Homeless shelters and the blues

In this article, I analyze the emergence of New York City’s infrastructure of homeless shelters dialectically, relationally, and historically. The members of Boogie Down Productions met in an incipient New York City homeless shelter in the mid-1980s. Their relationship and music is a window into a critical political consciousness of men living in homeless shelters because the artists gave expression to an emergent structure of feeling of resistance taking hold during intense changes to New York’s political economy and its institutions. The paper first analyzes homeless policy and infrastructural change through a reading of archival sources and government reports and documents. The second section understands oral histories conducted with men living in a New York City homeless shelter as blues geographies—insurgent, critical explanations of these institutional spaces. Shelter residents actively challenge the material conditions, relations, and values that produce homeless shelters as essential instruments of the carceral state. I argue that they activate this resistance to the naturalization of shelters, and themselves as homeless, by narrating carceral spaces as abolitionist spaces.

A qualitative mathematical model of immunocompetence with applications to SARS-CoV-2 immunity

A qualitative mathematical model of the notion of immunocompetence is developed, based on the formalism of Memory Evolutive Systems (MES), from which, immunocompetence is defined as an emergent structure of a higher order arising from the signal networks that are established between effector cells and molecules of the immune response in the presence of a given antigen. In addition, a possible mechanism of functorial nature is proposed, which may explain how immunocompetence is achieved in an organism endowed with innate and adaptive components of its immune system. Finally, a practical method to measure the immunocompetence status is established, using elements of the theory of small random graphs and taking into account the characteristics of the immune networks, established through transcriptional studies, of patients with severe COVID-19 and healthy patients, assuming that both types of patients were vaccinated with an effective biological against SARS-CoV-2.

On the construction of the concept ‘language’: Entrenched Conceptual Integration Networks Encountered in Evolutionary Biology and Studies of Language Evolution

<p>In recent years the relationship between language change and biological evolution has captured the attention of investigators operating in different disciplines, particularly evolutionary biology, AI and A-Life (Zeimke 2001, Hull 2001), as well as linguistics (Croft 2000; Sinha 1999), with each group often bringing radically different conceptualizations of the object under study, namely, “language” itself, to the debate.&nbsp;Over the centuries, meanings associated with the expression “language” have been influenced by mappings of conceptual frames and inputs from the biological sciences onto the entity referred to as “language”. At the same time the prestige of the “science of linguistics” created a feedback mechanism by which the referentiality of “language”, at each stage, was mapped back into the field of evolutionary biology along with the emergent structure(s) of the resulting “blend”. While significant energy has been spent on identifying ways in which biological evolution has been linked to concepts of language evolution (Dörries 2002), little attention has been directed to the nature of the conceptual integration networks that have been produced in the process. This paper examines the way conceptual integration theory can be brought to bear on the “blends” that have been created, focusing primarily on examples drawn from 19th century debates concerning the “language-species-organism analogy” in the emerging field of comparative-historical philology.</p><p>In recent years the relationship between language change and biological evolution has captured the attention of investigators operating in different disciplines, particularly evolutionary biology, AI and A-Life (Zeimke 2001, Hull 2001), as well as linguistics (Croft 2000; Sinha 1999), with each group often bringing radically different conceptualizations of the object under study, namely, “language” itself, to the debate. Over the centuries, meanings associated with the expression “language” have been influenced by mappings of conceptual frames and inputs from the biological sciences onto the entity referred to as “language”. At the same time the prestige of the “science of linguistics” created a feedback mechanism by which the referentiality of “language”, at each stage, was mapped back into the field of evolutionary biology along with the emergent structure(s) of the resulting “blend”. While significant energy has been spent on identifying ways in which biological evolution has been linked to concepts of language evolution (Dörries 2002), little attention has been directed to the nature of the conceptual integration networks that have been produced in the process. This paper examines the way conceptual integration theory can be brought to bear on the “blends” that have been created, focusing primarily on examples drawn from 19th century debates concerning the “language-species-organism analogy” in the emerging field of comparative-historical philology. The document includes Supplemental Materials: Resource Guide and Commentaries.</p>

More on holographic correlators: twisted and dimensionally reduced structures

Recently four-point holographic correlators with arbitrary external BPS operators were constructively derived in [1, 2] at tree-level for maximally superconformal theories. In this paper, we capitalize on these theoretical data, and perform a detailed study of their analytic properties. We point out that these maximally supersymmetric holographic correlators exhibit a hidden dimensional reduction structure à la Parisi and Sourlas. This emergent structure allows the correlators to be compactly expressed in terms of only scalar exchange diagrams in a dimensionally reduced spacetime, where formally both the AdS and the sphere factors have four dimensions less. We also demonstrate the superconformal properties of holographic correlators under the chiral algebra and topological twistings. For AdS5× S5 and AdS7× S4, we obtain closed form expressions for the meromorphic twisted correlators from the maximally R-symmetry violating limit of the holographic correlators. The results are compared with independent field theory computations in 4d $$ \mathcal{N} $$ N = 4 SYM and the 6d (2, 0) theory, finding perfect agreement. For AdS4× S7, we focus on an infinite family of near-extremal four-point correlators, and extract various protected OPE coefficients from supergravity. These OPE coefficients provide new holographic predictions to be matched by future supersymmetric localization calculations. In deriving these results, we also develop many technical tools which should have broader applicability beyond studying holographic correlators.

