Link – Page 414 – Chris Aldrich

🔖 IPAM Workshop on Gauge Theory and Categorification, March 6-10

Bookmarked IPAM Workshop on Gauge Theory and Categorification (Institute of Pure and Applied Mathematics at UCLA - March 6-10, 2017)

The equations of gauge theory lie at the heart of our understanding of particle physics. The Standard Model, which describes the electromagnetic, weak, and strong forces, is based on the Yang-Mills equations. Starting with the work of Donaldson in the 1980s, gauge theory has also been successfully applied in other areas of pure mathematics, such as low dimensional topology, symplectic geometry, and algebraic geometry.

More recently, Witten proposed a gauge-theoretic interpretation of Khovanov homology, a knot invariant whose origins lie in representation theory. Khovanov homology is a “categorification” of the celebrated Jones polynomial, in the sense that its Euler characteristic recovers this polynomial. At the moment, Khovanov homology is only defined for knots in the three-sphere, but Witten’s proposal holds the promise of generalizations to other three-manifolds, and perhaps of producing new invariants of four-manifolds.

This workshop will bring together researchers from several different fields (theoretical physics, mathematical gauge theory, topology, analysis / PDE, representation theory, symplectic geometry, and algebraic geometry), and thus help facilitate connections between these areas. The common focus will be to understand Khovanov homology and related invariants through the lens of gauge theory.

This workshop will include a poster session; a request for posters will be sent to registered participants in advance of the workshop.

Edward Witten will be giving two public lectures as part of the Green Family Lecture series:

March 6, 2017
From Gauge Theory to Khovanov Homology Via Floer Theory
The goal of the lecture is to describe a gauge theory approach to Khovanov homology of knots, in particular, to motivate the relevant gauge theory equations in a way that does not require too much physics background. I will give a gauge theory perspective on the construction of singly-graded Khovanov homology by Abouzaid and Smith.

March 8, 2017
An Introduction to the SYK Model
The Sachdev-Ye model was originally a model of quantum spin liquids that was introduced in the mid-1990′s. In recent years, it has been reinterpreted by Kitaev as a model of quantum chaos and black holes. This lecture will be primarily a gentle introduction to the SYK model, though I will also describe a few more recent results.

5 pages to add to your academic website | Veronika Cheplygina

Read 5 pages to add to your academic website by Veronika Cheplygina (Veronika Cheplygina)

Previously I wrote about getting your setting up your own academic website in WordPress and installing some helpful plugins. But once you have all that, what content do you actually add to your new website? Of course, you are probably going to have pages for your CV (possibly split into different pages for research, teaching etc) and your publications. In this post I cover a few other pages I like to see on people’s professional websites. I admit I do not have all of these yet myself – but I’ve provided a few nice examples of those who do.

Entropy | Special Issue: Maximum Entropy and Bayesian Methods

Bookmarked Entropy | Special Issue : Maximum Entropy and Bayesian Methods (mdpi.com)

Open for submission now
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 August 2017

A special issue of Entropy (ISSN 1099-4300).

Deadline for manuscript submissions: 31 August 2017

Special Issue Editor

Guest Editor

Dr. Brendon J. Brewer

Department of Statistics, The University of Auckland, Private Bag 92019, Auckland 1142, New Zealand
Website | E-MailPhone: +64275001336
Interests: bayesian inference, markov chain monte carlo, nested sampling, MaxEnt

Special Issue Information

Dear Colleagues,

Whereas Bayesian inference has now achieved mainstream acceptance and is widely used throughout the sciences, associated ideas such as the principle of maximum entropy (implicit in the work of Gibbs, and developed further by Ed Jaynes and others) have not. There are strong arguments that the principle (and variations, such as maximum relative entropy) is of fundamental importance, but the literature also contains many misguided attempts at applying it, leading to much confusion.

This Special Issue will focus on Bayesian inference and MaxEnt. Some open questions that spring to mind are: Which proposed ways of using entropy (and its maximisation) in inference are legitimate, which are not, and why? Where can we obtain constraints on probability assignments, the input needed by the MaxEnt procedure?

More generally, papers exploring any interesting connections between probabilistic inference and information theory will be considered. Papers presenting high quality applications, or discussing computational methods in these areas, are also welcome.

