Policymaking and Learning Actors, or Is A ’Double Movement’ In Cognition Possible?

  One of the key issues in K. Polanyi’s (1944, 1957) work is that capitalist markets may be inconsistent with societal values. This (external) inconsistency eventually leads to a reaction against the rationale of the market, what Polanyi refers to with the notion of the double movement. The double movement, in turn, may disrupt the (internal) consistency of the market, thereby leading to dramatic consequences for society, as was the case with fascism and nazism. A crucial question therefore is how to achieve a protective response without undermining society. The paper contends that the two types of (in)consistency basically depend on the shared knowledge available in a given society. It therefore discusses how that knowledge arises and how actors may favor or prevent change by acting on learning processes. The aim is to stress that a policy for change not only requires a scientific perspective that is not restricted within disciplinary boundaries, it also requires a dialogue between social scientists, policy-makers and all those sections of society who can be affected by a change in the status quo.

Industrial Districts and Economic Decline in Italy

� The paper argues that the so-called canonical view of the Italian industrial district (ID) depicts it as a system whose economic and social vitality requires the interaction between two major sub-systems: a community of people and a community of firms. A range of circumstances - including insufficient aggregate demand, competition from low-cost coun- tries and technological change - have determined inconsistencies between the rationales of these two sub-systems. As a result, lead firms have emerged that substitute the ID as coordinating instances. In the pursuit of their goals, they tend to prefer cost scrapping to quality enhancement, thereby determining a competition that further undermines the ID as a system. The paper contends that this outcome is not the only possible one. An alternative would require the regulatory - as opposed to merely permissive - action of pub- lic actors in that it would have to change the incentive system that leads firms to choose short-sighted strategies.

cyTRON and cyTRON/JS: two Cytoscape-based applications for the inference of cancer evolution models

The increasing availability of sequencing data of cancer samples is fueling the development of algorithmic strategies to investigate tumor heterogeneity and infer reliable models of cancer evolution. We here build up on previous works on cancer progression inference from genomic alteration data, to deliver two distinct Cytoscape-based applications, which allow to produce, visualize and manipulate cancer evolution models, also by interacting with public genomic and proteomics databases. In particular, we here introduce cyTRON, a stand-alone Cytoscape app, and cyTRON/JS, a web application which employs the functionalities of Cytoscape/JS. cyTRON was developed in Java; the code is available at https://github.com/BIMIB-DISCo/cyTRON and on the Cytoscape App Store http://apps.cytoscape.org/apps/cytron. cyTRON/JS was developed in JavaScript and R; the source code of the tool is available at https://github.com/BIMIB-DISCo/cyTRON-js and the tool is accessible from https://bimib.disco.unimib.it/cytronjs/welcome

Unemployment as a social cost

Over the last decade, workfare programmes provided support to the unemployed only insofar as they were willing to accept a job. The theoretical underpinnings of these programmes are that institutional constraints prevent labour supply from adjusting to the technologically determined requirements of labour demand. We contend that when individuals look for a job, they generally want to take into account non-monetary features such as occupational status. Status cannot be traded, it usually is complementary to income, it determines lifestyles and life possibilities. As for labour demand, its requirements do not reflect efficient behaviour and technical constraints because business ”efficiency” cannot be taken to be a measure of social efficiency and technology cannot be used as a benchmark to assess the efficiency of business conduct. We suggest that Sen’s notion of capabilities may constitute an appropriate benchmark to assess the social efficiency of the economic system. This leads us to a few policy implications. The ”capabilities benchmark” leads us to stress the importance of freedom to choose how to conduct one’s life. Acting in favour of freedom involves the understanding of how business strategies affect learning patterns and available choice sets. It also involves the assessment of policy issues - such as cooperation between the scientific community and business, scientific freedom, educational goals and their institutional implementation, and unemployment relief systems - which may influence the relation between business strategies and social learning.

A Model of Colonic Crypts using SBML Spatial

The Spatial Processes package enables an explicit definition of a spatial environment on top of the normal dynamic modeling SBML capabilities. The possibility of an explicit representation of spatial dynamics increases the representation power of SBML. In this work we used those new SBML features to define an extensive model of colonic crypts composed of the main cellular types (from stem cells to fully differentiated cells), alongside their spatial dynamics.Comment: In Proceedings Wivace 2013, arXiv:1309.712