Science mapping with asymmetrical paradigmatic proximity

We propose a series of methods to represent the evolution of a field of science at different levels: namely micro, meso and macro levels. We use a previously introduced asymmetric measure of paradigmatic proximity between terms that enable us to extract structure from a large publications database. We apply our set of methods on a case study from the Complex Systems Community through the mapping of more than 400 Complex Systems Science concepts indexed from a database as large as several millions of journal papers. We will first recapitulate the main properties of our asymmetric proximity measure. Then we show how salient paradigmatic fields can be embedded into a 2-dimensional visualization into which the terms are plotted according to their relative specificity and generality index. This meso-level helps us producing macroscopic maps of the field of science studied featuring the former paradigmatic fields

Betweenness and Diversity in Journal Citation Networks as Measures of Interdisciplinarity -- A Tribute to Eugene Garfield --

Journals were central to Eugene Garfield's research interests. Among other things, journals are considered as units of analysis for bibliographic databases such as the Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus. In addition to disciplinary classifications of journals, journal citation patterns span networks across boundaries to variable extents. Using betweenness centrality (BC) and diversity, we elaborate on the question of how to distinguish and rank journals in terms of interdisciplinarity. Interdisciplinarity, however, is difficult to operationalize in the absence of an operational definition of disciplines, the diversity of a unit of analysis is sample-dependent. BC can be considered as a measure of multi-disciplinarity. Diversity of co-citation in a citing document has been considered as an indicator of knowledge integration, but an author can also generate trans-disciplinary--that is, non-disciplined--variation by citing sources from other disciplines. Diversity in the bibliographic coupling among citing documents can analogously be considered as diffusion of knowledge across disciplines. Because the citation networks in the cited direction reflect both structure and variation, diversity in this direction is perhaps the best available measure of interdisciplinarity at the journal level. Furthermore, diversity is based on a summation and can therefore be decomposed, differences among (sub)sets can be tested for statistical significance. In an appendix, a general-purpose routine for measuring diversity in networks is provided

Modeling the Behavioral Landscape Ecology of a Reintroduced Carnivore

The American marten (Martes Americana) is an endangered forest carnivore native to the Upper Midwestern United States and culturally significant to local Ojibwe tribes. In this region, the marten faces a number of potential threats to its persistence, including competition, predation, lack of prey availability, lack of recruitment, and lack of population connectivity. To evaluate how marten behavior affects the conservation and management of this species, I developed an individual-based model to simulate marten dispersal and home range establishment. In Chapter 2, I describe the model and the process of calibrating it to perform comparably to real-world martens. I also demonstrate support for a theoretical hypothesis of animal dispersal, that a dispersing individual should be willing to settle in lower quality habitat over time. In Chapter 3, I apply this model to a nearby landscape in the region to determine how land use change, mortality, and asymmetrical landscape configuration affect the ability of martens to disperse and maintain connectivity between populations. Mortality of dispersing individuals had the greatest effect on connectivity, while landscape configuration had the greatest effect on dispersal metrics. In Chapter 4, I used a dynamic landscape simulation model combined with a model of land transformation to extend my IBM to investigate how 100 years of land use and climate change might affect marten populations. In Chapter 5, I demonstrate how behavioral barriers to mating among reintroduced martens from different source populations may be driving declines in genetic diversity in the region. Ultimately, this work shows how tools such as IBMs and population genetics can be used to address real-world conservation problems when experimental field methods are limited by factors such as time, cost, and scarcity. At the same time, these applications can be used to ask important questions of theoretical ecology, ultimately serving both pragmatic and paradigmatic purposes

The Reconstruction of Science Phylogeny

We are facing a real challenge when coping with the continuous acceleration of scientific production and the increasingly changing nature of science. In this article, we extend the classical framework of co-word analysis to the study of scientific landscape evolution. Capitalizing on formerly introduced science mapping methods with overlapping clustering, we propose methods to reconstruct phylogenetic networks from successive science maps, and give insight into the various dynamics of scientific domains. Two indexes - the pseudo-inclusion and the empirical quality - are introduced to qualify scientific fields and are used for reconstruction validation purpose. Phylogenetic dynamics appear to be strongly correlated to these two indexes, and to a weaker extent, to a third one previously introduced (density index). These results suggest that there exist regular patterns in the "life cycle" of scientific fields. The reconstruction of science phylogeny should improve our global understanding of science evolution and pave the way toward the development of innovative tools for our daily interactions with its productions. Over the long run, these methods should lead quantitative epistemology up to the point to corroborate or falsify theoretical models of science evolution based on large-scale phylogeny reconstruction from databases of scientific literature

Place Over Politics: Power, Strategy, Terrain, And Regime Type In Interstate War Outcomes, 1816-2003

