Volume 2, Issue 2 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