Social information use and the evolution of unresponsiveness in collective systems

Animal groups in nature often display an enhanced collective information-processing capacity. It has been speculated that natural selection will tune this response to be optimal, ensuring that the group is reactive while also being robust to noise. Here, we show that this is unlikely to be the case. By using a simple model of decision-making in a dynamic environment, we find that when individuals behave rationally and are subject to selection based on their accuracy, optimality of collective decision-making is not attained. Instead, individuals overly rely on social information and evolve to be too readily influenced by their neighbours. This is due to a classic evolutionary conflict between individual and collective interest. The result is a sub-optimal system that is poised on the cusp of total unresponsiveness. Individuals in the evolved group exhibit delayed reactions to changes in the environment, before responding with rapid, socially reinforced transitions, reminiscent of familiar human and animal social systems (markets, stampedes, fashions, etc.). Our results demonstrate that behaviour of this type may not be pathological, but instead could represent an evolutionary attractor for such collective systems.     

When agility meets open innovation: two approaches to manage inbound projects

Open Innovation is a leading paradigm in the current landscape, and scholars have been highly focused on defining the characteristics and capabilities that firms need to implement it successfully. This research aims to understand how organizations may implement inbound OI projects. Relying on a multiple case study approach and based on primary and secondary sources, this research highlights two main approaches: team‐centred and individual‐centred. The two approaches are discussed according to previous studies, highlighting how the first one is particularly coherent with previous research on Open Innovation, while the second one offers great insights from an Agile Project Management perspective. In particular, this research suggests how the Open Innovation literature can be enriched by considering the recent advancements in the Agile literature, valuing the individual and its autonomy to embrace external ideas from an OI perspective.     

LTE‐based satellite communications in LEO mega‐constellations

The integration of satellite and terrestrial networks is a promising solution for extending broadband coverage to areas not connected to a terrestrial infrastructure, as also demonstrated by recent commercial and standardisation endeavours. However, the large delays and Doppler shifts over the satellite channel pose severe technical challenges to traditional terrestrial systems, as long‐term evolution (LTE) or 5G. In this paper, 2 architectures are proposed for a low Earth orbit mega‐constellation realising a satellite‐enabled LTE system, in which the on‐ground LTE entity is either an eNB (Sat‐eNB) or a relay node (Sat‐RN). The impact of satellite channel impairments as large delays and Doppler shifts on LTE PHY/MAC procedures is discussed and assessed. The proposed analysis shows that, while carrier spacings, random access and RN attach procedures do not pose specific issues and hybrid automatic repeat request requires substantial modifications. Moreover, advanced handover procedures will be also required due to the satellites' movement.     

Ultrathin Polydopamine Films with Phospholipid Nanodiscs Containing a Glycophorin A Domain

Cellular membranes have long served as an inspiration for nanomaterial research. The preparation of ultrathin polydopamine (PDA) films with integrated protein pores containing phospholipids and an embedded domain of a membrane protein glycophorin A as simplified cell membrane mimics is reported. Large area, ultrathin PDA films are obtained by electropolymerization on gold surfaces with 10–18 nm thickness and dimensions of up to 2.5 cm². The films are transferred from gold to various other substrates such as nylon mesh, silicon, or substrates containing holes in the micrometer range, and they remain intact even after transfer. The novel transfer technique gives access to freestanding PDA films that remain stable even at the air interfaces with elastic moduli of ≈6–12 GPa, which are higher than any other PDA films reported before. As the PDA film thickness is within the range of cellular membranes, monodisperse protein nanopores, so‐called “nanodiscs,” are integrated as functional entities. These nanodisc‐containing PDA films can serve as semi‐permeable films, in which the embedded pores control material transport. In the future, these simplified cell membrane mimics may offer structural investigations of the embedded membrane proteins to receive an improved understanding of protein‐mediated transport processes in cellular membranes.     

Validation by Monte Carlo sampling of experimental observation functionals

We present and analyze a validation procedure for a given state estimate u ^? of the true field u ^true based on Monte Carlo sampling of experimental observation functionals. Our method provides, given a set of N possibly noisy local experimental observation functionals over the spatial domain Ω, confidence intervals for the L ²(Ω) error in state and the error in L ²(Ω) outputs. For L ²(Ω) outputs, our approach also provides a confidence interval for the output itself, which can be used to improve the initial output estimate based on u ^?. Our approach implicitly takes advantage of variance reduction, through the proximity of u ^? to u ^true, to provide tight confidence intervals even for modest values of N . We present results for a synthetic model problem to illustrate the elements of the methodology and confirm the numerical properties suggested by the theory. Finally, we consider an experimental thermal patch configuration to demonstrate the applicability of our approach to real physical systems.     

