Hiroki Sayama
Phys. Rev. E 102, 012303

 

Today’s society faces widening disagreement and conflicts among constituents with incompatible views. Escalated views and opinions are seen not only in radical ideology or extremism but also in many other scenes of our everyday life. Here we show that widening disagreement among groups may be linked to the advancement of information communication technology by analyzing a mathematical model of population dynamics in a continuous opinion space. We adopted the interaction kernel approach to model enhancement of people’s information-gathering ability and introduced a generalized nonlocal gradient as individuals’ perception kernel. We found that the characteristic distance between population peaks becomes greater as the wider range of opinions becomes available to individuals or the more attention is attracted to opinions distant from theirs. These findings may provide a possible explanation for why disagreement is growing in today’s increasingly interconnected society, without attributing its cause only to specific individuals or events.

Source: journals.aps.org

J.C. Correa, H. Laverde-Rojas, F. Marmolejo-Ramos, J. Tejada, Š. Bahník

 

Citations are often used as a metric of the impact of scientific publications. Here, we examine how the number of downloads from Sci-hub as well as various characteristics of publications and their authors predicts future citations. Using data from 12 leading journals in economics, consumer research, neuroscience, and multidisciplinary research, we found that articles downloaded from Sci-hub were cited 1.72 times more than papers not downloaded from Sci-hub and that the number of downloads from Sci-hub was a robust predictor of future citations. Among other characteristics of publications, the number of figures in a manuscript consistently predicts its future citations. The results suggest that limited access to publications may limit some scientific research from achieving its full impact.

Source: arxiv.org

Herd immunity differs from place to place, and many factors influence how it’s calculated.

Source: www.quantamagazine.org

Andrea Santoro and Vincenzo Nicosia
Phys. Rev. X 10, 021069 (2020)

A new measure of complexity of multilayer networks shows that these systems can encode an optimal amount of additional information compared to their single-layer counterparts and provides a powerful tool for their analysis.

Source: journals.aps.org

Alejandro P. Riascos, Denis Boyer, Paul Herringer, and José L. Mateos
Phys. Rev. E 101, 062147

 

We study random walks with stochastic resetting to the initial position on arbitrary networks. We obtain the stationary probability distribution as well as the mean and global first passage times, which allow us to characterize the effect of resetting on the capacity of a random walker to reach a particular target or to explore a finite network. We apply the results to rings, Cayley trees, and random and complex networks. Our formalism holds for undirected networks and can be implemented from the spectral properties of the random walk without resetting, providing a tool to analyze the search efficiency in different structures with the small-world property or communities. In this way, we extend the study of resetting processes to the domain of networks.

Source: journals.aps.org