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Copyright of Music in Society is the property of Musicological Society of Federation of Bosnia & Herzegovina, Academy of Music in Sarajevo and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this letter, we explore the link-adding method to improve communication robustness of networks. Firstly, a robustness measure called communication robustness (CR) is presented, which not only confirms the global effect of the largest connected component on the network communicability, but captures the local communicability of all small connected components. Secondly, we respectively put forward a simulated annealing algorithm, a heuristic algorithm called $r$ -Weak Interconnection Algorithm ($r$ -WIA) and a greedy algorithm to improve $CR$ of networks, where the 2-WIA can fast improve the network robustness with low time complexity $O(N^{2})$. Finally, the experimental results verify the effectiveness of the proposed algorithms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Highlights • Networks and graphs are naturally embedded in Euclidean hyperspheres. • Communicability embedding of networks/graphs reveals clusters in networks. • Nonmetric multidimensional scaling allows visualization of networks in 3D communicability space. • Communicability clusters of papers in a citation network reveal levels of mathematization. • Communicability clusters in a gene-gene network reveal genes that co-participate in cancer and other diseases. Abstract A complex network is a condensed representation of the relational topological framework of a complex system. A main reason for the existence of such networks is the transmission of items through the entities of these complex systems. Here, we consider a communicability function that accounts for the routes through which items flow on networks. Such a function induces a natural embedding of a network in a Euclidean high-dimensional sphere. We use one of the geometric parameters of this embedding, namely the angle between the position vectors of the nodes in the hyperspheres, to extract structural information from networks. First we propose a simple method for visualizing networks by reducing the dimensionality of the communicability space to 3-dimensional spheres. Secondly, we use clustering analysis to cluster the nodes of the networks based on their similarities in terms of their capacity to successfully deliver information through the network. After testing these approaches in benchmark networks and compare them with the most used clustering methods in networks we analyze two real-world examples. In the first, consisting of a citation network, we discover citation groups that reflect the level of mathematics used in their publications. In the second, we discover groups of genes that coparticipate in human diseases, reporting a few genes that coparticipate in cancer and other diseases. Both examples emphasize the potential of the current methodology for the discovery of new patterns in relational data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In real-world networks, information from source to destination does not only flow along the shortest path connecting them, but can flow along any alternative route. Communicability is a network metric that accounts for this issue and, especially in diffusion-like processes, provides a reliable measure of the ease of communication between node pairs. Accordingly, communicability appears to be promising for highlighting the disruption of connectivity among brain regions, caused by the white matter degeneration due to Alzheimer's disease (AD). Such a degeneration can be captured by digital imaging techniques, in particular diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), which allow to build the brain connectivity network through tractography algorithms and studying its complexity through graph theory. In this study, a cohort of 122 DTI scans, composed by 52 healthy control (HC) subjects, 40 AD patients and 30 mild cognitive impairment (MCI) converter subjects, from Alzheimer's Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) database, has been employed to study the suitability of communicability to serve as discriminant factor for AD. We developed a two-fold investigation. On one hand, a statistical analysis has been carried out to ascertain the information content provided by communicability to detect the brain regions mostly affected by the disease: node pairs with statistical significant different communicability have been found, corresponding to some well-known AD-related brain regions. On the other hand, heterogeneous groups of network features (which include/not include communicability) were input to a support vector machine, to assess the impact of communicability on the classification performances in the HC/AD and the HC/AD/MCI discrimination. The best performances, i.e. AUC = 0.82 in the HC/AD case and multiclass AUC = 0.77 in the HC/AD/MCI task, were obtained by using the values of communicability, outperforming the performance obtained with the other network metrics. In summary, this article suggests that communicability can be promising for an automatized AD diagnosis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Charles Briggs was interviewed in his visit to Brazil, where he taught in the School of Advanced Studies on Language and Society: Mobility, Multilingualism, and Globalization. The interview revolves around the ways he approaches transdisciplinary problems while also attempting to trace a genealogy of concepts like entextualization and communicability. Crafted by him in decades of intellectual and political engagement with indigenous communities and the academia, these concepts are widely spread in anthropology, language studies and public health. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License.

