In response to failures of central planning, the Chinese government has experimented not only with free-market trade zones, but with allowing non-profit foundations to operate in a decentralized fashion. A network study shows how these foundations have connected together by sharing board members, in a structural parallel to what is seen in corporations in the United States. This board interlock leads to the emergence of an elite group with privileged network positions. While the presence of government officials on non-profit boards is widespread, state officials are much less common in a subgroup of foundations that control just over half of all revenue in the network. This subgroup, associated with business elites, not only enjoys higher levels of within-elite links, but even preferentially excludes government officials from the nodes with higher degree. The emergence of this structurally autonomous sphere is associated with major political and social events in the state-society relationship.

 

State power and elite autonomy: The board interlock network of Chinese non-profits
Ji Ma, Simon DeDeo

http://arxiv.org/abs/1606.08103

Source: arxiv.org

Noise is widely understood to be something that interferes with a signal or process. Thus, it is generally thought to be destructive, obscuring signals and interfering with function. However, early in the 20th century, mechanical engineers found that mechanisms inducing additional vibration in mechanical systems could prevent sticking and hysteresis. This so-called “dither” noise was later introduced in an entirely different context at the advent of digital information transmission and recording in the early 1960s. Ironically, the addition of noise allows one to preserve information that would otherwise be lost when the signal or image is digitized. As we shall see, the benefits of added noise in these contexts are closely related to the phenomenon which has come to be known as stochastic resonance, the original version of which appealed to noise to explain how small periodic fluctuations in the eccentricity of the earth’s orbit might be amplified in such a way as to bring about the observed periodic transitions in climate from ice age to temperate age and back. These noise-induced transitions have since been invoked to explain a wide array of biological phenomena, including the foraging and tracking behavior of ants. Many biological phenomena, from foraging to gene expression, are noisy, involving an element of randomness. In this paper, we illustrate the general principles behind dithering and stochastic resonance using examples from image processing, and then show how the constructive use of noise can carry over to systems found in nature.

 

Noise and Function
Steven Weinstein, Theodore P. Pavlic

http://arxiv.org/abs/1608.04824

Source: arxiv.org