Collective intelligence in our highly connected world is a topic of interdisciplinary interest. Previous research has demonstrated that social network structures can affect collective intelligence, but the potential network impact is unknown when the task environment is volatile (i.e., optimal behavioral options can change over time), a common situation in human evolutionary history. Here, we report a laboratory experiment in which a total of 250 participants performed a "restless" two-armed bandit task either alone, or collectively in a centralized or decentralized network. Although both network conditions outperformed the solo condition, no sizable performance difference was detected between the centralized and decentralized networks. To understand the absence of network effects, we analyzed participants' behavior parametrically using an individual choice model. We then conducted exhaustive agent-based simulations to examine how different choice strategies may underlie collective performance in centralized or decentralized networks under volatile or stationary task environments. We found that, compared to the stationary environment, the difference in network structure had a much weaker impact on collective performance under the volatile environment across broad parametric variations. These results suggest that structural impacts of networks on collective intelligence may be constrained by the degree of environmental volatility.

The objective of this article is twofold: First, we compare the modal be going to-VP construction in English with the qu-VP 'go-VP', VP-qu 'VP-go', and qu-VP-qu 'go-VP-go' constructions in Chinese and propose that neither qu 'go' nor lai 'come' in Chinese has been grammaticalized to a modal auxiliary, as has occurred in the be going to construction in English: as Sweetser (1990) shows, in the history of grammaticalization, epistemic modality develops out of deontic modality, and this applies to the English be going to construction (Bybee (2015)); in Chinese, however, no evidence has been found to show that the verb qu 'go' has been grammaticalized to a modal auxiliary with the root modal meaning. While certain epistemic meanings are found in verb-verb compounds such as kan lai 'look come', and kan qu 'look go', we analyze this limited set of V–V compounds as instances of lexical rather than grammatical constructionalization (Traugott and Trousdale (2014)). Second, we discuss the qu in the VP-qu construction and the second qu in the qu-VP-qu construction and argue that these collocations have taken a small-step toward grammaticalization to forming semi-lexical verb of motion, a kind of light verb (Cardinalletti and Giusti (2001)). Drawing on a current theory of syntax, we demonstrate how these differ from purely lexical verbs of motion.

This article discusses the underrepresentation of women in the political arena worldwide by reviewing the relevant literature in the field of political science. Despite women's increasing participation in various fields, the average percentage of female legislators in OECD countries is only 33.83%, with only two countries achieving 50% representation. Increasing the number of female legislators is crucial to reflect the policy preferences of female voters and increase women's future political participation. However, multiple studies suggest that women face gender bias at each of the three stages of the political recruitment process: self-selection of potential candidates, nomination of aspiring candidates by political parties, and selection of candidates as representatives by voters. We review how gender bias may manifest at each stage of the political recruitment process to understand why there is a significant gender gap in political representation. Additionally, we introduce research discussing ways to reduce the gender gap in political representation.

Let Γ be any integral lattice in the Euclidean plane. For n>0, the universally concyclic number uc(Γ,n) is defined by the square of the minimum value among the radii of the circles that pass through exactly n points of Γ. In this paper, we give upper bounds of those numbers.

In Japan, the activities of local assembly members in prefectural assembly sessions are crucial within the framework of representative democracy. This study provides a comprehensive review of existing research that quantifies the activities of local assembly members through topic modeling. Furthermore, the BERTopic model was implemented to perform semantic clustering and topic labeling by combining bidirectional encoder representations from transformer (BERT) embeddings and clustering algorithms. The researchers used a dataset of local assembly minutes transformed into a machine-readable format and selected a subset of general questions (159 general questions from 32 members between 2011 and 2015, and 122 general questions from 23 members between 2016 and 2020) in Fukushima Prefecture. The results demonstrate that BERTopic exhibits robust semantic representation and visualization capabilities, thereby improving the understanding of relationships among the main topics. Compared to the Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and the Structural Topic Model (STM), BERTopic outperformed in terms of identifying subtle topics and yielded a higher topic coherence score, indicating more meaningful and consistent thematic extraction. Furthermore, this research contributes to documenting the recovery process in disaster-affected prefectures after the Great East Japan Earthquake and provides reference material for recovery efforts.