Population Thinking and Narrative Networks: Dickens, Joyce, and The Wire

Recent approaches to literary character treat fictional population as a defining element of narrative form but continue to read novels at the level of individual characters. This essay uses the tools of narrative network analysis to bridge the gap between microlevel readings and the interpretation of the novel’s character-system as a population. Network analyses of three highly populous works—Charles Dickens’s Bleak House, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and David Simon’s HBO series The Wire—yield measures of social density and character centrality that show how Joyce adapted a Dickensian network plot that emerged amid the population explosion of nineteenth-century Britain to an Irish context marked by demographic decline. This adaptation of Dickens’s plot structure prepared it for a similar use in The Wire. Both Joyce and Simon use a large fictional network to periodically decenter their protagonists and undermine the typological assumptions of much realist fiction. The essay suggests that, rather than read these developments as evidence of a formal rupture between modernism and realism, we view Bleak House, Ulysses, and The Wire as playing a role in an understudied tradition of “population thinking” in the novel.

Pandemics and the development of scientific methods in the history of epidemiology

The Covid-19 pandemic has made me see the history of epidemiology differently. Pandemics are such impressive events that they can exert urgent pressure to identify new modes of research and new methodologies to replace methods that have failed in the past. Some examples seem to corroborate this idea. The plague There is no doubt that one of the most important events in the history of science occurred in the 17th century when population thinking was discovered. All human and social sciences such as sociology, demography, Darwinian biology, political economy, statistics and epidemiology, have their origin in the discovery that dictates that events in populations can be predictable and have a probability of occurrence. Then the occurrence of events in populations can be quantified, can be compared between populations and can be the source of scientific knowledge. This true revolution in scientific thought is a consequence of changes in society that occurred due to plague pandemics. Since the great pandemic of the 14th century, outbreaks of plague in Europe caused great confusion in cities and increasingly threatened existing powers. It was the case of the monarchical society of England. In the event of an outbreak of plague in London, the nobles, the wealthy, and the army left the city, where only the poor remained. The situation became chaotic in London. It was quickly clear that there was a certain chronological regularity in the outbreaks. They started with a small but growing number of deaths in some parishes before spreading throughout the city. In the 16th century the city of London began to collect data on the number and location of pest deaths. The system was improved in the 17th century and extended to all causes of death, making it possible -by the end of the century- to organize orderly outings from London in the event of an outbreak of plague, preventing chaos. These data were printed and placed on the walls of the city. They were called the “Bills of mortality”, death posters. In this process, a temporal series of mortality data was established in London over decades.

APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT FOR ACADEMIC QUEUE MANAGEMENT (FIFO)

This article describes a quantitative research carried out with students from an academic institution in the city of Manaus-AM. Starting from the hypothesis of the time that students are waiting in a queue at a secretariat. Bearing in mind that in the present times the Information Technology is in an increasing evolution, where the mobile means of communication such as smartphones and the internet connection are extremely accessible by the population, thinking about this scope and the solution of this problem that is common to society in general. We intend to analyze the following question: the need to be in person in electronic queues and through this analysis to develop an application for the management of academic queues. To make this possible, we conducted a research through a tool called Justin mind, taking into account its easy handling for creating prototypes of web applications and mobile devices. The research is based on answering the following questions: regarding the application's proposal; what is the main problem faced by the participants when they arrive at an establishment, in relation to the time that the participants usually spend in line, regarding the use of the application in the academic environment, in relation to the desire to perform other activities while waiting in line. To check the feasibility of the application, the Google Forms platform was used, with the objective of knowing the public's opinion regarding the application's proposal and asking some questions directed to the needs that the application intends to solve. Taking into account all the data analyzed during the research. The application to be developed aims to allow the monitoring of the queue by the user through his mobile device. That way he does not necessarily need to be in the queue so he can carry out other activities, but always following the progress of the queue.

Population thinking vs. essentialism in biology and evolutionary economics

The standard perception of the dichotomy between population thinking and essentialism (typological thinking) in evolutionary economics descends from the golden age of the neo-Darwinian Synthesis. Over the last few decades the received view on population thinking has been seriously challenged in biology and its philosophy. First, the strong version of population thinking that banishes essentialism witnessed important tensions stemming from the ontological status of species. These tensions have been amplified by the demise of positivism and the rise of a new essentialism in philosophy of science. Second, the soft version that transforms the opposition between population thinking and essentialism to the dichotomy between ultimate and proximate causation has led to contradictory interpretations regarding the locus of ultimate causes. Taking stock of the previous discussion the paper addresses the limits to population thinking in the socio-economic realm. The upshot is that without denying the important achievements made by the application of population thinking in sub-disciplines like industrial dynamics and economic anthropology, the idea to generalize these applications into the whole socio-economic realm is problematic. The aforementioned achievements cannot come to grips with the structural aspects of capitalism, its different periods (e.g. the contemporary finance-led capitalism) and its geographical varieties. The resulting gap points to the importance of structural analysis (essentialism) and evolutionary political economy. The latter is distinguished from the rest of evolutionary economics by its project to go beyond the surface of economic phenomena and to critically analyze their underlying social structures

Genetic Variation in Insect Vectors: Death of Typology?

The issue of typological versus population thinking in biology is briefly introduced and defined. It is then emphasized how population thinking is most relevant and useful in vector biology. Three points are made: (1) Vectors, as they exist in nature, are genetically very heterogeneous. (2) Four examples of how this is relevant in vector biology research are presented: Understanding variation in vector competence, GWAS, identifying the origin of new introductions of invasive species, and resistance to inbreeding. (3) The existence of high levels of vector genetic heterogeneity can lead to failure of some approaches to vector control, e.g., use of insecticides and release of sterile males (SIT). On the other hand, vector genetic heterogeneity can be harnessed in a vector control program based on selection for refractoriness.