Dr. Brendon J. Brewer
Guest Editor

Submission

Manuscripts should be submitted online at www.mdpi.com by registering and logging in to this website. Once you are registered, click here to go to the submission form. Manuscripts can be submitted until the deadline. Papers will be published continuously (as soon as accepted) and will be listed together on the special issue website. Research articles, review articles as well as communications are invited. For planned papers, a title and short abstract (about 100 words) can be sent to the Editorial Office for announcement on this website.

Submitted manuscripts should not have been published previously, nor be under consideration for publication elsewhere (except conference proceedings papers). All manuscripts are refereed through a peer-review process. A guide for authors and other relevant information for submission of manuscripts is available on the Instructions for Authors page. Entropy is an international peer-reviewed Open Access monthly journal published by MDPI.

Please visit the Instructions for Authors page before submitting a manuscript. The Article Processing Charge (APC) for publication in this open access journal is 1500 CHF (Swiss Francs).

No papers have been published in this special issue yet.

How the ‘Alt-Right’ Came to Dominate the Comments on Trump’s Facebook Page | The Atlantic

Read How the 'Alt-Right' Came to Dominate the Comments on Trump's Facebook Page by Jonathon Morgan (The Atlantic)

Over the course of the campaign, the comments left on the president’s official Facebook page increasingly employed the rhetoric of white nationalism.

‘The Strongest Guys Are Often the Worst Construction Workers’ | The Atlantic

Read ‘The Strongest Guys Are Often the Worst Construction Workers’ by Chris Bodenner (The Atlantic)

As a construction laborer, I find that one of the funniest misconceptions about my job is that Hollywood and pretty much all TV show producers seem to think that all construction workers have Brooklyn or Bronx accents from the 1950s. Even when they show construction workers in LA or Dallas, the workers all seem to have Brooklyn accents.

But more seriously, I’ve had people literally tell me that I do “unskilled” or “brainless” work because I’m in construction. Yes, the construction industry is one of the least credentialed industries; you literally do not need a high school diploma. But once you enter the industry, you are expected to learn on the job—and quickly.

This week, I’m putting in a concrete footer/foundation underneath a
120-year-old brick house. That doesn’t require academic credentials, but it does require skill. Guys in my neighborhood have been killed because they did the process wrong.

Many people seem to think that strength is the best quality for a construction worker to have. Actually, even when it comes to the hard laboring jobs, the biggest and strongest guys are often the worst workers. They often get outworked by older, smaller, and/or skinnier or fatter guys. A man who likes to work or has a good attitude towards work can easily outwork a lazy muscular guy.

I had a relative by marriage who ended up disabled after a number of years in construction after episodes of showing off how much he could lift. He’d show up all the other guys on the job site by carrying two of whatever everybody else carried one of, after bragging he could out-lift everyone on site. All this resulted in delays in work followed by multiple back surgeries. I’d bet that some of the men who refused to engage in his petty contests kept their jobs a lot longer than he did.

The First Film Adaptation of Alice in Wonderland (1903) | Open Culture

Read The First Film Adaptation of Alice in Wonderland (1903) by Ted Mills (openculture.com)

