University of Maribor

About: University of Maribor is a education organization based out in Maribor, Slovenia. It is known for research contribution in the topics: Population & KEKB. The organization has 3987 authors who have published 13077 publications receiving 258339 citations. The organization is also known as: Univerza v Mariboru.

Culturomics meets random fractal theory: Insights into long-range correlations of social and natural phenomena over the past two centuries

Abstract: Culturomics was recently introduced as the application of high-throughput data collection and analysis to the study of human culture. Here we make use of this data by investigating fluctuations in yearly usage frequencies of specific words that describe social and natural phenomena, as derived from books that were published over the course of the past two centuries. We show that the determination of the Hurst parameter by means of fractal analysis provides fundamental insights into the nature of long-range correlations contained in the culturomic trajectories, and by doing so, offers new interpretations as to what might be the main driving forces behind the examined phenomena. Quite remarkably, we find that social and natural phenomena are governed by fundamentally different processes. While natural phenomena have properties that are typical for processes with persistent long-range correlations, social phenomena are better described as nonstationary, on-off intermittent, or Levy walk processes.

Cyclic dominance in evolutionary games: A review

Abstract: Rock is wrapped by paper, paper is cut by scissors, and scissors are crushed by rock. This simple game is popular among children and adults to decide on trivial disputes that have no obvious winner, but cyclic dominance is also at the heart of predator-prey interactions, the mating strategy of side-blotched lizards, the overgrowth of marine sessile organisms, and the competition in microbial populations. Cyclical interactions also emerge spontaneously in evolutionary games entailing volunteering, reward, punishment, and in fact are common when the competing strategies are three or more regardless of the particularities of the game. Here we review recent advances on the rock-paper-scissors and related evolutionary games, focusing in particular on pattern formation, the impact of mobility, and the spontaneous emergence of cyclic dominance. We also review mean-field and zero-dimensional rock-paper-scissors models and the application of the complex Ginzburg-Landau equation, and we highlight the importance and usefulness of statistical physics for the successful study of large-scale ecological systems. Directions for future research, related for example to dynamical effects of coevolutionary rules and invasion reversals due to multi-point interactions, are outlined as well.

Biaxial torus around nematic point defects.

Abstract: We study the biaxial structure of both line and point defects in a nematic liquid crystal confined within a capillary tube whose lateral boundary enforces homeotropic anchoring. According to Landau--de Gennes theory the local order in the material is described by a second-order tensor $\mathbf{Q},$ which encompasses both uniaxial and biaxial states. Our study is both analytical and numerical. We show that the core of a line defect with topological charge $M=1$ is uniaxial in the axial direction. At the lateral boundary, the uniaxial ordering along the radial direction is reached in two qualitatively different ways, depending on the sign of the order parameter on the axis. The point defects with charge $M=\ifmmode\pm\else\textpm\fi{}1$ exhibit a uniaxial ring in the plane orthogonal to the cylinder axis. This ring is in turn surrounded by a torus on which the degree of biaxiality attains its maximum. The typical lengths that characterize the structure of these defects depend both on the cylinder radius and the biaxial correlation length. It seems that the core of the point defect does not depend on the far nematic director field in the bulk limit.