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Displaying entries 46 through 60 of 70 found.

Life's Corporeal Evolution Encodes and Organizes Itself: An EarthWinian Genesis Synthesis

Lei, Xiaokang, et al. Exploring the Criticality Hypothesis Using Programmable Swarm Robots with Vicsek-like Interactions.. Journal of the Royal Society Interface. July, 2023. We note this article in a British journal by Xi’an University of Architecture and Technology, China system theorists as another theoretical finding of the nature's innate propensity to seek and achieve this optimum balance wherever it can.

A widely mentioned “criticality hypothesis” argues that biological swarm systems gain optimal responsiveness to perturbations and information processing capabilities by operating near the critical point where an ordered-to-disordered transition occurs. Here, we present an experimental validation for this phenomena by way of real swarm-robotic systems governed by (Tamas) Vicsek-like interactions (Google). We find that (i) not all ordered-disordered motion transitions correspond to the functional advantages for groups; (ii) collective response of groups is maximized near the critical state induced by alignment weight or scale rather than noise and other non-alignment factors; and (iii) those non-alignment factors act to highlight the functional advantages of alignment-induced criticality. (Excerpt)

de Kemmeter, Jean-Francois, et al. Self-Organized Criticality Explains the Emergence of Irregular Vegetation Patterns in Semi-arid Regions. arXiv:2307.14083. Once more contributions such as this by University of Namur, Belgium, Florida State University and University College Dublin including Malbor Asllani well evince the 21th century quantization of innate complex dynamic phenomena which underlies, untangles and exemplifies nature’s self-similar universality.

Vegetation patterns in semi-arid areas occur either as regular or irregular vegetation patches separated by bare ground. Our interest is the patchy state which exhibits a power-law distribution. Here we present a novel self-organizing criticality which drives variegated vegetation patterns in desert landscapes. The model integrates essential ecological principles, emphasizing positive interactions and limited resources. The study aims to establish a foundation for an advanced understanding self-organizing criticality as ecological pattern variously formation. (Excerpt)

Life’s Cerebral Faculties Become More Complex, Smarter, Informed, Proactive, Self-Aware

Ball, Phillip. Organisms as Agents of Evolution: A New Research Review. templeton.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/04/Biological-Agency_1_FINAL.pdf. A full review of this salient article by the British science sage appears in An Earthumanity Era above.

Virenque, Louis and Matteo Mossio. What is Agency? A View from Autonomy Theory. Biological Theory. June, 2023. University of Paris researchers (search MM, see website) introduce a Concepts of Agency collection amid new scientific persuasions that a self-assertive liberty is a prime, axial motive and purpose which distinguishes life’s evolutionary development from minimal origins. (We wonder if “semi-“ autonomous within common, vital groupings (flocks) would be a better sense.) See also The Concept of Agent in Biology by Samir Okasha (University of Bristol), What is Agency? A View from Science Studies and Cybernetics by Andrew Pickering (USC), and Biological Autonomy by Maxim Rainsky (University of Illinois).

The theory of biological autonomy provides a naturalized characterization of agency, understood as a general biological phenomenon that extends beyond the domain of intentionality and causation by mental states. Agency refers to the capacity of autonomous living beings (organisms) to purposively and functionally control their interactions with the environment. By so doing they adaptively modulate their own self-determining organization and proactive behavior so as to maintain and foster their own existence. We mention some crucial strengths of the autonomist conception of agency, and issues that it faces. (Abstract)

Our Earthuman Ascent: A Major Evolutionary Transition in Individuality

Wu, Yihan, et al. Characterizing normal perinatal development of the human brain structural connectivity. arXiv:2308.11836. We enter this work by Boston Children's Hospital and Harvard Medical School computational neuroscientists as an example 0f life's long knowledge accumulation which can finally into the 21st century be in retrospect fed back to the beings it arose from to heal,salve and mitigate. Thus a overall self-healing, medicating, palliative course becomes evident, such as occurred with viral pandemics, as a salient evolutionary feature.

Early brain development is characterized by the formation of a highly organized structural connectome. The interconnected nature of this connectome underlies the brain's cognitive abilities and influences its response to diseases and environmental factors. Hence, quantitative assessment of structural connectivity in the perinatal stage is useful for studying normal and abnormal neurodevelopment. In this study, we developed a computational framework, based on spatio-temporal averaging, for determining such baselines. We observed increases in global and local efficiency, a decrease in characteristic path length, and widespread strengthening of the connections within and across brain lobes and hemispheres. The new computational method and results are useful for assessing normal and abnormal development of the structural connectome early in life.

