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Now showing 1 - 10 of 76
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    When optimization for governing human-environment tipping elements is neither sustainable nor safe
    (London : Nature Publishing Group, 2018) Barfuss, W.; Donges, J.F.; Lade, S.J.; Kurths, J.
    Optimizing economic welfare in environmental governance has been criticized for delivering short-term gains at the expense of long-term environmental degradation. Different from economic optimization, the concepts of sustainability and the more recent safe operating space have been used to derive policies in environmental governance. However, a formal comparison between these three policy paradigms is still missing, leaving policy makers uncertain which paradigm to apply. Here, we develop a better understanding of their interrelationships, using a stylized model of human-environment tipping elements. We find that no paradigm guarantees fulfilling requirements imposed by another paradigm and derive simple heuristics for the conditions under which these trade-offs occur. We show that the absence of such a master paradigm is of special relevance for governing real-world tipping systems such as climate, fisheries, and farming, which may reside in a parameter regime where economic optimization is neither sustainable nor safe.
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    A new color image encryption scheme using CML and a fractional-order chaotic system
    (San Francisco, CA : Public Library of Science (PLoS), 2015) Wu, X.; Li, Y.; Kurths, J.
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    Topology identification of complex network via chaotic ant swarm algorithm
    (New York, NY : Hindawi Publishing Corporation, 2013) Peng, H.; Li, L.; Kurths, J.; Li, S.; Yang, Y.
    Nowadays, the topology of complex networks is essential in various fields as engineering, biology, physics, and other scientific fields. We know in some general cases that there may be some unknown structure parameters in a complex network. In order to identify those unknown structure parameters, a topology identification method is proposed based on a chaotic ant swarm algorithm in this paper. The problem of topology identification is converted into that of parameter optimization which can be solved by a chaotic ant algorithm. The proposed method enables us to identify the topology of the synchronization network effectively. Numerical simulations are also provided to show the effectiveness and feasibility of the proposed method.
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    Metastability for discontinuous dynamical systems under LĂ©vy noise: Case study on Amazonian Vegetation
    (London : Nature Publishing Group, 2017) Serdukova, L.; Zheng, Y.; Duan, J.; Kurths, J.
    For the tipping elements in the Earth's climate system, the most important issue to address is how stable is the desirable state against random perturbations. Extreme biotic and climatic events pose severe hazards to tropical rainforests. Their local effects are extremely stochastic and difficult to measure. Moreover, the direction and intensity of the response of forest trees to such perturbations are unknown, especially given the lack of efficient dynamical vegetation models to evaluate forest tree cover changes over time. In this study, we consider randomness in the mathematical modelling of forest trees by incorporating uncertainty through a stochastic differential equation. According to field-based evidence, the interactions between fires and droughts are a more direct mechanism that may describe sudden forest degradation in the south-eastern Amazon. In modeling the Amazonian vegetation system, we include symmetric α-stable Lévy perturbations. We report results of stability analysis of the metastable fertile forest state. We conclude that even a very slight threat to the forest state stability represents Ĺevy noise with large jumps of low intensity, that can be interpreted as a fire occurring in a non-drought year. During years of severe drought, high-intensity fires significantly accelerate the transition between a forest and savanna state.
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    Noise-Aided Logic in an Electronic Analog of Synthetic Genetic Networks
    (San Francisco, CA : Public Library of Science (PLoS), 2013) Hellen, E.H.; Dana, S.K.; Kurths, J.; Kehler, E.; Sinha, S.
    We report the experimental verification of noise-enhanced logic behaviour in an electronic analog of a synthetic genetic network, composed of two repressors and two constitutive promoters. We observe good agreement between circuit measurements and numerical prediction, with the circuit allowing for robust logic operations in an optimal window of noise. Namely, the input-output characteristics of a logic gate is reproduced faithfully under moderate noise, which is a manifestation of the phenomenon known as Logical Stochastic Resonance. The two dynamical variables in the system yield complementary logic behaviour simultaneously. The system is easily morphed from AND/NAND to OR/NOR logic.
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    Restoration of rhythmicity in diffusively coupled dynamical networks
    (London : Nature Publishing Group, 2015) Zou, W.; Senthilkumar, D.V.; Nagao, R.; Kiss, I.Z.; Tang, Y.; Koseska, A.; Duan, J.; Kurths, J.
