This book, based on published studies, takes a unique perspective on the 30-year collapse of pharmaceutical industry productivity in the search for small molecule OC magic bulletOCO interventions. The relentless escalation of inflation-adjusted cost per approved medicine in the United States OCo from $200 million in 1950 to $1.2 billion in 2010 OCo has driven industry giants to, at best, slavish imitation in drug design, and at worst, abandonment of research and embracing of widespread fraud in consumer marketing.The book adapts formalism across a number of disciplines to the strategy for design of mutilevel interventions, focusing first on molecular, cellular, and larger scale examples, and then extending the argument to the simplifications provided by the dominant role of social and cultural structures and processes in individual and population patterns of health and illness.In place of OC magic bulletsOCO, we must now apply OC magic strategiesOCO that act across both the scale and level of organization. This book provides an introductory roadmap to the new tools that will be needed for the design of such strategies."

This book, based on published studies, takes a unique perspective on the 30-year collapse of pharmaceutical industry productivity in the search for small molecule “magic bullet” interventions. The relentless escalation of inflation-adjusted cost per approved medicine in the United States — from $200 million in 1950 to $1.2 billion in 2010 — has driven industry giants to, at best, slavish imitation in drug design, and at worst, abandonment of research and embracing of widespread fraud in consumer marketing.The book adapts formalism across a number of disciplines to the strategy for design of mutilevel interventions, focusing first on molecular, cellular, and larger scale examples, and then extending the argument to the simplifications provided by the dominant role of social and cultural structures and processes in individual and population patterns of health and illness.In place of “magic bullets”, we must now apply “magic strategies” that act across both the scale and level of organization. This book provides an introductory roadmap to the new tools that will be needed for the design of such strategies./a

This book explores mental disorders from a uniquely evolutionary perspective. Although there have been many attempts to mathematically model neural processes and, to some extent, their dysfunction, there is very little literature that models mental function within a sociocultural, socioeconomic, and environmental context. Addressing this gap in the extant literature, this book explores essential aspects of mental disorders, recognizing the ubiquitous role played by the exaptation of crosstalk between cognitive modules at many different scales and levels of organization, the missing heritability of complex diseases, and cultural epigenetics. Further, it introduces readers to valuable control theory tools that permit the exploration of the environmental induction of neurodevelopmental disorders, as well as the study of the synergism between culture, psychopathology and sleep disorders, offering a distinctively unique resource.

The book presents a conceptually novel oscillations based paradigm, the Oscillation-Based Multi-Agent System (OSIMAS), aimed at the modelling of agents and their systems as coherent, stylized, neurodynamic processes. This paradigm links emerging research domains via coherent neurodynamic oscillation based representations of the individual human mind and society (as a coherent collective mind) states. Thus, this multidisciplinary paradigm delivers an empirical and simulation research framework that provides a new way of modelling the complex dynamics of individual and collective mind states. This book addresses a conceptual problem – the lack of a multidisciplinary, connecting paradigm, which could link fragmented research in the fields of neuroscience, artificial intelligence (AI), multi-agent system (MAS) and the social network domains. The need for a common multidisciplinary research framework essentially arises because these fields share a common object of investigation and simulation, i.e., individual and collective human behavior. Although the fields of research mentioned above all approach this from different perspectives, their common object of investigation unites them. By putting the various pathways of research as they are interrelated into perspective, this book provides a philosophical underpinning, experimental background and modelling tools that the author anticipates will reveal new frontiers in multidisciplinary research. Fundamental investigation of the implicit oscillatory nature of agents’ mind states and social mediums in general can reveal some new ways of understanding the periodic and nonperiodic fluctuations taking place in real life. For example, via agent states-related diffusion properties, we could investigate complex economic phenomena like the spread of stock market crashes, currency crises, speculative oscillations (bubbles and crashes), social unrest, recessionary effects, sovereign defaults, etc. All these effects are closely associated with social fragility, which follows and is affected by cycles such as production, political, business and financial. Thus, the multidisciplinary OSIMAS paradigm can yield new knowledge and research perspectives, allowing for a better understanding of social agents and their social organization principles.

