Decomposition rate as an emergent property of optimal microbial foraging

Microbial Virulence as an Emergent Property: Consequences and Opportunities

Although an existential threat from the microbial world might seem like science fiction, a catastrophic decline in amphibian populations with the extinction of dozens of species has been attributed to a chytrid fungus [1,2], and North American bats are being decimated by Geomyces destructans, a new fungal pathogen [3]. Hence, individual microbes can cause the extinction of a species. In the for...

The power law as an emergent property.

Recent work has shown that the power function, a ubiquitous characteristic of learning, memory, and sensation, can emerge from the arithmetic averaging of exponential curves. In the present study, the forgetting process was simulated via computer to determine whether power curves can result from the averaging of other types of component curves. Each of several simulations contained 100 memory t...

Monoallelic expression as an emergent property of stochastic gene regulation

Poincaré Semigroup Symmetry as an Emergent Property of Unstable Systems

The notion that elementary systems correspond to irreducible representations of the Poincaré group is the starting point for this paper, which then goes on to discuss how a semigroup for the time evolution of unstable states and resonances could emerge from the underlying Poincaré symmetry. Important tools in this analysis are the Clebsch-Gordan coefficients for the Poincaré group.

Metaphor as an Emergent Property of Machine-Readable Dictionaries

Previous computational attempts to handle nonliteral word usage have been restricted to "toy" systems that combine hand-coded lexicons with restricted sets of metaphor types that can be used to sanction specific classes of semantic subcategorization violations. These hand-coded efforts are unlikely to ever scale up to the rigors of real, free text. We describe an example-based approach to metap...