Related papers: Social Expansion versus Social Fragmentation
In an increasingly interconnected world, a key scientific challenge is to examine mechanisms that lead to the widespread propagation of contagions, such as misinformation and pathogens, and identify risk factors that can trigger large-scale…
Challenges due to the rapid urbanization of the world -- especially in emerging countries -- range from an increasing dependence on energy, to air pollution, socio-spatial inequalities, environmental and sustainability issues. Modelling the…
The 2008 global financial crisis marked the beginning of a decade dominated by fiscal austerity policies in much of the developed world. This paper presents a qualitative narrative review of an extensive collection of academic literature to…
We use the emergent field of Complex Networks to analyze the network of scientific collaborations between entities (universities, research organizations, industry related companies,...) which collaborate in the context of the so-called…
Social and political polarization is a significant source of conflict and poor governance in many societies. Thus, understanding its causes has become a priority of scholars across many disciplines. Here we demonstrate that shifts in…
The causes and implications of the regional variations in the spread of the incipient agriculture in Europe remain poorly understood. We apply population dynamics models to study the dispersal of the Neolithic in Europe from a localized…
The degree of convergence of the business cycles of the economies of the European Union is a key policy issue. In particular, a substantial degree of convergence is needed if the European Central Bank is to be capable of setting a monetary…
Scientific collaboration is often perceived as a joint global process that involves researchers worldwide, regardless of their place of work and residence. Globalization of science, in this respect, implies that collaboration among…
Innovation or the creation and diffusion of new material, social and cultural things in society has been widely studied in sociology and across the social sciences, with investigations sufficiently diverse and dispersed to make them…
Social, biological and economic networks grow and decline with occasional fragmentation and re-formation, often explained in terms of external perturbations. We show that these phenomena can be a direct consequence of simple imitation and…
Universality in the behavior of complex systems often reveals itself in the form of scale-invariant distributions that are essentially independent of the details of the microscopic dynamics. A representative paradigm of complex behavior in…
The emergence and popularization of online social networks suddenly made available a large amount of data from social organization, interaction and human behavior. All this information opens new perspectives and challenges to the study of…
Experimental studies have shown the ubiquity of altruistic behavior in human societies. The social structure is a fundamental ingredient to understand the degree of altruism displayed by the members of a society, in contrast to…
The adaptation of biological species to their environment depends on their traits. When various biological processes occur (survival, reproduction, migration, etc.), the trait distribution may change with respect to time and space. In the…
Spatial reciprocity is a well known tour de force of cooperation promotion. A thorough understanding of the effects of different population densities is therefore crucial. Here we study the evolution of cooperation in social dilemmas on…
The analysis of the demographic transition of the past century and a half, using both empirical data and mathematical models, has rendered a wealth of well-established facts, including the dramatic increases in life expectancy. Despite…
This paper presents the risks and opportunities of big data and the potential social benefits it can bring. The research is based on an analysis of the societal impacts observed in a set of six case studies across different European…
We use an information-theoretic measure of linguistic similarity to investigate the organization and evolution of scientific fields. An analysis of almost 20M papers from the past three decades reveals that the linguistic similarity is…
Socio-spatial segregation is the physical separation of different social, economic, or demographic groups within a geographic space, often resulting in unequal access to resources, services, and opportunities. The literature has…
Does the enemy of my enemy become my friend? A growing literature on structural analysis of interstate relationships has tackled this old question from the network perspective. However, the mechanism of long-term change in the structure of…