A nonuniform popularity-similarity optimization (nPSO) model to efficiently generate realistic complex networks with communities

The hidden metric space behind complex network topologies is a fervid topic in current network science and the hyperbolic space is one of the most studied, because it seems associated to the structural organization of many real complex systems. The Popularity-Similarity-Optimization (PSO) model simulates how random geometric graphs grow in the hyperbolic space, reproducing strong clustering and scale-free degree distribution, however it misses to reproduce an important feature of real complex networks, which is the community organization. The Geometrical-Preferential-Attachment (GPA) model was recently developed to confer to the PSO also a community structure, which is obtained by forcing different angular regions of the hyperbolic disk to have variable level of attractiveness. However, the number and size of the communities cannot be explicitly controlled in the GPA, which is a clear limitation for real applications. Here, we introduce the nonuniform PSO (nPSO) model that, differently from GPA, forces heterogeneous angular node attractiveness by sampling the angular coordinates from a tailored nonuniform probability distribution, for instance a mixture of Gaussians. The nPSO differs from GPA in other three aspects: it allows to explicitly fix the number and size of communities; it allows to tune their mixing property through the network temperature; it is efficient to generate networks with high clustering. After several tests we propose the nPSO as a valid and efficient model to generate networks with communities in the hyperbolic space, which can be adopted as a realistic benchmark for different tasks such as community detection and link prediction

A Gymnasion at Segesta? A Review of the Archaeological and Epigraphic Evidence

Obwohl zahlreiche Inschriften aus Sizilien Gymnasia und ihre Ämter erwähnen, ist die Kenntnis der zugehörigen Architektur spärlich, weil die Identifizierung von Gymnasia oft umstritten ist. Das betrifft exemplarisch die hellenistische Stadt Segesta, in der Ausgrabungen der Scuola Normale Superiore Inschriften mit Bezug zu einem Gymnasion und einen Peristylbau freigelegt haben, der als Teil eines Gymnasions identifiziert worden ist. Dieser Beitrag untersucht kritisch die entsprechenden epigraphischen und archäologischen Quellen und diskutiert, was sie aussagen und ob sie begründet verbunden werden können. Er zeigt, dass nur eine Inschrift die Existenz der Gymnasiarchie in Segesta belegt und der Peristylbau eher zu einem einheitlich geplanten Komplex politisch-administrativer Bauten gehörte

What Apostles and Prophets Taught Me About the Church

One of the most influential books in the last few years has been Dr. David Cannistraci’s The Gift of Apostle. Dr. Cannistraci’s article “New Apostolic Churches and Evangelical Theology” will answer some of the questions that may have been raised by it

What Apostles and Prophets Taught Me About the Church

One of the most influential books in the last few years has been Dr. David Cannistraci’s The Gift of Apostle. Dr. Cannistraci’s article “New Apostolic Churches and Evangelical Theology” will answer some of the questions that may have been raised by it

Do you see what I mean? The role of visual speech information in lexical representations

Human speech is necessarily multimodal and audiovisual redundancies in speech may play a vital role in speech perception across the lifespan. The majority of previous studies have focused particularly on how language is learned from auditory input, but the way in which audiovisual speech information is perceived and comprehended remains less well understood. Here, I examine how audiovisual and visual-only speech information is represented for known words, and if intersensory processing efficiency ability predicts the strength of the lexical representation. To explore the relationship between intersensory processing ability (indexed by matching temporally synchronous auditory and visual stimulation) and the strength of lexical representations, adult subjects participated in an audiovisual word recognition task and the Intersensory Processing Efficiency Protocol (IPEP). Participants were able to reliably identify a correct referent object across manipulations of modality (audiovisual vs visual-only) and pronunciation (correctly vs mispronounced). Correlational analyses did not reveal any relationship between processing efficiency and visual speech information in lexical representations. However, the results presented here suggest that adults’ lexical representations robustly include visual speech information and that visual speech information is sublexically processed during speech perception

Latent Geometry Inspired Graph Dissimilarities Enhance Affinity Propagation Community Detection in Complex Networks

Affinity propagation is one of the most effective unsupervised pattern recognition algorithms for data clustering in high-dimensional feature space. However, the numerous attempts to test its performance for community detection in complex networks have been attaining results very far from the state of the art methods such as Infomap and Louvain. Yet, all these studies agreed that the crucial problem is to convert the unweighted network topology in a 'smart-enough' node dissimilarity matrix that is able to properly address the message passing procedure behind affinity propagation clustering. Here we introduce a conceptual innovation and we discuss how to leverage network latent geometry notions in order to design dissimilarity matrices for affinity propagation community detection. Our results demonstrate that the latent geometry inspired dissimilarity measures we design bring affinity propagation to equal or outperform current state of the art methods for community detection. These findings are solidly proven considering both synthetic 'realistic' networks (with known ground-truth communities) and real networks (with community metadata), even when the data structure is corrupted by noise artificially induced by missing or spurious connectivity