Designing self-assembling kinetics with differentiable statistical physics models

The inverse problem of designing component interactions to target emergent structure is fundamental to numerous applications in biotechnology, materials science, and statistical physics. Equally important is the inverse problem of designing emergent kinetics, but this has received considerably less attention. Using recent advances in automatic differentiation, we show how kinetic pathways can be precisely designed by directly differentiating through statistical physics models, namely free energy calculations and molecular dynamics simulations. We consider two systems that are crucial to our understanding of structural self-assembly: bulk crystallization and small nanoclusters. In each case, we are able to assemble precise dynamical features. Using gradient information, we manipulate interactions among constituent particles to tune the rate at which these systems yield specific structures of interest. Moreover, we use this approach to learn nontrivial features about the high-dimensional design space, allowing us to accurately predict when multiple kinetic features can be simultaneously and independently controlled. These results provide a concrete and generalizable foundation for studying nonstructural self-assembly, including kinetic properties as well as other complex emergent properties, in a vast array of systems.

The effect of non-native plant invasions on the dispersal of native seeds.

Non-native plants change the communities they integrate in multiple ways, including direct and indirect effects on co-occurring native vegetation. While direct effects are more obvious, indirect effects, i.e. those mediated by biotic interactions with other trophic levels, can also have pervasive consequences for long-term community persistence. Seed dispersal is a critical stage during the life cycle of most plants, as it lays the foundations for plant recruitment patterns and long-term vegetation dynamics. By interacting with seed-dispersing animals, primarily frugivorous birds and mammals, plants can positively or negatively affect the dispersal of co-occurring native seeds. In an increasingly invaded world, it is thus critically important to identify general trends on the direction and magnitude of these effects. This chapter reviews the empirical evidence supporting such changes and the potential underlying mechanisms driving them. While the direct impacts of plant invasions are relatively easy to document, indirect effects are much harder to detect. Nevertheless, the most important consequence of the incorporation of new fruiting plants into native communities seems to be a direct competition for the services provided by the local dispersers, negatively affecting native seed dispersal rates. However, another key message emerging from the literature is that responses are highly idiosyncratic, and usually habitat- and species-specific, and therefore resistant to broad generalizations. Fruiting phenology, and in particular the synchrony/asynchrony between the availability of native and non-native fruits, seems to be a particularly important driver of the direction of the responses (i.e. towards facilitation or competition). However, most evidence is still derived from anecdotal observations and formal community level assessments are largely missing. Similarly, how invasive plants change the emergent structure of seed dispersal networks remains uncertain, with early evidence suggesting that novel seed dispersal networks might be structurally very similar to native ones. Bringing together classic experimental designs and new technical and analytical tools to provide broad synthesis will be vital in the near future to clarify the direction, magnitude and generality of these effects.

The tragic in Greek drama and conceptual blending

This paper examines the tragic sense permeating ancient Greek drama as a product of a special type of conceptual integration between two antithetic mental spaces, which prompts the simultaneous generation of two mutually exclusive emergent structures. The special tragic sense generated carries along the inferences of two equally impossible situations. The key-difference between this type of blend and other counterfactuals is argued to be found in the lack of reference scenario in the blend. In the context of theatrical enactment, the realisation of this special type of antithetic blend is based on the frame-clash between conceived and enacted space, matched by the emotions of pity and fear, respectively. The feeling of catharsis that follows the end of the play is analysed as a second level blend within the emergent structure that leads to the restoration of a single common space of cognitive compatibility between actors and audience.

The ecological and evolutionary consequences of systemic racism in urban environments

Urban areas are dynamic ecological systems defined by interdependent biological, physical, and social components. The emergent structure and heterogeneity of urban landscapes drives biotic outcomes in these areas, and such spatial patterns are often attributed to the unequal stratification of wealth and power in human societies. Despite these patterns, few studies have effectively considered structural inequalities as drivers of ecological and evolutionary outcomes and have instead focused on indicator variables such as neighborhood wealth. In this analysis, we explicitly integrate ecology, evolution, and social processes to emphasize the relationships that bind social inequities—specifically racism—and biological change in urbanized landscapes. We draw on existing research to link racist practices, including residential segregation, to the heterogeneous patterns of flora and fauna observed by urban ecologists. In the future, urban ecology and evolution researchers must consider how systems of racial oppression affect the environmental factors that drive biological change in cities. Conceptual integration of the social and ecological sciences has amassed considerable scholarship in urban ecology over the past few decades, providing a solid foundation for incorporating environmental justice scholarship into urban ecological and evolutionary research. Such an undertaking is necessary to deconstruct urbanization’s biophysical patterns and processes, inform equitable and anti-racist initiatives promoting justice in urban conservation, and strengthen community resilience to global environmental change.