How is the human brain like the Internet, metabolic networks, relations among English words, US airport networks, Hungarian road networks

Navigable networks as Nash equilibria of navigation games

András Gulyás, József J. Bíró, Attila Kőrösi, Gábor Rétvári & Dmitri Krioukov

Nature Communications 6, Article number: 7651 doi:10.1038/ncomms8651

Received 04 December 2014 Accepted 26 May 2015 Published 03 July 2015

Abstract: Common sense suggests that networks are not random mazes of purposeless connections, but that these connections are organized so that networks can perform their functions well. One function common to many networks is targeted transport or navigation. Here, using game theory, we show that minimalistic networks designed to maximize the navigation efficiency at minimal cost share basic structural properties with real networks. These idealistic networks are Nash equilibria of a network construction game whose purpose is to find an optimal trade-off between the network cost and navigability. We show that these skeletons are present in the Internet, metabolic, English word, US airport, Hungarian road networks, and in a structural network of the human brain. The knowledge of these skeletons allows one to identify the minimal number of edges, by altering which one can efficiently improve or paralyse navigation in the network.

A Brexit State of Mind @3QD: The Vision Thing

My latest post is up at 3 Quarks Daily, A Brexit State of Mind: The Vision Thing. I start with a dream–not a nightmare, but not a laughriot either–move into Brexit, dip into history, then on to the AI singularity and the end of science. I conclude with Tim Burke on Hillary Clinton.

Interspersed with five flix. These aren’t among them, but who knows? they might have been.

Networks in the Middle Ages

Calculating the Middle Ages? The Project "Complexities and Networks in the Medieval Mediterranean and Near East" (COMMED)

Johannes Preiser-Kapeller

(Submitted on 11 Dec 2015)

The project "Complexities and networks in the Medieval Mediterranean and Near East" (COMMED) at the Division for Byzantine Research of the Institute for Medieval Research (IMAFO) of the Austrian Academy of Sciences focuses on the adaptation and development of concepts and tools of network theory and complexity sciences for the analysis of societies, polities and regions in the medieval world in a comparative perspective. Key elements of its methodological and technological toolkit are applied, for instance, in the new project "Mapping medieval conflicts: a digital approach towards political dynamics in the pre-modern period" (MEDCON), which analyses political networks and conflict among power elites across medieval Europe with five case studies from the 12th to 15th century. For one of these case studies on 14th century Byzantium, the explanatory value of this approach is presented in greater detail. The presented results are integrated in a wider comparison of five late medieval polities across Afro-Eurasia (Byzantium, China, England, Hungary and Mamluk Egypt) against the background of the {\guillemotright}Late Medieval Crisis{\guillemotleft} and its political and environmental turmoil. Finally, further perspectives of COMMED are outlined.

Comments:	23 figures
Subjects:	Physics and Society (physics.soc-ph); Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems (nlin.AO)
Journal reference:	medieval worlds, 1.2 (2015) 100 - 127
DOI:	10.1553/medievalworlds_no2_2015s100
Cite as:	arXiv:1606.03433 [physics.soc-ph]
	(or arXiv:1606.03433v1 [physics.soc-ph] for this version)

H/t 3QD.

Search in the green

Respose to Sad Music

Eerola T, Peltola H-R (2016) Memorable Experiences with Sad Music—Reasons, Reactions and Mechanisms of Three Types of Experiences. PLoS ONE 11(6): e0157444. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0157444

Abstract: Reactions to memorable experiences of sad music were studied by means of a survey administered to a convenience (N = 1577), representative (N = 445), and quota sample (N = 414). The survey explored the reasons, mechanisms, and emotions of such experiences. Memorable experiences linked with sad music typically occurred in relation to extremely familiar music, caused intense and pleasurable experiences, which were accompanied by physiological reactions and positive mood changes in about a third of the participants. A consistent structure of reasons and emotions for these experiences was identified through exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses across the samples. Three types of sadness experiences were established, one that was genuinely negative (Grief-Stricken Sorrow) and two that were positive (Comforting Sorrow and Sweet Sorrow). Each type of emotion exhibited certain individual differences and had distinct profiles in terms of the underlying reasons, mechanisms, and elicited reactions. The prevalence of these broad types of emotional experiences suggested that positive experiences are the most frequent, but negative experiences were not uncommon in any of the samples. The findings have implications for measuring emotions induced by music and fiction in general, and call attention to the non-pleasurable aspects of these experiences.

