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Intro -- Preface -- Organization -- Contents -- Young People as Engaged Citizens: A Difficult Challenge Between Disillusionments and Hopes -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Youth Political and Civic Engagement: Definitions and Forms of Participation -- 3 Factors and Processes Influencing Civic and Political Participation -- 3.1 Demographic Factors -- 3.2 Macro-level Contextual Factors -- 3.3 Proximal Social Factors -- 3.4 Psychological Factors -- 4 Conclusion -- References -- Experiments on the Reaction of Citizens to New Voting Rules: A Survey -- 1 Introduction -- 2 A Laboratory Experiment -- 3 In-Situ Experiments -- 4 On-Line Experiments -- 5 Conclusion -- References -- Egalitarianism vs. Utilitarianism in Preferential Voting -- 1 Condorcet Theory of Democratic Vote -- 2 A Recent Development of Condorcet Theory -- 3 Egalitarian Voting in Simulations -- 3.1 Generating Synthetic Votes -- 3.2 Egalitarian Voting -- 4 Conclusion -- References -- Knowledge Management for Democratic Governance of Socio-Technical Systems -- 1 Introduction -- 2 Background and Motivation -- 2.1 Self-governing Socio-Technical Systems -- 2.2 Self-governing Institutions -- 2.3 Polycentrism and the Iron Law of Oligarchy -- 3 Knowledge Management in Classical Athens -- 4 Knowledge Management Processes for SG-STS -- 4.1 Technology for Knowledge Management -- 4.2 Knowledge Aggregation -- 4.3 Knowledge Alignment -- 4.4 Knowledge Codification -- 5 Open Issues -- 5.1 Applicability and Limitations of Self-governance -- 5.2 Adapting Historic Examples to Modern Socio-Economic-Technical Contexts -- 5.3 Unanticipated Consequences-``The Media Is the Message'' -- 5.4 Economic Viability -- 5.5 Power Plays -- 6 Summary and Conclusions -- References -- The Problematic Relationship Between Trust and Democracy -- Its Crisis and Web Dangers and Promises -- 1 Premise -- 1.1 Participatory vs. Deliberative.

