ComDig

Didier Sornette: How we can predict the next financial crisis

Mon, 17 Jun 2013 17:59:05 +0000

The 2007-2008 financial crisis, you might think, was an unpredictable one-time crash. But Didier Sornette and his Financial Crisis Observatory have plotted a set of early warning signs for unstable, growing systems, tracking the moment when any bubble is about to pop. (And he's seeing it happen again, right now.)

http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/498255a

Biology: The big challenges of big data

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 19:31:44 +0000

Biologists are joining the big-data club. With the advent of high-throughput genomics, life scientists are starting to grapple with massive data sets, encountering challenges with handling, processing and moving information that were once the domain of astronomers and high-energy physicists

Biology: The big challenges of big data

Vivien Marx
Nature 498, 255–260 (13 June 2013)

Network Science at Center of Surveillance Dispute

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 19:29:24 +0000

Last week, civil libertarians cried foul when press reports revealed that, in its efforts to ferret out terrorists, the U.S. National Security Agency (NSA) is collecting cell phone records and Internet data from companies such as Verizon, Facebook, and Skype. Some argued that the federal government is spying on its own citizens. From the nature of the data, scientists say it's clear that NSA is performing network analysis, a type of science that aims to identify social groups from the connections among people. And NSA is hardly the only organization doing such work, researchers say. Private companies are already tracing people's social circles.

Network Science at Center of Surveillance Dispute
Adrian Cho

Science 14 June 2013:
Vol. 340 no. 6138 p. 1272
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.340.6138.1272

http://www.technologyreview.com/featuredstory/515926/how-technology-is-destroying-jobs/

How Technology Is Destroying Jobs

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 19:13:34 +0000

That robots, automation, and software can replace people might seem obvious to anyone who’s worked in automotive manufacturing or as a travel agent. But Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s claim is more troubling and controversial. They believe that rapid technological change has been destroying jobs faster than it is creating them, contributing to the stagnation of median income and the growth of inequality in the United States. And, they suspect, something similar is happening in other technologically advanced countries.That robots, automation, and software can replace people might seem obvious to anyone who’s worked in automotive manufacturing or as a travel agent. But Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s claim is more troubling and controversial. They believe that rapid technological change has been destroying jobs faster than it is creating them, contributing to the stagnation of median income and the growth of inequality in the United States. And, they suspect, something similar is happening in other technologically advanced countries.

How Technology Is Destroying Jobs
By David Rotman on June 12, 2013

http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.2296

Collective behavior and evolutionary games - An introduction

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 19:10:13 +0000

This is an introduction to the special issue titled "Collective behavior and evolutionary games" that is in the making at Chaos, Solitons & Fractals. The term collective behavior covers many different phenomena in nature and society. From bird flocks and fish swarms to social movements and herding effects, it is the lack of a central planner that makes the spontaneous emergence of sometimes beautifully ordered and seemingly meticulously designed behavior all the more sensational and intriguing. The goal of the special issue is to attract submissions that identify unifying principles that describe the essential aspects of collective behavior, and which thus allow for a better interpretation and foster the understanding of the complexity arising in such systems. As the title of the special issue suggests, the later may come from the realm of evolutionary games, but this is certainly not a necessity, neither for this special issue, and certainly not in general. Interdisciplinary work on all aspects of collective behavior, regardless of background and motivation, and including synchronization and human cognition, is very welcome.

Collective behavior and evolutionary games - An introduction

Matjaz Perc, Paolo Grigolini

Daniel Suarez: The kill decision shouldn't belong to a robot

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 18:30:13 +0000

As a novelist, Daniel Suarez spins dystopian tales of the future. But on the TEDGlobal stage, he talks us through a real-life scenario we all need to know more about: the rise of autonomous robotic weapons of war. Advanced drones, automated weapons and AI-powered intelligence-gathering tools, he suggests, could take the decision to make war out of the hands of humans.

Complexity Digest's insight:
This talk is well beyond scifi armaggedon scenarios. Rather convincing and plausible.

Parasites Affect Food Web Structure Primarily through Increased Diversity and Complexity

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 15:20:09 +0000

Food webs are networks of feeding interactions among species. Although parasites comprise a large proportion of species diversity, they have generally been underrepresented in food web data and analyses. Previous analyses of the few datasets that contain parasites have indicated that their inclusion alters network structure. However, it is unclear whether those alterations were a result of unique roles that parasites play, or resulted from the changes in diversity and complexity that would happen when any type of species is added to a food web. In this study, we analyzed many aspects of the network structure of seven highly resolved coastal estuary or marine food webs with parasites. In most cases, we found that including parasites in the analysis results in generic changes to food web structure that would be expected with increased diversity and complexity. However, in terms of specific patterns of links in the food web (“motifs”) and the breadth and contiguity of feeding niches, parasites do appear to alter structure in ways that result from unique traits—in particular, their close physical intimacy with their hosts, their complex life cycles, and their small body sizes. Thus, this study disentangles unique from generic effects of parasites on food web organization, providing better understanding of similarities and differences between parasites and free-living species in their roles as consumers and resources.

Dunne JA, Lafferty KD, Dobson AP, Hechinger RF, Kuris AM, et al. (2013) Parasites Affect Food Web Structure Primarily through Increased Diversity and Complexity. PLoS Biol 11(6): e1001579. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.1001579

Can six billion cells phones collecting data on how people move lead to better human health?

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 15:11:51 +0000

Collecting and analyzing information from simple cell phones can provide surprising insights into how people move about and behave—and even help us understand the spread of diseases.

At a computer in her office at the Harvard School of Public Health in Boston, epidemiologist Caroline Buckee points to a dot on a map of Kenya’s western highlands, representing one of the nation’s thousands of cell-phone towers. In the fight against malaria, Buckee explains, the data transmitted from this tower near the town of Kericho has been epidemiological gold.

When she and her colleagues studied the data, she found that people making calls or sending text messages originating at the Kericho tower were making 16 times more trips away from the area than the regional average. What’s more, they were three times more likely to visit a region northeast of Lake Victoria that records from the health ministry identified as a malaria hot spot. The tower’s signal radius thus covered a significant waypoint for transmission of malaria, which can jump from human to human via mosquitoes. Satellite images revealed the likely culprit: a busy tea plantation that was probably full of migrant workers. The implication was clear, Buckee says. “There will be a ton of infected [people] there.”

Can Life Evolve from Wires and Plastic?

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 15:10:16 +0000

In a laboratory tucked away in a corner of the Cornell University campus, Hod Lipson’s robots are evolving. He has already produced a self-aware robot that is able to gather information about itself as it learns to walk.

Hod Lipson reports: "We wrote a trivial 10-line algorithm, ran it on big gaming simulator, put it in a big computer and waited a week. In the beginning we got piles of junk. Then we got beautiful machines. Crazy shapes. Eventually a motor connected to a wire, which caused the motor to vibrate. Then a vibrating piece of junk moved infinitely better than any other… eventually we got machines that crawl. The evolutionary algorithm came up with a design, blueprints that worked for the robot."

The computer-bound creature transferred from the virtual domain to our world by way of a 3D printer. And then it took its first steps. Was this arrangement of rods and wires the machine-world’s equivalent of the primordial cell? Not quite: Lipson’s robot still couldn’t operate without human intervention. ‘We had to snap in the battery,’ he told me, ‘but it was the first time evolution produced physical robots. Eventually, I want to print the wires, the batteries, everything. Then evolution will have so much freedom. Evolution will not be constrained.’

