42,287 research outputs found
Chronic infection: punctuated interpenetration and pathogen virulence
We apply an information dynamics formalism to the Levens and Lewontin vision of biological interpenetration between a 'cognitive condensation' including immune function embedded in social and cultural structure on the one hand, and an established, highly adaptive, parasite population on the other. We iterate the argument, beginning with direct interaction between cognitive condensation and pathogen, then extend the analysis to second order 'mutator' mechanisms inherent both to immune function and to certain forms of rapid pathogen antigenic variability.
The methodology, based on the Large Deviations Program of applied probability, produces synergistic cognitive/adaptive 'learning plateaus' that represent stages of chronic infection, and, for human populations, is able to encompass the fundamental biological reality of culture omitted by other approaches.
We conclude that, for 'evolution machine' pathogens like HIV and malaria, simplistic magic bullet 'medical' drug, vaccine, or behavior modification interventions which do not address the critical context of overall living and working conditions may constitute selection pressures triggering adaptations in life history strategy resulting in marked increase of pathogen virulenc
Toward Cultural Oncology: The Evolutionary Information Dynamics of Cancer
'Racial' disparities among cancers, particularly of the breast and prostate, are something of a mystery. For the US, in the face of slavery and its sequelae, centuries of interbreeding have greatly leavened genetic differences between 'Blacks' and 'whites', but marked contrasts in disease prevalence and progression persist. 'Adjustment' for socioeconomic status and lifestyle, while statistically accounting for much of the variance in breast cancer, only begs the question of ultimate causality. Here we propose a more basic biological explanation that extends the theory of immune cognition to include elaborate tumor control mechanisms constituting the principal selection pressure acting on pathologically mutating cell clones. The interplay between them occurs in the context of an embedding, highly structured, system of culturally specific psychosocial stress which we find is able to literally write an image of itself onto disease progression. The dynamics are analogous to punctuated equilibrium in simple evolutionary proces
On unbalanced Boolean functions with best correlation immunity
It is known that the order of correlation immunity of a nonconstant
unbalanced Boolean function in variables cannot exceed ; moreover,
it is if and only if the function corresponds to an equitable
-partition of the -cube with an eigenvalue of the quotient matrix.
The known series of such functions have proportion , , or of
the number of ones and zeros. We prove that if a nonconstant unbalanced Boolean
function attains the correlation-immunity bound and has ratio of the
number of ones and zeros, then is divisible by . In particular, this
proves the nonexistence of equitable partitions for an infinite series of
putative quotient matrices. We also establish that there are exactly
equivalence classes of the equitable partitions of the -cube with quotient
matrix and classes, with . These
parameters correspond to the Boolean functions in variables with
correlation immunity and proportion and , respectively (the case
remains unsolved). This also implies the characterization of the
orthogonal arrays OA and OA.Comment: v3: final; title changed; revised; OA(512,11,2,6) discusse
Culture and Cancer
Genetic mechanisms, since they broadly involve information
transmission, should be translatable into information dynamics formalism. From this perspective we reconsider the adaptive mutator, one possible means of 'second order selection' by which a highly structured 'language' of environment and development writes itself onto the variation upon which evolutionary selection and tumorigenesis operate. Our approach uses recent results in the spirit of the Large Deviations Program of applied probability that permit transfer of phase transition approaches from statistical mechanics to information theory, generating evolutionary and developmental punctuation in what we claim to be a highly natural manner
Consciousness, cognition, and the hierarchy of context: extending the global neuronal workspace model
We adapt an information theory analysis of interacting cognitive biological and social modules to the problem of the global neuronal workspace, the new standard neuroscience paradigm for consciousness. Tunable punctuation emerges in a natural way, suggesting the possibility of fitting appropriate phase transition power law, and away from transition, generalized Onsager relation expressions, to observational data on conscious reaction. The development can be extended in a straightforward manner to include psychosocial stress, culture, or other cognitive modules which constitute a structured, embedding hierarchy of contextual constraints acting at a slower rate than neuronal function itself. This produces a 'biopsychosociocultural' model of individual consciousness that, while otherwise quite close to the standard treatment, meets compelling philosophical and other objections to brain-only descriptions
A new class of codes for Boolean masking of cryptographic computations
We introduce a new class of rate one-half binary codes: {\bf complementary
information set codes.} A binary linear code of length and dimension
is called a complementary information set code (CIS code for short) if it has
two disjoint information sets. This class of codes contains self-dual codes as
a subclass. It is connected to graph correlation immune Boolean functions of
use in the security of hardware implementations of cryptographic primitives.
Such codes permit to improve the cost of masking cryptographic algorithms
against side channel attacks. In this paper we investigate this new class of
codes: we give optimal or best known CIS codes of length We derive
general constructions based on cyclic codes and on double circulant codes. We
derive a Varshamov-Gilbert bound for long CIS codes, and show that they can all
be classified in small lengths by the building up construction. Some
nonlinear permutations are constructed by using -codes, based on the
notion of dual distance of an unrestricted code.Comment: 19 pages. IEEE Trans. on Information Theory, to appea
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