Naturalist Methods in the Sociology of Creation: The Case Against Reductionism

The Sociology of Culture has much to say when it comes to the ever-changing general consensus on what constitutes legitimate culture and definitions of creativity. The naturalistic studieson cognition in social and cognitive sciences show this empirically (Bourdieu, 1979: Becker, 1982, 2002; Sennett, 2012; Author, 2014). Creative cognition is part of an institutional context. However, the influential culturalist branch of cognitive sociology (CCS) reduces creativity toa cognitivist psychological level (Lizardo and Strand, 2010). We start from the conjecture that the Sociology of Culture can draw on the naturalistic paradigm of cognition to explain creativity without falling into reductionist or atomist positions. The authors take the diversityof theoretical-empirical proposals into account in identifying the starting points for focusing the debate at both the macro and micro levels. The body of the article comprises a literature review which, while not exhaustive, offers a full picture of the pragmatic and integrated models of creativity. The studies analysed present inter-subjective processes of creationand the transmission of variable legitimate criteria concerning cultural consumption such as categorisations, evaluations and aesthetic judgments. The sociological perspective offers scope for strengthening critical tools for examining creativity.

Integrated and Control-Oriented Simulation Tool for Optimizing Urban Drainage System Operation

With the management and operation of urban drainage systems (UDS) becoming more complicated and difficult, integrated models aiming to control and manage the entire drainage system are under enormous demand. Ideally, integrated models, as a potential tool for meeting the increasing demands, should combine both conceptual and mechanistic models that merge all UDS components and balance simulation accuracy with time constraints. Within this context, our study introduces an innovative modeling software, Simuwater, which couples multiple principles, simulates multiple components, and combines optimized control functions, playing a role in the integrated simulation and overflow control application of UDS. The software has been utilized in a real-time case-control study in one city of China, and it obtained significant optimized operation results to reduce combined sewer overflow (CSO) by making full use of the storage facilities and actuators. As the Simuwater model continues to improve in depth and breadth, it will play an increasingly important role in more application scenarios of UDS.

Perspectives on tipping points in integrated models of the natural and human earth system: cascading effects and telecoupling

The Earth system and the human system are intrinsically linked. Anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions have led to the climate crisis, which is causing unprecedented extreme events and could trigger Earth system tipping elements. Physical and social forces can lead to tipping points and cascading effects via feedbacks and telecoupling, but the current generation of climate-economy models do not generally take account of these interactions and feedbacks. Here, we show the importance of the interplay between human societies and Earth systems in creating tipping points and cascading effects and the way they in turn affect sustainability and security. The lack of modeling of these links can lead to an underestimation of climate and societal risks as well as how societal tipping points can be harnessed to moderate physical impacts. This calls for the systematic development of models for a better integration and understanding of Earth and human systems at different spatial and temporal scales, specifically those that enable decision-making to reduce the likelihood of crossing local or global tipping points.

Hierarchy of Integrated Models of Varying Detail to Solve Problems at Different Stages of Gas Condensate Projects Development

This study makes an attempt to generalize the integrated modeling tools used by the authors in practice on the basis of the following criteria: the volume of the initial data, the integration mechanism, constraints and assumptions. Various types of integrated models are compared with each other, the need for their application is analyzed, they are connected at various stages of the project development and by the tasks solved at this stage. It also describes the challenges that the authors encountered when working with integrated models of various levels of detail, approaches to their solution, and the lessons learned.

A Systematic Strategy to Find Potential Therapeutic Targets for Pseudomonas aeruginosa Using Integrated Computational Models

Pseudomonas aeruginosa is an opportunistic human pathogen that has been a constant global health problem due to its ability to cause infection at different body sites and its resistance to a broad spectrum of clinically available antibiotics. The World Health Organization classified multidrug-resistant Pseudomonas aeruginosa among the top-ranked organisms that require urgent research and development of effective therapeutic options. Several approaches have been taken to achieve these goals, but they all depend on discovering potential drug targets. The large amount of data obtained from sequencing technologies has been used to create computational models of organisms, which provide a powerful tool for better understanding their biological behavior. In the present work, we applied a method to integrate transcriptome data with genome-scale metabolic networks of Pseudomonas aeruginosa. We submitted both metabolic and integrated models to dynamic simulations and compared their performance with published in vitro growth curves. In addition, we used these models to identify potential therapeutic targets and compared the results to analyze the assumption that computational models enriched with biological measurements can provide more selective and (or) specific predictions. Our results demonstrate that dynamic simulations from integrated models result in more accurate growth curves and flux distribution more coherent with biological observations. Moreover, identifying drug targets from integrated models is more selective as the predicted genes were a subset of those found in the metabolic models. Our analysis resulted in the identification of 26 non-host homologous targets. Among them, we highlighted five top-ranked genes based on lesser conservation with the human microbiome. Overall, some of the genes identified in this work have already been proposed by different approaches and (or) are already investigated as targets to antimicrobial compounds, reinforcing the benefit of using integrated models as a starting point to selecting biologically relevant therapeutic targets.

Urbanizing the floodplain: Global changes of imperviousness in flood-prone areas

Cities have historically developed close to rivers and coasts, increasing human exposure to flooding. That exposure is exacerbated by changes in climate and population, and by urban encroachment on floodplains. Although the mechanisms of how urbanization affects flooding are relatively well understood, there have been limited efforts to assess the magnitude of floodplain encroachment globally and how it has changed in both space and time. Highly resolved global datasets of both flood risk and changes in urban area from 1985-2015 are now available, enabling the reconstruction of the history of floodplain encroachment at high spatial resolutions. Here we show that the urbanized area in floodplains that have an average probability of flooding of 1/100 years, has almost doubled since 1985. Further, the rate of urban expansion into these floodplains increased by a factor of 1.5 after the year 2000. We also find that urbanization rates were highest in the most hazardous areas of floodplains, with population growth in these urban floodplains suggesting an accompanying increase in population density. These results reveal the scope, trajectory and extent of global floodplain encroachment. With tangible implications for flood risk management, these data can be directly used with integrated models to assess adaptation pathways for urban flooding.