Not many people would call creatures bred of plastic, wires and metal beautiful. Yet to see them toddle deliberately across the laboratory floor, or bend and snap as they pick up blocks and build replicas of themselves, brings to mind the beauty of evolution and animated life.

One could imagine Lipson’s electronic menagerie lining the shelves at Toys R Us, if not the CIA, but they have a deeper purpose. Lipson hopes to illuminate evolution itself. Just recently, his team provided some insight into modularity—the curious phenomenon whereby biological systems are composed of discrete functional units.

Though inherently newsworthy, the fruits of the Creative Machines Lab are just small steps along the road towards new life. Lipson, however, maintains that some of his robots are alive in a rudimentary sense. ‘There is nothing more black or white than alive or dead,’ he said, ‘but beneath the surface it’s not simple. There is a lot of grey area in between.’

The robots of the Creative Machines Lab might fulfill many criteria for life, but they are not completely autonomous—not yet. They still require human handouts for replication and power. These, though, are just stumbling blocks, conditions that could be resolved some day soon—perhaps by way of a 3D printer, a ready supply of raw materials, and a human hand to flip the switch just the once.

According to Lipson, an evolvable system is ‘the ultimate artificial intelligence, the most hands-off AI there is, which means a double edge. All you feed it is power and computing power. It’s both scary and promising.’ What if the solution to some of our present problems requires the evolution of artificial intelligence beyond anything we can design ourselves? Could an evolvable program help to predict the emergence of new flu viruses? Could it create more efficient machines? And once a truly autonomous, evolvable robot emerges, how long before its descendants make a pilgrimage to Lipson’s lab, where their ancestor first emerged from a primordial soup of wires and plastic to take its first steps on Earth?

Denial: Self-Deception, False Beliefs, and the Origins of the Human Mind (by Ajit Varki, Danny Brower)

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 15:08:05 +0000

The history of science abounds with momentous theories that disrupted conventional wisdom and yet were eventually proven true. Ajit Varki and Danny Brower's "Mind over Reality" theory is poised to be one such idea-a concept that runs counter to commonly-held notions about human evolution but that may hold the key to understanding why humans evolved as we did, leaving all other related species far behind.

At a chance meeting in 2005, Brower, a geneticist, posed an unusual idea to Varki that he believed could explain the origins of human uniqueness among the world's species: Why is there no humanlike elephant or humanlike dolphin, despite millions of years of evolutionary opportunity? Why is it that humans alone can understand the minds of others?

Haunted by their encounter, Varki tried years later to contact Brower only to discover that he had died unexpectedly. Inspired by an incomplete manuscript Brower left behind, DENIAL presents a radical new theory on the origins of our species. It was not, the authors argue, a biological leap that set humanity apart from other species, but a psychological one: namely, the uniquely human ability to deny reality in the face of inarguable evidence-including the willful ignorance of our own inevitable deaths.

The awareness of our own mortality could have caused anxieties that resulted in our avoiding the risks of competing to procreate-an evolutionary dead-end. Humans therefore needed to evolve a mechanism for overcoming this hurdle: the denial of reality.

As a consequence of this evolutionary quirk we now deny any aspects of reality that are not to our liking-we smoke cigarettes, eat unhealthy foods, and avoid exercise, knowing these habits are a prescription for an early death. And so what has worked to establish our species could be our undoing if we continue to deny the consequences of unrealistic approaches to everything from personal health to financial risk-taking to climate change. On the other hand reality-denial affords us many valuable attributes, such as optimism, confidence, and courage in the face of long odds.

Probably Approximately Correct: Nature's Algorithms for Learning and Prospering in a Complex World (by Leslie Valiant)

Fri, 14 Jun 2013 15:07:56 +0000

How does life prosper in a complex and erratic world? While we know that nature follows patterns—such as the law of gravity—our everyday lives are beyond what known science can predict. We nevertheless muddle through even in the absence of theories of how to act. But how do we do it?

In Probably Approximately Correct, computer scientist Leslie Valiant presents a masterful synthesis of learning and evolution to show how both individually and collectively we not only survive, but prosper in a world as complex as our own. The key is “probably approximately correct” algorithms, a concept Valiant developed to explain how effective behavior can be learned. The model shows that pragmatically coping with a problem can provide a satisfactory solution in the absence of any theory of the problem. After all, finding a mate does not require a theory of mating. Valiant’s theory reveals the shared computational nature of evolution and learning, and sheds light on perennial questions such as nature versus nurture and the limits of artificial intelligence.

Offering a powerful and elegant model that encompasses life’s complexity, Probably Approximately Correct has profound implications for how we think about behavior, cognition, biological evolution, and the possibilities and limits of human and machine intelligence.

Constraint and Contingency in Multifunctional Gene Regulatory Circuits

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 18:25:49 +0000

Many essential biological processes, ranging from embryonic patterning to circadian rhythms, are driven by gene regulatory circuits, which comprise small sets of genes that turn each other on or off to form a distinct pattern of gene expression. Gene regulatory circuits often have multiple functions. This means that they can form different gene expression patterns at different times or in different tissues. We know little about multifunctional gene regulatory circuits. For example, we do not know how multifunctionality constrains the evolution of such circuits, how many circuits exist that have a given number of functions, and whether tradeoffs exist between multifunctionality and the robustness of a circuit to mutation. Because it is not currently possible to answer these questions experimentally, we use a computational model to exhaustively enumerate millions of regulatory circuits and all their possible functions, thereby providing the first comprehensive study of multifunctionality in model regulatory circuits. Our results highlight limits of circuit designability that are relevant to both systems biologists and synthetic biologists.

Payne JL, Wagner A (2013) Constraint and Contingency in Multifunctional Gene Regulatory Circuits. PLoS Comput Biol 9(6): e1003071. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pcbi.1003071

Productivity in Physical and Chemical Science Predicts the Future Economic Growth of Developing Countries Better than Other Popular Indices

Thu, 13 Jun 2013 18:14:47 +0000

Scientific productivity of middle income countries correlates stronger with present and future wealth than indices reflecting its financial, social, economic or technological sophistication. We identify the contribution of the relative productivity of different scientific disciplines in predicting the future economic growth of a nation. Results show that rich and poor countries differ in the relative proportion of their scientific output in the different disciplines: countries with higher relative productivity in basic sciences such as physics and chemistry had the highest economic growth in the following five years compared to countries with a higher relative productivity in applied sciences such as medicine and pharmacy. Results suggest that the economies of middle income countries that focus their academic efforts in selected areas of applied knowledge grow slower than countries which invest in general basic sciences.

Jaffe K, Caicedo M, Manzanares M, Gil M, Rios A, et al. (2013) Productivity in Physical and Chemical Science Predicts the Future Economic Growth of Developing Countries Better than Other Popular Indices. PLoS ONE 8(6): e66239. http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0066239

Raffaello D'Andrea: The astounding athletic power of quadcopters

Wed, 12 Jun 2013 19:05:18 +0000

In a robot lab at TEDGlobal, Raffaello D'Andrea demos his flying quadcopters: robots that think like athletes, solving physical problems with algorithms that help them learn. In a series of nifty demos, D'Andrea show drones that play catch, balance and make decisions together -- and watch out for an I-want-this-now demo of Kinect-controlled quads.

http://dx.doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0063400

Information Driven Self-Organization of Complex Robotic Behaviors

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 18:39:42 +0000

Information theory is a powerful tool to express principles to drive autonomous systems because it is domain invariant and allows for an intuitive interpretation. This paper studies the use of the predictive information (PI), also called excess entropy or effective measure complexity, of the sensorimotor process as a driving force to generate behavior. We study nonlinear and nonstationary systems and introduce the time-local predicting information (TiPI) which allows us to derive exact results together with explicit update rules for the parameters of the controller in the dynamical systems framework. In this way the information principle, formulated at the level of behavior, is translated to the dynamics of the synapses. We underpin our results with a number of case studies with high-dimensional robotic systems. We show the spontaneous cooperativity in a complex physical system with decentralized control. Moreover, a jointly controlled humanoid robot develops a high behavioral variety depending on its physics and the environment it is dynamically embedded into. The behavior can be decomposed into a succession of low-dimensional modes that increasingly explore the behavior space. This is a promising way to avoid the curse of dimensionality which hinders learning systems to scale well.