The book shows a very original organization addressing in a non traditional way, but with a systematic approach, to who has an interest in using mathematics in the social sciences. The book is divided in four parts: (a) a historical part, written by Vittorio Capecchi which helps us understand the changes in the relationship between mathematics and sociology by analyzing the mathematical models of Paul F. Lazarsfeld, the model of simulation and artificial societies, models of artificial neural network and considering all the changes in scientific paradigms considered, (b) a part coordinated by Pier Luigi Contucci on mathematical models that consider the relationship between the mathematical models that come from physics and linguistics to arrive at the study of society and those which are born within sociology and economics, (c) a part coordinated by Massimo Buscema analyzing models of artificial neural networks, (d) a part coordinated by Bruno D`Amore which considers the relationship between mathematics and art. The title of the book "Mathematics and Society" was chosen because the mathematical applications exposed in the book allow you to address two major issues: (a) the general theme of technological innovation and quality of life (among the essays are on display mathematical applications to the problems of combating pollution and crime, applications to mathematical problems of immigration, mathematical applications to the problems of medical diagnosis, etc.) (b) the general theme of technical innovation and creativity, for example the art and mathematics section which connects to the theme of creative cities. The book is very original because it is not addressed only to those who are passionate about mathematical applications in social science but also to those who, in different societies, are: (a) involved in technological innovation to improve the quality of life, (b) involved in the wider distribution of technological innovation in different areas of creativity (as in the project "Creative Cities Network" of UNESCO). TOC: Mathematics and Society Preface Vittorio Capecchi, Massimo Buscema, Pierluigi Contucci, Bruno D`Amore 1- Vittorio Capecchi: Historical Introduction Section I (mathematics and models) 2- Pierluigi Contucci, Ignacio Gallo, Stefano Ghirlanda: "Equilibria of culture contact derived from ingroup and outgroup attitudes" 3- Oscar Bolina: "Society from the Statistical Mechanics Perspective" 4- Anna M. Borghi, Daniele Caligiore, Claudia Scorolli: "Objects, words, and actions. Some reasons why embodied models are badly needed in cognitive psychology." 5- Luca Desanctis, Stefano Ghirlanda: "Shared culture needs large social networks" 6- C. Gallo: "Mathematical models of financial markets" 7- F. Gallo, Pierluigi Contucci, A. Coutts, Ignacio Gallo: "Tackling climate change through energy efficiency: mathematical models to offer evidence-based recommendations for public policy" 8- Simone Sarti, Marco Terraneo: "An application of the multilevel regression technique to validate a social stratification scale" 9- Robert B. Smith: "The Academic Mind Revisited: Contextual Analysis via Multilevel Modeling" Section III (mathematics and neural networks) 10 - Massimo Buscema: "The General Philosophy of the Artificial Adaptive Systems" 11 - Massimo Buscema, Pier Luigi Sacco: "Auto-Contractive Maps, the H Function and the Maximally Regular Graph (MRG): a new methodology for data mining" 12- Massimo Buscema, Pier Luigi Sacco: "An Artificial Intelligent Systems Approach to - Unscrambling Power Networks in Italy`s Business Environment" 13- Giulia Massini: "Multi - Meta SOM" 14- Massimo Buscema: "How to make data mining: The Persons Arrested Dataset" 15- Enzo Grossi: "Medicine and Mathematics of Complex Systems" 16- Massimo Buscema, Enzo Grossi: "J-Net System: a new paradigm for Artificial Neural Networks applied to diagnostic imaging" 17 - S. Tangaro, R. Bellotti, F. De Carlo, G. Gargano: "Digital Image Processing in Medical Applications" Section III (mathematics and art) 18 - Giorgio T. Bagni: "Mathematics, Art, and Interpretation: an Hermeneutic Perspective" 19- Giorgio Bolondi: "Point, line and surface, following Hilbert and Kandinsky" 20- Bruno D`Amore: Figurative arts and mathematics: pipes, horses, triangles and meanings A contribution to a problematic theory of conceptual meaning, from Frege and Magritte up to the present time" 21- Michele Emmer: The idea of space in art, technology and mathematics" 22- Raffaele Mascella, Franco Eugeni,e Ezio Sciarpa: "Mathematical structures and sense of beauty" 23- Monica Idà: "Visual impact and mathematical learning" 24- Marco Pierini: "Art by Numbers.Mel Bochner, Roman Opalka and other Philarhythmics" 25-Aldo Spizzichino: "My way of playing with the computer. Suggestions for a personal experience in vector graphics" 26- Gian Marco Todesco: "Four dimensional ideas" 27- Igino Aschieri, Paola Vighi: "From Art to Mathematics in the paintings of Theo van Doesburg" Editors`s biographies

Winner selection by majority, in elections between two candidates, is the only rule compatible with democratic principles. Instead, when candidates are three or more and voters rank candidates in order of preference, there are no univocal criteria for the selection of the winning (consensus) ranking and the outcome is known to depend sensibly on the adopted rule. Building upon eighteenth century Condorcet theory, whose idea was max- imising total voter satisfaction, we propose here a new basic principle (dimension) to guide the selection: satisfaction should be distributed among voters as equally as possible. With this new criterion we identify an optimal set of rankings, ranging from the Condorcet solution to the the most egalitarian one with respect to the voters. Most importantly, we show that highly egalitarian rankings are much more robust, with respect to random fluctuations in the votes, than consensus rankings returned by classical voting rules (Copeland, Tideman, Schulze). The newly introduced dimension provides, when used together with that of Condorcet, a more informative classification of all the possible rankings. By increasing awareness in selecting a consensus ranking our method may lead to social choices which are more egalitarian compared to those achieved by presently available voting systems.