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    Comparison of correlation analysis techniques for irregularly sampled time series
    (Göttingen : Copernicus GmbH, 2011) Rehfeld, K.; Marwan, N.; Heitzig, J.; Kurths, J.
    Geoscientific measurements often provide time series with irregular time sampling, requiring either data reconstruction (interpolation) or sophisticated methods to handle irregular sampling. We compare the linear interpolation technique and different approaches for analyzing the correlation functions and persistence of irregularly sampled time series, as Lomb-Scargle Fourier transformation and kernel-based methods. In a thorough benchmark test we investigate the performance of these techniques. All methods have comparable root mean square errors (RMSEs) for low skewness of the inter-observation time distribution. For high skewness, very irregular data, interpolation bias and RMSE increase strongly. We find a 40 % lower RMSE for the lag-1 autocorrelation function (ACF) for the Gaussian kernel method vs. the linear interpolation scheme,in the analysis of highly irregular time series. For the cross correlation function (CCF) the RMSE is then lower by 60 %. The application of the Lomb-Scargle technique gave results comparable to the kernel methods for the univariate, but poorer results in the bivariate case. Especially the high-frequency components of the signal, where classical methods show a strong bias in ACF and CCF magnitude, are preserved when using the kernel methods. We illustrate the performances of interpolation vs. Gaussian kernel method by applying both to paleo-data from four locations, reflecting late Holocene Asian monsoon variability as derived from speleothem δ18O measurements. Cross correlation results are similar for both methods, which we attribute to the long time scales of the common variability. The persistence time (memory) is strongly overestimated when using the standard, interpolation-based, approach. Hence, the Gaussian kernel is a reliable and more robust estimator with significant advantages compared to other techniques and suitable for large scale application to paleo-data.
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    An electronic analog of synthetic genetic networks
    (San Francisco, CA : Public Library of Science (PLoS), 2011) Hellen, E.H.; Volkov, E.; Kurths, J.; Dana, S.K.
    An electronic analog of a synthetic genetic network known as the repressilator is proposed. The repressilator is a synthetic biological clock consisting of a cyclic inhibitory network of three negative regulatory genes which produces oscillations in the expressed protein concentrations. Compared to previous circuit analogs of the repressilator, the circuit here takes into account more accurately the kinetics of gene expression, inhibition, and protein degradation. A good agreement between circuit measurements and numerical prediction is observed. The circuit allows for easy control of the kinetic parameters thereby aiding investigations of large varieties of potential dynamics.
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    Characterizing time series: When Granger causality triggers complex networks
    (Bristol : Institute of Physics Publishing, 2012) Ge, T.; Cui, Y.; Lin, W.; Kurths, J.; Liu, C.
    In this paper, we propose a new approach to characterize time series with noise perturbations in both the time and frequency domains by combining Granger causality and complex networks. We construct directed and weighted complex networks from time series and use representative network measures to describe their physical and topological properties. Through analyzing the typical dynamical behaviors of some physical models and the MIT-BIH 7 human electrocardiogram data sets, we show that the proposed approach is able to capture and characterize various dynamics and has much potential for analyzing real-world time series of rather short length.
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    Multi-scale event synchronization analysis for unravelling climate processes: A wavelet-based approach
    (Göttingen : Copernicus GmbH, 2017) Agarwal, A.; Marwan, N.; Rathinasamy, M.; Merz, B.; Kurths, J.
    The temporal dynamics of climate processes are spread across different timescales and, as such, the study of these processes at only one selected timescale might not reveal the complete mechanisms and interactions within and between the (sub-)processes. To capture the non-linear interactions between climatic events, the method of event synchronization has found increasing attention recently. The main drawback with the present estimation of event synchronization is its restriction to analysing the time series at one reference timescale only. The study of event synchronization at multiple scales would be of great interest to comprehend the dynamics of the investigated climate processes. In this paper, the wavelet-based multi-scale event synchronization (MSES) method is proposed by combining the wavelet transform and event synchronization. Wavelets are used extensively to comprehend multi-scale processes and the dynamics of processes across various timescales. The proposed method allows the study of spatio-temporal patterns across different timescales. The method is tested on synthetic and real-world time series in order to check its replicability and applicability. The results indicate that MSES is able to capture relationships that exist between processes at different timescales.