Martius G, Der R, Ay N (2013) Information Driven Self-Organization of Complex Robotic Behaviors. PLoS ONE 8(5): e63400. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0063400

Optimal behaviour can violate the principle of regularity

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 18:38:32 +0000

Understanding decisions is a fundamental aim of behavioural ecology, psychology and economics. The regularity axiom of utility theory holds that a preference between options should be maintained when other options are made available.[...] Here, I use models of state-dependent behaviour to demonstrate that choices can violate regularity even when behavioural strategies are optimal.

The effect of population structure on the rate of evolution

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 18:38:28 +0000

Ecological factors exert a range of effects on the dynamics of the evolutionary process. A particularly marked effect comes from population structure, which can affect the probability that new mutations reach fixation.[...] By comparing population structures that amplify selection with other population structures, both analytically and numerically, we show that evolution can slow down substantially even in populations where selection is amplified.

Self-extinction through optimizing selection

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 18:38:21 +0000

Evolutionary suicide is a process in which selection drives a viable population to extinction. So far, such selection-driven self-extinction has been demonstrated in models with frequency-dependent selection.

Adaptive tag switching reinforces the coevolution of contingent cooperation and tag diversity

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 18:38:02 +0000

We institute a spatial model to investigate the effect of the coevolution of tag and strategy on the evolution of cooperation in the context of the Prisoner's Dilemma game. Interactions just happen between tag-identical neighbors. Individuals exploited by defectors change their current tags at a certain cost.

The Self Illusion: The brain's greatest con trick?

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 18:35:54 +0000

Professor Bruce Hood shows that the concept of the 'self' is a figment of the brain, generated as a character to weave our internal processes and experiences together into a coherent narrative.

Forgetting Is Harder for Older Brains: Scientific American

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 17:45:59 +0000

Kids are wildly better than adults at most types of learning—most famously, new languages. One reason may be that adults' brains are “full,” in a way. Creating memories relies in part on the destruction of old memories, and recent research finds that adults have high levels of a protein that prevents such forgetting.

Discrete Dynamics Lab, June 2013 update

Tue, 11 Jun 2013 15:23:20 +0000

Network (and jump) graph nodes contract down to 1 pixel -- improving the scolling tube for large 1d networks, improvements to enlarged DDLab window layout, load/save ascii seed files.
The Derrida plot (described in EDD#22) is usually applied as an order-chaos measure for large RBN in the context of models of genetic regulatory networks, but it also provides Liapunov-like insights into CA rules. New options allow automatic plots of sets of rules in ascending decimal order, filtering out equivalent binary rcode and tcode, and listing equivalence classes and rule clusters.

For Null Boundary Conditions, inputs beyond the network's edges are held at a constant value of zero. All DDLab functions can now be easily switched between Periodic and Null. Null boundaries are of interest in pattern recognition, and where the system is grounded or quenched, or bounded by an edge, skin or membrane.
The new 2d hex/triangular neighborhoods for k3 and k4 permit investigating the dynamics on these simpler lattices, with many instances of complexity.

http://www.ddlab.com

http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0453

Subfield Effects on the Core of Coauthors

Mon, 10 Jun 2013 21:40:36 +0000

It is examined whether the number ($J$) of (joint) publications of a "main scientist" with her/his coauthors ranked according to rank ($r$) importance, i.e. $ J \propto 1/r $, as found by Ausloos [1] still holds for subfields, i.e. when the "main scientist" has worked on different, sometimes overlapping, subfields. Two cases are studied. It is shown that the law holds for large subfields. As shown, in an Appendix, is also useful to combine small topics into large ones for better statistics. It is observed that the sub-cores are much smaller than the overall coauthor core measure. Nevertheless, the smallness of the core and sub-cores may imply further considerations for the evaluation of team research purposes and activities.

Subfield Effects on the Core of Coauthors

Hassan Bougrine

http://www.nature.com/news/quantum-physics-the-quantum-atom-1.13117

Quantum physics: The quantum atom

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 17:16:31 +0000

July 1913 saw Danish physicist Niels Bohr publish the first of three papers setting out a radical new view of the nuclear atom. His idea — a positively charged nucleus ringed by electrons in orbits of discrete energies — explained the frequencies of light emitted by hydrogen as electrons made leaps between orbits. Quantum rules determined the electrons' energies, preventing the instabilities that had plagued previous mechanical models of atoms.

This special issue of Nature explores the origin and legacy of Bohr's quantum atom, a model that has resonated ever since.

Bayes' Theorem in the 21st Century

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 17:13:54 +0000

The term "controversial theorem" sounds like an oxymoron, but Bayes' theorem has played this part for two-and-a-half centuries. Twice it has soared to scientific celebrity, twice it has crashed, and it is currently enjoying another boom. The theorem itself is a landmark of logical reasoning and the first serious triumph of statistical inference, yet is still treated with suspicion by most statisticians. There are reasons to believe in the staying power of its current popularity, but also some signs of trouble ahead.

Bayes' Theorem in the 21st Century
Bradley Efron

Science 7 June 2013:
Vol. 340 no. 6137 pp. 1177-1178
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.1236536

Mysteries of Development

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 17:11:52 +0000

Development is, literally, the journey of a life time, and it is a trip still as mysterious as it is remarkable. Despite new methods to probe how an animal or plant forms from a single cell, biologists have much to learn about the unimaginably complex process. To identify some of the field's persistent riddles, Senior Editors Beverly Purnell and Stella Hurtley and the news staff of Science have consulted with developmental biologists on our Board of Reviewing Editors and elsewhere. The mysteries offered here are a humbling reminder that our knowledge of development remains to a great extent embryonic.

How Do Organs Know When They Have Reached the Right Size?
Why Do So Many Neurons Commit Suicide During Brain Development?
How Do Microbes Shape Animal Development?
How Does Fetal Environment Influence Later Health?

Mysteries of Development
John Travis

Science 7 June 2013:
Vol. 340 no. 6137 p. 1156
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.340.6137.1156-a

Getting into Shape

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 17:07:18 +0000

As development progresses from a single fertilized egg to 2, 4, 6, 8, 16 cells, and so on, the early apparent homogeneity soon transitions to cells displaying varied sizes and shapes. Cell adhesion and cortical tension, with their associated forces, contribute to such changes. Crowded cells are pushed and pulled, but some make their own way via cell-autonomous migration or chemotaxis. These events proceed in an amazingly precise, choreographed manner, both temporally and spatially. Distinct germ layers and ultimately the stereotypic body form result, with amazing robustness. This special issue presents exciting advances in understanding morphogenesis, or the development of body shape.