From the discussion:

Defusing the paradox of pleasurable sadness

The results help us to contextualise several of the conflicting results obtained in the previous studies of music and sadness. First of all, the paradox of pleasurable sadnesss is actually less puzzling if one acknowledges that there are different types of “sadnesses”. Past empirical studies have put particular emphasis on the pleasurable experiences induced by sad music [5, 6, 9, 53], which could be close to Sublime Sorrow or at least Comforting Sorrow identified in the present study. Only few empirical studies have acknowledged the fact that the experiences induced by sad music might actually be genuinely negative, harrowing and unpleasant [18, 22] although such experiences are acknowledged by ethnomusicological field studies [15, 54]. The third factor in this study (Grief-Stricken Sorrow) seems to portray such affective experiences, wherein the thematic analysis of the experiences’ content revealed themes of bereavement, mourning, and loss.

Secondly, there seems to be a clear difference between an aesthetic emotion, such as the one labelled here as Sublime Sorrow, and the other type of positive experience, Comforting Sorrow. The latter is related to other people, to social relationships, and is typically more reflective than the experiences induced by moving music, which is one of the hallmarks of Sublime Sorrow. When looking at the qualitative data, lyrics seemed to play a crucial role within the experiences relating to difficult situations of life. This observation stands out in interesting light when comparing it to a finding by Brattico and her colleagues [12], who discovered that lyrics (or vocal information in general) may be crucial for defining the sadness of a musical piece. Furthermore, in their study, participants judged instrumental sad music as more pleasant and beautiful than music containing lyrics. Thus, it might be that Sublime Sorrow is more relevant for the experiences of listening to instrumental music, whereas Grief-Stricken Sorrow and Comforting Sorrow are induced by vocal music with meaningful lyrics. However, since our participants did not consistently identify the type of music they were describing, this connection can only be speculated.

If the differences related to sadness are unacknowledged, this could lead research to either focus on mood regulation strategies [8] if the emphasis is placed on experiences related to Comforting Sorrow, or to aesthetic experiences [55] when the Sublime Sorrow is the actual object of study. In some cases, both types of experiences seem to be combined [6], but such strategies need more refined treatment of the experiences involved in sadness before they will lead to genuinely novel insights on the topic.

The Universal Map, Apple or Google?

From 2011 to 2015 Justine O'Beirne led Apple's mapping efforts. He' been writing some interesting essays. From 2015, The Universal Map: Cartography's Most Important Moment is Rapidly Approaching:

Just thirty years ago—and for most of human history—a cartographer would make a map, print and distribute it, and hope that maybe a few thousand or so people would ever use it before it went out of date. Apart from a handful of atlases and classroom maps, most maps had small, local audiences, went out of date quickly, and were often difficult to read and understand—let alone share.

Fast forward to today, and cartography has since undergone a number of profound changes:

• An unprecedented level of detail is now available to the average person, for little or no cost. ...
• Maps are now always up to date. ...
• Maps fit us, regardless of who or where we are. ...
• Maps are integrated with robust search & routing. ...
• Advanced sensors keep us apprised of our current location, 24 hours a day. ... 

These are all profound technical changes, 10x improvements that are hugely impactful in their own right. But there’s an even deeper, more profound cultural change seemingly on the horizon:

FOR THE FIRST TIME IN HUMAN HISTORY, THE MAJORITY OF THE WORLD MIGHT SOON BE USING THE SAME MAP.

And he's just published the first part of a four-part comparison between Google Maps and Apple Maps, the current leading candidates for the first universal map. The first part looks at map contents, cities, roads, and places:

We looked at 54 pairs of maps across three cities (New York, San Francisco, and London) and found several significant differences (POI = point of interest):

• Apple Maps, on average, labels more cities than Google at every zoom.

• Google Maps, on average, labels more roads than Apple on nearly every zoom.

• For two-thirds of zooms, both maps generally show the same number of roads. For the remaining third, Apple almost always shows more roads.

• Both maps, on average, label a similar number of POIs—but have only 10% of their POIs in common on an average zoom.

• Both maps also prioritize different kinds of POIs: Google Maps heavily prioritizes transit, while Apple prioritizes landmarks. Apple also generally shows a greater number of POI categories on a given zoom—and shows twice as many restaurants and shops as Google.