This book describes how epigenetic context, in a large sense, affects gene expression and the development of an organism, using the asymptotic limit theorems of information theory to construct statistical models useful in data analysis. The approach allows deep understanding of how embedding context affects development. We find that epigenetic information sources act as tunable catalysts, directing ontogeny into characteristic pathways, a perspective having important implications for epigenetic epidemiology. In sum, environmental stressors can induce a broad spectrum of developmental dysfunctions, and the book explores a number of pandemic chronic diseases, using U.S. data at different scales and levels of organization. In particular, we find the legacy of slavery has been grossly compounded by accelerating industrial decline and urban decay. Individual chapters are dedicated to obesity and its sequelae, coronary heart disease, cancer, mental disorders, autoimmune dysfunction, Alzheimer’s disease, and other conditions. Developmental disorders are driven by environmental factors channeled by historical trajectory and are unlikely to respond to medical interventions at the population level in the face of persistent individual and community stress. Drugs powerful enough to affect deleterious epigenetic programming will likely have side effects leading to shortened lifespan. Addressing chronic conditions and developmental disorders requires significant large-scale changes in public policy and resource allocation.

For countless generations people have been told that their potential as humans is limited and fundamentally unequal. The social order, they have been assured, is arranged by powers beyond their control. More recently the appeal has been to biology, specifically the genes, brain sciences, the concept of intelligence, and powerful new technologies. Reinforced through the authority of science and a growing belief in bio-determinism, the ordering of the many for the benefit of a few has become more entrenched. Yet scientists are now waking up to the influence of ideology on research and its interpretation. In Genes, Brains, and Human Potential, Ken Richardson illustrates how the ideology of human intelligence has infiltrated genetics, brain sciences, and psychology, flourishing in the vagueness of basic concepts, a shallow nature-versus-nurture debate, and the overhyped claims of reductionists. He shows how ideology, more than pure science, has come to dominate our institutions, especially education, encouraging fatalism about the development of human intelligence among individuals and societies. Genes, Brains, and Human Potential goes much further: building on work being done in molecular biology, epigenetics, dynamical systems, evolution theory, and complexity theory, it maps a fresh understanding of intelligence and the development of human potential. Concluding with an upbeat message for human possibilities, this synthesis of diverse perspectives will engender new conversations among students, researchers, and other interested readers.

This monograph defines the notion of a ?system? by reference to those systems which exhibit goal-oriented behavior and utilize the notion of decision making and controls. Such systems allow for phenomenological description and fix the nature of causal transformations of input effects into output quantities. The study of consequences of the fact that the systems possess some properties constitutes the content of systems optimization methodology which goes beyond the scope of descriptive classification of systems.Chapter 1 deals with philosophical problems of systems methodology. An attempt is made to systematize and analyze the problems of scientific methodology as applied to systems modeling methodology which is viewed as the most general concept utilized in modern science.Chapter 2 focuses on problems of qualitative analysis in natural and social sciences. Attention is drawn to problems of measurement theory and quantitative analysis of systems.Approaches and methods of systems analysis and synthesis form the central portion of the book. Much study is given to the methods of systems decomposition, an integration using both discrete and continuous descriptions of objects, processes, and phenomena. Examples of complex goal-oriented systems are also provided.The remaining part of the book is largely centered around the methodology of multiobjective systems optimization.

The focus of this is on the latest developments related to the analysis of problems in which several scales are presented. After a theoretical presentation of the theory of homogenization in the periodic case, the other contributions address a wide range of applications in the fields of elasticity (asymptotic behavior of nonlinear elastic thin structures, modeling of junction of a periodic family of rods with a plate) and fluid mechanics (stationary Navier-Stokes equations in porous media). Other applications concern the modeling of new composites (electromagnetic and piezoelectric materials) and imperfect transmission problems. A detailed approach of numerical finite element methods is also investigated.

This monograph provides a comprehensive overview of the author's work on the fields of fractional calculus and waves in linear viscoelastic media, which includes his pioneering contributions on the applications of special functions of the Mittag-Leffler and Wright types. It is intended to serve as a general introduction to the above-mentioned areas of mathematical modeling. The explanations in the book are detailed enough to capture the interest of the curious reader, and complete enough to provide the necessary background material needed to delve further into the subject and explore the research literature given in the huge general bibliography. This book is likely to be of interest to applied scientists and engineers.

This monograph is an outgrowth of a set of lecture notes on the maximum entropy method delivered at the 1st Venezuelan School of Mathematics. This yearly event aims at acquainting graduate students and university teachers with the trends, techniques and open problems of current interest. In this book the author reviews several versions of the maximum entropy method and makes its underlying philosophy clear.