Getting into Shape
Beverly A. Purnell

Science 7 June 2013:
Vol. 340 no. 6137 p. 1183
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/science.340.6137.1183

Economics: A tale of cash and credit

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 16:55:52 +0000

The macroeconomist Felix Martin covers a vast geographical and historical spread in his argument that we have it all wrong about money. Money: The Unauthorised Biography reveals that credit has a crucial role in society, but that many misunderstandings persist about the relationship of credit to gold or fiat money. The latest views on microeconomic theory get no airing here, yet such developments point to a scientific shift towards an information-processing and network analysis of money and credit markets in a dynamic evolving economy.

Economics: A tale of cash and credit

Martin Shubik
Nature 498, 35 (06 June 2013) http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/498035a

http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0813

Social Media and Information Overload: Survey Results

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 16:32:03 +0000

A UK-based online questionnaire investigating aspects of usage of user-generated media (UGM), such as Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter, attracted 587 participants. Results show a high degree of engagement with social networking media such as Facebook, and a significant engagement with other media such as professional media, microblogs and blogs. Participants who experience information overload are those who engage less frequently with the media, rather than those who have fewer posts to read. Professional users show different behaviours to social users. Microbloggers complain of information overload to the greatest extent. Two thirds of Twitter-users have felt that they receive too many posts, and over half of Twitter-users have felt the need for a tool to filter out the irrelevant posts. Generally speaking, participants express satisfaction with the media, though a significant minority express a range of concerns including information overload and privacy.

Social Media and Information Overload: Survey Results

Kalina Bontcheva, Genevieve Gorrell, Bridgette Wessels

http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.4328

Competition-induced criticality in a model of meme popularity

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 16:21:22 +0000

Heavy-tailed distributions of meme popularity occur naturally in a model of meme diffusion on social networks. Competition between multiple memes for the limited resource of user attention is identified as the mechanism that poises the system at criticality. The popularity growth of each meme is described by a critical branching process, and asymptotic analysis predicts power-law distributions of popularity with very heavy tails (exponent $\alpha<2$, unlike preferential-attachment models), similar to those seen in empirical data.

Competition-induced criticality in a model of meme popularity

James P. Gleeson, Jonathan A. Ward, Kevin P. O'Sullivan, William T. Lee

https://wis.ntu.edu.sg/pls/webexe/REGISTER_NTU.REGISTER?EVENT_ID=OA13060216025114

International Symposium on Health Systems Complexity

Fri, 07 Jun 2013 15:28:59 +0000

Health Systems Complexity is a cross-disciplinary research field that takes a unique system dynamics view of health, examining all aspects from the molecular level all the way up to healthcare and governance itself. Health Systems Complexity at the NTU in Singapore is aligned with world-wide initiatives to model patients, like the Virtual Physiological Human, and the health systems in which they function. At the NTU one of the aims is to develop scenario-based decision support systems to assess the influence of healthcare and medication measures on the whole health chain, from the biomedical effects to the impact on social and health policy.

The Health Systems Complexity symposium is pleased to have renowned scholars, scientists, educators and leaders from different corners of the world to talk about how the notion of complexity science can help in understanding health in an integrative way. The symposium presents a revolutionary approach to reforming basic practice and large-scale care delivery, based on the concept of health care as a complex, self-organized, and self-interactive system. The goals of this symposium is to bring together original thinkers who do not shy away from unconventional methods to address the tremendous challenges the growing and aging population of our world is facing.

Event Date 08 Jul 2013 09:00 AM (Mon) - 09 Jul 2013 06:00 PM (Tue)
Venue Education Wing, Level 3, Lecture Room 4, Nanyang Executive Centre, NTU, Singapore

http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0253

Game of Life on Phyllosilicates: Gliders, Oscillators and Still Life

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 19:01:59 +0000

A phyllosilicate is a sheet of silicate tetrahedra bound by basal oxygens. A phyllosilicate automaton is a regular network of finite state machines --- silicon nodes and oxygen nodes --- which mimics structure of the phyllosilicate. A node takes states 0 and 1. Each node updates its state in discrete time depending on a sum of states of its three (silicon) or six (oxygen) neighbours. Phyllosilicate automata exhibit localizations attributed to Conway's Game of Life: gliders, oscillators, still lifes, and a glider gun. Configurations and behaviour of typical localizations, and interactions between the localizations are illustrated.

Game of Life on Phyllosilicates: Gliders, Oscillators and Still Life

Andrew Adamatzky

Islands and the CounterIntuitive Effect They Have on Tsunamis

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 14:33:40 +0000

Computer simulations show that, far from protecting coastal communities, islands can dramatically amplify the damaging impact of tsunamis.

http://arxiv.org/abs/1306.0072

Adaptive long-range migration promotes cooperation under tempting conditions

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 14:30:39 +0000

Migration is a fundamental trait in humans and animals. Recent studies investigated the effect of migration on the evolution of cooperation, showing that contingent migration favors cooperation in spatial structures. In those studies, only local migration to immediate neighbor sites was considered, while long-range migration has not been considered yet, partly because the long-range migration has been generally regarded as harmful for cooperation as it would bring the population to a well-mixed state that favors defection. In this paper, we studied the effects of adaptive long-range migration on the evolution of cooperation through agent-based simulations of a spatial Prisoner's Dilemma game in which individuals can jump to a farther site if they are surrounded by more defectors. Our results show that adaptive long-range migration strongly promotes cooperation, especially under conditions where the temptation to defect is considerably high. Moreover, we found that cooperation emerges and remains robustly through mutation and migration even from a condition in which only defectors exist. These findings demonstrate the significance of adaptive long-range migration, a naturally observed migration style in human and animal behaviors, for the evolution of cooperation.

Adaptive long-range migration promotes cooperation under tempting conditions

Genki Ichinose, Masaya Saito, Hiroki Sayama, David Sloan Wilson

http://www.socinfo2013.org

SocInfo 2013

Wed, 05 Jun 2013 14:13:51 +0000

We are delighted to welcome the International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo 2013) to Kyoto, Japan. The conference will take place from November 25 to 27 at Clock Tower Centennial Hall, Kyoto University.

The International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo 2013) is an interdisciplinary venue for researchers from Computer Science, Informatics, Social Sciences and Management Sciences to share ideas and opinions, and present original research work on studying the interplay between socially-centric platforms and social phenomena. The ultimate goal of Social Informatics is to create better understanding of socially-centric platforms not just as a technology, but also as a set of social phenomena. To that end, we are inviting interdisciplinary papers, on applying information technology in the study of social phenomena, on applying social concepts in the design of information systems, on applying methods from the social sciences in the study of social computing and information systems, on applying computational algorithms to facilitate the study of social systems and human social dynamics, and on designing information and communication technologies that consider social context.

http://networks.imtlucca.it/index.php/events

Horizons in Social Sciences 2013

Tue, 04 Jun 2013 17:23:20 +0000

Nowadays there is an ongoing intense scientific debate around the definition of the foundational concepts as well as about the most appropriate methodological approaches to deal with the understanding of social dynamics. The challenge of understanding human behaviors is complex and intricate. Humans are intentional (and not necessarily rational) and the dynamics of social behavior are influenced by multitude of factors. In particular, with the advent of the Big Data era– i.e. the explosion of available datasets from technological mediated communication – that challenge has increased its complexity. If on the one hand we can have access to an enormous set of observable social and mobility traces, on the other hand there is a lack of theoretical concepts to ground and interpret data as an expression of individual and social behavior. The event is intended to gather the most proficient scientists and companies working at the edge of the computational social science and big data to detail the new frontiers and challenges with an interdisciplinary, tight and non reductionist approach.The symposium is open to all researchers, scientists and practitioners.

