Inspired by empirical studies of networked systems such as the Internet, social networks, and biological networks, researchers have in recent years developed a variety of techniques and models to help us understand or predict the behavior of these systems. Here we review developments in this field, including such concepts as the small-world effect, degree distributions, clustering, network correlations, random graph models, models of network growth and preferential attachment, and dynamical processes taking place on networks.

/pdf/the-structure-and-function-of-complex-networks-34deompc9l.pdf

The Structure and Function of Complex Networks

https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.2307%2F3343168.pdf

Development as Freedom

We investigate whether income inequality affects subsequent growth in a cross-country sample for 1965-90, using the models of Barro (1997), Bleaney and Nishiyama (2002) and Sachs and Warner (1997), with negative results. We then investigate the evolution of income inequality over the same period and its correlation with growth. The dominating feature is inequality convergence across countries. This convergence has been significantly faster amongst developed countries. Growth does not appear to influence the evolution of inequality over time. Outline

https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/81822/1/02-28.pdf

Economic growth and income inequality

Social Network Analysis

ChEMBL is an Open Data database containing binding, functional and ADMET information for a large number of drug-like bioactive compounds. These data are manually abstracted from the primary published literature on a regular basis, then further curated and standardized to maximize their quality and utility across a wide range of chemical biology and drug-discovery research problems. Currently, the database contains 5.4 million bioactivity measurements for more than 1 million compounds and 5200 protein targets. Access is available through a web-based interface, data downloads and web services at: https://www.ebi.ac.uk/chembldb.

/pdf/chembl-a-large-scale-bioactivity-database-for-drug-discovery-4mahqu7a7p.pdf

ChEMBL: a large-scale bioactivity database for drug discovery

How can we solve problems in the society that cause socio economic crises such as the one of 2008? Here we introduce the subject of this special issue, ‘physics of societies’, dealing with a general introduction to the subject, and the particular special issue projects’ presentation, explaining why this subject is important to the scientific community and to the society, what are the problems that we can deal better using these approaches, and what can be suggested to do next in practice. We emphasize the strength of physics of socio-economic systems to treat problems in nations that are not solved with other approaches, and that these results can indeed affect the people, in particular with intervention schemes that support creating managed organizations, including support from socio-economic-organizations, for instance.

https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/S2424942417030013

Introduction to the Special Issue on Physics of Societies

We study the statistics of citations made to the top ranked indexed journals for Science and Social Science databases in the Journal Citation Reports using different measures. Total annual citation and impact factor, as well as a third measure called the annual citation rate are used to make the detailed analysis. We observe that the distribution of the annual citation rate has an universal feature - it shows a maximum at the rate scaled by half the average, irrespective of how the journals are ranked, and even across Science and Social Science journals, and fits well to log-Gumbel distribution. Correlations between different quantities are studied and a comparative analysis of the three measures is presented. The newly introduced annual citation rate factor helps in understanding the effect of scaling the number of citation by the total number of publications. The effect of the impact factor on authors contributing to the journals as well as on editorial policies is also discussed.

On the evolution and utility of annual citation indices

The COVID-19 pandemic has thrown natural life out of gear across the globe. Strict measures are deployed to curb the spread of the virus that is causing it, and the most effective of them have been social isolation. This has led to wide-spread gloom and depression across society but more so among the young and the elderly. There are currently more than 200 million college students in 186 countries worldwide, affected due to the pandemic. The mode of education has changed suddenly, with the rapid adaptation of e-learning, whereby teaching is undertaken remotely and on digital platforms. This study presents insights gathered from social media posts that were posted by students and young adults during the COVID times. Using statistical and NLP techniques, we analyzed the behavioral issues reported by users themselves in their posts in depression-related communities on Reddit. We present methodologies to systematically analyze content using linguistic techniques to find out the stress-inducing factors. Online education, losing jobs, isolation from friends, and abusive families emerge as key stress factors.

/pdf/identifying-pandemic-related-stress-factors-from-social-299jqm9s0q.pdf

Identifying pandemic-related stress factors from social-media posts - Effects on students and young-adults.

We consider the ideal-gas models of trading markets, where each agent is identified with a gas molecule and each trading as an elastic or money-conserving (two-body) collision. Unlike in the ideal gas, we introduce saving propensity $\lambda$ of agents, such that each agent saves a fraction $\lambda$ of its money and trades with the rest. We show the steady-state money or wealth distribution in a market is Gibbs-like for $\lambda=0$, has got a non-vanishing most-probable value for $\lambda \ne 0$ and Pareto-like when $\lambda$ is widely distributed among the agents. We compare these results with observations on wealth distributions of various countries.

Ideal Gas-Like Distributions in Economics: Effects of Saving Propensity

While literature and sociology are separately signifying, discursive practices, their use in unison has been limited to either the sociology of literature or a sociology through literature. This article, while demonstrating these two approaches as doubly mistaken, innovates – with two annotated poems – a more or most literary, poetic sociology where the self-deconstructive writing that happens in the event of a poem, undergoes a destructive mutation being contaminated by the social: they cannot be sundered in annotation, cannot be gleaned from a unity a priori. Then, are we prepared to subvert the sociologic of sociological texts and themes through poetic sociology in the classroom? The moment is here.

Arnab Chatterjee

Papers

Introduction to the Special Issue on Physics of Societies

On the evolution and utility of annual citation indices

Identifying pandemic-related stress factors from social-media posts - Effects on students and young-adults.

Ideal Gas-Like Distributions in Economics: Effects of Saving Propensity

Subverting Sociologic? Two Annotated Poems for a More Literary, Poetic Sociology