Oblique Iris

The Birth of the Drum Set

By Nick Jaina in Smithsonian Folkways Magazine:

For the drums are not one instrument, but many. The drum set is a hybrid of instruments from around the world, from cultures that were assembling in port cities like New Orleans. The snare and bass drum were once slung over shoulders in European militaries, the drum heads pulled tight by ropes, and that tradition carried over to American armies. Chinese immigrants came to the United States because they were hired or forced into labor, and they brought with them their own centuries-old theater traditions, highlighted by colorfully-painted tom-toms that made a beautiful full sound, distinct from snares or bass drums. Cymbals evolved from bronze cisterns made in places like Turkey and China; they were later pounded into flatter shapes and supplied to countries around Europe for operas and military music, becoming so popular in the United States that Zildjian, the original Turkish cymbal company, eventually moved to Massachusetts.

The Dee Dee Chandler and the groove:

The drum set was coalescing at the same time jazz was, and they helped to push each other along. The distillation of the different rhythmic instruments into one set to be played by one person meant that the rhythmic interpretation was now codified in one human body. For centuries, percussion instruments in classical music were played by different people, and, perhaps partly for that reason, “groove” and feel were never paramount. For the first time in history, one human body was able to create the pulse, the back beat, the syncopation, and the texture of a percussion part all by itself. The possibilities for more forward, propulsive, linear grooves turned the musical world upside down for decades to come.

Edward “Dee Dee” Chandler was a drummer living in New Orleans at the turn of the century. He played music in two worlds: the down and dirty shows in the brothels of Storyville and the high-society gigs at places like the Grunwald Hotel off of Canal Street. He was of mixed race and could roughly pass for white, but when Plessy v. Ferguson was handed down, it included rules limiting the freedom of anyone with even a drop of mixed-race blood from going to places like the Grunwald.

But again, from limitation comes innovation. Other people had done such a thing before, but Dee Dee Chandler was perhaps one of the first drummers to use a makeshift pedal to play the bass drum with his foot while playing snare with his hands. Before that you would have to have a different musician play each instrument or use a style called “double drumming,” which involved playing bass drum and snare drum simultaneously with both hands and no feet, limiting the kind of rhythms you could express on the snare. The weird contraption that allowed Chandler to play the bass drum with his foot was not smooth like today’s pedals and must have been a challenge to play. But it was a point on the evolution of the drum set as a more dynamic instrument that, in just a few decades, would become the lynchpin of jazz ensembles, whose rhythmic playfulness created some of the best music of the century. And it was the music created in those poorer places, with audiences innovating new dance steps like swing, that made jazz music so alive.

In a comment on the article Samm Bennett links to his page of vintage drum kits from the 1920s and 1930s.

Heavy lifter floats down the Hudson

Viet Thanh Nguyen's Pulitzer and the continuing apocalypse, now

David Streitfeld in the NYTimes:

LOS ANGELES — Viet Thanh Nguyen has been wrestling with “Apocalypse Now” for most of his life — as a boy, a college student, a scholar, a writer of fiction. The movie was initially a source of pain, then a puzzle to be understood, and finally an inspiration for his novel about a Vietnamese spy, “The Sympathizer.”

Even now, after a rapturous reception for the novel, his first, that included the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, Mr. Nguyen’s feelings about Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 war epic are still somewhat raw.

I was struck by this paragraph:

“People just like me were being slaughtered,” Mr. Nguyen said. “I felt violated.” A decade later, as a student at Berkeley, he talked about the scene for a film class. He began rationally, he remembered, and then realized his voice was full of rage. “It was an antiwar movie about the war in Vietnam, but the movie was about Americans,” he said. “The Vietnamese were silent and erased.”

Apocalypse Now was loosely based on Heart of Darkness. China Achebe said much the same thing about Heart of Darkness in his essay, "An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness'" (Massachusetts Review. 18. 1977):

Students of Heart of Darkness will often tell you that Conrad is concerned not so much with Africa as with the deterioration of one European mind caused by solitude and sickness. They will point out to you that Conrad is, if anything, less charitable to the Europeans in the story than he is to the natives, that the point of the story is to ridicule Europe's civilizing mission in Africa. A Conrad student informed me in Scotland that Africa is merely a setting for the disintegration of the mind of Mr. Kurtz.

Which is partly the point. Africa as setting and backdrop which eliminates the African as human factor. Africa as a metaphysical battlefield devoid of all recognizable humanity, into which the wandering European enters at his peril. Can nobody see the preposterous and perverse arrogance in thus reducing Africa to the role of props for the break-up of one petty European mind? But that is not even the point. The real question is the dehumanization of Africa and Africans which this age-long attitude has fostered and continues to foster in the world.

