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) a
reas, 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.
Long birth time series for Romania are investigated from Benfords law point of view, distinguishing between families with a religious (Orthodox and Non-Orthodox) affiliation. The data extend from Jan. 01, 1905 till Dec. 31, 2001, i.e. over 97 years o
r 35 429 days. The results point to a drastic breakdown of Benfords law. Some interpretation is proposed, based on the statistical aspects due to population sizes, rather than on human thought constraints when the law breakdown is usually expected. Benfords law breakdown clearly points to natural causes.
(shortened version) Religions and languages are social variables, like age, sex, wealth or political opinions, to be studied like any other organizational parameter. In fact, religiosity is one of the most important sociological aspects of population
s. Languages are also a characteristics of the human kind. New religions, new languages appear though others disappear. All religions and languages evolve when they adapt to the society developments. On the other hand, the number of adherents of a given religion, the number of persons speaking a language is not fixed. Several questions can be raised. E.g. from a macroscopic point of view : How many religions/languages exist at a given time? What is their distribution? What is their life time? How do they evolve?. From a microscopic view point: can one invent agent based models to describe macroscopic aspects? Does it exist simple evolution equations? It is intuitively accepted, but also found through from statistical analysis of the frequency distribution that an attachment process is the primary cause of the distribution evolution : usually the initial religion/language is that of the mother. Later on, changes can occur either due to heterogeneous agent interaction processes or due to external field constraints, - or both. Such cases can be illustrated with historical facts and data. It is stressed that characteristic time scales are different, and recalled that external fields are very relevant in the case of religions, rending the study more interesting within a mechanistic approach
Let the population of e.g. a country where some opinion struggle occurs be varying in time, according to Verhulst equation. Consider next some competition between opinions such as the dynamics be described by Lotka and Volterra equations. Two kinds o
f influences can be used, in such a model, for describing the dynamics of an agent opinion conversion: this can occur (i) either by means of mass communication tools, under some external field influence, or (ii) by means of direct interactions between agents. It results, among other features, that change(s) in environmental conditions can prevent the extinction of populations of followers of some ideology due to different kinds of resurrection effects. The tension arising in the country population is proposed to be measured by an appropriately defined scale index.
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 bel
onging 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.
The dynamic behavior of a multiagent system in which the agent size $s_{i}$ is variable it is studied along a Lotka-Volterra approach. The agent size has hereby for meaning the fraction of a given market that an agent is able to capture (market share
). A Lotka-Volterra system of equations for prey-predator problems is considered, the competition factor being related to the difference in size between the agents in a one-on-one competition. This mechanism introduces a natural self-organized dynamic competition among agents. In the competition factor, a parameter $sigma$ is introduced for scaling the intensity of agent size similarity, which varies in each iteration cycle. The fixed points of this system are analytically found and their stability analyzed for small systems (with $n=5$ agents). We have found that different scenarios are possible, from chaotic to non-chaotic motion with cluster formation as function of the $sigma$ parameter and depending on the initial conditions imposed to the system. The present contribution aim is to show how a realistic though minimalist nonlinear dynamics model can be used to describe market competition (companies, brokers, decision makers) among other opinion maker communities.
Social impacts and degrees of organization inherent to opinion formation for interacting agents on networks present interesting questions of general interest from physics to sociology. We present a quantitative analysis of a case implying an evolving
small size network, i.e. that inherent to the ongoing debate between modern creationists (most are Intelligent Design (ID) proponents (IDP)) and Darwins theory of Evolution Defenders (DED)). This study is carried out by analyzing the structural properties of the citation network unfolded in the recent decades by publishing works belonging to members of the two communities. With the aim of capturing the dynamical aspects of the interaction between the IDP and DED groups, we focus on $two$ key quantities, namely, the {it degree of activity} of each group and the corresponding {it degree of impact} on the intellectual community at large. A representative measure of the former is provided by the {it rate of production of publications} (RPP), whilst the latter can be assimilated to the{it rate of increase in citations} (RIC). These quantities are determined, respectively, by the slope of the time series obtained for the number of publications accumulated per year and by the slope of a similar time series obtained for the corresponding citations. The results indicate that in this case, the dynamics can be seen as geared by triggered or damped competition. The network is a specific example of marked heterogeneity in exchange of information activity in and between the communities, particularly demonstrated through the nodes having a high connectivity degree, i.e. opinion leaders.
A comparison of two english texts from Lewis Carroll, one (Alice in wonderland), also translated into esperanto, the other (Through a looking glass) are discussed in order to observe whether natural and artificial languages significantly differ from
each other. One dimensional time series like signals are constructed using only word frequencies (FTS) or word lengths (LTS). The data is studied through (i) a Zipf method for sorting out correlations in the FTS and (ii) a Grassberger-Procaccia (GP) technique based method for finding correlations in LTS. Features are compared : different power laws are observed with characteristic exponents for the ranking properties, and the {it phase space attractor dimensionality}. The Zipf exponent can take values much less than unity ($ca.$ 0.50 or 0.30) depending on how a sentence is defined. This non-universality is conjectured to be a measure of the author $style$. Moreover the attractor dimension $r$ is a simple function of the so called phase space dimension $n$, i.e., $r = n^{lambda}$, with $lambda = 0.79$. Such an exponent should also conjecture to be a measure of the author $creativity$. However, even though there are quantitative differences between the original english text and its esperanto translation, the qualitative differences are very minutes, indicating in this case a translation relatively well respecting, along our analysis lines, the content of the author writing.
We present a comparison of two english texts, written by Lewis Carroll, one (Alice in wonderland) and the other (Through a looking glass), the former translated into esperanto, in order to observe whether natural and artificial languages significantl
y differ from each other. We construct one dimensional time series like signals using either word lengths or word frequencies. We use the multifractal ideas for sorting out correlations in the writings. In order to check the robustness of the methods we also write the corresponding shuffled texts. We compare characteristic functions and e.g. observe marked differences in the (far from parabolic) f(alpha) curves, differences which we attribute to Tsallis non extensive statistical features in the frequency time series and length time series. The esperanto text has more extreme vallues. A very rough approximation consists in modeling the texts as a random Cantor set if resulting from a binomial cascade of long and short words (or words and blanks). This leads to parameters characterizing the text style, and most likely in fine the author writings.
Religious adherence can be considered as a degree of freedom, in a statistical physics sense, for a human agent belonging to a population. The distribution, performance and life time of religions can thus be studied having in mind heterogeneous inter
acting agent modeling in mind. We present a comprehensive analysis of 58 so called religion (to be better defined in the main text) evolutions, as measured through their number of adherents between 1900 and 2000, - data taken from the World Christian Encyclopedia: 40 are considered to be presently growing cases, including 11 turn overs in the XX century; 18 are presently decaying, among which 12 are found to have had a recent maximum, in the XIX or the XX century. The Avrami-Kolmogorov differential equation which usually describes solid state transformations, like crystal growth, is used in each case in order to obtain the preferential attachment parameter introduced previously. It is often found close to unity, indicating a smooth evolution. However large values suggest the occurrence of extreme cases which we conjecture are controlled by so called external fields. A few cases indicate the likeliness of a detachment process. We discuss different growing and decaying religions, and illustrate various fits. Some cases seem to indicate the lack of reliability of the data. Others, departure from Avrami law. We point out two difficulties in the analysis : (i) the precise original time of apparition of a religion, (ii) the time of its maximum, both informations being necessary for integrating reliably any evolution equation. Moreover the Avrami evolution equation might be surely improved, in particular, and somewhat obviously, for the decaying religion cases.
