127 research outputs found
Model-free inference of direct network interactions from nonlinear collective dynamics
No full textThe topology of interactions in network dynamical systems fundamentally underlies their function. Accelerating technological progress creates massively available data about collective nonlinear dynamics in physical, biological, and technological systems. Detecting direct interaction patterns from those dynamics still constitutes a major open problem. In particular, current nonlinear dynamics approaches mostly require to know a priori a model of the (often high dimensional) system dynamics. Here we develop a model-independent framework for inferring direct interactions solely from recording the nonlinear collective dynamics generated. Introducing an explicit dependency matrix in combination with a block-orthogonal regression algorithm, the approach works reliably across many dynamical regimes, including transient dynamics toward steady states, periodic and non-periodic dynamics, and chaos. Together with its capabilities to reveal network (two point) as well as hypernetwork (e.g., three point) interactions, this framework may thus open up nonlinear dynamics options of inferring direct interaction patterns across systems where no model is known
NovoSpaRc: flexible spatial reconstruction of single-cell gene expression with optimal transport
No full textnovoSpaRc predicts locations of single cells in space by solely using single-cell RNA sequencing data. An existing reference database of marker genes is not required, but significantly enhances performance if available.
novoSpaRc accompanies the following publication:
Gene Expression Cartography
M. Nitzan, N. Karaiskos, N. Friedman, N. Rajewsky
Nature (2019
Call for Contributions: "The Capitalist Mode of Power: Critical Engagements with the Power Theory of Value"
No full textPOSTED BY TIM DI MUZIO:
The 2009 publication of Nitzan and Bichler’s Capital as Power: A Study of Order and Creorder has unsettled both heterodox and mainstream theorists of political economy, while igniting debate across the social sciences. Building on decades of research, their book offers not only a provocation to all political economists, but also a new approach to studying capital and capitalist sociality as a mode of power.
This collection, edited by Tim DiMuzio, aims to bring together scholars and practitioners interested in critically appraising and engaging with the work of Nitzan and Bichler, as well as researchers who use a power theory of value in their own work.
Contributions should be no longer than 8,000 words, including notes and references. Papers should be original (i.e. not published elsewhere), unless the author has explicit permission from the copyright holder to republish the piece in this volume. Contributions will be evaluated on their merit, as well as on how well they fit within the larger project.
Deadline for Submissions: June 1, 2011
Submissions are to be sent to: [email protected]
The politics of nihilism : from the nineteenth century to contemporary Israel /
No full text"Contemporary politics is faced, on the one hand, with political stagnation and lack of a progressive vision on the side of formal, institutional politics, and, on the other, with various social movements that venture to challenge modern understandings of representation, participation,and democracy. Interestingly, both institutional and anti-institutional sides of this antagonism tend to accuse each other of "nihilism", namely, of mere oppositional destructiveness and failure to offer a constructive, positive alternative to the status quo. Nihilism seems, then, all engulfing. In order to better understand this political situation and ourselves within it, Nihilism and the State of Israel proposes a thorough theoretical examination of the concept of nihilism and its historical development followed by critical studies of Israeli politics and culture. The authors show that, rather than a mark of mutual opposition and despair, nihilism is a fruitful category for tracing and exploring the limits of political critique, rendering them less rigid and opening up a space of potentiality for thought, action, and creation"--Includes bibliographical references (pages 224-226) and index.Machine generated contents note: -- Introduction (Roy Ben-Shai and Nitzan Lebovic) Chapter 1 Nihilism as Stasis: A Plea for a New Hermeneutics of Exposure (Nitzan Lebovic) Chapter 2 Less than Nihilism (Luca Di Blasi) Chapter 3 Doing Nothing or Nothing Doing? (Michael Gillespie) Chapter 4 A Concept of Nihilism for the Coming End of the World (Adi Ophir) Chapter 5 Nihilism, Revolt, and the Spectacle (Bilent Diken) Chapter 6 The Epistemology of Nihilism in Otto Weininger's Sex and Character (Bettina Bergo) Chapter 7 In Sickness and in Health: Nietzsche, Amery and the "Moral Difference" (Roy Ben-Shai) Chapter 8 Nihilism and