Rodrick Wallace

This book applies the powerful asymptotic limit theorems of information and control theories to understanding the dynamics of dysfunction in cognitive cultural artifacts encompassing individual minds, small social groupings, institutions, machine systems, and their many critical composites. A particular focus is on attempts to build ‘intelligent machines’ that would supposedly rival or surpass human minds. All such efforts are blindsided by the reality that all such machines are cultural artifacts of those who build them, closely reflecting cultural priorities and blindness, and that intelligent entities lacking the feedback of high-speed embodiment must endure exaggerated levels of failure by fabulation and hallucination. A principal feature is the detailed working-out of many probability models that can serve as the foundation of statistical tools for the analysis of real-time, real-world data on cognitive failure across a broad range of modes, scales, and levels of organization.

This book provides a unique formal foundation for the development of statistical tools useful in the exploration of observational and experimental data related to embodied cognition. The asymptotic limit theorems of information and control theories can be used to construct statistical tools analogous to -- but different from -- regression models for the study of the often highly punctuated cognitive phenomena embedded in and hence influenced by a surrounding ecosystem of which the phenomena are themselves part. The book builds probability models based on those theorems that incorporate embodiment at a number of scales and levels of organization, ranging from the effects of stress on the immune system within a higher organism, through institutional (and machine) cognition under challenge from adversaries, to the failure of public health institutions under pathogen challenge. In distinct contrast to the existing literature, many detailed, worked-out examples provide templates for sophisticated readers to build their own model/tool constructs.

From the ‘punctuated equilibrium' of Eldrege and Gould, through Lewontin's ‘triple helix' and the various visions and revisions of the Extended Evolutionary Synthesis (EES) of Laland and others, both data and theory have demanded an opening-up of the 1950's Evolutionary Synthesis that so firmly wedded evolutionary theory to the mathematics of gene frequency analysis. It can, however, be argued that a single deep and comprehensive mathematical theory may simply not be possible for the almost infinite varieties of evolutionary process active at and across the full range of scales of biological, social, institutional, and cultural phenomena. Indeed, the case history of 'meme theory' should have raised a red flag that narrow gene-centered models of evolutionary process may indeed have serious limitations. What is attempted here is less grand, but still broader than a gene-centered analysis. Following the instruction of Maturana and Varela that all living systems are cognitive, in a certainsense, and that living as a process is a process of cognition, the asymptotic limit theorems of information and control theories that bound all cognition provide a basis for constructing an only modestly deep but wider-ranging series of probability models that might be converted into useful statistical tools for the analysis of observational and experimental data related to evolutionary process. The line of argument in this series of interrelated essays proves to be surprisingly direct.

This book explores the role of deception, delay, and self-deception in the dynamics of organized conflict, taking a formal approach that hews closely to the asymptotic limit theorems of information and control theories. The resulting probability models can, with some effort—and some confidence—be converted to statistical tools for the analysis of real-time observational and ‘experimental’ data on institutionalized confrontation across both traditional and emerging ‘Clausewitz Landscapes’.