Health workers in Papua New Guinea strongly emphasise their duty to provide services to the country's rural majority. Trained to see rural communities as lacking modern discipline and order, they worry that rural people will resist, perhaps with violence, if health workers fail to 'show respect for culture'. Examining cultural improvisation among nursing students on a rural experience practicum in the Eastern Highlands, I show how students and teachers tried to craft culturally respectful health education. However, when difficulties emerged, local people were described as unable or unwilling to harim tok (understand, heed or follow instructions). The capacity to follow instructions, cultivated through education and Christian faith, was cast as incompatible with Highlands culture. Rural health promotion activities, when they fail to foment major transformation, can help reproduce the ideological construction of the people of the hauslain (village, hamlet) as emotionally volatile and ungovernable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the concept of high-level containment care (HLCC or ‘biocontainment’), dates back to 1969, the 2014−2016 outbreak of Ebola virus disease (EVD) brought with it a renewed emphasis on the use of specialized HLCC units in the care of patients with EVD. Employment of these units in the United States and Western Europe resulted in a significant decrease in mortality compared to traditional management in field settings. Moreover, this employment appeared to significantly lessen the risk of nosocomial transmission of disease; no secondary cases occurred among healthcare workers in these units. While many now accept the wisdom of utilizing HLCC units and principles in the management of EVD (and, presumably, of other transmissible and highly hazardous viral hemorrhagic fevers, such as those caused by Marburg and Lassa viruses), no consensus exists regarding additional diseases that might warrant HLCC. We propose here a construct designed to make such determinations for existing and newly discovered diseases. The construct examines infectivity (as measured by the infectious dose needed to infect 50% of a given population (ID50)), communicability (as measured by the reproductive number (R0)), and hazard (as measured by morbidity and mortality). Diseases fulfilling all three criteria (i.e., those that are highly infectious, communicable, and highly hazardous) are considered candidates for HLCC management if they also meet a fourth criterion, namely that they lack effective and available licensed countermeasures.

In this paper, we investigate the connectivity alterations of the subcortical brain network due to Alzheimer’s disease (AD). Mostly, the literature investigated AD connectivity abnormalities at the whole brain level or at the cortex level, while very few studies focused on the sub-network composed only by the subcortical regions, especially using diffusion-weighted imaging (DWI) data. In this work, we examine a mixed cohort including 46 healthy controls (HC) and 40 AD patients from the Alzheimer’s Disease Neuroimaging Initiative (ADNI) data set. We reconstruct the brain connectome through the use of state of the art tractography algorithms and we propose a method based on graph communicability to enhance the information content of subcortical brain regions in discriminating AD. We develop a classification framework, achieving 77% of area under the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve in the binary discrimination AD vs. HC only using a 12 × 12 subcortical features matrix. We find some interesting AD-related connectivity patterns highlighting that subcortical regions tend to increase their communicability through cortical regions to compensate the physical connectivity reduction between them due to AD. This study also suggests that AD connectivity alterations mostly regard the inter-connectivity between subcortical and cortical regions rather than the intra-subcortical connectivity.

Agamben’s overall method as detailed inThe Signature of All Thingsis named by him as philosophical archaeology. Said archaeology addresses the large-scale concepts that organise discursive structures over time and place and reveals their common metaphysical basis. In particular an impossible to sustain economy between a founding common and a founded proper which constantly change place so that the clear distinction between that which founds and that which is founded becomes impossible to discern. It becomes, in his terminology, indifferent. The signatures of Power, Life, Potentiality and Language are well known in Agamben’s work, as is his love for poetry. What has not yet been commented on is that for Agamben Poetry is a signature and so must be subject to the same method of suspensive indifference as the more nefarious discourses of power and domination. In this article the signature of Poetry is defined as the economy between the semantic, or prose as founding common, and the semiotic, or poetry as founded proper. That Agamben gives so much attention to the signature Poetry is because it is central to the suspension of the basis of all signatory constructs, Language as pure communicability as such. Yet more than this Agamben’s indifferentiation of poetry in terms of the perceived tension between semantic and semiotic, opens up complex and powerful forces at the heart of the poetic. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Croatian Journal of Education / Hrvatski Časopis za Odgoj i Obrazovanje is the property of Uciteljski Fakultet u Zagrebu and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This paper reviews Gaston Leroux’s Phantom of the Opera in the context of the social and cultural changes of the metropolis Paris at the end of the 19th century. The Phantom of the Opera, a success in the literary world and widely proliferated in its musical and film renditions afterward, is considered and interpreted mainly in the literary and artistic tradition. In this paper, however, this work will be considered from an urban sociological perspective, especially from that of Walter Benjamin, who developed the theory of the urban culture, focusing on the dreaming collectives at the end of the 19th century. Leroux’s novel can be regarded as an exemplary social form of the collective dreams of the period expressed in arts, architectures, popular stories and films and other popular arts. Given the premise that the dream images in the novel, so-called kitsch, reflect the fears and desires of the bourgeois middle class that were pathologized in the figure of the ghost, this paper reveals the cultural, social and transnational implications of the Ghost-Image in relation to the rapidly changing borders of the 19th century metropolis.

