⚔ http://nautil.us/blog/why-our-postwar-long-peace-is-fragile

🤔 Getting started with Python in HPC https://t.co/vAecAaTqsI

Quantum Field Theory and Critical Phenomena

Fourth Edition
Jean Zinn-Justin

A Clarendon Press Publication
International Series of Monographs on Physics

Completely revised fourth edition of a classic text
Fully updated, containing 50% new material, including three new chapters
Emphasis on common aspects of particle physics and critical phenomena
Provides profound understanding of QFT, renormalization group, and their main applications in physics
Website for exercises

Phase Transitions and Renormalization Group
Jean Zinn-Justin
Oxford Graduate Texts

Elementary, authoratative introduction by experienced teacher and author
Central topic in theoretical physics today
Covers mean-field theory, critical phenomena, renormalization group, continuum limit, perturbative methods
Based on many years of teaching experience

From Random Walks to Random Matrices
Jean Zinn-Justin

Introduces major topics in modern theoretical physics
Features short introductions in self-contained chapters
Covers renormalization group, fixed points, universality, continuum limit
Authoritative overviews by an experienced author and teacher

🔸 Critical Phenomena: field theoretical approach

http://www.scholarpedia.org/article/Critical_Phenomena:_field_theoretical_approach

David Tong: Lectures on Statistical Field Theory

These lecture notes provide a detailed introduction to phase transitions and the renormalisation group, aimed at "Part III" (i.e. masters level) students. The lecture notes come in around 130 pages and can be downloaded below.

http://www.damtp.cam.ac.uk/user/tong/sft.html

Modeling cities
“short review with a discussion about the possibility of constructing a science of cities”

https://t.co/4M5Sga7q4s

🎞 Is Complexity a Science? Is it a possibly useful new way of engineering?

In this video narrated by Maxi San Miguel it will be argued that Complexity is a new way of thinking, necessary for a scientific renaissance that can transform society.

📺 https://t.co/OR41RZjRCd

geoplot looks like a nice tool for plotting geo data in Python. Seaborn but for spatial data ;) You can try there quick start tutorial here: https://t.co/2JjhfsvFBV
no install needed

🖤 Recollecting Mitchell Feigenbaum— a chaos pioneer

by SFI External Professor Fred Cooper

https://medium.com/@sfiscience/recollecting-mitchell-feigenbaum-a-chaos-pioneer-206a73a91a42

Feigenbaum’s constants are universal ratios … that relate to phenomena with oscillatory (cyclic) behavior, such as swinging pendulums or heart rhythms. The most well-known one, Feigenbaum’s Delta, refers to the spacing between parameter values required to double the cycle’s length, which decreases exponentially by a factor approaching approximately 4.669.

Among all my friends, Mitchell was the most unusual and brilliant. He viewed the world through the lens of a scientist. When he walked through the forest he wondered “at what distance do the trees merge and become inseparable?” When he looked at the moon he wondered “why does the moon appear larger when it is on the horizon?” He then needed to develop a theory to explain these phenomena “from scratch.” This led him to study how vision evolved from fish to humans and why optical illusions occur as a result of “mistakes” made by our sensory cognition. When he was asked by Pete Carruthers, “what is the origin of turbulence?” Mitchell looked at the simplest nonlinear system — the logistic map where bifurcations took place. This led to the famous Feigenbaum numbers, which were an essential part in understanding the onset of chaos.

Mitchell had a great love of music and again wondered how can one improve on digital technology so that the sound of the onset of a bow string could be captured. His interest in photography led him to write computer codes to undo the mistakes made by existing copying machines so that a perfect image could be printed. I found it fascinating that not only did he ask these questions, which were unusual to me, but then he dropped everything to figure out the answer. This also led to the production of maps with minimal distortion and computer codes for figuring out how to label maps in the clearest fashion.

Mitchell was a dear friend and he will be missed.

Spectral properties and the accuracy of mean-field approaches for epidemics on correlated networks
“comparison between stochastic simulations and mean-field theories of the susceptible-infected-susceptible (SIS) model on correlated networks”

https://t.co/h6h6o7KPqy

🎞 We are biased but the Internet could help us measure it & possibly fix it. Also, let's save the Internet instead of blaming it for everything!

https://t.co/eN9hRTrrhZ

Calling all quantitative life scientists! Deadline to apply to this postdoc is July 10, 2019!

https://t.co/1utmJVxueR

🎞 Taha Yasseri course on "Research Design in Social Data Science" is finally live!

Here is a sneak preview!

If you like it, enrol to join the next cohort, starting 10 Oct, here:
https://t.co/xkiREH7yk3

terrific paper on causal emergence: https://t.co/ZNBVvq0dhy

Since then, we’ve been building a formalism to study causal emergence in networks. Today we posted our first paper on it https://t.co/Til7g7LCEk

Networks are such powerful objects. They've changed how we study complex systems. But I’ve always been struck by how nontrivial the “what is a node?” question can be.

We provide a framework for identifying the most informative *scale* to describe interdependencies in a system...

...which is to say, we find that compressed or coarse-grained or macroscale denoscriptions of networks often have more *effective information* than the original microscale network (e.g. your raw network data).

This noise-minimizing process is known as causal emergence.

So what?

It's a question of zoom: what's the right scale to represent brain networks, given what we want from our model? What's the best scale to model economic systems? What counts as a "node" in a genome?

They're rich, tough, fun problems. And there's a long way to go.