As a follow-up to COVID-19 in New York City: an Ecology of Race and Class Oppression, which showed that decades of discriminatory public policies shaped the Bronx into the epicenter of the first wave of COVID-19, this book examines the build up to the crest and subsequent ebbing of the second wave of COVID-19 across the 62 counties of New York State (NYS) and 152 ZIP Code areas of the four central boroughs of New York City (NYC). Like its predecessor, the sequel examines the vulnerabilities that give rise to spikes in infection rates that form epicenters. Unlike the first wave, NYC was not the epicenter of the second wave; high-incident counties just outside NYS formed an extended initial epicenter and exported COVID-19 to neighboring counties of NYS. Rural NYS counties differed significantly from urban ones socioeconomically and in infection rates during the cresting period. Before the crest, no socioeconomic factor was associated with county infection rates; rather, the major associating factor was political and cultural: percent of the 2020 vote garnered by Trump. Rural counties voted heavily for Trump. This association disappeared post-crest by mid-January 2021. In NYC, the Bronx again behaved like a single high-incidence entity, unlike the other three boroughs that had patches of high and low infection incidence. Among the topics covered:The Second COVID Wave Washes Over New York StateThe Second Wave Storm-Surges Across New York CityDiscussion of County Data from the Second Wave of COVID-19Parsing Meaning From the 152 ZIP Code Data The book closes with a prescription for pandemic response planning based on empowered communities and workers interacting with health departments as equals. The Recurrence of COVID-19 in New York State and New York City is a valuableresource for social epidemiologists, public health researchers of health disparities, those in public service tasked with addressing these problems, and infectious disease scientists who focus on spread in human populations of new zoonotic diseases. The brief also will find readership among students in these fields, civil rights scholars, science writers, medical anthropologists and sociologists, medical and public health historians, public health economists, and public policy scientists.

This book makes application to the dynamics of arousal and distraction, and to other examples. A modified version of the Kadanoff picture of phase transitions in consciousness emerges from the Morse Function itself in a surprisingly standard manner, closely associated with the breaking of groupoid symmetries driven by fundamental equivalence class algebras. Although this is far indeed from the familiar world of physical theory, it should be possible, on the basis of the probability models developed in the book, to develop new statistical tools for the analysis of observational and empirical data regarding cognition and consciousness.

Steep socioeconomic hierarchy in post-industrial Western society threatens public health because of the physiological consequences of material and psychosocial insecurities and deprivations. Following on from their previous books, the authors continue their exploration of the geography of early mortality from age-related chronic conditions, of risk behaviors and their health outcomes, and of infant and child mortality, all due to rigid hierarchy. They divide the 50 states into those that gave their electoral college votes to Trump and those that gave theirs to Clinton in the 2016 presidential election and compare the two sets for socioeconomic and public health profiles. They deliberately apply only simple standard statistical methods in the public health analyses: t-test, Mann-Whitney test, bivariate regression, and backward stepwise multivariate regression. The book assumes familiarity with basic statistics.The authors argue that the unequal power relations that result in eroding public health in the nation and, in particular, in the Trump-voting states, largely cascade from the collapse of American industry, and they analyze the Cold War roots of that collapse. In two largely independent chapters on economics, they explore both the suppression of countervailing forces, such as organized labor, and the diversion of technical resources to the military as essential foundations to the population-level suffering that expressed itself in the 2016 presidential election.This interdisciplinary book has several primary audiences: creators of public policies, such as legislators and governmental staff, public health professionals and social epidemiologists, economists, labor union professionals, civil rights advocates, political scientists, historians, and students of these disciplines from public health through the social sciences.

This book is the first social epidemiological study of COVID-19 spread in New York City (NYC), the primary epicenter of the United States. New York City spread COVID-19 throughout the United States. The context of epicenter formation determined the rapid, extreme rise of NYC case and mortality rates. Decades of public policies destructive of poor neighborhoods of color heavily determined the spread within the City. Premature mortality rates revealed the "weathering" of policy-targeted communities: accelerated aging due to chronic stress. COVID attacks the elderly more severely than those under the age of 60. Communities with high proportions of prematurely aged residents proved fertile ground for COVID illness and mortality. The very public policies that created swaths of white wealth across much of Manhattan and parts of Brooklyn destroyed the human diversity needed to ride out crises. Topics covered within the chapters include: Premature Death Rate Geography in New York City: Implications for COVID-19 NYC COVID Markers at the ZIP Code Level Prospero's New Castles: COVID Infection and Premature Mortality in the NY Metro Region Pandemic Firefighting vs. Pandemic Fire Prevention Conclusion: Scales of Time in Disasters An exemplary study in health disparities, COVID-19 in New York City: An Ecology of Race and Class Oppression is essential reading for social epidemiologists, public health researchers of health disparities, those in public service tasked with addressing these problems, and infectious disease scientists who focus on spread in human populations of new zoonotic diseases. The brief also should appeal to students in these fields, civil rights scholars, science writers, medical anthropologists and sociologists, medical and public health historians, public health economists, and public policy scientists.

