Collecting is usually understood as an activity that bestows
permanence, unity, and meaning on otherwise scattered and ephemeral
objects. In The Redemption of Things , Samuel Frederick
emphasizes ...that to collect things, however, always entails
displacing, immobilizing, and potentially disfiguring them, too. He
argues that the dispersal of objects, seemingly antithetical to the
collector's task, is essential to the logic of gathering and
preservation.
Through analyses of collecting as a dialectical process of
preservation and loss, The Redemption of Things
illustrates this paradox by focusing on objects that challenge
notions of collectability: ephemera, detritus, and trivialities
such as moss, junk, paper scraps, dust, scent, and the transitory
moment. In meticulous close readings of works by Gotthelf, Stifter,
Keller, Rilke, Glauser, and Frisch, and by examining an
experimental film by Oskar Fischinger, Frederick reveals how the
difficulties posed by these fleeting, fragile, and forsaken objects
help to reconceptualize collecting as a poetic activity that makes
the world of scattered things uniquely palpable and knowable.
Cooperation, paying a cost to benefit others, is widespread. Cooperation can be promoted by pleiotropic 'win-win' mutations which directly benefit self (self-serving) and partner (partner-serving). ...Previously, we showed that partner-serving should be defined as increased benefit supply rate per intake benefit. Here, we report that win-win mutations can rapidly evolve even under conditions unfavorable for cooperation. Specifically, in a well-mixed environment we evolved engineered yeast cooperative communities where two strains exchanged costly metabolites, lysine and hypoxanthine. Among cells that consumed lysine and released hypoxanthine,
mutations repeatedly arose.
is self-serving, improving self's growth rate in limiting lysine.
is also partner-serving, increasing hypoxanthine release rate per lysine consumption and the steady state growth rate of partner and of community.
also arose in monocultures evolving in lysine-limited chemostats. Thus, even without any history of cooperation or pressure to maintain cooperation, pleiotropic win-win mutations may readily evolve to promote cooperation.
Mutualisms can be promoted by pleiotropic win-win mutations which directly benefit self (self-serving) and partner (partner-serving). Intuitively, partner-serving phenotype could be quantified as an ...individual's benefit supply rate to partners. Here, we demonstrate the inadequacy of this thinking, and propose an alternative. Specifically, we evolved well-mixed mutualistic communities where two engineered yeast strains exchanged essential metabolites lysine and hypoxanthine. Among cells that consumed lysine and released hypoxanthine, a chromosome duplication mutation seemed win-win: it improved cell's affinity for lysine (self-serving), and increased hypoxanthine release rate per cell (partner-serving). However, increased release rate was due to increased cell size accompanied by increased lysine utilization per birth. Consequently, total hypoxanthine release rate per lysine utilization (defined as 'exchange ratio') remained unchanged. Indeed, this mutation did not increase the steady state growth rate of partner, and is thus solely self-serving during long-term growth. By extension, reduced benefit production rate by an individual may not imply cheating.
How do people talk about COVID-19 online? To address this question, we offer an unsupervised framework that allows us to examine Twitter framings of the pandemic. Our approach employs a network-based ...exploration of social media data to identify, categorize, and understand communication patterns about the novel coronavirus on Twitter. The simplest structure that emerges from our analysis is the distinction between the internal/personal, external/global, and generic threat framings of the pandemic. This structure replicates in different Twitter samples and is validated using the variation of information measure, reflecting the significance and stability of our findings. Such an exploratory study is useful for understanding the contours of the natural, non-random structure in this online space. We contend that this understanding of structure is necessary to address a host of causal, supervised, and related questions downstream.
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