Repetition. Dahlia Ravikovitch's Reiterations as Critique (Liron Mor) Chapter 9 What is a "Manifestly Illegal" Order? Law and Politics after Yoram Kaniuk's Nevelot (Itamar Mann) Chapter 10 To Be at Home: Spaces of Citizenship in the Community Settlements of the Galilee (Fatina Abreek-Zubeidat and Ronen Ben-Arie)BibliographyIndex."Contemporary politics is faced, on the one hand, with political stagnation and lack of a progressive vision on the side of formal, institutional politics, and, on the other, with various social movements that venture to challenge modern understandings of representation, participation,and democracy. Interestingly, both institutional and anti-institutional sides of this antagonism tend to accuse each other of "nihilism", namely, of mere oppositional destructiveness and failure to offer a constructive, positive alternative to the status quo. Nihilism seems, then, all engulfing. In order to better understand this political situation and ourselves within it, Nihilism and the State of Israel proposes a thorough theoretical examination of the concept of nihilism and its historical development followed by critical studies of Israeli politics and culture. The authors show that, rather than a mark of mutual opposition and despair, nihilism is a fruitful category for tracing and exploring the limits of political critique, rendering them less rigid and opening up a space of potentiality for thought, action, and creation"-
Strategy of "flattening" in the Selfie Museum and its relevance for architecture
No full textThis electronic version was submitted by the student author. The certified thesis is available in the Institute Archives and Special Collections.Thesis: S.M., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architecture, 2019Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (pages 83-84).The focal point of this thesis is the turn from the display of objects to the display of environments, a change that blurs the line between the body and the display, and questionably absorbs the subject into the object. The Selfie Museum epitomizes this cultural shift. In The Selfie Museum, subject and object aren't the sole dichotomies that are conflated: physical space combines with virtual image; the still moment merges with the temporal experience; two dimensional projections are overlaid onto three dimensional structures. As a result, architects become "experience designers," virtual reality is a mode of design practice, and an "instagrammable" moment is a project deliverable. This thesis simultaneously acknowledges these changes and critiques them. At the same time, it offers the combination of apparent oppositions as a potential new set of tools that can help rethink aspects of our profession. Although The Selfie Museum is another form of entertainment that will come and go, examining this typology allows me to question how these spaces are embedded in culture; challenging traditional museum displays, body image perceptions, and the basic concept of a tourist destination. The etymology of the word "display" means to unfold, scatter, reveal. This thesis seeks to unfold a few new understandings about Architecture using The Selfie Museum, or a few new Observations on The Selfie Museum using Architecture.by Nitzan Zilberman.S.M.S.M. Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Department of Architectur
SiFT: uncovering hidden biological processes by probabilistic filtering of single-cell data
No full textAbstract Cellular populations simultaneously encode multiple biological attributes, including spatial configuration, temporal trajectories, and cell-cell interactions. Some of these signals may be overshadowed by others and harder to recover, despite the great progress made to computationally reconstruct biological processes from single-cell data. To address this, we present SiFT, a kernel-based projection method for filtering biological signals in single-cell data, thus uncovering underlying biological processes. SiFT applies to a wide range of tasks, from the removal of unwanted variation in the data to revealing hidden biological structures. We demonstrate how SiFT enhances the liver circadian signal by filtering spatial zonation, recovers regenerative cell subpopulations in spatially-resolved liver data, and exposes COVID-19 disease-related cells, pathways, and dynamics by filtering healthy reference signals. SiFT performs the correction at the gene expression level, can scale to large datasets, and compares favorably to state-of-the-art methods
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Studies on the Emergence of Order in Out-of-equilibrium Systems
