Emergence Of Agreement Research Articles

Analysis and control of agreement and disagreement opinion cascades

We introduce and analyze a continuous time and state-space model of opinion cascades on networks of large numbers of agents that form opinions about two or more options. By leveraging our recent results on the emergence of agreement and disagreement states, we introduce novel tools to analyze and control agreement and disagreement opinion cascades. New notions of agreement and disagreement centrality, which depend only on network structure, are shown to be key to characterizing the nonlinear behavior of agreement and disagreement opinion formation and cascades. Our results are relevant for the analysis and control of opinion cascades in real-world networks, including biological, social, and artificial networks, and for the design of opinion-forming behaviors in robotic swarms. We illustrate an application of our model to a multi-robot task-allocation problem and discuss extensions and future directions opened by our modeling framework.

Cross-morpheme facilitation: The systematic emergence of agreement in 2-year-olds

ABSTRACTThis article investigates the relationship between third person singular present tense agreement morphemes, copula is and verb-s, at 2;00 and 2;03. Language samples from 60 children at 2;00 were analyzed for the productivity of copula is as measured by the number of different morphemes preceding is in children’s sentences. Samples at 2;03 were analyzed for the number of different verb stems affixed with –s or marked with verb past inflection. Concurrent control measures of vocabulary and MLU were obtained at 2;03. Two hierarchical multiple regressions were performed to determine whether there was a relationship between 2;00 copula is and 2;03 verb inflection. Each regression had a different 2;03 verb inflectional category, verb-s or verb past, as its dependent variable. The results of the verb-s regression showed that both MLU and copula is productivity accounted for significant portions of unique variance in 2;03 verb-s productivity. In contrast, the results of the verb past regression revealed that only MLU accounted for a significant amount of variance. These data indicate that the grammatical features connecting copula is and verb-s emerge soon after the second birthday.

The Microwave Background from Cambridge

Microwave background astronomy has arrived. Largely because of improvements in receivers, the last three years have seen the emergence of agreement concerning important measurements of the microwave background radiation (MBR):– hard evidence that the MBR has a black-body spectrum (see Smoot in these proceedings);– the unambiguous detection of the Sunyaev-Zeldovich decrement in clusters of galaxies (Birkinshaw et al 1984), and indeed profiles of the decrement across clusters (Birkinshaw in these proceedings);– the lack of anisotropy in the MBR temperature T on scales of a few arcmin down to ΔT/T˜5×10-5 (Uson & Wilkinson 1984; Readhead, private communication) and the consequent elimination of simple theories of adiabatic primordial fluctuations.