42,287 research outputs found

    Chronic infection: punctuated interpenetration and pathogen virulence

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    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

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    '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

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    It is known that the order of correlation immunity of a nonconstant unbalanced Boolean function in nn variables cannot exceed 2n/3−12n/3-1; moreover, it is 2n/3−12n/3-1 if and only if the function corresponds to an equitable 22-partition of the nn-cube with an eigenvalue −n/3-n/3 of the quotient matrix. The known series of such functions have proportion 1:31:3, 3:53:5, or 7:97:9 of the number of ones and zeros. We prove that if a nonconstant unbalanced Boolean function attains the correlation-immunity bound and has ratio C:BC:B of the number of ones and zeros, then CBCB is divisible by 33. In particular, this proves the nonexistence of equitable partitions for an infinite series of putative quotient matrices. We also establish that there are exactly 22 equivalence classes of the equitable partitions of the 1212-cube with quotient matrix [[3,9],[7,5]][[3,9],[7,5]] and 1616 classes, with [[0,12],[4,8]][[0,12],[4,8]]. These parameters correspond to the Boolean functions in 1212 variables with correlation immunity 77 and proportion 7:97:9 and 1:31:3, respectively (the case 3:53:5 remains unsolved). This also implies the characterization of the orthogonal arrays OA(1024,12,2,7)(1024,12,2,7) and OA(512,11,2,6)(512,11,2,6).Comment: v3: final; title changed; revised; OA(512,11,2,6) discusse

    Culture and Cancer

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    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

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    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

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    We introduce a new class of rate one-half binary codes: {\bf complementary information set codes.} A binary linear code of length 2n2n and dimension nn 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 <132.<132. 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 ≀12\le 12 by the building up construction. Some nonlinear permutations are constructed by using Z4\Z_4-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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