Invited Speakers: Alessandro Vespignani, David Lazer, Nicola Santoro

July 11, 2013 - IMT Lucca, Italy

Francis Heylighen: Foundations for a Mathematical Model of the Global Brain

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 21:50:29 +0000

May 17, 2013 Brussels, VUB

Marko Rodriguez: Distributed Graph Analytics with Faunus

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 21:40:30 +0000

Faunus is a graph analytics engine built atop the Hadoop distributed computing platform. The graph representation is a distributed adjacency list, whereby a vertex and its incident edges are co-located with one another. Querying a Faunus graph is possible with a MapReduce-variant of the Gremlin graph traversal language. A Gremlin expression compiles down to a series of MapReduce-steps that are sequence optimized and then executed by Hadoop. Results are stored as transformations to the input graph (graph derivations) or computational side-effects such as aggregates (graph statistics). Beyond querying, a collection of input/output formats are supported which enable Faunus to load/store graphs in the distributed graph database Titan, various common text-based formats stored in HDFS, and via arbitrary user-defined functions. This presentation will focus primarily on Faunus, but will also review the satellite technologies that enable it.

Seminar page: http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/206

http://arxiv.org/abs/1305.7440

A Simple Generative Model of Collective Online Behaviour

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 21:34:50 +0000

Human activities---from voter mobilization to political protests---increasingly take place in online environments, providing novel opportunities for relating individual behaviours to population-level outcomes. The recent availability of data sets that capture the behaviour of individuals participating in online social systems has driven the emerging field of computational social science, as large-scale empirical data sets enable the development of detailed computational models of individual and collective behaviour. Given the inherent limitations of observational data, it is crucial to investigate the extent to which models of collective dynamics can distinguish between different individual-level mechanisms. Here we introduce a simple generative model for the collective behaviour of millions of social networking site users who are deciding between different software applications. Our model incorporates two distinct components: one is associated with recent decisions of users, and the other reflects the cumulative popularity of each application. Importantly, although various combinations of the two mechanisms yield long-time behaviour that is consistent with data, only models that strongly emphasize recent popularity of applications over their cumulative popularity reproduce the observed temporal dynamics. Our approach demonstrates the value of even very simple generative models in understanding collective social behaviour, and it highlights the need to address temporal dynamics---not just long-time behaviour---when modelling complex social systems.

A Simple Generative Model of Collective Online Behaviour

James P. Gleeson, Davide Cellai, Jukka-Pekka Onnela, Mason A. Porter, Felix Reed-Tsochas

http://www.springer.com/series/11784

Computational Social Sciences

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 20:06:54 +0000

Series Editors: Bertino, E., Foster, J., Gilbert, N., Golbeck, J., Kitts, J.A., Liebovitch, L., Matei, S.A., Nijholt, A., Savit, R., Vinciarelli, A.

A series of authored and edited monographs that utilize quantitative and computational methods to model, analyze and interpret large-scale social phenomena. Titles within the series contain methods and practices that test and develop theories of complex social processes through bottom-up modeling of social interactions. Of particular interest is the study of the co-evolution of modern communication technology and social behavior and norms, in connection with emerging issues such as trust, risk, security and privacy in novel socio-technical environments.
Computational Social Sciences is explicitly transdisciplinary: quantitative methods from fields such as dynamical systems, artificial intelligence, network theory, agent-based modeling, and statistical mechanics are invoked and combined with state-of-the-art mining and analysis of large data sets to help us understand social agents, their interactions on and offline, and the effect of these interactions at the macro level. Topics include, but are not limited to social networks and media, dynamics of opinions, cultures and conflicts, socio-technical co-evolution and social psychology. Computational Social Sciences will also publish monographs and selected edited contributions from specialized conferences and workshops specifically aimed at communicating new findings to a large transdisciplinary audience. A fundamental goal of the series is to provide a single forum within which commonalities and differences in the workings of this field may be discerned, hence leading to deeper insight and understanding.

Angela Lee Duckworth: The key to success? Grit

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 19:40:51 +0000

Leaving a high-flying job in consulting, Angela Lee Duckworth took a job teaching math to seventh graders in a New York public school. She quickly realized that IQ wasn’t the only thing separating the successful students from those who struggled. Here, she explains her theory of “grit” as a predictor of success.

orgcomplexity.com

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 14:53:42 +0000

This blog is home to those not put aback by the complexity inherent to healthcare. This is a site for the complexity as well as system science relishers.

Theories of Learning

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 14:52:43 +0000

Information dissipation as an early-warning signal for the Lehman Brothers collapse in financial time series

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 14:50:58 +0000

In financial markets, participants locally optimize their profit which can result in a globally unstable state leading to a catastrophic change. The largest crash in the past decades is the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers which was followed by a trust-based crisis between banks due to high-risk trading in complex products. We introduce information dissipation length (IDL) as a leading indicator of global instability of dynamical systems based on the transmission of Shannon information, and apply it to the time series of USD and EUR interest rate swaps (IRS). We find in both markets that the IDL steadily increases toward the bankruptcy, then peaks at the time of bankruptcy, and decreases afterwards. Previously introduced indicators such as ‘critical slowing down’ do not provide a clear leading indicator. Our results suggest that the IDL may be used as an early-warning signal for critical transitions even in the absence of a predictive model.

Information dissipation as an early-warning signal for the Lehman Brothers collapse in financial time series
Rick Quax, Drona Kandhai & Peter M. A. Sloot
Scientific Reports 3, Article number: 1898
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep01898

Big Data Drives 'National Day Of Civic Hacking'

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 14:50:25 +0000

Nationwide hackathon this weekend encourages coders to use publicly available data to tackle problems ranging from poverty to poultry handling.

LAWS, LANGUAGE and LIFE: Howard Pattee's classic papers on the physics of symbols with contemporary commentary (by Howard Hunt Pattee)

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 14:48:45 +0000

Howard Pattee is a physicist who for many years has taken his own path in studying the physics of symbols, which is now a foundation for biosemiotics. By extending von Neumann’s logical requirements for self-replication, to the physical requirements of symbolic instruction at the molecular level, he concludes that a form of quantum measurement is necessary for life. He explains why all non-dynamic symbolic and informational controls act as special (allosteric) constraints on dynamical systems. Pattee also points out that symbols do not exist in isolation but in coordinated symbol systems we call languages. Such insights turn out to be necessary to situate biosemiotics as an objective scientific endeavor. By proposing a way to relate quiescent symbolic constraints to dynamics, Pattee’s work builds a bridge between physical, biological, and psychological models that are based on dynamical systems theory. Pattee’s work awakes new interest in cognitive scientists, where his recognition of the necessary separation—the epistemic cut—between the subject and object provides a basis for a complementary third way of relating the purely symbolic, computational models of cognition and the purely dynamic, non-representational models. This selection of Pattee’s papers also addresses several other fields, including hierarchy theory, artificial life, self-organization, complexity theory, and the complementary epistemologies of the physical and biological sciences.

The Neural Basis of Free Will: Criterial Causation (by Peter Ulric Tse)

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 14:48:21 +0000

The issues of mental causation, consciousness, and free will have vexed philosophers since Plato. In this book, Peter Tse examines these unresolved issues from a neuroscientific perspective. In contrast with philosophers who use logic rather than data to argue whether mental causation or consciousness can exist given unproven first assumptions, Tse proposes that we instead listen to what neurons have to say. Because the brain must already embody a solution to the mind--body problem, why not focus on how the brain actually realizes mental causation?

