• An earthquake in Mexico received the spotlight of the media for several weeks, allowed quantifying media coverage.
• A person from a large city receives more attention from the media, per person, than a person from a small city.
• The coverage that the media places on a specific event or topic has an exponential decay. The coverage given to an event drops by half every eight days.

 

Temporal and spatial analysis of the media spotlight

Rafael Prieto Curiel, Carmen Cabrera Arnau, MaraTorres Pinedo, Humberto González Ramírez, Steven R.Bishop

Computers, Environment and Urban Systems
Volume 75, May 2019, Pages 254-263

Source: www.sciencedirect.com

Measuring the impact and success of human performance is common in various disciplines, including art, science, and sports. Quantifying impact also plays a key role on social media, where impact is usually defined as the reach of a user’s content as captured by metrics such as the number of views, likes, retweets, or shares. In this paper, we study entire careers of Twitter users to
understand properties of impact. We show that user impact tends to have certain characteristics: First, impact is clustered in time, such that the most impactful tweets of a user appear close to each other. Second, users commonly have ‘hot streaks’ of impact, i.e., extended periods of high-impact tweets. Third, impact tends to gradually build up before, and fall off after, a user’s most impactful tweet. We attempt to explain these characteristics using various properties measured on social media, including the user’s network, content, activity, and experience, and find that changes in impact are associated with significant changes in these properties. Our findings open interesting avenues for future research on virality and influence on social media.

 

Hot Streaks on Social Media

Kiran Garimella, Robert West

Source: arxiv.org

Research using social network analyses has been booming since the start of the 2000s, with studies not only in humans but also many nonhuman species. Primates are no exception, with the number of retrievable items using the keywords “social networks primates” increasing tenfold from 2000 to 2017 (Fig. 1a). Studies are in various domains including psychology, behavioral sciences, and sociology, as well as neurosciences and infectious diseases (Fig. 1b). To our knowledge, several special issues and books have focused on animals (Croft et al. 2008; Whitehead 2008; Krause et al. 2009; Sheldon 2015; Sueur and Mery 2017) but with only one special issue devoted to primates (Sueur et al. 2011). In the last decade studies have evolved from describing structures (Manno 2008; Carter et al. 2013; Bret et al. 2013) and topologies of social networks or centrality of group members according to their sociodemographic characteristics (Lusseau and Newman 2004; Kanngiesser et al. 2011), to a more holistic approach where the function and evolution of networks are linked to ecological factors, behavioral mechanisms, network topologies, and vice versa (Brent et al. 2013; Fisher et al. 2016; Balasubramaniam et al. 2018). In this new special issue, our aim is to present this integrative and multilevel approach along with state-of-the-art methodologies and theoretical approaches for the study of primate social networks.

 

Editorial: Social networks analyses in primates, a multilevel perspective

Ivan Puga-Gonzalez, Sebastian Sosa, Cédric Sueur

Primates
pp 1–3

Source: link.springer.com

Cellular automata are fully discrete, computational, or dynamical systems, characterised by a local, totally decentralised action. Although extremely simple in structure, they are able to represent arbitrarily complex phenomena. However, due to the very big number of rules in any nontrivial space, finding a local rule that globally unfolds as desired remains a challenging task. In order to help along this direction, here we present the current state of cellular automata templates, a data structure that allows for the representation of sets of cellular automata in a compact manner. The template data structure is defined, along with processes by which interesting templates can be built. In the end, we give an illustrative example showcasing how templates can be used to explore a very large cellular automaton space. Although the idea itself of template has been introduced before, only now its conceptual underpinnings and computational robustness rendered the notion effective for practical use.

 

A Fully Operational Framework for Handling Cellular Automata Templates
Mauricio Verardo and Pedro P. B. de Oliveira

Complexity
Volume 2019, Article ID 6573793, 11 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/6573793

Source: www.hindawi.com

Mathematical and computational models are key tools for understanding biological phenomena. In the last decades, scientific and technological advances have facilitated their evergrowing adoption in biologically oriented research. The strongly interdisciplinary character of these areas, in which biologists work along with researchers from physical sciences, engineering, and medicine, fosters the cross-fertilization between scientific fields. However, the large degree of structural and parametric uncertainty typically associated with biological processes makes it nontrivial to analyze them using techniques imported from fields in which these issues are less prevalent. Thus, there is a need for new methodological developments that fill this gap. The present special issue addresses this need by providing an overview of current open problems and presenting recent results regarding mathematical inference and modelling of biological systems.

 

Editorial
Computational Methods for Identification and Modelling of Complex Biological Systems
Alejandro F. Villaverde, Carlo Cosentino, Attila Gábor, and Gábor Szederkényi

Complexity
Volume 2019, Article ID 4951650, 3 pages
https://doi.org/10.1155/2019/4951650

Source: www.hindawi.com