2,527 research outputs found
Novelty and Collective Attention
The subject of collective attention is central to an information age where
millions of people are inundated with daily messages. It is thus of interest to
understand how attention to novel items propagates and eventually fades among
large populations. We have analyzed the dynamics of collective attention among
one million users of an interactive website -- \texttt{digg.com} -- devoted to
thousands of novel news stories. The observations can be described by a
dynamical model characterized by a single novelty factor. Our measurements
indicate that novelty within groups decays with a stretched-exponential law,
suggesting the existence of a natural time scale over which attention fades
Flow of emotional messages in artificial social networks
Models of message flows in an artificial group of users communicating via the
Internet are introduced and investigated using numerical simulations. We
assumed that messages possess an emotional character with a positive valence
and that the willingness to send the next affective message to a given person
increases with the number of messages received from this person. As a result,
the weights of links between group members evolve over time. Memory effects are
introduced, taking into account that the preferential selection of message
receivers depends on the communication intensity during the recent period only.
We also model the phenomenon of secondary social sharing when the reception of
an emotional e-mail triggers the distribution of several emotional e-mails to
other people.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figures, submitted to International Journal of Modern
Physics
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A Model for Cell Wall Dissolution in Mating Yeast Cells: Polarized Secretion and Restricted Diffusion of Cell Wall Remodeling Enzymes Induces Local Dissolution
Mating of the budding yeast, Saccharomyces cerevisiae, occurs when two haploid cells of opposite mating types signal using reciprocal pheromones and receptors, grow towards each other, and fuse to form a single diploid cell. To fuse, both cells dissolve their cell walls at the point of contact. This event must be carefully controlled because the osmotic pressure differential between the cytoplasm and extracellular environment causes cells with unprotected plasma membranes to lyse. If the cell wall-degrading enzymes diffuse through the cell wall, their concentration would rise when two cells touched each other, such as when two pheromone-stimulated cells adhere to each other via mating agglutinins. At the surfaces that touch, the enzymes must diffuse laterally through the wall before they can escape into the medium, increasing the time the enzymes spend in the cell wall, and thus raising their concentration at the point of attachment and restricting cell wall dissolution to points where cells touch each other. We tested this hypothesis by studying pheromone treated cells confined between two solid, impermeable surfaces. This confinement increases the frequency of pheromone-induced cell death, and this effect is diminished by reducing the osmotic pressure difference across the cell wall or by deleting putative cell wall glucanases and other genes necessary for efficient cell wall fusion. Our results support the model that pheromone-induced cell death is the result of a contact-driven increase in the local concentration of cell wall remodeling enzymes and suggest that this process plays an important role in regulating cell wall dissolution and fusion in mating cells
Long-time behavior of Ginzburg-Landau systems far from equilibrium
Using singular-perturbation techniques, we study the stability of modulated structures generated by driving Ginzburg-Landau systems far from equilibrium. We show that, far from equilibrium, the steady-state behavior is controlled by an effective Lagrangian which possesses the same functional form as the original free energy but with renormalized coefficients. We study both linear and nonlinear sources and determine their influence on the long-term stability of the bifurcating solutions
Economics-Based Optimization of Unstable Flows
As an example for the optimization of unstable flows, we present an
economics-based method for deciding the optimal rates at which vehicles are
allowed to enter a highway. It exploits the naturally occuring fluctuations of
traffic flow and is flexible enough to adapt in real time to the transient flow
characteristics of road traffic. Simulations based on realistic parameter
values show that this strategy is feasible for naturally occurring traffic, and
that even far from optimality, injection policies can improve traffic flow.
Moreover, the same method can be applied to the optimization of flows of gases
and granular media.Comment: Revised version of ``Optimizing Traffic Flow'' (cond-mat/9809397).
