Control and Data Analysis of Complex Networks

abstract: This dissertation treats a number of related problems in control and data analysis of complex networks. First, in existing linear controllability frameworks, the ability to steer a network from any initiate state toward any desired state is measured by the minimum number of driver nodes. However, the associated optimal control energy can become unbearably large, preventing actual control from being realized. Here I develop a physical controllability framework and propose strategies to turn physically uncontrollable networks into physically controllable ones. I also discover that although full control can be guaranteed by the prevailing structural controllability theory, it is necessary to balance the number of driver nodes and control energy to achieve actual control, and my work provides a framework to address this issue. Second, in spite of recent progresses in linear controllability, controlling nonlinear dynamical networks remains an outstanding problem. Here I develop an experimentally feasible control framework for nonlinear dynamical networks that exhibit multistability. The control objective is to apply parameter perturbation to drive the system from one attractor to another. I introduce the concept of attractor network and formulate a quantifiable framework: a network is more controllable if the attractor network is more strongly connected. I test the control framework using examples from various models and demonstrate the beneficial role of noise in facilitating control. Third, I analyze large data sets from a diverse online social networking (OSN) systems and find that the growth dynamics of meme popularity exhibit characteristically different behaviors: linear, “S”-shape and exponential growths. Inspired by cell population growth model in microbial ecology, I construct a base growth model for meme popularity in OSNs. Then I incorporate human interest dynamics into the base model and propose a hybrid model which contains a small number of free parameters. The model successfully predicts the various distinct meme growth dynamics. At last, I propose a nonlinear dynamics model to characterize the controlling of WNT signaling pathway in the differentiation of neural progenitor cells. The model is able to predict experiment results and shed light on the understanding of WNT regulation mechanisms.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation Electrical Engineering 201

Internet memes as internet signs: a semiotic view of digital culture

This article argues for a clearer framework of internet-based "memes". The science of memes, dubbed 'memetics', presumes that memes remain "copying units" following the popularisation of the concept in Richard Dawkins' celebrated work, The Selfi sh Gene (1976). Yet Peircean semiotics and biosemiotics can challenge this doctrine of information transmission. While supporting a precise and discursive framework for internet memes, semiotic readings reconfi gure contemporary formulations to the - now-established - conception of memes. Internet memes can and should be conceived, then, as habit-inducing sign systems incorporating processes involving asymmetrical variation. So, drawing on biosemiotics, Tartu-Moscow semiotics, and Peircean semiotic principles, and through a close reading of the celebrated 2011 Internet meme Rebecca Black's Friday, this article proposes a working outline for the defi nition of internet memes and its applicability for the semiotic analysis of texts in new media communication

Attack of the Fake Geek Girls: Challenging Gendered Harassment and Marginalization in Online Spaces

abstract: Attack of the Fake Geek Girls: Challenging Gendered Harassment and Marginalization in Online Spaces applies feminist, gender, and rhetorical theories and methods, along with critical discourse analysis, to case studies of the popular online social media platforms of Jezebel, Pinterest, and Facebook. This project makes visible the structural inequities that underpin the design and development of internet technologies, as well as commonplace assumptions about who is an online user, who is an active maker of internet technologies, and who is a passive consumer of internet technologies. Applying these critical lenses to these inequities and assumptions enables a re-seeing of commonplace understandings of the relationship between gender performativity and digital cultures and practices. Together, these lenses provide a useful set of tools for methodically resisting the mystique of technologies that are, simultaneously, represented as so highly technical as to be opaque to scrutiny, and as ubiquitous to everyday life as to be beneath critical examination. Through a close reading of the discourses surrounding these popular social media platforms and a rhetorical analysis of their technological affordances, I documented the transference of gender-biased assumptions about women's roles, interests, and competencies, which have historically been found in face-to-face contexts, to these digital spaces. For example, cultural assumptions about the frivolity of women's interests, endeavors, issues, and labors make their way into digital discourse that situates the online practices of women as those of passive consumers who use the internet only to shop and socialize, rather than to go about the serious, masculine business of making original digital content. This project expands on existing digital identity and performativity research, while applying a sorely needed feminist critique to online discourses and discursive practices that assume maleness and masculinity as the default positionality. These methods are one approach to addressing the pressing problems of online harassment, the gender gap in the technology sector, and the gender gap in digital literacies that have pedagogical, political, and structural implications for the classroom, workplace, economic markets, and civic sphere.Dissertation/ThesisDoctoral Dissertation English 201

