Public health care interventions—regarding vaccination, obesity, and HIV, for example—standardly take the form of information dissemination across a community. But information networks can vary importantly between different ethnic communities, as can levels of trust in information from different sources. We use data from the Greater Pittsburgh Random Household Health Survey to construct models of information networks for White and Black communities--models which reflect the degree of information contact between individuals, with degrees of trust in information from various sources correlated with (...) positions in that social network. With simple assumptions regarding belief change and social reinforcement, we use those modeled networks to build dynamic agent-based models of how information can be expected to flow and how beliefs can be expected to change across each community. With contrasting information from governmental and religious sources, the results show importantly different dynamic patterns of belief polarization within the two communities. (shrink)

The central theme of this book is that the intentional aspects of mental processes are explicable, with mathematics, as due to the operation of purely material brain mechanisms. Nelson's version of mechanism holds that "a being has a mind if and only if its body or certain bodily parts are guided by formally distinct rules of a complexity to account for intentionality, and it is capable of conscious feeling". But he limits his inquiry to an investigation of the first of (...) these two conditions only: "So far as I can see, mechanism as such has nothing whatever to say about the relationship between physical states and states of awareness such as pains and ideas, although it does specifically address itself to the understanding of cognition, intelligence, and other such attributes of mind". (shrink)