Month: October 2021

Higher education responses to COVID-19 in the United States: Evidence for the impacts of university policy

Brennan Klein, View ORCID ProfileNicholas Generous, View ORCID ProfileMatteo Chinazzi, Zarana Bhadricha, Rishab Gunashekar, Preeti Kori, Bodian Li, View ORCID ProfileStefan McCabe, View ORCID ProfileJon Green, View ORCID ProfileDavid Lazer, View ORCID ProfileChristopher R. Marsicano, View ORCID ProfileSamuel V. Scarpino, View ORCID ProfileAlessandro Vespignani

Brennan Klein, Nicholas Generous, Matteo Chinazzi, Zarana Bhadricha, Rishab Gunashekar, Preeti Kori, Bodian Li, Stefan McCabe, Jon Green, David Lazer, Christopher R. Marsicano, Samuel V. Scarpino, Alessandro Vespignani

With a dataset of testing and case counts from over 1,400 institutions of higher education (IHEs) in the United States, we analyze the number of infections and deaths from SARS-CoV-2 in the counties surrounding these IHEs during the Fall 2020 semester (August to December, 2020). We used a matching procedure designed to create groups of counties that are aligned along age, race, income, population, and urban/rural categories—socio-demographic variables that have been shown to be correlated with COVID-19 outcomes. We find that counties with IHEs that remained primarily online experienced fewer cases and deaths during the Fall 2020 semester; whereas before and after the semester, these two groups had almost identical COVID-19 incidence. Additionally, we see fewer deaths in counties with IHEs that reported conducting any on-campus testing compared to those that reported none. We complement the statistical analysis with a case study of IHEs in Massachusetts—a rich data state in our dataset—which further highlights the importance of IHE-affiliated testing for the broader community. The results in this work suggest that campus testing can itself be thought of as a mitigation policy and that allocating additional resources to IHEs to support efforts to regularly test students and staff would be beneficial to mitigating the spread of COVID-19 in the general population.

Read the full article at: www.medrxiv.org

The complexity of human cooperation under indirect reciprocity

Fernando P. Santos, Jorge M. Pacheco and Francisco C. Santos

Phil. Trans. Roy. Soc.

Indirect reciprocity (IR) is a key mechanism to understand cooperation among unrelated individuals. It involves reputations and complex information processing, arising from social interactions. By helping someone, individuals may improve their reputation, which may be shared in a population and change the predisposition of others to reciprocate in the future. The reputation of individuals depends, in turn, on social norms that define a good or bad action, offering a computational and mathematical appealing way of studying the evolution of moral systems. Over the years, theoretical and empirical research has unveiled many features of cooperation under IR, exploring norms with varying degrees of complexity and information requirements. Recent results suggest that costly reputation spread, interaction observability and empathy are determinants of cooperation under IR. Importantly, such characteristics probably impact the level of complexity and information requirements for IR to sustain cooperation. In this review, we present and discuss those recent results. We provide a synthesis of theoretical models and discuss previous conclusions through the lens of evolutionary game theory and cognitive complexity. We highlight open questions and suggest future research in this domain.

Read the full article at: royalsocietypublishing.org

GESDA Science Breakthrough Radar

The 2021 GESDA Science Breakthrough Radar provides an overview of science trends and breakthrough predictions at 5, 10 and 25 years in 24 science and technology areas, a synthesis of the related fundamental debates in society, and an exploration of opportunities for concerted action through initial contributions on the implications for international affairs, global challenges, and the SDGs.

Read the full article at: radar.gesda.global

Complexity and change: thinking, practices and processes for addressing global challenges (2nd Edition)

16, 17, 18, 19, 22 (+23) November 2021, 11:00am – 06:00pm (GMT)

Online | SECOND CALL for applications >> until 14 October 2021

This CES Winter School is a 2nd Edition of the previously named “Sustainable development, complexity and change: thinking and practices for the SDG and other objectives” CES Winter School, held on December 2020. It is based on a logic of deep interdisciplinarity, oriented towards promoting productive, collaborative, critical and creative dialogues between different disciplines and modes of thinking, between theory and research and the practices that “in the real world” enact and realise, critique or present alternative or complementary proposals to current global challenges.

While the international political agenda is guided by the concept of sustainable development, both the concept and it’s expression, configured in the 17 SDG and their indicators, remain under discussion, raising issues about their adequacy to places, contexts and specific problems, about the practices that sustain the concept of sustainable development and the degree of congruence between the thinking underlying such political agendas, the complexity of the world and the actions informed by such thinking. The question needs to be raised that an insufficient recognition of the complexity of the problems that sustain local and global policies and the realities they aim to dress, as well as of the need to develop modes of thinking and practices congruent with such complexity, may prevent or limit the success of this international agenda, even leading, in unpredictable ways, to the configurations of new, more or less preferred or unwanted realities.

In this Winter School, we propose to address key global challenges, exploring a variety of critical, alternative and complementary views on how to address their complexity. As such, the School will combine lectures/seminars and guided and creative moments of group discussion aimed at the integration of knowledge and experiences towards the production of new ideas and projects.

More at: ces.uc.pt

Anil Seth on Emergence, Information, and Consciousness – Sean Carroll’s Mindscape

Those of us who think that that the laws of physics underlying everyday life are completely known tend to also think that consciousness is an emergent phenomenon that must be compatible with those laws. To hold such a position in a principled way, it’s important to have a clear understanding of “emergence” and when it happens. Anil Seth is a leading researcher in the neuroscience of consciousness, who has also done foundational work (often in collaboration with Lionel Barnett) on what emergence means. We talk about information theory, entropy, and what they have to do with how things emerge.

Read the full article at: www.preposterousuniverse.com