Once lost, this eight minute, very damaged, but very delightful silent version of Alice in Wonderland was restored several years ago by the British Film Institute. It is the first film adaptation of the 1865 Lewis Carroll classic. And at the time, the original length of 12 minutes (eight are all that’s left) made it the longest film coming out of the nascent British film industry. After about a minute, the eye ignores the damage of the film, like the ear ignores a scratched 78 rpm record. Viewers can expect several vignettes from the novel, not a flowing narrative. It starts with Alice following the White Rabbit down the hole, the “eat me” and “drink me” sequence, the squealing baby that turns into a piglet, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Tea Party, and the Red Queen and her playing card minions. The coloring of the negative is a BFI reconstruction of the original colors, by the way. The film was produced and directed by Cecil Hepworth and Percy Stow out of their Hepworth Studios in Walton-on-the-Thames, near London. They show knowledge of the camera trickery pioneered only a few years earlier by Georges Méliès, like the shrinking and growing Alice and the appearance of the Cheshire Cat. That cat, by the way, was the Hepworth’s family pet. Hepworth himself plays the frog-headed footman, and his wife played the Red Queen. May Clark, who played Alice, was 18 at the time, and had already worked on several Hepworth productions, and not just acting. According to her bio at the Women Film Pioneers project, she did a bit of everything around the studio, “from special effects and set decoration to costume design and carpentry.” The early days of film have a real “student project” feel about them, no pigeonholed roles, just everybody chipping in. As for Cecil Hepworth, he appeared destined for a career in film, as his father ran magic lantern shows. Cecil worked for several companies before setting up his own and wrote one of the first books on the subject, Animated Photography: The ABC of the Cinematograph. His company continued to make films in this early style through 1926, but eventually ran out of money. To pay off debts, the receivership company melted down his films to get the silver, which was the reason most scholars thought his films were lost. In 2008, one of his films was discovered, and then “Alice.” There may still be others out there. You can find Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland in our collection, 800 Free eBooks for iPad, Kindle & Other Devices. And the 1903 film listed in our other collection, 1,150 Free Movies Online: Great Classics, Indies, Noir, Westerns, etc.. Ted Mills is a freelance writer on the arts who currently hosts the FunkZone Podcast. You can also follow him on Twitter at @tedmills, read his other arts writing at tedmills.com and/or watch his films here.

🔖 The Hypercycle: A Principle of Natural Self-Organization | Springer

Bookmarked The Hypercycle - A Principle of Natural Self-Organization | M. Eigen | Springer (Springer, 1979)

This book originated from a series of papers which were published in "Die Naturwissenschaften" in 1977178. Its division into three parts is the reflection of a logic structure, which may be abstracted in the form of three theses:

A. Hypercycles are a principle of natural self-organization allowing an integration and coherent evolution of a set of functionally coupled self-replicative entities.

B. Hypercycles are a novel class of nonlinear reaction networks with unique properties, amenable to a unified mathematical treatment.

C. Hypercycles are able to originate in the mutant distribution of a single Darwinian quasi-species through stabilization of its diverging mutant genes. Once nucleated hypercycles evolve to higher complexity by a process analogous to gene duplication and specialization. In order to outline the meaning of the first statement we may refer to another principle of material self organization, namely to Darwin's principle of natural selection. This principle as we see it today represents the only understood means for creating information, be it the blue print for a complex living organism which evolved from less complex ancestral forms, or be it a meaningful sequence of letters the selection of which can be simulated by evolutionary model games.

Part A in .pdf format.

🔖 Cognition and biology: perspectives from information theory

Bookmarked Cognition and biology: perspectives from information theory (ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)

The intimate relation between biology and cognition can be formally examined through statistical models constrained by the asymptotic limit theorems of communication theory, augmented by methods from statistical mechanics and nonequilibrium thermodynamics. Cognition, often involving submodules that act as information sources, is ubiquitous across the living state. Less metabolic free energy is consumed by permitting crosstalk between biological information sources than by isolating them, leading to evolutionary exaptations that assemble shifting, tunable cognitive arrays at multiple scales, and levels of organization to meet dynamic patterns of threat and opportunity. Cognition is thus necessary for life, but it is not sufficient: An organism represents a highly patterned outcome of path-dependent, blind, variation, selection, interaction, and chance extinction in the context of an adequate flow of free energy and an environment fit for development. Complex, interacting cognitive processes within an organism both record and instantiate those evolutionary and developmental trajectories.

🔖 Thermodynamics of Prediction

Bookmarked Thermodynamics of Prediction (journals.aps.org Phys. Rev. Lett. 109, 120604 (2012))

A system responding to a stochastic driving signal can be interpreted as computing, by means of its dynamics, an implicit model of the environmental variables. The system’s state retains information about past environmental fluctuations, and a fraction of this information is predictive of future ones. The remaining nonpredictive information reflects model complexity that does not improve predictive power, and thus represents the ineffectiveness of the model. We expose the fundamental equivalence between this model inefficiency and thermodynamic inefficiency, measured by dissipation. Our results hold arbitrarily far from thermodynamic equilibrium and are applicable to a wide range of systems, including biomolecular machines. They highlight a profound connection between the effective use of information and efficient thermodynamic operation: any system constructed to keep memory about its environment and to operate with maximal energetic efficiency has to be predictive.