While the study of war occurrence is among the primary considerations of the field of international relations, only recently has attention turned towards the study of war outcomes. This attention is best represented by the democratic victory proposition, which suggests that democracies win the majority of their wars by virtue of being democratic. However, elements of this study are currently incipient. In turn, this dissertation generates a novel set of variables to measure the impact of terrain on war outcomes, including measures of spatial extent, topographic heterogeneity, and land cover heterogeneity. These metrics are generated for all 94 interstate wars in the correlates of war population between 1816-2003, as well as disaggregated forms of WWI, WWII, and Vietnam – bringing the total to 105 wars. These data are then used to analyze war outcomes using multinomial logistic regression. The results suggest that, at present, the democratic victory proposition is incomplete. Further research is needed to explore the complex relationship between state capabilities, strategy, regime type, and terrain

Place Over Politics: Power, Strategy, Terrain, And Regime Type In Interstate War Outcomes, 1816-2003

While the study of war occurrence is among the primary considerations of the field of international relations, only recently has attention turned towards the study of war outcomes. This attention is best represented by the democratic victory proposition, which suggests that democracies win the majority of their wars by virtue of being democratic. However, elements of this study are currently incipient. In turn, this dissertation generates a novel set of variables to measure the impact of terrain on war outcomes, including measures of spatial extent, topographic heterogeneity, and land cover heterogeneity. These metrics are generated for all 94 interstate wars in the correlates of war population between 1816-2003, as well as disaggregated forms of WWI, WWII, and Vietnam – bringing the total to 105 wars. These data are then used to analyze war outcomes using multinomial logistic regression. The results suggest that, at present, the democratic victory proposition is incomplete. Further research is needed to explore the complex relationship between state capabilities, strategy, regime type, and terrain

Towards an ‘alternative’ geography of innovation:Alternative milieu, socio-cognitive protection and sustainability experimentation

This paper highlights the hitherto unrecognised role of ‘alternative’ places in protecting different forms of sustainability innovation. The paper uses the concept of an alternative milieu to illustrate how a geographically localised concentration of countercultural practices, institutions and networks can create socio-cognitive ‘niche’ protection for sustainability experiments. An alternative milieu creates protection for the emergence of novelties by (i) creating ontological and epistemological multiplicity; (ii) sustain- ing productive spatial imaginaries; and (iii) supporting ontological security. These different dimensions of protection are explored with reference to an in-depth, empirical case study of Totnes in the United Kingdom. The paper concludes with some reflections on the theoretical implications of this research for the theorising of niche protection and for the geographies of innovation more generally, along with some recommendations for future areas of enquiry

Transnational corporations, state and classes in Turkey: the rise of new forms of dependent development in global automotive value chains

Is dependency theory dead as an explanation of underdevelopment in today’s global economy? Has the rise of new economic powerhouses and an increasing share of higher value-added manufacturing in the global south cast the notions of subordination, peripherality and dependence into the dustbin of history? Today, a broad consensus answers these questions in the affirmative. In stark contrast to this commonly-held contention in the current development discourse, this study aims to bring these notions back to critical development studies by offering an up-to-date and analytically valid conceptualisation of dependency in today’s global south. Taking the historical-structural dependency perspective as a point of departure, the study revisits and builds upon the notion of dependent development by drawing on a set of conceptual insights derived from Schumpeter’s theory of innovation, Global Value Chain analyses and a class-relational articulation of the developmental state. In doing so, the study shows how core-like and periphery-like activities have clustered in time and space, leading to polarisation in today’s global economy, and how new forms of dependency have been spatially re-produced along hierarchically-structured global value chains through the interplay of transnational corporations, states and classes. Based on this framework, the study then explores the limits and prospects of capitalist development and its implications for wider society in today’s global south. With occasional references to cases of dependent development in Latin America and East Asia, the study examines changing dynamics and rise of new forms of dependency relations in Turkey and the Turkish automotive industry. Adding a sense of change and movement, the study shows how dependent nature of Turkish capitalist development has concretised and taken new forms along automotive value chains through shifting configurations of class forces and state-society relations, and their manifold interactions with the world economy, from the early years of modern Turkey to the present

Synergistic information in a dynamical model implemented on the human structural connectome reveals spatially distinct associations with age

We implement the dynamical Ising model on the large scale architecture of white matter connections of healthy subjects in the age range 4-85 years, and analyze the dynamics in terms of the synergy, a quantity measuring the extent to which the joint state of pairs of variables is projected onto the dynamics of a target one. We find that the amount of synergy in explaining the dynamics of the hubs of the structural connectivity (in terms of degree strength) peaks before the critical temperature, and can thus be considered as a precursor of a critical transition. Conversely the greatest amount of synergy goes into explaining the dynamics of more central nodes. We also find that the aging of the structural connectivity is associated to significant changes in the simulated dynamics: there are brain regions whose synergy decreases with age, in particular the Frontal Pole, the Subcallosal area and the Supplementary Motor area; these areas could then be more likely to show a decline in terms of the capability to perform higher order computation (if structural connectivity was the sole variable). On the other hand, several regions in the temporal cortex show a positive correlation with age in the first 30 years of life, i.e. during brain maturation