Haspel, Gal, et al. To Reverse Engineer an Entire Nervous System. arXiv:2308.06578. A group of 25 senior neuroscientists from across the USA including George Church, Anne Hart, and Konrad Kording propose a next stage for our collective global brain endeavor to retrospectively analyze and describe life's long cerebral evolution. The plan is to use modern machine learning so to first simulate a C. elegans' impressive breadth of brain states and behaviors. And by a philosophia view we wonder what essential kind of existence this may be which proceeds and needs to re-present to itself going forward.

Sun, Weinan, et al.. Organizing Memories for Generalization in Complementary Learning Systems.. Nature Neuroscience. July, 2023. Janelia Research Campus, Virginia and Harvard University brain researchers including James Fitzgerald contribute another view on the effective presence of a dynamic reciprocity between archetypal discrete and integral aspects.

Memorization and generalization are complementary cognitive processes that jointly promote adaptive behavior. These functions depend on system consolidations by way of neocortical memory traces from hippocampal precursors. Here we introduce a new formalization that reveals a bicameral tension. We resolve it by postulating that memories only consolidate when it aids generalization. This framework accounts for partial hippocampal–cortical memory transfer and a normative principle to understand field observations. Generalization-optimized systems consolidation thus provides new insight into how adaptive behavior benefits from complementary learning systems specialized for memorization and generalization. (Abstract)

Northoff, Georg, et al. As Without, So Within: How the Brain’s Temporo-Spatial Alignment to the Environment Shapes Consciousness. INterface Focus. March, 2023. As cognitive awareness becomes commonly amenable to scientific and conceptual subject, to cite another approach here GN, University of Ottawa, Phillipp Klar, University of Dusseldorf, Magnus Bein, McGill University, and Adam Safron, Johns Hopkins University describe in detail a triune, self-similar foreground, middle stage and background environment model and method.

Bettencourt, Luis. Introduction to Urban Science: Evidence and Theory of Cities as Complex Systems. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2021. The veteran systems scholar is now at the University of Chicago as a professor of Urban Innovation. His survey of the 21st century understandings, after Michael Batty and Marc Bartholemy, of human habitations in many ways as dynamic, evolving, fractal-like organisms achieves a latest authoritative contribution,

Mastrandrea, R., et al. Coalitions in International Litigation: A Network Perspective.. arXiv:2306.02203. We record this paper by Italian and Belgian system theorists including Guido Caldarelli to document how even sovereign legalities, and other public policies can be known to have a phenomenal mathematic source common with common network topologies. If we peoples could ever be so knowledgeably advised, a better, viable Earthnicity might prevail.

We apply network science principles to analyze the coalitions formed by European Union (EU) nations and institutions during litigation proceedings at the European Court of Justice. By constructing Friends and Foes networks, we explore their characteristics and dynamics through the application of cluster detection, motifs, and duplex analysis. Our findings demonstrate that the Friends and Foes networks exhibit dis-assortative behavior, highlighting the inclination of nodes to connect with dissimilar nodes. Network modularities find that coalitions align along regional and institutional lines, rather than national divisions. (Excerpt)

Kushwaha, Niraj and Edward Lee. Discovering the Mesoscale for Chains of Conflict.. PNAS Nexus. 2/7, 2023. Complexity Science Hub, Vienna theorists provide a detailed, insightful study about how even violent warfare can yet be found to hold to and reveal innate, common, regularities. Our final fate may depend on whether such Earthwise learnings can be realized and availed in time.

Conflicts, like many social processes, are related events that span multiple scales from the instantaneous to multi-year development, and in space, from one neighborhood to continents. We develop a method for extracting causally related chains of events that addresses armed violence. Our method explicitly accounts for an adjustable spatial and temporal scale of interaction for clustering individual events from a detailed data set, the Armed Conflict Event & Location Data Project. Thus, we show how a systematic, data-driven, and scalable procedure extracts social objects for study, providing a scope for scrutinizing and predicting conflict and other processes. (excerpt)


Our approach is inspired by advances in physics and biophysics relating to the analysis of multiple scales in cascades such as the propagation of stress in collapsing materials and neural activity in the brain . Our method is robust because it relies only on information about the presence or absence of conflict, introduces a distance-dependent measure of causal interaction incorporating uncertainties, and allows analyses to move between spatial and temporal scale. (1)

Kushwawa, Niraj and Edward Lee. Discovering the mesoscale for chains of conflict. PNAS Nexus. 2/7, 2023. In mid year, as violence rages, Complexity Science Hub, Vienna theorists achieve a deep, thorough analysis, which as the quotes note,shows a significant affinity with a self-organized criticality akin to neural dynamics and everywhere else. In regard, a robust mathematical basis is at last which at last could be availed to understand and mitigate.

