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News

Blyth Institute Paper Highlighted
in Mathematics Magazine

The standard notation for higher-order di!erentials (the
Liebniz notation) does not allow di!erentials to be used
in an algebraic manner (multiply, dividing, canceling, etc.).
Last year, a Blyth Institute researcher published a new no-
tation for di!erentials that allow them to be algebraically
manipulable (Bartlett and Khurshudyan, 2019).

Recently, this paper was highlighted in Mathematics Maga-
zine, a publication of the Mathematics Association of Amer-
ica (Campbell and Rosenthal, 2019), in their “Reviews”
section. The review validated the overall the results of the
paper, saying, “the authors make a strong case for a clear
and honest notation that facilitates working with di!eren-
tials.” While the reviewers agreed with the fact that the new
notation makes working with di!erentials more straightfor-
ward, they thought that, for teaching, it “is probably just
as confusing for students as the shorthand expression.”

Blyth Institute Researcher
Publishes Paper on Active
Information in Biology

Blyth Institute director Jonathan Bartlett published a new
paper earlier this year on using the concept of Active Infor-
mation in biology. Active Information was originally devel-
oped for evolution simulations, such as Avida and the Ev
system, to measure how much information the simulation
writers added to the system (Dembski and Marks II, 2009).
Essentially, Active Information was developed as a way of
measuring “cheating” on the part of programmers trying to
demonstrate natural selection with code.

In “Measuring Active Information in Biological Systems,”
Bartlett decided to turn the metric onto living organisms,
to provide a mechanism to see how much their evolution
was actually governed by Darwinian mechanisms and how
much of it was guided by mechanisms of variation built in
to the organisms themselves (Bartlett, 2020). While it has

been known for a while that there are mutational mecha-
nisms within genomes, it takes a lot of time and money to
tease them out. Essentially, this measurement can be used
to determine whether a mutational mechanism is worth in-
vestigating, or if it should be just considered “spontaneous.”
If an organism’s mutations displays significant active infor-
mation for a selection pressure, this is good evidence that
there is a mechanism worth discovering that is producing
those mutations.

A followup note on this paper by the author is available in
this issue.

New Era of Research in Active
Information

In addition to the applications of active information to bi-
ology in the previous news item, there has been a renewed
interest in active information from other parties as well.
So far, two other active information papers by Daniel An-
drés Díaz-Pachón and Robert J Marks II have been pub-
lished in the journal BIO-Complexity. The first one extends
active information into unbounded domains (Díaz-Pachón
and Marks II, 2020b). The second one uses active infor-
mation to compare neutral and selective evolution (Díaz-
Pachón and Marks II, 2020a).

Additionally, active information has shown to be a useful
concept generally in statistical investigations. A trio of au-
thors from the biostatistics and engineering departments
of University of Miami published a paper describing the
usage of active information in hypothesis testing and its re-
lationship to type-I errors (Díaz-Pachón, Sáenz, and Rao,
2020). The same group also developed a general method
of statistical mode-hunting using active information (Díaz-
Pachón, Sáenz, Rao, and Dazard, 2019) which has been
utilized in data mining software such as PRIMsrc (Dazard
et al., 2015).



50 News

Blyth Institute Assists with N95
Mask Shortage

Most people are aware that the COVID-19 pandemic has
caused a shortage in N95 masks. Private citizens have
stepped into the breach by 3D printing various types of
PPE equipment on home 3D printers. The Blyth Institute
has been helping out by helping individuals who are print-
ing masks increase their printing capacity.

We would like to thank everyone who is doing the printing
for their hard work and e!orts in this time. We would
especially like to thank the front-line medical workers for
whom this equipment is made. Thank you for standing in
the gap for us all.

References

Bartlett, J (2020). “Measuring Active Information in Bio-
logical Systems”. In: Communications of the Blyth In-
stitute 2020.2, pp. 1–11. doi: doi:10.5048/BIO- C.
2020.2.

Bartlett, J and A Zh Khurshudyan (2019). “Extending the
Algebraic Manipulability of Di!erentials”. In: Dynam-
ics of Continuous, Discrete and Impulsive Systems, Se-
ries A: Mathematical Analysis 26.3, pp. 217–230.

Campbell, P J and E S Rosenthal (2019). “Reviews”. In:
Mathematics Magazine 92.5, pp. 396–397. doi: 10 .
1080/0025570X.2019.1673628.

Dazard, J et al. (2015). “R package PRIMsrc: Bump Hunt-
ing by Patient Rule Induction Method for Survival, Re-
gression, and Classification”. In: JSM Proceedings, Sec-
tion for Statistical Programmers and Analysts, pp. 650–
664.

Dembski, W A and R J Marks II (2009). “Conservation of
Information in Search: Measuring the Cost of Success”.
In: IEEE Transactions on Systems, Man and Cyber-
netics A, Systems & Humans 5.5, pp. 1051–1061. doi:
10.1109/TSMCA.2009.2025027.

Díaz-Pachón, D A and R J Marks II (2020a). “Active Infor-
mation Requirements for Fixation on the Wright-Fisher
Model of Population Genetics”. In: BIO-Complexity
2020.4, pp. 1–6.

Díaz-Pachón, D A and R J Marks II (2020b). “General-
ized Active Information: Extensions to Unbounded Do-
mains”. In: BIO-Complexity 2020.3, pp. 1–6.

Díaz-Pachón, D A, J P Sáenz, and J S Rao (2020). “Hypoth-
esis testing with active information”. In: Statistics and
Probability Letters 161. doi: 10.1016/j.spl.2020.
108742.

Díaz-Pachón, D A, J P Sáenz, J S Rao, and J Dazard
(2019). In: Applied Stochastic Models in Business and
Industry 35.2, pp. 1–18. doi: 10.1002/asmb.2430.

https://doi.org/doi:10.5048/BIO-C.2020.2
https://doi.org/doi:10.5048/BIO-C.2020.2
https://doi.org/10.1080/0025570X.2019.1673628
https://doi.org/10.1080/0025570X.2019.1673628
https://doi.org/10.1109/TSMCA.2009.2025027
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.spl.2020.108742
https://doi.org/10.1016/j.spl.2020.108742
https://doi.org/10.1002/asmb.2430

	About This Journal
	The Purpose of the Journal
	Paper Submission Policies
	Other Journal Content

	From the Editors
	Annie CrawfordAnnie CrawfordMetaphor and Meaning  in the Teleological Language of Biology
	Introduction
	The History of Teleology in the Biological Sciences
	Teleological language is Essential to Biology
	If teleological language is essential to biology, then life must be teleological
	Conclusion: Life All the Way Down

	Salvador CordovaSalvador CordovaFisher's Fundamental Theorem of Natural Selection  Isn't Fundamental After All
	Introduction: The Problem of Defining Fitness
	Absolute ``Darwinian'' Fitness vs. Relative Fitness
	Mean and Variance of Relative Fitnesses
	Numerical Examples to Illustrate Fisher's Theorem
	Discussion
	Conclusion

	Eric HollowayEric HollowayTutorial: Bioinformatics Basics
	Introduction
	Genetic Code and Sequence Translation
	Sequencing and Assembly
	Accessing Data
	Finding Things With BLAST
	Summary

	Letters and Notes
	Eric HollowayYou Cannot Get Meaning From Randomness
	Jonathan BartlettActive Information is a Specified Complexity Model
	Eric HollowayEvolution in the Valley of Illusions
	Jonathan BartlettIs Active Information Applicable to Biology?
	Eric HollowayEmpirical Active Information

	News

