Hurst exponent of very long birth time series in XX century Romania. Social and religious aspects

The Hurst exponent of very long birth time series in Romania has been extracted from official daily records, i.e. over 97 years between 1905 and 2001 included. The series result from distinguishing between families located in urban (U) or rural (R) areas, and belonging (Ox) or not (NOx) to the orthodox religion. Four time series combining both criteria, (U,R) and (Ox, NOx), are also examined. A statistical information is given on these sub-populations measuring their XX-th century state as a snapshot. However, the main goal is to investigate whether the daily production of babies is purely noisy or is fluctuating according to some non trivial fractional Brownian motion, - in the four types of populations, characterized by either their habitat or their religious attitude, yet living within the same political regime. One of the goals was also to find whether combined criteria implied a different behavior. Moreover, we wish to observe whether some seasonal periodicity exists. The detrended fluctuation analysis technique is used for finding the fractal correlation dimension of such (9) signals. It has been first necessary, due to two periodic tendencies, to define the range regime in which the Hurst exponent is meaningfully defined. It results that the birth of babies in all cases is a very strongly persistent signal. It is found that the signal fractal correlation dimension is weaker (i) for NOx than for Ox, and (ii) or U with respect to R. Moreover, it is observed that the combination of U or R with NOx or OX enhances the UNOx, UOx, and ROx fluctuations, but smoothens the RNOx signal, thereby suggesting a stronger conditioning on religiosity rituals or rules.

Organization of networks with tagged nodes and biased links: a priori distinct communities. The case of Intelligent Design Proponents and Darwinian Evolution Defenders

Among topics of opinion formation it is of interest to observe the characteristics of networks with a priori distinct communities. As an illustration, we report on the citation network(s) unfolded in the recent decades through web available works belonging to selected members of the Neocreationist and Intelligent Design Proponents (IDP) and the Darwinian Evolution Defenders (DED) communities. An adjacency matrix of tagged nodes is first constructed; it is not symmetric. A generalization of considerations pertaining to the case of networks with biased links, directed or undirected, is thus presented. The main characteristic coefficients describing the structure of such partially directed networks with tagged nodes are outlined. The structural features are discussed searching for statistical aspects, equivalence or not of subnetworks through the degree distributions, each network assortativity, the global and local clustering coefficients and the Average Overlap Indices. The various closed and open triangles made from nodes, moreover distinguishing the community, are especially listed to calculate the clustering characteristics. The distribution of elements in the rectangular submatrices are specially examined since they represent inter-community connexions. The emphasis being on distinguishing the number of vertices belonging to a given community. Using such informations one can distinguish between opinion leaders, followers and main rivals and briefly interpret their relationships through psychological-like conditions intrinsic to behavior rules in either community. Considerations on other controversy cases with similar social constraints are outlined, as well as suggestions on further, more general, work deduced from our observations on such networks.