Statistical physics of vaccination

This paper addresses the scope for more integrated general analysis of diversity in science, technology and society. It proposes a framework recognizing three necessary but individually insufficient properties of diversity. Based on 10 quality criteria, it suggests a general quantitative non-parametric diversity heuristic. This allows the systematic exploration of diversity under different perspectives, including divergent conceptions of relevant attributes and contrasting weightings on different diversity properties. It is shown how this heuristic may be used to explore different possible trade-offs between diversity and other aspects of interest, including portfolio interactions. The resulting approach offers a way to be more systematic and transparent in the treatment of scientific and technological diversity in a range of fields, including conservation management, research governance, energy policy and sustainable innovation.

A General Framework for Analysing Diversity in Science, Technology and Society

Actes de la Recherche en Sciences sociales

Like other fields of inquiry, the social sciences have attempted to move with the times, even to the point of developing new descriptors for familiar social phenomena. The study of utopian societies is a case in point; a number of related components must be clarified at the outset of this discussion. First of all, it is important to note that not all utopian experiments are communal in nature, although the tendency to believe that they are is fairly common. Neither are utopian communities necessarily religious in philosophy, nor are they necessarily antiestablishment or delusional gatherings. It is true that many of them originated in response to the dreams or visions of a particularly charismatic individual, but others emerged as a result of rational group action or as what might be termed extended forms of social antithesis.

The Concept of Utopia

Community structure is one of the most relevant features encountered in numerous real-world applications of networked systems. Despite the tremendous effort of a large interdisciplinary community of scientists working on this subject over the past few decades to characterize, model, and analyze communities, more investigations are needed in order to better understand the impact of community structure and its dynamics on networked systems. Here, we first focus on generative models of communities in complex networks and their role in developing strong foundation for community detection algorithms. We discuss modularity and the use of modularity maximization as the basis for community detection. Then, we follow with an overview of the Stochastic Block Model and its different variants as well as inference of community structures from such models. Next, we focus on time evolving networks, where existing nodes and links can disappear, and in parallel new nodes and links may be introduced. The extraction of communities under such circumstances poses an interesting and non-trivial problem that has gained considerable interest over the last decade. We briefly discuss considerable advances made in this field recently. Finally, we focus on immunization strategies essential for targeting the influential spreaders of epidemics in modular networks. Their main goal is to select and immunize a small proportion of individuals from the whole network to control the diffusion process. Various strategies have emerged over the years suggesting different ways to immunize nodes in networks with overlapping and non-overlapping community structure. We first discuss stochastic strategies that require little or no information about the network topology at the expense of their performance. Then, we introduce deterministic strategies that have proven to be very efficient in controlling the epidemic outbreaks, but require complete knowledge of the network.

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On community structure in complex networks: challenges and opportunities

The identification of nodes occupying important positions in a network structure is crucial for the understanding of the associated real-world system. Usually, betweenness centrality is used to evaluate a node capacity to connect different graph regions. However, we argue here that this measure is not adapted for that task, as it gives equal weight to “local” centers (i.e. nodes of high degree central to a single region) and to “global” bridges, which connect different communities. This distinction is important as the roles of such nodes are different in terms of the local and global organisation of the network structure. In this paper we propose a decomposition of betweenness centrality into two terms, one highlighting the local contributions and the other the global ones. We call the latter bridgeness centrality and show that it is capable to specifically spot out global bridges. In addition, we introduce an effective algorithmic implementation of this measure and demonstrate its capability to identify global bridges in air transportation and scientific collaboration networks

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Detecting global bridges in networks

Resume Comment le gout de la culture vient-il aux enfants et comment celui-ci evolue-t-il au cours de cette periode qui les fait passer de l’enfance a la grande adolescence ? Comment le fait de regarder la television, ecouter la radio et de la musique, lire des livres et des magazines, jouer a des jeux video, utiliser l’ordinateur et naviguer sur l’internet s’inscrit-il dans le quotidien des jeunes generations et dans quelle mesure contribue-t-il a leur construction identitaire ?Issue d’une enquete longitudinale de grande ampleur qui a suivi les memes enfants (pres de 4 000) depuis l’âge de 11 ans (en 2002) jusqu’a 17 ans (en 2008), l’etude decrit la frequence et la diversite des pratiques, usages et consommations des adolescents et l’influence des instances de transmission (parents, famille, ecole, institutions culturelles, etc.). Cette observation inedite des comportements culturels contribue a la connaissance de la sociologie des jeunes publics, et des trajectoires des enfants au fil des annees, entre prises et deprises pour la culture.

L’enfance des loisirs

La revolution numerique ne semble pas avoir change les liens etroits entre position sociale, d’une part, et dotation en equipements, detentions de competences, intensites d’investissement dans les loisirs culturels, types d’usages et de preferences, d’autre part. Malgre l’apparente generalisation des technologies numeriques, d’importantes inegalites subsistent en matiere aussi bien d’equipement des foyers en ordinateurs, que d’acces et d’usages d'Internet. Qu’en sera-t-il des generations nees avec le numerique, qui ont ete enfants et adolescents dans les annees 2000 ? Nous nous proposons d’apporter des elements de reponses a partir des resultats de l’enquete longitudinale sur les pratiques culturelles et de loisirs des enfants et des adolescents realisee a l’initiative du Ministere de la Culture : 4000 enfants entres en CP en 1997 et ayant grandi dans la decennie 2000, entre la generalisation du telephone portable et celle des reseaux sociaux en ligne, ont ete interroges tous les deux ans par questionnaire sur leurs loisirs, leurs pratiques culturelles et leurs gouts entre 2002 et 2008. En nous concentrant sur les relations entre les pratiques numeriques (en termes de frequences et de types d’usages) de cette generation d’adolescents et leurs transformations, d’une part, et les equipements et les pratiques des parents, d’autre part, nous entendons discuter l’idee d’un rapport unifie des adolescents a la culture numerique, et en proposer un tableau qui tienne mieux compte a la fois de la complexite et de la diversite des usages, et des clivages sociaux qui continuent de les traverser, ainsi que de la recomposition de ces clivages avec l’avancee en âge chez les filles et chez les garcons.

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La stratification sociale des pratiques numériques des adolescents

" La diversification des formes de la transmission culturelle : quelques elements de reflexion a partir d'une enquete longitudinale sur les pratiques culturelles des adolescents "

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La diversification des formes de la transmission culturelle : quelques éléments de réflexion à partir d'une enquête longitudinale sur les pratiques culturelles des adolescents

Six decennies apres sa parution initiale, une experience inedite de traduction collaborative ouverte permet enfin de decouvrir en francais le fameux article dans lequel l’anthropologue britannique John A. Barnes avait ete un des premiers, sinon le premier, a mobiliser la notion de « reseau social ». Dans un premier temps de cette presentation, nous voudrions donner quelques indices du role que l’article de Barnes a joue dans le developpement de l’analyse des reseaux sociaux, et dans un second temps il s’agit de proposer une restitution synthetique des enjeux et des conditions de cette experience inedite de traduction collaborative, en reseau justement, qui a permis de rendre desormais ce texte beaucoup plus facilement accessible a la communaute francophone des sciences sociales.

Pierre Mercklé

Papers

Detecting global bridges in networks

L’enfance des loisirs

La stratification sociale des pratiques numériques des adolescents

La diversification des formes de la transmission culturelle : quelques éléments de réflexion à partir d'une enquête longitudinale sur les pratiques culturelles des adolescents

La « découverte » des réseaux sociaux