Motion Blur

Limitations of the Google Books Corpus for Drawing Inferences about Cultural and Linguistic Evolution

Pechenick EA, Danforth CM, Dodds PS (2015) Characterizing the Google Books Corpus: Strong Limits to Inferences of Socio-Cultural and Linguistic Evolution. PLoS ONE 10(10): e0137041. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0137041

Abstract: It is tempting to treat frequency trends from the Google Books data sets as indicators of the “true” popularity of various words and phrases. Doing so allows us to draw quantitatively strong conclusions about the evolution of cultural perception of a given topic, such as time or gender. However, the Google Books corpus suffers from a number of limitations which make it an obscure mask of cultural popularity. A primary issue is that the corpus is in effect a library, containing one of each book. A single, prolific author is thereby able to noticeably insert new phrases into the Google Books lexicon, whether the author is widely read or not. With this understood, the Google Books corpus remains an important data set to be considered more lexicon-like than text-like. Here, we show that a distinct problematic feature arises from the inclusion of scientific texts, which have become an increasingly substantive portion of the corpus throughout the 1900s. The result is a surge of phrases typical to academic articles but less common in general, such as references to time in the form of citations. We use information theoretic methods to highlight these dynamics by examining and comparing major contributions via a divergence measure of English data sets between decades in the period 1800–2000. We find that only the English Fiction data set from the second version of the corpus is not heavily affected by professional texts. Overall, our findings call into question the vast majority of existing claims drawn from the Google Books corpus, and point to the need to fully characterize the dynamics of the corpus before using these data sets to draw broad conclusions about cultural and linguistic evolution.

Sex? What's the Difference? It's not binary; it's complex.

Claire Ainsworth in Nature, from February 15, 2016:

Sex can be much more complicated than it at first seems. According to the simple scenario, the presence or absence of a Y chromosome is what counts: with it, you are male, and without it, you are female. But doctors have long known that some people straddle the boundary — their sex chromosomes say one thing, but their gonads (ovaries or testes) or sexual anatomy say another. Parents of children with these kinds of conditions — known as intersex conditions, or differences or disorders of sex development (DSDs) — often face difficult decisions about whether to bring up their child as a boy or a girl. Some researchers now say that as many as 1 person in 100 has some form of DSD2.

When genetics is taken into consideration, the boundary between the sexes becomes even blurrier. Scientists have identified many of the genes involved in the main forms of DSD, and have uncovered variations in these genes that have subtle effects on a person's anatomical or physiological sex. What's more, new technologies in DNA sequencing and cell biology are revealing that almost everyone is, to varying degrees, a patchwork of genetically distinct cells, some with a sex that might not match that of the rest of their body. Some studies even suggest that the sex of each cell drives its behaviour, through a complicated network of molecular interactions. “I think there's much greater diversity within male or female, and there is certainly an area of overlap where some people can't easily define themselves within the binary structure,” says John Achermann, who studies sex development and endocrinology at University College London's Institute of Child Health.

These discoveries do not sit well in a world in which sex is still defined in binary terms. Few legal systems allow for any ambiguity in biological sex, and a person's legal rights and social status can be heavily influenced by whether their birth certificate says male or female.

The final two paragraphs:

Yet if biologists continue to show that sex is a spectrum, then society and state will have to grapple with the consequences, and work out where and how to draw the line. Many transgender and intersex activists dream of a world where a person's sex or gender is irrelevant. Although some governments are moving in this direction, Greenberg is pessimistic about the prospects of realizing this dream — in the United States, at least. “I think to get rid of gender markers altogether or to allow a third, indeterminate marker, is going to be difficult.”

So if the law requires that a person is male or female, should that sex be assigned by anatomy, hormones, cells or chromosomes, and what should be done if they clash? “My feeling is that since there is not one biological parameter that takes over every other parameter, at the end of the day, gender identity seems to be the most reasonable parameter,” says Vilain. In other words, if you want to know whether someone is male or female, it may be best just to ask.