This book applies cutting-edge methods from cognitive and evolutionary theories to develop models of conflict between hierarchically-structured cognitive entities under circumstances of imprecision, uncertainty and stress. Characterized as friction and the fog-of-war by the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, such conditions impair institutional cognition in real-time conflict and pose a real and continuing threat to organizations, such as the US military. In a linked collection of formal essays and a mathematical appendix, the book explores different aspects of cognitive and evolutionary process as conducted under the direction of doctrine that acts as a kind of genome for retention of what is learned through Lamarckian evolutionary selection pressures: armies and corporate entities learn from conflict, and incorporate that learning into their ongoing procedures. The book proposes models and policy solutions for strategic competence. A central feature of the book is a formal description of the famous OODA loop of the US military theorist John Boyd in terms of the Data Rate Theorem that links control and information theories. That description is expanded to cover more fully the impact of stochastic fog-of-war effects on tactical and operational scales of conflict. Subsequent chapters examine in more detail the role of doctrine, and the particular effect of embedding culture on cognitive and Lamarckian evolutionary processes associated with conflict on tactical, operational, and strategic scales and levels of organization. A scientifically sophisticated exercise in applied mathematics, history, evolutionary theory, and ecosystem theory, this book will be appropriate for researchers and students interested in defense, security, and international relations, as well as non-academic career professionals in government and industry.

The creation of economic institutions that can function well under substantial uncertainties -- Black Swans -- is analogous to the dilemmas confronting our hunter-gatherer forefathers in the face of large-scale ecological unpredictability. The ultimate solution was not the development of a super hunter-gatherer technology that could ride out repeated catastrophe, but rather the invention, in neolithic times, of culturally-adapted 'farmed' ecosystems constructed to maximize food yield and minimize risks of famine. Recent advances in evolutionary and ecosystem theory applied to economic structure and process may permit construction of both new economic theory and new tools for data analysis that can help in the design of more robust economic institutions. This may result in less frequent and less disruptive transitions, and enable the design of culturally-specific systems less affected by those that do occur.This unique and innovative book applies cutting-edge methods from cognitive science and evolutionary theory to the problem of the necessary stabilization of economic processes. At the core of this book is the establishment of a statistics-like toolbox for the study of empirical data that is consistent with generalized evolutionary approaches. This toolbox enables the construction of both new economic theories and methods of data analysis that can help in the design of more robust economic institutions. This in turn will result in less frequent and less disruptive Black Swans, and enable as well the design of culturally-specific systems less affected by those that do occur.

This book applies cutting-edge methods from cognitive and evolutionary theories to develop models of conflict between hierarchically-structured cognitive entities under circumstances of imprecision, uncertainty and stress. Characterized as friction and the fog-of-war by the Prussian military theorist Carl von Clausewitz, such conditions impair institutional cognition in real-time conflict and pose a real and continuing threat to organizations, such as the US military. In a linked collection of formal essays and a mathematical appendix, the book explores different aspects of cognitive and evolutionary process as conducted under the direction of doctrine that acts as a kind of genome for retention of what is learned through Lamarckian evolutionary selection pressures: armies and corporate entities learn from conflict, and incorporate that learning into their ongoing procedures. The book proposes models and policy solutions for strategic competence. A central feature of the book is a formal description of the famous OODA loop of the US military theorist John Boyd in terms of the Data Rate Theorem that links control and information theories. That description is expanded to cover more fully the impact of stochastic fog-of-war effects on tactical and operational scales of conflict. Subsequent chapters examine in more detail the role of doctrine, and the particular effect of embedding culture on cognitive and Lamarckian evolutionary processes associated with conflict on tactical, operational, and strategic scales and levels of organization. A scientifically sophisticated exercise in applied mathematics, history, evolutionary theory, and ecosystem theory, this book will be appropriate for researchers and students interested in defense, security, and international relations, as well as non-academic career professionals in government and industry.