A Peer-reviewed Newspaper About_ Excessive Research

Research on machines, research with machines, and research as a machine. Publication resulting from research workshop at Exhibition Research Lab, Liverpool John Moores University, organised in collaboration with Liverpool John Moores University and Liverpool Biennial, and transmediale festival for art and digital culture, Berlin

The Waiting Room: Re-Making Adulthood Among America’s Underemployed

This dissertation takes as its starting point the problem of underemployment among young adults in the post-recession United States. Recent studies have shown that the number of college-educated Americans employed in positions not requiring a degree has reached historic highs. Such analyses are limited, however, in that they do not capture the lived effects of such trends—how underemployment insinuates itself into a person\u27s worldview and identity. This ethnographic study delves into the intimate correlates of macroeconomic change by investigating the impact of underemployment on notions of adulthood among recent college graduates working in the Minneapolis-St. Paul restaurant industry. For the young people that I interviewed and worked alongside for a year, a central question in their lives appeared to be, how does one become an adult without the stable pay and prestige that has defined legitimate, middle class adulthood for prior generations? My study found that, for many white collar hopefuls, the beginnings of their careers were defined by a period of precarious employment—a waiting room, as some called it—for wealth, self-actualization, and adulthood itself. For those workers without means to subsidize their wages during this period, restaurant work provided an essential income stream and bulwark against economic instability. This period of underemployment ultimately fostered a waiting room subjectivity, a stultifying, yet creative state in which workers dealt with the practical problem of becoming adults despite deficits in prestige and income. Their tactics were crystallized in the internet meme adulting and ranged from traditional consumer activities such as purchasing a bed frame to communalist householding arrangements. Overall, I argue that their waiting room world constitutes one refraction of an emerging generational subject, haunted by the norms of the twentieth century but birthed into an era where those norms have collapsed into a disordered state of adulthood, fertile with risk and possibility

What is new in new nuclear criticism? : Post-Chernobyl perspective

Researching the literary dimension of the “nuclear” narrative in Eastern-European and North American writing practices gives an opportunity to distinguish not only the local/global features of the nuclear “Other” implementation in the context of researching ecological memory and nuclear identity formation in the post-Cold-War societies but also the new concepts, methods for analysis and forms, launched by the new “nuclear” age. The “original” nuclear criticism (posted by Derrida “No Apocalypse, Not Now: Seven Missiles and Seven Missives, 1984) seemed to be fading (due to the fact that the Cold War was considered to be over) and resulted in ecocritical movement. Nevertheless, Chernobyl as well as other “nuclear energy” events, and nuclear energy in general, changed the way we think about nuclear criticism, which has proved the launch of new nuclear criticism with its methodologies of literary analysis. My presentation will demonstrate the transformations of “nuclear energy” concept - from “the politicized Chernobyl” (regarded as a tomb of the Soviet regime, the “alternative history”, the Soviet self-destroying science, as a peace of propaganda policy, a factor of national identity formation) to “slow violence of the nuclear”(“Atom for Peace”, “Sarcophagus”, “the Exclusion Zone”, “cancer death”, “Zone culture”) - in writing practices about “Chernobyl” within the last 30 years (actually covered by the post-Chernobyl experience). Basing on “hyber object frame” (T.Morton), “intergenerational memory” studies (S.Lindsay), “collective narrative” (N.Bekhta) and through the psychoanalytical lens, such approach to “nuclear” subject formation and nuclear phobia as key concepts in the contermporary nuclear narratives encourages to discuss what a new nuclear criticism might look like today and reframe the “provincialized” nuclear narratives.Peer reviewe