Trump conquers Japan, and then the world

The strangest Trump video ever, in which Trump is elected world president, and if you suspect that it may not be shooting straight, you'd be correct:

It's by Mike Diva, "an American video director, special effects artist, musician and YouTube personality." Wikipedia says:

Diva's intent was to "seem obnoxiously pro-Trump" while doing the opposite, with the production quality so good that viewers would ask: "Why would a Japanese ad agency make this?" Indeed, many early online comments mistook the video for a genuine ad, despite Trump's being (briefly) depicted as giving a Nazi salute amid swastikas and ultimately transforming into an earth-destroying robot. The video was shot over a month and a half with virtually no budget and stars the cosplayer and wig stylist known as Sushi Monster.

A short interview with Diva at Slate. Linguistically informed commentary at Language Log.

Jerry Seinfeld & the Craft of Comedy

Another working paper. URL at Academia.edu:

https://www.academia.edu/26282876/Jerry_Seinfeld_and_the_Craft_of_Comedy

Abstract: Stand-up comedy is tightly constructed despite appearing to be casual and improvised. In one section this working paper examines a comedy bit about donut holes and finds in it a metaphysical dimension that is, in fact, typical of Seinfeld’s comedy. Another section shows how a conversation with President Barack Obama hinges on the distinction between a social role and the person playing that role. A final piece looks at the wide range of ephemeral phenomena around which Seinfeld crafts his comedy.

CONTENTS

Introduction: A Comedian’s Mind 1

Jerry Seinfeld and Barack Obama Have a Meeting of the Minds 3

Seinfeld Through the Donut Hole 11

Single Shots: Seinfeld’s Ongoing Anatomy of Life and Comedy 15

 

Introduction: A Comedian’s Mind

Jerry Seinfeld started out as and remains a stand-up comedian. I’ve never seen one of his live shows. I didn’t really become aware of him until I started watching Seinfeld, and that’s when I learned that he did stand-up. Stand-up, of course, is live performance, something I’m familiar with as a musician. And that’s where I connect with him, the rigors of live performance and preparing for it.

One of the pieces I’ve collected here, “Seinfeld Through the Donut Hole,” is specifically about that. It’s a light analysis of a specific comic bit, one about donut holes and fat people. The point about donut holes is that there’s nothing there. The point about fat people is that eating donut holes is not a viable weight reduction strategy. Just how Seinfeld connects these two, that’s the art and craft of comedy.

The first piece, “Jerry Seinfeld and Barack Obama Have a Meeting of the Minds,” is a bit different. It centers on an episode from Seinfeld’s current web-based series, Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. As you may know, the premise is simple: Seinfeld, who loves and collects cars, meets a comedian in a car specifically selected for them. The two go off, Seinfeld driving, and get coffee–and, more often than not, breakfast or lunch as well. They’re chatting all the time.

The conversation is “real” in the simple sense that it is not scripted. But the show we see is nonetheless meticulously crafted. Upwards of three hours of whatever (it’s not film and it’s not videotape; it’s digital bits stored in what? flash memory?) is edited down to 15 or 20 minutes of program. That makes it watchable, entertaining, and even enlightening, whereas the raw footage, if you can call it that, would be a snooze fest.

Barack Obama, of course, is not a comedian. But he’s got a sense of humor. That, and the fact that he’s President of the United States, is why Seinfeld did an episode with him. Just who approached whom about doing this, Seinfeld to Obama, Obama to Seinfeld, I don’t know.

The conversation is real in the same sense that all these CCGC conversations are real; it’s not scripted. Most of the conversation is casual chit chat. But there’s a moment where it turns real in a deeper sense, and that’s what my piece is about. The deeper revelation starts when Seinfeld asks: “How many world leaders do you think are just completely out of their mind?” It pierces the veil when Seinfeld tells Obama “the work was joyful. And interesting, and that was my focus.” That’s what makes Jerry Seinfeld tick, and, we are to infer, Barack Obama too.

The third and last piece, “Single Shots: Seinfeld’s Ongoing Anatomy of Life and Comedy,” is a bit different. “Single Shot” is a figure of speech: a single shot of cream in your coffee; different versions of a single bit, motif, or incident from different episodes of Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee. Think of it as compressed commentary on Seinfeld. The show came to be known as a show about nothing, but it really isn’t. That is, it isn’t about nothing. It’s about the metaphysical (yes, I said “metaphysical”) oddities of everyday life, the oddities through which stand-up comedians drive their tightly constructed comedic contraptions. Each single shot focuses on one oddity, thereby bringing it into metaphysical relief.

Metaphysical? There’s that word again.

Don’t ask, don’t tell.

OK.