Chris Aldrich

[1209.3026] Losing My Revolution: How Many Resources Shared on Social Media Have Been Lost?

[1608.00462] Are Safer Looking Neighborhoods More Lively? A Multimodal Investigation into Urban Life

Authors: Marco De Nadai, Radu L. Vieriu, Gloria Zen, Stefan Dragicevic, Nikhil Naik, Michele Caraviello, Cesar A. Hidalgo, Nicu Sebe, Bruno Lepri

To appear in the Proceedings of ACM Multimedia Conference (MM), 2016. October 15 - 19, 2016, Amsterdam, Netherlands

Policy makers, urban planners, architects, sociologists, and economists are interested in creating urban areas that are both lively and safe. But are the safety and liveliness of neighborhoods independent characteristics? Or are they just two sides of the same coin? In a world where people avoid unsafe looking places, neighborhoods that look unsafe will be less lively, and will fail to harness the natural surveillance of human activity. But in a world where the preference for safe looking neighborhoods is small, the connection between the perception of safety and liveliness will be either weak or nonexistent. In this paper we explore the connection between the levels of activity and the perception of safety of neighborhoods in two major Italian cities by combining mobile phone data (as a proxy for activity or liveliness) with scores of perceived safety estimated using a Convolutional Neural Network trained on a dataset of Google Street View images scored using a crowdsourced visual perception survey. We find that: (i) safer looking neighborhoods are more active than what is expected from their population density, employee density, and distance to the city centre; and (ii) that the correlation between appearance of safety and activity is positive, strong, and significant, for females and people over 50, but negative for people under 30, suggesting that the behavioral impact of perception depends on the demographic of the population. Finally, we use occlusion techniques to identify the urban features that contribute to the appearance of safety, finding that greenery and street facing windows contribute to a positive appearance of safety (in agreement with Oscar Newman's defensible space theory). These results suggest that urban appearance modulates levels of human activity and, consequently, a neighborhood's rate of natural surveillance
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[1606.07772] The emotional arcs of stories are dominated by six basic shapes

[1406.1391] ";A Vehicle of Symbols and Nothing More."; George Romanes, Theory of Mind, Information, and Samuel Butler

Donald Forsdyke indicates [at https://www.quantamagazine.org/20151119-life-is-information-adami/#comment-361734] that "...Polymath Adami has "looked at so many fields of science" and has correctly indicated the underlying importance of information theory, to which he has made important contributions. However, perhaps because the interview was concerned with the origin of life and was edited and condensed, many readers may get the impression that IT is only a few decades old. However, information ideas in biology can be traced back to at least 19th century sources. In the 1870s Ewald Hering in Prague and Samuel Butler in London laid the foundations. Butler's work was later taken up by Richard Semon in Munich, whose writings inspired the young Erwin Schrodinger in the early decades of the 20th century. The emergence of his text – "What is Life" – from Dublin in the 1940s, inspired those who gave us DNA structure and the associated information concepts in "the classic period" of molecular biology. For more please see: Forsdyke, D. R. (2015) History of Psychiatry 26 (3), 270-287."

Let's look into this and see where, if at all, there may be a bridge over to either Claude Shannon or Boolean Algebra.

The Episciences.org project is involved in the open access movement #epijournals

The main idea is to provide a technical platform of peer-reviewing; its purpose is to promote the emergence of epijournals, namely open access electronic journals taking their contents from preprints deposited in open archives such as arXiv or HAL, that have not been published elsewhere.

The editorial boards of such epijournals organize peer reviewing and scientific discussion of selected or submitted preprints. Epijournals can thus be considered as “overlay journals” built above the open archives; they add value to these archives by attaching a scientific caution to the validated papers.

Physics, Topology, Logic and Computation: A Rosetta Stone #categorytheory

arXiv:0903.0340 [quant-ph]
In physics, Feynman diagrams are used to reason about quantum processes. In the 1980s, it became clear that underlying these diagrams is a powerful analogy between quantum physics and topology: namely, a linear operator behaves very much like a "cobordism". Similar diagrams can be used to reason about logic, where they represent proofs, and computation, where they represent programs. With the rise of interest in quantum cryptography and quantum computation, it became clear that there is extensive network of analogies between physics, topology, logic and computation. In this expository paper, we make some of these analogies precise using the concept of "closed symmetric monoidal category". We assume no prior knowledge of category theory, proof theory or computer science.
#categorytheory, #physics, #topology

[1012.5647] An informal introduction to topos theory

Author: Tom Leinster
This short expository text is for readers who are confident in basic category theory but know little or nothing about toposes. It is based on some impromptu talks given to a small group of category theorists.
Subjects: Category Theory (math.CT); Algebraic Geometry (math.AG); Logic (math.LO)

[1503.02776] The Emergence of Life as a First Order Phase Transition

We demonstrate a phase transition from non-life to life, defined as non-replicating and replicating systems respectively, and characterize some of its dynamical properties. The transition is first order and demonstrates many characteristics one might expect from a newly emergent biosphere. During the phase transition the system experiences an explosive growth in diversity, with restructuring of both the extant replicator population and the environment. The observed dynamics have a natural information-theoretic interpretation, where the probability for the transition to occur depends on the mutual information shared between replicators and environment. Through the transition, the system undergoes a series of symmetry breaking transitions whereby the information content of replicators becomes increasingly distinct from that of their environment. Thus, the replicators that nucleate the transition in the non-life phase are often not those which are ultimately selected in the life phase. We discuss the implications of these results for understanding the emergence of life, and natural selection more broadly.
#arXiv, #itbio