Linguistic laws in biology

Stuart Semple, Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho, Morgan L. Gustison

Trends in Ecology and Evolution

Linguistic laws, the common statistical patterns of human language, have been investigated by quantitative linguists for nearly a century. Recently, biologists from a range of disciplines have started to explore the prevalence of these laws beyond language, finding patterns consistent with linguistic laws across multiple levels of biological organisation, from molecular (genomes, genes, and proteins) to organismal (animal behaviour) to ecological (populations and ecosystems). We propose a new conceptual framework for the study of linguistic laws in biology, comprising and integrating distinct levels of analysis, from description to prediction to theory building. Adopting this framework will provide critical new insights into the fundamental rules of organisation underpinning natural systems, unifying linguistic laws and core theory in biology.

Read the full article at: www.sciencedirect.com

Opinion Models and Social Influence on Networks. Mason Porter

From the spreading of diseases and memes to the development of
opinions and social influence, dynamical processes are influenced heavily
by the networks on which they occur. In this talk, I’ll discuss social
influence and opinion models on networks. I’ll present a few types of
models — including threshold models of social contagions, voter models
that coevolve with network structure, and bounded-confidence models with
continuous opinions — and illustrate how such processes are affected by
the networks on which they occur. I’ll also connect these models to
opinion polarization and the development of echo chambers in online social
networks.

Watch at: www.youtube.com

Games in Rigged Economies

Luís F. Seoane
Phys. Rev. X 11, 031058 (2021)

Multiple aspects of an economy can be regulated, tampered with, or left to chance. Economic actors can exploit these degrees of freedom, at a cost, to bend the flow of wealth in their favor. If intervention becomes widespread, microeconomic strategies of different actors can build into emergent macroeconomic effects. How viable is a “rigged” economy? How do growing economic complexity and wealth affect it? We study rigged economies with a toy model. In it, economic degrees of freedom progress from minority to coordination games as intervention increases. Growing economic complexity spontaneously defuses cartels. But excessive complexity leads to large-fluctuations regimes, threatening the system’s stability. Simulations suggest that wealth must grow faster than linearly with economic complexity to avoid this regime and keep economies viable in the long run. We discuss a real-case scenario of multiple economic actors coordinated to result in an emergent upset of the stock market.

Read the full article at: link.aps.org

An Inconvenient Truth About AI

Rodney A. Brooks

AI won’t surpass human intelligence anytime soon

Just about every successful deployment of AI has either one of two expedients: It has a person somewhere in the loop, or the cost of failure, should the system blunder, is very low.

Read the full article at: spectrum.ieee.org