Steep socioeconomic hierarchy in post-industrial Western society threatens public health because of the physiological consequences of material and psychosocial insecurities and deprivations. Following on from their previous books, the authors continue their exploration of the geography of early mortality from age-related chronic conditions, of risk behaviors and their health outcomes, and of infant and child mortality, all due to rigid hierarchy. They divide the 50 states into those that gave their electoral college votes to Trump and those that gave theirs to Clinton in the 2016 presidential election and compare the two sets for socioeconomic and public health profiles. They deliberately apply only simple standard statistical methods in the public health analyses: t-test, Mann-Whitney test, bivariate regression, and backward stepwise multivariate regression. The book assumes familiarity with basic statistics.The authors argue that the unequal power relations that result in eroding public health in the nation and, in particular, in the Trump-voting states, largely cascade from the collapse of American industry, and they analyze the Cold War roots of that collapse. In two largely independent chapters on economics, they explore both the suppression of countervailing forces, such as organized labor, and the diversion of technical resources to the military as essential foundations to the population-level suffering that expressed itself in the 2016 presidential election.This interdisciplinary book has several primary audiences: creators of public policies, such as legislators and governmental staff, public health professionals and social epidemiologists, economists, labor union professionals, civil rights advocates, political scientists, historians, and students of these disciplines from public health through the social sciences.The Open Access version of this book, available at http://www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

This book discusses the socioeconomic effects of Right-to-Work (RTW) laws on state populations. RTW laws forbid requiring union membership even at union-represented worksites. The core of the 22 long-term RTW states was the Confederacy, cultural descendants of rigidly hierarchical agrarian feudal England. RTW laws buttress hierarchy and power imbalance which unions minimize at the worksite and by encouraging higher educational attainment, social mobility, and individual empowerment through group validation. Contrary to claims of RTW proponents, RTW and non-RTW states do not differ significantly in unemployment rates.RTW states have higher poverty rates, lower median household incomes, and lower educational attainment on average and median than non-RTW states. RTW states on average and median have lower life expectancy, higher obesity prevalence, and higher rates of all-cause mortality, early mortality from chronic conditions, child mortality, and risk behaviors than non-RTW states. The higher mortality rates result in startlingly higher annual numbers of years of life lost before age 75. Stroke mortality at age 55-64 in RTW states results in nearly 10,000 years annually lost in excess of what it would be if the mortality rate were that of non-RTW states.A review of respected publications describes the physiological mechanisms and epidemiology of accelerated aging due to socioeconomic stress. Unions challenge hierarchy directly at work-sites and indirectly through encouraging college education, social mobility, and community and political engagement. How startling that feudal hierarchy lives in 21st century America, shaping vast differences between states in macro- and micro-economics, educational attainment, innovation, life expectancy, obesity prevalence, chronic disease mortality, infant and child mortality, risk behaviors, and other public health markers! Readers will gain insight about the coming clash between feudal individualism and adaptive collectivism, and, in the last chapter, on ways to win the clash by “missionary” work for collectivism.

The vector-borne Zika virus joins avian influenza, Ebola, and yellow fever as recent public health crises threatening pandemicity.By a combination of stochastic modeling and economic geography, this book proposes two key causes together explain the explosive spread of the worst of the vector-borne outbreaks.Ecosystems in which such pathogens are largely controlled by environmental stochasticity are being drastically streamlined by both agribusiness-led deforestation and deficits in public health and environmental sanitation.Consequently, a subset of infections that once burned out relatively quickly in local forests are now propagating across susceptible human populations whose vulnerability to infection is often exacerbated in structurally adjusted cities. The resulting outbreaks are characterized by greater global extent, duration, and momentum.As infectious diseases in an age of nation states and global health programs cannot, as much of the present modeling literature presumes, be described by interacting populations of host, vector, and pathogen alone, a series of control theory models is also introduced here. These models, useful to researchers and health officials alike, explicitly address interactions between government ministries and the pathogens they aim to control.