No full textA challenge in fundamental physics and especially in thermodynamics is to understand emergent order in far-from-equilibrium systems. While at equilibrium, temperature plays the role of a key thermodynamic variable whose uniformity in space and time defines the equilibrium state the system is in, this is not the case in a far-from-equilibrium driven system. When energy flows through a finite system at steady-state, temperature takes on a time-independent but spatially varying character. In this study, the convection patterns of a Rayleigh-Bénard fluid cell at steady-state is used as a prototype system where the temperature profile and fluctuations are measured spatio-temporally. The thermal data is obtained by performing high-resolution real-time infrared calorimetry on the convection system as it is first driven out-of-equilibrium when the power is applied, achieves steady-state, and then as it gradually relaxes back to room temperature equilibrium when the power is removed. This work provides new experimental data on the non-trivial nature of thermal fluctuations when stable complex convective structures emerge. The thermal analysis of these convective cells at steady-state further yield local equilibrium-like statistics as the temperature manifold bifurcates into regions of emergent order (sources) and disorder (sink). These localized domains which coexist together, reveal equilibrium-like fluctuations for the temperature scalar. We extend these experimental results to derive a thermodynamic equation of state for a driven system with emergent order from the first principles. We present a field theoretic formalism by defining the Lagrangian density as a function of a generic thermodynamic scalar. Our definition of the thermodynamic Lagrangian density involves two components, the internal work or the coherent part which gives rise to emergent order, and the internal dissipation or the incoherent part which acts as the internal sink. The salient feature of this formulation is that it takes into account the spatial and temporal gradients of the thermodynamic scalar as the system is driven out-of-equilibrium, similar to the Rayleigh-Bénard system. The action functional defined on this scalar manifold connects local equilibrium-like domains. On minimizing the action and solving the Euler-Lagrange equation, we obtain a generalized thermodynamic equation of state for a driven system with emergent order. In conclusion, these results correlate the spatial ordering of the convective cells with the evolution of the system's temperature manifold
The Autocatalytic Sprawl of Pseudorational Mastery
No full text* Winner of the 2018 RECASP Essay Prize *
According to Jonathan Nitzan and Shimshon Bichler (2009), capital is not an economic quantity, but a mode of power. Their fundamental thesis could be summarized as follows: capital is power quantified in monetary terms. But what do we do when we quantify? What is the nature of money in a capitalist society? Indeed, what is power? In the following, we try to develop a concept of power as the ability of persons to create particular formations against resistance. The kinds of formations persons can think of depend on the society they live in, which can be identified by what Cornelius Castoriadis called its social imaginary significations (SIS). The core SIS of capitalism is rational mastery operating with computational rationality. Computational rationality in turn rests on a particular understanding of how signification works: it works through operational symbolism, as theorized by Sybille Krämer in analyzing the philosophy of Leibniz. When the concept of the SIS of modern rationality was developed in the 1950s and 1960s, bureaucracy was seen as the main organizational mode of rational mastery. We argue that there are two modes of rational mastery, capitalization and bureaucratization, that interact with each other in capitalist society. The paper concludes with deliberations on the future of rational mastery and possible ways out.
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FRONT PICTURE: International Space Station Expedition 26 Crew (24 Dec 2010), Montreal at Night. Astronaut photograph ISS026-E-12474 (https://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/images/48471/montreal-at-night). Image courtesy of the Earth Science and Remote Sensing Unit, NASA Johnson Space Center (https://eol.jsc.nasa.gov/)
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BIO: The author studied physics and informatics, along with a lot of philosophy, but is also interested in many other subjects. He came across Bichler and Nitzan’s Capital as Power in the first decade of the twenty-first century when he was politically active in various ways. He rediscovered Castoriadis through one of Bichler and Nitzans’s works. Since then, he has tried to understand what Bichler and Nitzan actually mean by power. As there is no concrete answer to this question, he has been trying to develop one by (con)fusing concepts developed by Castoriadis and other thinkers with some of his own
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