The following model of political process is intended to be a moderately realistic representation of Florentine republicanism, during the period of the Renaissance (ca. 1300-1500). The model is composed of two parts: (a) patronage - namely, the building up of partisan networks through the...

We critique the measure of complexity introduced by Shiner, Davison, and Landsberg in Ref. [1]. In particular, we point out that it is over-universal, in the sense that it has the same dependence on disorder for structurally distinct systems. We also point out a misinterpretation of a result...

Stability and diversity are two key properties that living entities share with spin glasses, where they are manifested through the breaking of the phase space into many valleys or local minima connected by saddle points. The topology of the phase space can be conveniently condensed into a tree...

Models of habitat fragmentation have mainly explored the effects on a few species ecologies or on a hierarchical community of competitors. These models reveal that, under different conditions, ecosystem response can underly sharp changes when some given thresholds are reached. Here we explore...

We show that the problem of designing RNA sequences that can fold into multiple stable secondary structures can be transformed into a combinatorial optimization problem that can be solved by means of simple heuristics. Hence it is feasible to design RNA switches with prescribed strucutral...

This paper provides an analysis of aggregate behavioral outcomes when individual utility exhibits social interaction effects. We study generalized logistic models of individual choice which incorporate terms reflecting the desire of individuals to conform to the behavior of others in an...

The theory of autocatalytic binary ligation is reviewed within the context of a rigorously applied Michaelis-Menten quasi-steady-state approximation to obtain explicit analytical results describing time-course data from experiments. A detailed protocol for the step-wise elucidation of a minimal...

Zipf's law states that the frequency of a word is a power function of its rank. The exponent of the power is usually accepted to be close to (-)1. Great deviations between the predicted and real number of different words of a text, disagreements between the predicted and real exponent of the...

We investigate the importance of Veblen effects on work hours, namely the manner in which a desire to emulate the consumption standards of the rich influences individuals' allocation of time between labor and leisure. Our model of the choice of work hours captures Veblen effects by taking...

In statistics it is necessary to study the relation among many probability distributions. Information geometry elucidates the geometric structure on the space of all distributions. When combined with Bayesian decision theory, it leads to the new concept of "ideal estimates." They uniquely exist...