Related papers: Everything's Fine
Although the existence of a cause and effect relationship between emotions and Psychosomatic Illnesses (manifestation of organic diseases produced by emotional problems) is an unquestionable fact, yet it remains to be explained the…
Individuals on social media may reveal themselves to be in various states of crisis (e.g. suicide, self-harm, abuse, or eating disorders). Detecting crisis from social media text automatically and accurately can have profound consequences.…
It is well known that behavioral changes in contact patterns may significantly affect the spread of an epidemic outbreak. Here we focus on simple endemic models for recurrent epidemics, by modelling the social contact rate as a function of…
The problem of learning in the absence of external intelligence is discussed in the context of a simple model. The model consists of a set of randomly connected, or layered integrate-and fire neurons. Inputs to and outputs from the…
We investigate the salience of extinction risk as a source of impatience. Our framework distinguishes between human extinction risk and individual mortality risk while allowing for various degrees of intergenerational altruism.…
The problem of individualization is recognized as crucial in almost every field. Identifying causes of effects in specific events is likewise essential for accurate decision making. However, such estimates invoke counterfactual…
The process of evolution by natural selection leads to phenotypes of increasing fitness. For cellular chemical reaction networks, this means optimising a variety of fitness functions such as robustness, precision, or sensitivity to external…
The spread of infectious disease in a human community or the proliferation of fake news on social media can be modeled as a randomly growing tree-shaped graph. The history of the random growth process is often unobserved but contains…
We study the dynamics of a \emph{myopic} forager that randomly wanders on a lattice in which each site contains one unit of food. Upon encountering a food-containing site, the forager eats all the food at this site with probability $p<1$;…
Exerting fluctuations is a part of our daily life: traffic noise, heartbeat, opinion poll, currency exchange rate, electrical current, chemical reactions - they all permanently fluctuate. One of the most important questions is why the…
In this essay written with my students and collaborators in mind, I share simple recipes that are easy and often fun to put in practice and that make a big difference in one's life. The seven guiding principles are: (1) sleep, (2) love and…
Well protected human and laboratory animal populations with abundant resources are evolutionary unprecedented. Physical approach, which takes advantage of their extensively quantified mortality, establishes that its dominant fraction yields…
In the ecological approach to perception and action, information that specifies affordances is available in the energy arrays surrounding organisms, and this information is detected by organisms in order to perceptually guide their actions.…
The new field of complex systems supports the view that a number of systems arising from disciplines as diverse as physics, biology, engineering, and economics may have certain quantitative features that are intriguingly similar. The earth…
Where does it all come from? Where are we going? Are we alone in the universe? What is good and what is evil? The scientific narrative of cosmic evolution demands that we tackle such big questions with a cosmological perspective. I tackle…
A sequential decision-making agent balances between exploring to gain new knowledge about an environment and exploiting current knowledge to maximize immediate reward. For environments studied in the traditional literature, optimal…
Distress is a complex condition which affects a significant percentage of cancer patients and may lead to depression, anxiety, sadness, suicide and other forms of psychological morbidity. Compelling evidence supports screening for distress…
Mounting evidences are being gathered suggesting that income and wealth distribution in various countries or societies follow a robust pattern, close to the Gibbs distribution of energy in an ideal gas in equilibrium, but also deviating…
Why life is complex and --most importantly-- what is the origin of the over abundance of complexity in nature? This is a fundamental scientific question which, paraphrasing the late Per Bak, "is screaming to be answered but seldom is even…
The perceived risk and reward for a given situation can vary depending on resource availability, accumulated wealth, and other extrinsic factors such as individual backgrounds. Based on this general aspect of everyday life, here we use…