Month: June 2017

Defined by Design: The Surprising Power of Hidden Gender, Age, and Body Bias in Everyday Products and Places

This wide-ranging overview of design in everyday life demonstrates how design shapes our lives in ways most of us would never imagine. The author, a leading expert in social and psychological issues in design, uncovers the gender, age, and body biases inherent in the designs of common products and living spaces that we all routinely use. From the schools our children attend and the buildings we work in to ill-fitting clothes and one-size-fits-all seating in public transportation, restaurants, and movie theaters, we are surrounded by an artificial environment that can affect our comfort, our self-image, and even our health.

Anthony points out the flaws and disadvantages of certain fashions, children’s toys, high-tech gadgets, packaging, public transportation, public restrooms, neighborhood layouts, classrooms, workplaces, hospitals, and more. In an increasingly diverse populace where many body types, age groups, and cultures interact, she argues that it’s time our environments caught up.

Source: www.amazon.com

The Mathematics and Mechanics of Biological Growth

This monograph presents a general mathematical theory for biological growth. It provides both a conceptual and a technical foundation for the understanding and analysis of problems arising in biology and physiology. The theory and methods are illustrated on a wide range of examples and applications.

A process of extreme complexity, growth plays a fundamental role in many biological processes and is considered to be the hallmark of life itself. Its description has been one of the fundamental problems of life sciences, but until recently, it has not attracted much attention from mathematicians, physicists, and engineers. The author herein presents the first major technical monograph on the problem of growth since D’Arcy Wentworth Thompson’s 1917 book On Growth and Form.

The emphasis of the book is on the proper mathematical formulation of growth kinematics and mechanics. Accordingly, the discussion proceeds in order of complexity and the book is divided into five parts. First, a general introduction on the problem of growth from a historical perspective is given.  Then, basic concepts are introduced within the context of growth in filamentary structures. These ideas are then generalized to surfaces and membranes and eventually to the general case of volumetric growth. The book concludes with a discussion of open problems and outstanding challenges.  

Source: www.amazon.com

2nd Australian Social Network Analysis Conference (ASNAC 2017)

Welcome to the second Australian Social Network Analysis Conference (ASNAC 2017) to be held on the 28-29 November 2017 at the University of Sydney. This conference marks the second national meeting in Australia for researchers and practitioners who are working with social network analysis (SNA). 

Source: www.asnac2017.org.au

Multiscale Information Theory and the Marginal Utility of Information

Complex systems display behavior at a range of scales. Large-scale behaviors can emerge from the correlated or dependent behavior of individual small-scale components. To capture this observation in a rigorous and general way, we introduce a formalism for multiscale information theory. Dependent behavior among system components results in overlapping or shared information. A system’s structure is revealed in the sharing of information across the system’s dependencies, each of which has an associated scale. Counting information according to its scale yields the quantity of scale-weighted information, which is conserved when a system is reorganized. In the interest of flexibility we allow information to be quantified using any function that satisfies two basic axioms. Shannon information and vector space dimension are examples. We discuss two quantitative indices that summarize system structure: an existing index, the complexity profile, and a new index, the marginal utility of information. Using simple examples, we show how these indices capture the multiscale structure of complex systems in a quantitative way.

 

Multiscale Information Theory and the Marginal Utility of Information
Benjamin Allen, Blake C. Stacey, and Yaneer Bar-Yam

Entropy 2017, 19(6), 273; doi:10.3390/e19060273

Source: www.mdpi.com

How to fight corruption

Anticorruption initiatives are often put forth as solutions to problems of waste and inefficiency in government programs. It’s easy to see why. So often, somewhere along the chain that links the many participants in public service provision or other government activities, funds may get stolen or misdirected, bribes exchanged for preferential treatment, or genuine consumers of public services supplemented by “ghost” users. As a result, corruption reduces economic growth and leaves citizens disillusioned and distrustful of government. It is tempting to think that more monitoring, stricter sanctions, or positive inducements for suitable behavior will reduce corruption. But every anticorruption or antifraud program elicits a strategic response by those who orchestrated and benefited from wrongdoing in the first place. How can these unintended consequences be anticipated and avoided?

 

How to fight corruption
Raymond Fisman, Miriam Golden

Science  26 May 2017:
Vol. 356, Issue 6340, pp. 803-804
DOI: 10.1126/science.aan081

Source: science.sciencemag.org