AbstractIn recent years Italy has been involved in massive migration flows and, consequently, migrant integration is becoming a urgent political, economic and social issue. In this paper we apply quantitative methods, based on probability theory and statistical mechanics, to study the relative integration of migrants in Italy. In particular, we focus on the probability distribution of a classical quantifier that social scientists use to measure migrant integration, that is, the fraction of mixed (natives and immigrants) married couples, and we study, in particular, how it changes with respect to the migrant density. The analysed dataset collected yearly by ISTAT (Italian National Institute of Statistics), from 2002 to 2010, provides information on marriages and population compositions for all Italian municipalities. Our findings show that there are strong differences according to the size of the municipality. In fact, in large cities the occurrence of mixed marriages grows, on average, linearly with respect to the migrant density and its fluctuations are always Gaussian; conversely, in small cities, growth follows a square-root law and the fluctuations, which have a much larger scale, approach an exponential quartic distribution at very small densities. Following a quantitative approach, whose origins trace back to the probability theory of interacting systems, we argue that the difference depends on how connected the social tissue is in the two cases: large cities present a highly fragmented social network made of very small isolated components while villages behave as percolated systems with a rich tie structure where isolation is rare or completely absent. Our findings are potentially useful for policy makers; for instance, the incentives towards a smooth integration of migrants or the size of nativist movements should be predicted based on the size of the targeted population.

In recent years Italy has been involved in massive migration flows and, con- sequently, migrant integration is becoming a urgent political, economic and social issue. In this paper we apply quantitative methods, based on probability theory and statistical mechanics, to study the relative integration of migrants in Italy. In particular, we focus on the probability distribution of a classical quantifier that social scientists use to measure migrant integration, that is, the fraction of mixed (natives and immigrants) married couples, and we study, in particular, how it changes with respect to the migrant density. The analysed dataset collected yearly by ISTAT (Italian National Institute of Statistics), from 2002 to 2010, pro- vides information on marriages and population compositions for all Italian municipalities. Our findings show that there are strong differences according to the size of the municipality. In fact, in large cities the occurrence of mixed marriages grows, on average, linearly with respect to the migrant density and its fluctuations are always Gaussian; conversely, in small cities, growth follows a square-root law and the fluctuations, which have a much larger scale, approach an exponential quartic distribution at very small densities. Following a quantitative approach, whose origins trace back to the probability theory of interacting systems, we argue that the difference depends on how connected the social tissue is in the two cases: large cities present a highly fragmented social network made of very small isolated components while villages behave as percolated systems with a rich tie structure where isolation is rare or completely absent. Our findings are potentially useful for policy makers; for instance, the incentives towards a smooth integration of migrants or the size of nativist movements should be predicted based on the size of the targeted population.

We apply stochastic process theory to the analysis of immigrant integration. Using a unique and detailed data set from Spain, we study the relationship between local immigrant density and two social and two economic immigration quantifiers for the period 1999–2010. As opposed to the classic time-series approach, by letting immigrant density play the role of 'time' and the quantifier the role of 'space,' it becomes possible to analyse the behavior of the quantifiers by means of continuous time random walks. Two classes of results are then obtained. First, we show that social integration quantifiers evolve following diffusion law, while the evolution of economic quantifiers exhibits ballistic dynamics. Second, we make predictions of best- and worst-case scenarios taking into account large local fluctuations. Our stochastic process approach to integration lends itself to interesting forecasting scenarios which, in the hands of policy makers, have the potential to improve political responses to integration problems. For instance, estimating the standard first-passage time and maximum-span walk reveals local differences in integration performance for different immigration scenarios. Thus, by recognizing the importance of local fluctuations around national means, this research constitutes an important tool to assess the impact of immigration phenomena on municipal budgets and to set up solid multi-ethnic plans at the municipal level as immigration pressures build ; This work is supported by the FIRB grants RBFR08EKEV and RBFR10N90W. EA and AB acknowledge also partial financial support by GNFM-(INdAM) via Progetto Giovani 2013 (AB) and 2014 (EA). RS is grateful to the project Competition, Adaptation and Labour-Market Attainment of International Migrants in Europe (CALMA)? granted by the VI National Plan for Scientific Research, Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (CSO2012-38521), for partial financial support.