Conflicts, like many social processes, are related events that span multiple scales in time, from the instantaneous to multi-year development, and in space, from one neighborhood to continents. Yet, there is little systematic work on connecting the multiple scales, causality between events, and measures of uncertainty. We develop a method for extracting related chains of events that addresses these limitations with armed conflict accounts for an adjustable spatial and temporal scale of interaction. With it, we discover a mesoscale ranging from a week to a few months and tens to hundreds of kilometers, where long-range correlations and nontrivial dynamics relating conflict events emerge. Importantly, clusters in the mesoscale, while extracted from conflict statistics, are identifiable with mechanism cited in field studies. Thus, we show how a systematic, data-driven, and scalable procedure extracts social objects for study,. (Excerpt)

We demonstrate here a systematic procedure that addresses these limitations by uncovering causal patterns from conflict statistics. Our approach is inspired by fundamental advances in physics and biophysics relating to the analysis of multiple scales in cascades such as the propagation of stress in collapsing materials and neural activity in the brain. Our approach is robust to errors because it relies only on information about the presence or absence of conflict, introduces a distance-dependent measure of causal interaction incorporating uncertainties, and allows analyses to move systematically between spatial and temporal scales

Prieto-Curiel, Rafael, et al. The Diaspora Model for Human Migration. arXiv:2309.03070.. Eight Complexity Science Hub, Vienna theorists including Yuri Holovatch in Ukraine begin to scope out and develop ways that 21st century understandings of mathematical nonlinear dynamics can serve to reveal consistent, repetitive patterns at both macro and micro geographic and populace phases. By virtue of these findings, a deeper track might be availed.guidance

Migration's impact spans various social dimensions, including demography, sustainability, politics, economy and gender disparities. Yet, the decision-making process behind migrants choosing their destination remains elusive. Existing models rely on population size and travel distance. Here we propose the diaspora model of migration which involves intensity (the number of people moving to a place) and assortativity (the goal within the country). Despite its simplicity, our model reproduces the observed stable flow and distribution of migration yielding good estimates of migrant inflow at various geographic scales. (Excerpt)

Earth Earns: An Open Participatory Earthropocene to Astropocene CoCreativity

Polgreen, Lydia. In a Report From a Distant Border, I Glimpsed Our Brutal Future. New York Times. August 24, 2023. (As I write, F16s roar overhead from Westover AFB.) An African American opinion journalist comments on the massacre noted below as an ominous sign as violent, tribal, environmental forces drive such tragic movements. In regard, we restate a basic intent of this now PediaPedia Earthica resource website to try to enter, outline and document the advent of a salutary, wumanwise dispensation to save the rare bioplanet and a better for future children

Once in a while, some single thing manages to encapsulate all that feels terrible about our world today. For me, this week, it was a bone-chilling report from Human Rights Watch documenting how Saudi border guards had killed hundreds — perhaps thousands — of Ethiopians seeking to cross from Yemen into Saudi Arabia.

“If I’m elected president, we’re going to end Trump’s assault on the dignity of immigrant communities,” Biden said in his acceptance speech at the 2020 Democratic National Convention. I am certain that President Biden believed these words. His administration is playing the hand it has been dealt. But as the events in the Saudi desert illustrate, this century is going to be nasty, brutish and long.

Rockstrom, Johan, et al. Safe and Just Earth system boundaries. Nature. May 31, 2023. Thirty senior environmentalists from across Europe, China, Australia and the USA including Marten Scheffer and Timothy Lenton post a studious array of both specific and comprehensive recommendations for personal, local and planetary sustainable health and well being. We enter in this Anthropocene section for clearly, as the G20 summit motto states One Earth, Family, Future, we must unite and transcend to a viable ecosphere unity.

The stability and resilience of the Earth system and human well-being are inseparably linked, yet their interdependencies are rarely recognized so they are often treated independently. Here, we use modelling and literature assessment to quantify safe and just Earth system boundaries (ESBs) for climate, the biosphere, water and nutrient cycles, and aerosols at global and subglobal scales. We propose ESBs for maintaining the resilience and stability of the Earth system (safe ESBs) and minimizing exposure to significant harm to humans from Earth system change. We propose that our assessment provides a quantitative foundation for safeguarding the global commons for all people now and into the future.

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