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"Elite institutions have become so politically progressive in part because the people in them want to feel good about themselves as they take part in systems that exclude and reject."

What if We’re the Bad Guys Here? nytimes.com/2023/08/02/opinion

If you're off on vacation soon, you can mine this episode of the for reading tips, as Pavel Tomancak suggested some of his favorite Czech authors

embo.org/podcasts/who-reviews-

Hello there! For a brief #introduction, we are the young researchers of the Complex Systems Society, and we strive to enable all early-stage researchers interested in complexity science to integrate into the community. We do so by offering grants, and by organizing events, such as the warm-up of the Conference on Complex Systems (picture of seemingly happy participants from Palma's edition below).

Let's hope we can bring the community together here as well 🤗

"Our study found evidence of higher excess mortality for Republican voters compared with Democratic voters in Florida and Ohio after, but not before, #COVID-19 vaccines were available to all adults in the US."
jamanetwork.com/journals/jamai

When I speak publicly about cigarettes being much worse than psychedelics, no one takes me seriously (maybe because I'm DJ on the side :) But, seriously, we are letting too many people die of when there is at least a chance here.
newstatesman.com/encounter/2023…

newstatesman.com/encounter/202

Are biological systems really at the ? Jordan Rozum presents our recent work @netsci2023 on how in makes them much more stable than critical.
12:15 (Sync & Control) (BIG Room)
mdpi.com/1099-4300/25/2/374
biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/20

Effective Connectivity and Bias Entropy Improve Prediction of Dynamical Regime in Automata Networks

Biomolecular network dynamics are thought to operate near the critical boundary between ordered and disordered regimes, where large perturbations to a small set of elements neither die out nor spread on average. A biomolecular automaton (e.g., gene, protein) typically has high regulatory redundancy, where small subsets of regulators determine activation via collective canalization. Previous work has shown that effective connectivity, a measure of collective canalization, leads to improved dynamical regime prediction for homogeneous automata networks. We expand this by (i) studying random Boolean networks (RBNs) with heterogeneous in-degree distributions, (ii) considering additional experimentally validated automata network models of biomolecular processes, and (iii) considering new measures of heterogeneity in automata network logic. We found that effective connectivity improves dynamical regime prediction in the models considered; in RBNs, combining effective connectivity with bias entropy further improves the prediction. Our work yields a new understanding of criticality in biomolecular networks that accounts for collective canalization, redundancy, and heterogeneity in the connectivity and logic of their automata models. The strong link we demonstrate between criticality and regulatory redundancy provides a means to modulate the dynamical regime of biochemical networks.

www.mdpi.com

Are biological near critical? Existing models are not, as shown in our recent work with Jordan C Rozum, Reka Albert, Kyu Hyong Park, and Felipe Costa.
,
of biomolecular suggests functional modules far from the
biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/20

Robustness of biomolecular networks suggests functional modules far from the edge of chaos

A common feature of complex systems is their ability to balance the flexibility needed to adapt to their environment with the rigidity required for robust function. It has been conjectured that living systems accomplish this by existing at the "edge of chaos", i.e., the critical boundary between ordered and disordered dynamics. Simple toy models of gene regulatory networks lend support to this idea, and mathematical tools developed for these toy models yield similar results when applied to experimentally-supported models of specific cellular regulatory mechanisms (functional modules). Here, however, we demonstrate that a deeper inspection of 72 experimentally-supported discrete dynamical models of functional modules reveals previously unobserved order in these systems on long time scales, suggesting greater rigidity in these systems than was previously conjectured. Our analysis relies on new measures that quantify the tendency of perturbations to spread through a discrete dynamical system. A benefit of our new approach is that it accounts for how system trajectories are mapped to phenotypes in practice. Because these measures are computationally expensive to estimate, existing tools were insufficient for the ensemble of models considered here. To simulate the tens of millions of trajectories required for convergence, we developed a multi-purpose CUDA-based simulation tool, which we have made available as the open-source Python library cubewalkers. We find that in experimentally-supported models of biomolecular functional modules, perturbation propagation is more transitory than previously thought, and that even in cases where large perturbation cascades persist, their phenotypic effects are often minimal. Moreover, by examining the impact of update scheme on experimentally-supported models, we find evidence that stochasticity and desynchronization can lead to increased recovery from regulatory perturbation cascades in functional modules and uncover previously unreported population-level robustness to even timing perturbations in these systems. We identify specific biological mechanisms underlying these dynamical behaviors and highlight them in experimentally-supported regulatory networks from the systems biology literature. Based on novel measures and simulations, our results suggest that--contrary to current theory--functional modules of biological systems are ordered and far from the edge of chaos. ### Competing Interest Statement The authors have declared no competing interest.

www.biorxiv.org

@Radical_EgoCom@kolektiva.social at least the CEO asks what he should do. In Academia Dean's & co totally expected it. No questions asked....

This Saturday. If you're in Lisbon. After 1am, @RoterdaoC Cais do Sodré, pink street.

Such a cool use of PCA (and other viz tech) in art by @schichmax and colleagues!

We did something related applied to Roman wall paintings with
Kelly Mecclinton 's yet unpublished dissertation "Computationally Modeling Roman Domestic Art and Architecture".

epjdatascience.springeropen.co

Compression ensembles quantify aesthetic complexity and the evolution of visual art - EPJ Data Science

To the human eye, different images appear more or less complex, but capturing this intuition in a single aesthetic measure is considered hard. Here, we propose a computationally simple, transparent method for modeling aesthetic complexity as a multidimensional algorithmic phenomenon, which enables the systematic analysis of large image datasets. The approach captures visual family resemblance via a multitude of image transformations and subsequent compressions, yielding explainable embeddings. It aligns well with human judgments of visual complexity, and performs well in authorship and style recognition tasks. Showcasing the functionality, we apply the method to 125,000 artworks, recovering trends and revealing new insights regarding historical art, artistic careers over centuries, and emerging aesthetics in a contemporary NFT art market. Our approach, here applied to images but applicable more broadly, provides a new perspective to quantitative aesthetics, connoisseurship, multidimensional meaning spaces, and the study of cultural complexity.

epjdatascience.springeropen.com

The power of life being a code and language being a virus also carries the seeds (or programs) of their own destruction.

Could chatbots help devise the next pandemic virus? | Science | AAAS science.org/content/article/co

Muito obrigado por finalmente alguém dizer o óbvio: a descolonização foi racista. Adotou as categorias do colonialismo mais racista do século XIX: europeus são brancos e só têm lugar na Europa, africanos são negros e só têm lugar em África. Os indianos, tal como no sistema do Apartheid, tinham uma classificação especial. Nunca o regime explicou porque não tiveram todos os cidadãos do ex-império português o direito a escolher a cidadania no (novo) país que entendessem. Refugiados foram criados só pela cor da sua pele. Uma celebração do 25 de Abril que não discuta este racismo abertamente, é uma fantochada lírica de um regime que nunca admite o seu centralismo racista.

["publico.pt/2053094"]

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