. A finite-time singularity accompanied by four accelerating log-periodic cycles can be identified during the time frame 1495-1945.
In this paper, we consider the problem of exploring structural regularities of networks by dividing the nodes of a network into groups such that the members of each group have similar patterns of connections to other groups. Specifically, we propose a general statistical model to describe network structure. In this model, group is viewed as hidden or unobserved quantity and it is learned by fitting the observed network data using the expectation-maximization algorithm. Compared with existing models, the most prominent strength of our model is the high flexibility. This strength enables it to possess the advantages of existing models and overcomes their shortcomings in a unified way. As a result, not only broad types of structure can be detected without prior knowledge of what type of intrinsic regularities exist in the network, but also the type of identified structure can be directly learned from data. Moreover, by differentiating outgoing edges from incoming edges, our model can detect several types of structural regularities beyond competing models. Tests on a number of real world and artificial networks demonstrate that our model outperforms the state-of-the-art model at shedding light on the structural features of networks, including the overlapping community structure, multipartite structure and several other types of structure which are beyond the capability of existing models.
We explore simple models aimed at the study of social contagion, in which contagion proceeds through two stages. When coupled with demographic turnover, we show that two-stage contagion leads to nonlinear phenomena which are not present in the basic `classical models of mathematical epidemiology. These include: bistability, critical transitions, endogenous oscillations, and excitability, suggesting that contagion models with stages could account for some aspects of the complex dynamics encountered in social life. These phenomena, and the bifurcations involved, are studied by a combination of analytical and numerical means.
Networks are universally considered as complex structures of interactions of large multi-component systems. In order to determine the role that each node has inside a complex network, several centrality measures have been developed. Such topological features are also important for their role in the dynamical processes occurring in networked systems. In this paper, we argue that the dynamical activity of the nodes may strongly reshape their relevance inside the network making centrality measures in many cases misleading. We show that when the dynamics taking place at the local level of the node is slower than the global one between the nodes, then the system may lose track of the structural features. On the contrary, when that ratio is reversed only global properties such as the shortest distances can be recovered. From the perspective of networks inference, this constitutes an uncertainty principle, in the sense that it limits the extraction of multi-resolution information about the structure, particularly in the presence of noise. For illustration purposes, we show that for networks with different time-scale structures such as strong modularity, the existence of fast global dynamics can imply that precise inference of the community structure is impossible.