Electroactive Ionic Soft Actuators with Monolithically Integrated Gold Nanocomposite Electrodes

Electroactive ionic gel/metal nanocomposites are produced by implanting supersonically accelerated neutral gold nanoparticles into a novel chemically crosslinked ion conductive soft polymer. The ionic gel consists of chemically crosslinked poly(acrylic acid) and polyacrylonitrile networks, blended with halloysite nanoclays and imidazolium‐based ionic liquid. The material exhibits mechanical properties similar to that of elastomers (Young's modulus ≈ 0.35 MPa) together with high ionic conductivity. The fabrication of thin (≈100 nm thick) nanostructured compliant electrodes by means of supersonic cluster beam implantation (SCBI) does not significantly alter the mechanical properties of the soft polymer and provides controlled electrical properties and large surface area for ions storage. SCBI is cost effective and suitable for the scaleup manufacturing of electroactive soft actuators. This study reports the high‐strain electromechanical actuation performance of the novel ionic gel/metal nanocomposites in a low‐voltage regime (from 0.1 to 5 V), with long‐term stability up to 76 000 cycles with no electrode delamination or deterioration. The observed behavior is due to both the intrinsic features of the ionic gel (elasticity and ionic transport capability) and the electrical and morphological features of the electrodes, providing low specific resistance (<100 Ω cm^?2), high electrochemical capacitance (≈mF g^?1), and minimal mechanical stress at the polymer/metal composite interface upon deformation.     

Combining social media affordances for organising collective action

Social media provide new opportunities for supporting the dynamics of collective action (CA), allowing for the mobilisation of people into debates and involving them in new forms of collective decision making. Although current studies focus on opportunities offered by social media for collective action, there is still a need to deepen the understanding of how social media support the organisation of CA and to study the effects of individual actions performed on social media in complex organisational settings. We here explore how social media are used to manage CA by the Italian political movement Movimento Cinque Stelle, using the concept of affordances as the conceptual framing. Based on the qualitative case analyses, our study contributes to the knowledge base by identifying a typology of nine affordances supporting CA and exploring how the combined actualisations of some affordances of the typology create antecedents of the fundamental processes of CA. On the basis of the study analysis, we suggest a model to describe how social media support CA through affordances, their combinations, and the creation of antecedents and then formulate implications for research and practice.     

Ejection chain moves for automatic neighborhood synthesis in constrained cardinality‐minimization problems

In this paper, we deal with the problem of automatically synthesizing “good” neighborhoods for a specific class of problems, namely constrained cardinality‐minimization problems. Exploiting the peculiarity of the objective function of such problems, we develop automatic ejection chain moves that define neighborhood structures to be explored with a black‐box solver. In particular, starting from a formulation of a cardinality‐minimization problem and a feasible solution, our procedure automatically detects the “entities” involved in the problem and learns the strength of the relationships among them. This information is then used to define the characteristics of our moves that consist in ejecting one entity at a time from the solution. If one of such moves results in an infeasible solution, then feasibility is recovered by performing an additional step based on the solution of an auxiliary problem. The computational results show that, when assessed on four well‐known constrained cardinality‐minimization problems, our approach outperforms both a black‐box mixed integer programming solver and a state‐of‐the‐art model‐based neighborhood search procedure with respect to both solution quality and computing times.     

A column‐generation‐based approach to fleet design problems mixing owned and hired vehicles

We look at the problem of choosing a fleet of vehicles to carry out delivery tasks across a long time horizon. The delivery quantities may vary significantly from day to day, and from season to season, and the underlying routing problem may have rich constraints, for example, time windows, multiple compartments, multiple commodities, and compatibility constraints. We consider the option of hiring extra vehicles from external carriers in order to efficiently carry out the day‐to‐day operations while containing the costs of owning the fleet. The goal is to design a fleet so as to minimize the sum of costs of routing the fleet every day of the horizon, the acquisition costs, the maintenance costs, and the costs of hiring external vehicles. In the literature, there is no previous work on fleet design for a long time horizon, which also considers the hiring options. We propose to tackle the problem using column generation and develop three different heuristics. The methods proposed are tested and compared on a set of real‐world problems. It is also shown how introducing the possibility of hiring helps reducing the overall cost and the number of idle vehicles over the planning horizon.     

Cover Image,Volume 66, Issue 3

The cover image, by Katia Sparnacci et al., is based on the Research Article High temperature surface neutralization process with random copolymers for block copolymer self‐assembly, DOI: 10.1002/pi.5285 .