Tse draws on exciting recent neuroscientific data concerning how informational causation is realized in physical causation at the level of NMDA receptors, synapses, dendrites, neurons, and neuronal circuits. He argues that a particular kind of strong free will and "downward" mental causation are realized in rapid synaptic plasticity. Recent neurophysiological breakthroughs reveal that neurons function as criterial assessors of their inputs, which then change the criteria that will make other neurons fire in the future. Such informational causation cannot change the physical basis of information realized in the present, but it can change the physical basis of information that may be realized in the immediate future. This gets around the standard argument against free will centered on the impossibility of self-causation. Tse explores the ways that mental causation and qualia might be realized in this kind of neuronal and associated information-processing architecture, and considers the psychological and philosophical implications of having such an architecture realized in our brains.

The Anatomy of Violence: The Biological Roots of Crime (by Adrian Raine)

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 14:48:11 +0000

Why do some innocent kids grow up to become cold-blooded serial killers? Is bad biology partly to blame? For more than three decades Adrian Raine has been researching the biological roots of violence and establishing neurocriminology, a new field that applies neuroscience techniques to investigate the causes and cures of crime. In The Anatomy of Violence, Raine dissects the criminal mind with a fascinating, readable, and far-reaching scientific journey into the body of evidence that reveals the brain to be a key culprit in crime causation.

Raine documents from genetic research that the seeds of sin are sown early in life, giving rise to abnormal physiological functioning that cultivates crime. Drawing on classical case studies of well-known killers in history—including Richard Speck, Ted Kaczynski, and Henry Lee Lucas—Raine illustrates how impairments to brain areas controlling our ability to experience fear, make good decisions, and feel guilt predispose us to violence. He contends that killers can actually be coldhearted: something as simple as a low resting heart rate can give rise to violence. But arguing that biology is not destiny, he also sketches out provocative new biosocial treatment approaches that can change the brain and prevent violence.

Finally, Raine tackles the thorny legal and ethical dilemmas posed by his research, visualizing a futuristic brave new world where our increasing ability to identify violent offenders early in life might shape crime-prevention policies, for good and bad. Will we sacrifice our notions of privacy and civil rights to identify children as potential killers in the hopes of helping both offenders and victims? How should we punish individuals with little to no control over their violent behavior? And should parenting require a license? The Anatomy of Violence offers a revolutionary appraisal of our understanding of criminal offending, while also raising provocative questions that challenge our core human values of free will, responsibility, and punishment.

The Form Within: My Point of View (by Karl H Pribram)

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 14:47:56 +0000

THE FORM WITHIN is the fascinating story of two hundred years of pioneering brain research, told from the unique perspective of the only brain scientist who has been, and still remains, an active participant in that story throughout the past seventy years: Karl H. Pribram.

In THE FORM WITHIN, Dr. Pribram takes us on a compelling journey from the dawn of our collective “recorded perceptions” in cave paintings to our greatest achievements as a species. He explains the important task of mapping the brain; the discovery of our holographic processing of memory and perception; and the detailed research that has created our understanding of self-organizing biological systems.

Along the way, Pribram shares the intimate interactions he has had with luminaries of twentieth-century science, including David Bohm, Francis Crick, John Eccles, Dennis Gabor, Hubel and Wiesel, Wolfgang Kohler, Karl Lashley, Aleksandr Romanovitch Luria, Ilya Prigogine, B. F. Skinner, Eugene Sokolov, and many others.

But this riveting glimpse into our past is only a part of the story. Pribram also provides us with insightful breakthroughs into a science of the future, and points the way to where our understanding of the brain is headed.

http://www.soms.ethz.ch/workshop2013

Workshop 2013 - ETH Risk Center: Vulnerability and resilience of supply chains

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 14:45:59 +0000

ETH Zurich (Switzerland), September 12-13, 2013

Program
The workshop will run for two days, with an evening dinner cruise on Lake Zurich after the first day. Two sessions each day will consist of talks by invited speakers and there will be a panel discussion at the end of each day.
A detailed agenda will be published soon.

Poster session
The poster session offers an opportunity for an interactive presentation of your work.
If you want to present a poster, please submit a pdf file of it (max. 5 megabytes) to info-riskcenter@ethz.ch. The best posters will be selected for the poster exhibition by the program committee. The submission deadline is July 31.

http://www.santafe.edu/education/schools/complex-systems-summer-school-chile/

Complex Systems Summer School - Chile | Santa Fe Institute

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 14:19:18 +0000

CSSS-Chile is an intensive 11-day exploration of biocomplexity and the complex behavior in the environment and social sciences. This school is intended for graduate and postdoctoral fellows. Topics include social dynamics, scaling and network theory, ecology and nonlinear dynamics among others.
The school is open to students from all countries. Participants are expected to attend for the full 11 days.

Assistant Professor (Tenure Track) of Social Network Analysis @ETHZurich

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 13:56:28 +0000

The Department of Humanities, Social and Political Sciences at ETH Zurich (www.gess.ethz.ch ) invites applications for a tenure track assistant professorship in Social Network Analysis. The position is part of the interdisciplinary Behavioral Studies Section and open to applications from all scientific disciplines.

The candidate should have an internationally recognized track record in Social Network Analysis and be able to build and sustain a strong research program. Furthermore, he or she should document an ability to teach effectively and be clearly committed to doing research in an interdisciplinary environment. The new professor will be expected to teach undergraduate level courses (in German or English) and graduate level courses (in English) within the scope of the required electives in the humanities and social sciences. ETH Zurich offers an environment that expects and supports high quality teaching and research.

Collaborations: The fourth age of research

Fri, 31 May 2013 15:28:39 +0000

Research has progressed through three ages: the individual, the institutional and the national. Nations competed to be at the cutting edge because this contributed to the wider economy through knowledge, new processes and products.

Today, we are entering a fourth age of research, driven by international collaborations between elite research groups. This will challenge the ability of nations to conserve their scientific wealth either as intellectual property or as research talent. Tensions are growing: between the knowledge a country needs to remain competitive and the assets it can exclusively secure, and between the collaborative and domestic parts of the research base. Institutions that do not form international collaborations risk progressive disenfranchisement, and countries that do not nurture their talent will lose out entirely.

Collaborations: The fourth age of research

Jonathan Adams
Nature 497, 557–560 (30 May 2013) http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/497557a

http://asc-cybernetics.org/2013/

ASC Conference 2013: Acting – Learning – Understanding: Conference

Fri, 31 May 2013 14:13:08 +0000

University of Bolton, UK, 28 Jul - 3 Aug 2013

The fundamental position taken by the conference designers is based in circular causality, which was at the heart of the concerns of the Macy Conferences (1946 to 1952) where cybernetics took its contemporary form. It is easy to talk about circular causality, but to live within it is harder.

ISSS 57

Thu, 30 May 2013 15:09:06 +0000

International Society for the Systems Sciences 57th Annual Conference.

Hai Phong, Vietnam. July, 2013

http://isss57.com

Special Issue “Physics of Information”

Wed, 29 May 2013 14:08:55 +0000

A special issue of Information (ISSN 2078-2489).
Deadline for manuscript submissions: 20 November 2013

Constructed Complexities

Tue, 28 May 2013 20:46:21 +0000

Complexity theory and social constructionism are two important meta-theories that have evolved from very different worldviews and knowledge bases. Yet, there are some important similarities between the core arguments of the two meta-theories and these similarities are largely neglected in methodological debates. In essence, both meta-theories reject reductionist, time, space and relationship-free analyses of positivist or Newtonian social science.