For related work see http://www.parc.xerox.com/dynamics/ and
http://www.theo2.physik.uni-stuttgart.de/helbing.htm
Evolution of reference networks with aging
We study the growth of a reference network with aging of sites defined in the
following way. Each new site of the network is connected to some old site with
probability proportional (i) to the connectivity of the old site as in the
Barab\'{a}si-Albert's model and (ii) to , where is the
age of the old site. We consider of any sign although reasonable
values are . We find both from simulation and
analytically that the network shows scaling behavior only in the region . When increases from to 0, the exponent of the
distribution of connectivities ( for large ) grows
from 2 to the value for the network without aging, i.e. to 3 for the
Barab\'{a}si-Albert's model. The following increase of to 1 makes
to grow to . For the distribution is
exponentional, and the network has a chain structure.Comment: 4 pages revtex (twocolumn, psfig), 5 figure
Power-law distributions from additive preferential redistributions
We introduce a non-growth model that generates the power-law distribution
with the Zipf exponent. There are N elements, each of which is characterized by
a quantity, and at each time step these quantities are redistributed through
binary random interactions with a simple additive preferential rule, while the
sum of quantities is conserved. The situation described by this model is
similar to those of closed -particle systems when conservative two-body
collisions are only allowed. We obtain stationary distributions of these
quantities both analytically and numerically while varying parameters of the
model, and find that the model exhibits the scaling behavior for some parameter
ranges. Unlike well-known growth models, this alternative mechanism generates
the power-law distribution when the growth is not expected and the dynamics of
the system is based on interactions between elements. This model can be applied
to some examples such as personal wealths, city sizes, and the generation of
scale-free networks when only rewiring is allowed.Comment: 12 pages, 4 figures; Changed some expressions and notations; Added
more explanations and changed the order of presentation in Sec.III while
results are the sam
Trends Prediction Using Social Diffusion Models
The importance of the ability of predict trends in social media has been
growing rapidly in the past few years with the growing dominance of social
media in our everyday's life. Whereas many works focus on the detection of
anomalies in networks, there exist little theoretical work on the prediction of
the likelihood of anomalous network pattern to globally spread and become
"trends". In this work we present an analytic model the social diffusion
dynamics of spreading network patterns. Our proposed method is based on
information diffusion models, and is capable of predicting future trends based
on the analysis of past social interactions between the community's members. We
present an analytic lower bound for the probability that emerging trends would
successful spread through the network. We demonstrate our model using two
comprehensive social datasets - the "Friends and Family" experiment that was
held in MIT for over a year, where the complete activity of 140 users was
analyzed, and a financial dataset containing the complete activities of over
1.5 million members of the "eToro" social trading community.Comment: 6 Pages + Appendi
Dendritic and axonal targeting patterns of a genetically-specified class of retinal ganglion cells that participate in image-forming circuits.
BackgroundThere are numerous functional types of retinal ganglion cells (RGCs), each participating in circuits that encode a specific aspect of the visual scene. This functional specificity is derived from distinct RGC morphologies and selective synapse formation with other retinal cell types; yet, how these properties are established during development remains unclear. Islet2 (Isl2) is a LIM-homeodomain transcription factor expressed in the developing retina, including approximately 40% of all RGCs, and has previously been implicated in the subtype specification of spinal motor neurons. Based on this, we hypothesized that Isl2+ RGCs represent a related subset that share a common function.ResultsWe morphologically and molecularly characterized Isl2+ RGCs using a transgenic mouse line that expresses GFP in the cell bodies, dendrites and axons of Isl2+ cells (Isl2-GFP). Isl2-GFP RGCs have distinct morphologies and dendritic stratification patterns within the inner plexiform layer and project to selective visual nuclei. Targeted filling of individual cells reveals that the majority of Isl2-GFP RGCs have dendrites that are monostratified in layer S3 of the IPL, suggesting they are not ON-OFF direction-selective ganglion cells. Molecular analysis shows that most alpha-RGCs, indicated by expression of SMI-32, are also Isl2-GFP RGCs. Isl2-GFP RGCs project to most retino-recipient nuclei during early development, but specifically innervate the dorsal lateral geniculate nucleus and superior colliculus (SC) at eye opening. Finally, we show that the segregation of Isl2+ and Isl2- RGC axons in the SC leads to the segregation of functional RGC types.ConclusionsTaken together, these data suggest that Isl2+ RGCs comprise a distinct class and support a role for Isl2 as an important component of a transcription factor code specifying functional visual circuits. Furthermore, this study describes a novel genetically-labeled mouse line that will be a valuable resource in future investigations of the molecular mechanisms of visual circuit formation
Properties of weighted complex networks
We study two kinds of weighted networks, weighted small-world (WSW) and
weighted scale-free (WSF). The weight of a link between nodes and
in the network is defined as the product of endpoint node degrees; that is
. In contrast to adding weights to links during
networks being constructed, we only consider weights depending on the ``
popularity\rq\rq of the nodes represented by their connectivity. It was found
that the both weighted networks have broad distributions on characterization
the link weight, vertex strength, and average shortest path length.
Furthermore, as a survey of the model, the epidemic spreading process in both
weighted networks was studied based on the standard \emph{susceptible-infected}
(SI) model. The spreading velocity reaches a peak very quickly after the
infection outbreaks and an exponential decay was found in the long time
propagation.Comment: 14 pages, 5 figure
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