Urban economists have put forward the idea that cities that are culturally interesting tend to attract “the creative class” and, as a result, end up being economically successful. Yet it is still unclear how economic and cultural dynamics mutually influence each other. By contrast, that has been extensively studied in the case of individuals. Over decades, the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu showed that people’s success and their positions in society mainly depend on how much they can spend (their economic capital) and what their interests are (their cultural capital). For the first time, we adapt Bourdieu’s framework to the city context. We operationalize a neighborhood’s cultural capital in terms of the cultural interests that pictures geo-referenced in the neighborhood tend to express. This is made possible by the mining of what users of the photo-sharing site of Flickr have posted in the cities of London and New York over 5 years. In so doing, we are able to show that economic capital alone does not explain urban development. The combination of cultural capital and economic capital, instead, is more indicative of neighborhood growth in terms of house prices and improvements of socio-economic conditions. Culture pays, but only up to a point as it comes with one of the most vexing urban challenges: that of gentrification.

 

The New Urban Success: How Culture Pays

Desislava Hristova, Luca M. Aiello and Daniele Quercia

Front. Phys., 09 April 2018 | https://doi.org/10.3389/fphy.2018.00027

Source: www.frontiersin.org

Multifractal analysis offers a number of advantages to measure spatial economic segregation and inequality, as it is free of categories and boundaries definition problems and is insensitive to some shape-preserving changes in the variable distribution. We use two datasets describing Kyoto land prices in 1912 and 2012 and derive city models from this data to show that multifractal analysis is suitable to describe the heterogeneity of land prices. We found in particular a sharp decrease in multifractality, characteristic of homogenisation, between older Kyoto and present Kyoto, and similarities both between present Kyoto and present London, and between Kyoto and Manhattan as they were a century ago. In addition, we enlighten the preponderance of spatial distribution over variable distribution in shaping the multifractal spectrum. The results were tested against the classical segregation and inequality indicators, and found to offer an improvement over those.

 

Salat H, Murcio R, Yano K, Arcaute E (2018) Uncovering inequality through multifractality of land prices: 1912 and contemporary Kyoto. PLoS ONE 13(4): e0196737. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0196737

Source: journals.plos.org

The complex dynamics of gene expression in living cells can be well-approximated using Boolean networks. The average sensitivity is a natural measure of stability in these systems: values below one indicate typically stable dynamics associated with an ordered phase, whereas values above one indicate chaotic dynamics. This yields a theoretically motivated adaptive advantage to being near the critical value of one, at the boundary between order and chaos. Here, we measure average sensitivity for 66 publicly available Boolean network models describing the function of gene regulatory circuits across diverse living processes. We find the average sensitivity values for these networks are clustered around unity, indicating they are near critical. In many types of random networks, mean connectivity <K> and the average activity bias of the logic functions <p> have been found to be the most important network properties in determining average sensitivity, and by extension a network’s criticality. Surprisingly, many of these gene regulatory networks achieve the near-critical state with <K> and <p> far from that predicted for critical systems: randomized networks sharing the local causal structure and local logic of biological networks better reproduce their critical behavior than controlling for macroscale properties such as <K> and <p> alone. This suggests the local properties of genes interacting within regulatory networks are selected to collectively be near-critical, and this non-local property of gene regulatory network dynamics cannot be predicted using the density of interactions alone.

Logic and connectivity jointly determine criticality in biological gene regulatory networks
Bryan C. Daniels, Hyunju Kim, Douglas Moore, Siyu Zhou, Harrison Smith, Bradley Karas, Stuart A. Kauffman, Sara I. Walker

Source: arxiv.org

Understanding how a scientist develops new scientific collaborations or how their papers receive new citations is a major challenge in scientometrics. The approach being proposed simultaneously examines the growth processes of the co-authorship and citation networks by analyzing the evolutions of the rich get richer and the fit get richer phenomena. In particular, the preferential attachment function and author fitnesses, which govern the two phenomena, are estimated non-parametrically in each network. The approach is applied to the co-authorship and citation networks of the flagship journal of the strategic management scientific community, namely the Strategic Management Journal. The results suggest that the abovementioned phenomena have been consistently governing both temporal networks. The average of the attachment exponents in the co-authorship network is 0.30 while it is 0.29 in the citation network. This suggests that the rich get richer phenomenon has been weak in both networks. The right tails of the distributions of author fitness in both networks are heavy, which imply that the intrinsic scientific quality of each author has been playing a crucial role in getting new citations and new co-authorships. Since the total competitiveness in each temporal network is founded to be rising with time, it is getting harder to receive a new citation or to develop a new collaboration. Analyzing the average competency, it was found that on average, while the veterans tend to be more competent at developing new collaborations, the newcomers are likely better at acquiring new citations. Furthermore, the author fitness in both networks has been consistent with the history of the strategic management scientific community. This suggests that coupling node fitnesses throughout different networks might be a promising new direction in analyzing simultaneously multiple networks.

 

The evolutions of the rich get richer and the fit get richer phenomena in scholarly networks: the case of the strategic management journal

Guillermo Armando Ronda-Pupo, Thong Pham

Scientometrics pp 1–21

Source: link.springer.com

This paper investigates a consensus-based auction algorithm in the context of decentralized traffic control. In particular, we study the automation of a road intersection, where a set of vehicles is required to cross without collisions. The crossing order will be negotiated in a decentralized fashion. An on-board model predictive controller (MPC) will compute an optimal trajectory which avoids collisions with higher priority vehicles, thus retaining convex safety constraints. Simulations are then performed in a time-variant traffic environment.

 

Automation Of Road Intersections Using Consensus-based Auction Algorithms
Fabio Molinari, Jörg Raisch

Source: arxiv.org