While social constructionism reveals existence of multiple realities and viewpoints, history and context dependence of reality and the role of social embeddedness; complexity theory studies heterogeneous populations and the role of stochasticity, path-dependence of processes, the role of interactions and interdependencies and properties of social networks.

This project aims to initiate an international network of scholars working together to identify conflicts or differences as well as links and similarities between complexity theory and social constructionism. The network will also aim to develop a lingua franca through which some stability could be imposed on the terms in which social scientists debate these matters, so that scholars from different disciplines, in particular the early career researchers, could find their way around over crowded terminology.

Odd Couples: Extraordinary Differences between the Sexes in the Animal Kingdom (by Daphne J. Fairbairn)

Tue, 28 May 2013 20:35:37 +0000

While we joke that men are from Mars and women are from Venus, our gender differences can't compare to those of other animals. For instance: the male garden spider spontaneously dies after mating with a female more than fifty times his size. Female cichlids must guard their eggs and larvae--even from the hungry appetites of their own partners. And male blanket octopuses employ a copulatory arm longer than their own bodies to mate with females that outweigh them by four orders of magnitude. Why do these gender gulfs exist? Introducing readers to important discoveries in animal behavior and evolution, Odd Couples explores some of the most extraordinary sexual differences in the animal world. From the fields of Spain to the deep oceans, evolutionary biologist Daphne Fairbairn uncovers the unique and bizarre characteristics--in size, behavior, ecology, and life history--that exist in these remarkable species and the special strategies they use to maximize reproductive success. Fairbairn describes how male great bustards aggressively compete to display their gorgeous plumage and large physiques to watching, choosey females. She investigates why female elephant seals voluntarily live in harems where they are harassed constantly by eager males. And she reveals why dwarf male giant seadevils parasitically fuse to their giant female partners for life. Fairbairn also considers humans and explains that although we are keenly aware of our own sexual differences, they are unexceptional within the vast animal world.

Looking at some of the most amazing creatures on the planet, Odd Couples sheds astonishing light on what it means to be male or female in the animal kingdom.

Mindvaults: Sociocultural Grounds for Pretending and Imagining (by Radu J. Bogdan)

Tue, 28 May 2013 20:35:11 +0000

The human mind has the capacity to vault over the realm of current perception, motivation, emotion, and action, to leap -- consciously and deliberately -- to past or future, possible or impossible, abstract or concrete scenarios and situations. In this book, Radu Bogdan examines the roots of this uniquely human ability, which he terms "mindvaulting." He focuses particularly on the capacities of pretending and imagining, which he identifies as the first forms of mindvaulting to develop in childhood. Pretending and imagining, Bogdan argues, are crucial steps on the ontogenetic staircase to the intellect. Bogdan finds that pretending and then imagining develop from a variety of sources for reasons that are specific and unique to human childhood. He argues that these capacities arise as responses to sociocultural and sociopolitical pressures that emerge at different stages of childhood. Bogdan argues that some of the properties of mindvaulting -- including domain versatility and nonmodularity -- resist standard evolutionary explanations. To resolve this puzzle, Bogdan reorients the evolutionary analysis toward human ontogeny, construed as a genuine space of evolution with specific pressures and adaptive responses. Bogdan finds that pretending is an ontogenetic response to sociocultural challenges in early childhood, a pre-adaptation for imagining; after age four, the adaptive response to cooperative and competitive sociopolitical pressures is a competence for mental strategizing that morphs into imagining.

Brilliant Blunders: From Darwin to Einstein - Colossal Mistakes by Great Scientists That Changed Our Understanding of Life and the Universe (by Mario Livio)

Tue, 28 May 2013 20:34:56 +0000

Charles Darwin, William Thomson (Lord Kelvin), Linus Pauling, Fred Hoyle, and Albert Einstein were all brilliant scientists. Each made groundbreaking contributions to his field—but each also stumbled badly. Darwin’s theory of natural selection shouldn’t have worked, according to the prevailing beliefs of his time. Not until Gregor Mendel’s work was known would there be a mechanism to explain natural selection. How could Darwin be both wrong and right? Lord Kelvin, Britain’s leading scientific intellect at the time, gravely miscalculated the age of the earth. Linus Pauling, the world’s premier chemist (who would win the Nobel Prize in chemistry) constructed an erroneous model for DNA in his haste to beat the competition to publication. Astrophysicist Fred Hoyle dismissed the idea of a “Big Bang” origin to the universe (ironically, the caustic name he gave to this event endured long after his erroneous objections were disproven). And Albert Einstein, whose name is synonymous with genius, speculated incorrectly about the forces that hold the universe in equilibrium—and that speculation opened the door to brilliant conceptual leaps. These five scientists expanded our knowledge of life on earth, the evolution of the earth itself, and the evolution of the universe, despite and because of their errors. As Mario Livio luminously explains, the scientific process advances through error. Mistakes are essential to progress.

Does Science Need a Global Language?: English and the Future of Research (by Scott L. Montgomery)

Tue, 28 May 2013 20:34:26 +0000

In early 2012, the global scientific community erupted with news that the elusive Higgs boson had likely been found, providing potent validation for the Standard Model of how the universe works. Scientists from more than one hundred countries contributed to this discovery—proving, beyond any doubt, that a new era in science had arrived, an era of multinationalism and cooperative reach. Globalization, the Internet, and digital technology all play a role in making this new era possible, but something more fundamental is also at work. In all scientific endeavors lies the ancient drive for sharing ideas and knowledge, and now this can be accomplished in a single tongue— English. But is this a good thing?

In Does Science Need a Global Language?, Scott L. Montgomery seeks to answer this question by investigating the phenomenon of global English in science, how and why it came about, the forms in which it appears, what advantages and disadvantages it brings, and what its future might be. He also examines the consequences of a global tongue, considering especially emerging and developing nations, where research is still at a relatively early stage and English is not yet firmly established.

Throughout the book, he includes important insights from a broad range of perspectives in linguistics, history, education, geopolitics, and more. Each chapter includes striking and revealing anecdotes from the front-line experiences of today’s scientists, some of whom have struggled with the reality of global scientific English. He explores topics such as student mobility, publication trends, world Englishes, language endangerment, and second language learning, among many others. What he uncovers will challenge readers to rethink their assumptions about the direction of contemporary science, as well as its future.

Tychomancy: Inferring Probability from Causal Structure (by Michael Strevens)

Tue, 28 May 2013 20:33:56 +0000

Tychomancy—meaning “the divination of chances”—presents a set of rules for inferring the physical probabilities of outcomes from the causal or dynamic properties of the systems that produce them. Probabilities revealed by the rules are wide-ranging: they include the probability of getting a 5 on a die roll, the probability distributions found in statistical physics, and the probabilities that underlie many prima facie judgments about fitness in evolutionary biology.

Michael Strevens makes three claims about the rules. First, they are reliable. Second, they are known, though not fully consciously, to all human beings: they constitute a key part of the physical intuition that allows us to navigate around the world safely in the absence of formal scientific knowledge. Third, they have played a crucial but unrecognized role in several major scientific innovations.

A large part of Tychomancy is devoted to this historical role for probability inference rules. Strevens first analyzes James Clerk Maxwell’s extraordinary, apparently a priori, deduction of the molecular velocity distribution in gases, which launched statistical physics. Maxwell did not derive his distribution from logic alone, Strevens proposes, but rather from probabilistic knowledge common to all human beings, even infants as young as six months old. Strevens then turns to Darwin’s theory of natural selection, the statistics of measurement, and the creation of models of complex systems, contending in each case that these elements of science could not have emerged when or how they did without the ability to “eyeball” the values of physical probabilities.