We give a formal definition of a multiplex network and using its supra-adjacency matrix representation we construct the multiplex communicability matrix. Then we prove that the communicability function naturally induces an embedding of the multiplexes in a hyperspherical Euclidean space. We then study (i) intra-layer, (ii) inter-layer, and (iii) inter-layer self-communicability distance and angles in multiplex networks. Using these multiplex metrics we study a social multiplex related to an office politics and the multiplex of synaptic interactions between neurons in the worm C. elegans . We find that the average communicability angles in these multiplexes exhibits a minimum for certain value of the interlayer coupling strength. We provide an explanation for this phenomenon which emerges from the multiplexity of these systems and related it to other important phenomena like the synchronizability of these systems. Finally, we define and study communicability shortest paths in the multiplexes. We show how the communicability shortest paths avoid the most central nodes in the multiplexes in terms of their degree and betweenness, which is a main difference with (topological) shortest paths. We explain this behavior in terms of a diffusive model in which the ‘information’ not only diffuses between the nodes but it is also processed internally on the entities of the complex system. Finally, we give some new ideas on how to extend the current work and represent complex systems as ‘multiplex hypergraphs’ and ‘multi-simplicial complexes’.

We study the relationship between the sentiment levels of Twitter users and the evolving network structure that the users created by @-mentioning each other. We use a large dataset of tweets to which we apply three sentiment scoring algorithms, including the open source SentiStrength program. Specifically we make three contributions. Firstly, we find that people who have potentially the largest communication reach (according to a dynamic centrality measure) use sentiment differently than the average user: for example, they use positive sentiment more often and negative sentiment less often. Secondly, we find that when we follow structurally stable Twitter communities over a period of months, their sentiment levels are also stable, and sudden changes in community sentiment from one day to the next can in most cases be traced to external events affecting the community. Thirdly, based on our findings, we create and calibrate a simple agent-based model that is capable of reproducing measures of emotive response comparable with those obtained from our empirical dataset.

The philosophical activity of critique is intimately connected with the mundane activity of public criticism that takes place in newspapers. Drawing on the Kantian tradition of critical philosophy, we argue that four axes, namely, self-examination, liminal interrogation, concern with legitimacy, and the requirement of communicability, are implied by critical discourse and public debate. We then examine a recent set of polemics (between Doğan Akın, Ali Bayramoğlu, and Etyen Mahçupyan) in the Turkish press with the aid of these axes--as well as techniques for the analysis of informal reasoning--to determine what critical function such polemics may have. We conclude that critique survives as polemic in the Turkish press, but in such a way that the latter's publicity vitiates the former's communicability. The result is that polemics ultimately track the balance of power between social forces rather than being a transformative element within them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We introduce the concept of communicability angle between a pair of nodes in a graph. We provide strong analytical and empirical evidence that the average communicability angle for a given network accounts for its spatial efficiency on the basis of the communications among the nodes in a network. We determine characteristics of the spatial efficiency of more than a hundred real-world networks that represent complex systems arising in a diverse set of scenarios. In particular, we find that the communicability angle correlates very well with the experimentally measured value of the relative packing efficiency of proteins that are represented as residue networks. We finally show how we can modulate the spatial efficiency of a network by tuning the weights of the edges of the networks. This allows us to predict the effects of external stresses on the spatial efficiency of a network as well as to design strategies to improve important parameters in real-world systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Computing & System Journal (C&S) / Revista de Sistemas e Computação (RSC) is the property of FACS Servicos Educacionais S.A. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The authors discuss evidence which shows that behind each stage of Small-World (SW) brain structure lurks fundamental technical, methodological or theoretical stumbling blocks that render the experimental quantification of the SW structure and its interpretation in terms of information processing. They emphasize that a functional brain activity reconstructed with the use of standard system-level brain recording techniques.