Humans form groups and congregate into groups for a variety of reasons and in a variety of contexts e.g., corporations in offline space and guilds in Massively Multiplayer Online Games (MMOGs). In recent years a number of models of group formation have been proposed. One such model is Johnson et al’s [10] model of group evolution. The model is motivated by commonalities observed in evolution of...

According to their self-representations, western European guilds in the early modern period (1500–1800) were archetypal patriarchal institutions. In cities and towns where they existed, the vast majority of guilds restricted their membership to men. Corporate statutes not only prohibited women from becoming mistresses, they also prevented them from entering apprenticeship or even taking employm...

1. The extent to which plant-herbivore feeding interactions are specialized is key to understand the processes maintaining the diversity of both tropical forest plants and their insect herbivores. However, studies documenting the full complexity of tropical plant-herbivore food webs are lacking. 2. We describe a complex, species-rich plant-herbivore food web for lowland rain forest in Papua New...

In this research, considering the importance of the topic and the gap in previous researches, a model for predicting tax evasion of guilds based on data mining technique is presented. The analyzed data includes the review of 5600 tax files of all trades with tax codes in Qazvin province during the years 2013-2018. The tax file related to guilds is in five tax groups, including the guild group o...

This paper is concerned with the massively multi-player online role-playing game Ultima Online. Because of the large number of players, the evolution of sub-groups, or guilds, are very common. This document contains a general description of Ultima Online and an analysis of a particular guild. I show that the guild can be classified as a virtual community and discuss the importance of its rules ...

We study the temporal evolution of different types of guilds in the massively multiplayer online role playing game WORLD OF WARCRAFT R © . Given a large corpus of observations of online activities of players, we apply convex-hull non-negative matrix factorization to cluster our data of about 1,400,000 guilds into well interpretable prototypes. Given these prototypes, we analyze guild formation ...

Insect pollination underpins apple production but the extent to which different pollinator guilds supply this service, particularly across different apple varieties, is unknown. Such information is essential if appropriate orchard management practices are to be targeted and proportional to the potential benefits pollinator species may provide. Here we use a novel combination of pollinator effec...

The composition and diversity of biotic assemblages is regulated by a complex interplay of environmental features. We investigated the influence of climate and the aquatic habitat conditions on the larval traits and the structure of amphibian larval guilds in north-western Africa. We classified the species into morphological groups, based on external traits: body shape, size, and the relative p...

How food webs are structured has major implications for their stability and dynamics. While poorly studied to date, arctic food webs are commonly assumed to be simple in structure, with few links per species. If this is the case, then different parts of the web may be weakly connected to each other, with populations and species united by only a low number of links. We provide the first highly r...

We studied size-abundance relationships in a species-rich Amazonian bird community and found that the slope of the logarithmic relationship between population density and bodymass (b = -0.22) is significantly shallower than expected under Damuth's energetic equivalence rule (EER), which states that population energy use (PEU) is independent of species body mass. We used estimates of avian field...