Organic seeds must be of high quality

The project “SaaGodt” looks into combating seed-borne diseases and the germination quality of organic seeds. Although hypotheses have been made, it cannot be concluded that organic seed generally has poorer germination capacity, says project manager Anders Borgen

Emergent user behavior on Twitter modelled by a stochastic differential equation

Data from the social-media site, Twitter, is used to study the fluctuations in tweet rates of brand names. The tweet rates are the result of a strongly correlated user behavior, which leads to bursty collective dynamics with a characteristic 1/f noise. Here we use the aggregated "user interest" in a brand name to model collective human dynamics by a stochastic differential equation with multiplicative noise. The model is supported by a detailed analysis of the tweet rate fluctuations and it reproduces both the exact bursty dynamics found in the data and the 1/f noise

Rotation-limited growth of three dimensional body-centered cubic crystals

According to classical grain growth laws, grain growth is driven by the minimization of surface energy and will continue until a single grain prevails. These laws do not take into account the lattice anisotropy and the details of the microscopic rearrangement of mass between grains. Here we consider coarsening of body-centered cubic polycrystalline materials in three dimensions using the phase field crystal model. We observe as function of the quenching depth, a cross over between a state where grain rotation halts and the growth stagnates and a state where grains coarsen rapidly by coalescence through rotation and alignment of the lattices of neighboring grains. We show that the grain rotation per volume change of a grain follows a power law with an exponent of $-1.25$. The scaling exponent is consistent with theoretical considerations based on the conservation of dislocations

Elasticity with Arbitrarily Shaped Inhomogeneity

A classical problem in elasticity theory involves an inhomogeneity embedded in a material of given stress and shear moduli. The inhomogeneity is a region of arbitrary shape whose stress and shear moduli differ from those of the surrounding medium. In this paper we present a new, semi-analytic method for finding the stress tensor for an infinite plate with such an inhomogeneity. The solution involves two conformal maps, one from the inside and the second from the outside of the unit circle to the inside, and respectively outside, of the inhomogeneity. The method provides a solution by matching the conformal maps on the boundary between the inhomogeneity and the surrounding material. This matching converges well only for relatively mild distortions of the unit circle due to reasons which will be discussed in the article. We provide a comparison of the present result to known previous results.Comment: (10 pages, 10 figures

Computing Cournot-Nash equilibria / 1441

Includes bibliographical references (p. 22-23)

Organizational structure and communication networks in a university environment

The ``six degrees of separation" between any two individuals on Earth has become emblematic of the 'small world' theme, even though the information conveyed via a chain of human encounters decays very rapidly with increasing chain length, and diffusion of information via this process may be very inefficient in large human organizations. The information flow on a communication network in a large organization, the University of Oslo, has been studied by analyzing e-mail records. The records allow for quantification of communication intensity across organizational levels and between organizational units (referred to as ``modules"). We find that the number of e-mails messages within modules scales with module size to the power of $1.29\pm .06$, and the frequency of communication between individuals decays exponentially with the number of links required upwards in the organizational hierarchy before they are connected. Our data also indicates that the number of messages sent by administrative units is proportional to the number of individuals at lower levels in the administrative hierarchy, and the ``divergence of information" within modules is associated with this linear relationship. The observed scaling is consistent with a hierarchical system in which individuals far apart in the organization interact little with each other and receive a disproportionate number of messages from higher levels in the administrative hierarchy.Comment: 9 pages, 3 figure

Communication dynamics in finite capacity social networks

In communication networks structure and dynamics are tightly coupled. The structure controls the flow of information and is itself shaped by the dynamical process of information exchanged between nodes. In order to reconcile structure and dynamics, a generic model, based on the local interaction between nodes, is considered for the communication in large social networks. In agreement with data from a large human organization, we show that the flow is non-Markovian and controlled by the temporal limitations of individuals. We confirm the versatility of our model by predicting simultaneously the degree-dependent node activity, the balance between information input and output of nodes and the degree distribution. Finally, we quantify the limitations to network analysis when it is based on data sampled over a finite period of time.Comment: Physical Review Letter, accepted (5 pages, 4 figures