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.

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.

The vector-borne Zika virus joins avian influenza, Ebola, and yellow fever as recent public health crises threatening pandemicity.By a combination of stochastic modeling and economic geography, this book proposes two key causes together explain the explosive spread of the worst of the vector-borne outbreaks.Ecosystems in which such pathogens are largely controlled by environmental stochasticity are being drastically streamlined by both agribusiness-led deforestation and deficits in public health and environmental sanitation.Consequently, a subset of infections that once burned out relatively quickly in local forests are now propagating across susceptible human populations whose vulnerability to infection is often exacerbated in structurally adjusted cities. The resulting outbreaks are characterized by greater global extent, duration, and momentum.As infectious diseases in an age of nation states and global health programs cannot, as much of the present modeling literature presumes, be described by interacting populations of host, vector, and pathogen alone, a series of control theory models is also introduced here. These models, useful to researchers and health officials alike, explicitly address interactions between government ministries and the pathogens they aim to control.

This book discusses the socioeconomic effects of Right-to-Work (RTW) laws on state populations. RTW laws forbid requiring union membership even at union-represented worksites. The core of the 22 long-term RTW states was the Confederacy, cultural descendants of rigidly hierarchical agrarian feudal England. RTW laws buttress hierarchy and power imbalance which unions minimize at the worksite and by encouraging higher educational attainment, social mobility, and individual empowerment through group validation. Contrary to claims of RTW proponents, RTW and non-RTW states do not differ significantly in unemployment rates.RTW states have higher poverty rates, lower median household incomes, and lower educational attainment on average and median than non-RTW states. RTW states on average and median have lower life expectancy, higher obesity prevalence, and higher rates of all-cause mortality, early mortality from chronic conditions, child mortality, and risk behaviors than non-RTW states. The higher mortality rates result in startlingly higher annual numbers of years of life lost before age 75. Stroke mortality at age 55-64 in RTW states results in nearly 10,000 years annually lost in excess of what it would be if the mortality rate were that of non-RTW states.A review of respected publications describes the physiological mechanisms and epidemiology of accelerated aging due to socioeconomic stress. Unions challenge hierarchy directly at work-sites and indirectly through encouraging college education, social mobility, and community and political engagement. How startling that feudal hierarchy lives in 21st century America, shaping vast differences between states in macro- and micro-economics, educational attainment, innovation, life expectancy, obesity prevalence, chronic disease mortality, infant and child mortality, risk behaviors, and other public health markers! Readers will gain insight about the coming clash between feudal individualism and adaptive collectivism, and, in the last chapter, on ways to win the clash by “missionary” work for collectivism.

The language of business is the language of dreams, but the language of war is the language of nightmare made real. Yet business dreams of driverless cars on intelligent roads, and of other real-time critical systems under the control of algorithmic entities, have much of war about them. Such systems, including military institutions at the tactical, operational and strategic scales, act on rapidly-shifting roadway topologies whose ‘traffic rules’ can rapidly change. War is never without both casualty and collateral damage, and realtime critical systems of any nature will inevitably partake of fog-of-war and frictional challenges almost exactly similar to those that have made warfare intractable for modern states. Into the world of Carl von Clausewitz, John Boyd, Mao Tse-Tung, Vo Nguyen Giap and Genghis Khan, come the brash, bright-eyed techies of Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Uber who forthrightly step in where a phalanx of angels has not feared to tread, but treaded badly indeed. In this book we use cutting-edge tools from information and control theories to examine canonical and idiosyncratic failure modes of real-time cognitive systems facing fog-of-war and frictional constraints. In sum, nobody ever navigates, or can navigate, the landscapes of Carl von Clausewitz unscathed.