Six tenure-track researcher positions at Chemistry Institute, UNAM

Tue, 28 May 2013 16:18:38 +0000

In the following areas:

1. Phisicochemistry
2. Biomacromolecules
3. Natural products
4. Organic chemistry
5. Inorganic chemistry
6. Analysis and material study of art and cultural works.

Frontiers in Neurorobotics | Research Topics

Wed, 22 May 2013 20:35:24 +0000

Frontiers in Neurorobotics Research Topic: "Intrinsic motivations and open-ended development in animals, humans, and robots"

The aim of this Research Topic for Frontiers in Neurorobotics and Frontiers in Cognitive Science is to present state-of-the-art research, whether theoretical, empirical, or computational investigations, on open-ended development driven by intrinsic motivations. The topic will address questions such as: How do motivations drive learning? How are complex skills built up from a foundation of simpler competencies? What are the neural and computational bases for intrinsically motivated learning? What is the contribution of intrinsic motivations to wider cognition?

...

Now is an important moment in the study of intrinsically motivated open-ended development, requiring contributions and integration across a large number of fields within the cognitive sciences. This Research Topic aims to contribute to this effort by welcoming papers carried out with ethological, psychological, neuroscientific and computational approaches, as well as research that cuts across disciplines and approaches. Original research advancing specific aspects of the state-of-the art and review/theoretical papers aiming to systematize the field are both suitable for this Topic.

Topic Editors:

Gianluca Baldassarre, Italian National Research Council (CNR), Italy
Andrew Barto, University of Massachusetts Amherst, USA
Marco Mirolli, Istituto di Scienze e Tecnologie della Cognizione, Italy
Peter Redgrave
Richard M. Ryan, University of Rochester, USA
Tom Stafford, University of Sheffield, United Kingdom

Deadline for full article submission: 21 May 2013

Extended deadline for full article submission: 21 Jun 2013

Ken Robinson: How to escape education's death valley

Fri, 17 May 2013 19:53:07 +0000

Sir Ken Robinson outlines 3 principles crucial for the human mind to flourish -- and how current education culture works against them. In a funny, stirring talk he tells us how to get out of the educational "death valley" we now face, and how to nurture our youngest generations with a climate of possibility.

Johan Bollen. Modeling collective mood states from large-scale social media data.

Mon, 13 May 2013 20:34:06 +0000

ECCO/GBI seminar winter 2012-2013
Modeling collective mood states from large-scale social media data
December 17, 2012 Brussels, VUB

Johan Bollen
Associate Professor,
School of Informatics and Computing,
Indiana University

Abstract and more info: http://ecco.vub.ac.be/?q=node/199

http://blogs.cornell.edu/alife14nyc/

ALIFE Conference XIV

Mon, 13 May 2013 20:26:54 +0000

THE 14TH INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON THE SIMULATION & SYNTHESIS OF LIVING SYSTEMS

Javits Center, NYC

July 24th, 25th and 26th 2014

Temporal Networks

Mon, 13 May 2013 19:04:21 +0000

The concept of temporal networks is an extension of complex networks as a modeling framework to include information on when interactions between nodes happen.
Many studies of the last decade examine how the static network structure affect dynamic systems on the network. In this traditional approach the temporal aspects are pre-encoded in the dynamic system model.
Temporal-network methods, on the other hand, lift the temporal information from the level of system dynamics to the mathematical representation of the contact network itself.
This framework becomes particularly useful for cases where there is a lot of structure and heterogeneity both in the timings of interaction events and the network topology.

Temporal Networks
Holme, Petter; Saramäki, Jari (Eds.)

http://t.co/DWnhXNIiXb

http://www.springer.com/computer/information+systems+and+applications/book/978-3-540-93812-5

Simulating Social Complexity - A Handbook

Mon, 13 May 2013 19:02:42 +0000

Simulating Social Complexity examines all aspects of using agent- or individual-based simulation. This approach represents systems as individual elements having each their own set of differing states and internal processes. The interactions between elements in the simulation represent interactions in the target systems. What makes these elements "social" is that they are usefully interpretable as interacting elements of an observed society. In this, the focus is on human society, but can be extended to include social animals or artificial agents where such work enhances our understanding of human society.

Edmonds, B. & Meyer, R. (eds.) (2013) Simulating Social Complexity - a
handbook. Springer.

http://www.peptidesandproteins.org/

peptides and proteins

Mon, 13 May 2013 18:41:57 +0000

Peptides and Proteins: Beyond Structure, Function and Biotechnology

Saturday 27 July – Tuesday 30 July, 2013 Le Carré Plantagenet, Rue Claude Blondeau, 72000, Le Mans, France

Conformed speakers and participants:

Jean-Marie Lehn, University Louis Pasteur Strasbourg, Robert Langer, MIT Ada Yonath, Weizmann Institute of Science Alan Fersht, University of Cambridge Uwe Sleytr, University of Natural Resources & Life Sciences, Tom Blundell, University of Cambridge Charlotte Hauser, Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology Andrew Marshall, Nature Biotechnology Astride Gräslund, Stockholm University, Maria Masucci, Karolinska Institute Ingemar Ernberg, Karolinska Institute Horst Vogel, EPFL-Lausanne Martin Egli, Vandelbilt University Marc Rioult, 3DMatrix-Europe, Lyon, France Joel Janin, CNRS Gif-sur-Yvette, France Philip Merssersmith, Northwestern University William DeGrado, University of California San Francisco Philipp Baask, NanoTemper, Münich, Germany Mary Chan, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore Hiroshi Fukumura, Tohoku University, Japan Lotta Tegler, University of Linköpin, Sweden Christian Riekel, ESRF, Grenoble, France Jörg Lebahn, DESYLAB, Hamburg, Germany Yusuke Nagai, Menicon Ltd, Japan Christophe Egles, Université de Technologie de Compiègne, France Steve Yang, the Yang Trust Fund Sam Haryono, Cancer Clinic, Jakarta, Indonesia Shuguang Zhang, MIT

http://www.barabasilab.com/success/

Science of Success

Mon, 13 May 2013 15:37:03 +0000

This event, hosted by the Institute of Quantitative Social Science at Harvard University and organized by the Center of Complex Network Research at Northeastern University on June 17th, brings together social scientists, computer scientists, economists, physicists and mathematicians to discuss the quantitative laws and patterns behind success.

Speakers

Pierre Azoulay James A. Evans
Santo Fortunato Gautam Mukunda
Alexander M. Petersen Camille Sweeney
Arnout van de Rijt Brian Uzzi
Christoph Riedl Nicola Perra
Duncan Watts Chaoming Song

http://www.cicc.unam.mx/activities/2013/snlsep/index.html

School on Nonlinearity and Stochasticity in Emergent Phenomena

Fri, 10 May 2013 02:08:37 +0000

School on Nonlinearity and Stochasticity in Emergent Phenomena

July 29th - August 2nd, 2013

Centro Internacional de Ciencias A.C. Cuernavaca, Mexico.

Lecturers
Rafael Barrio Instituto de Física, UNAM. Mexico
Carlos Gershenson Instituto de Investigación en Matemáticas Aplicadas y Sistemas, UNAM. Mexico
Holger Henning Harvard University. USA
David Hochberg Centro de Astrobiología, CSIC/INTA. Spain
Henrik Jensen Imperial College London. UK
María Elena Lárraga Instituto de Ingeniería, UNAM. Mexico

Forecast: What Physics, Meteorology, and the Natural Sciences Can Teach Us About Economics (by Mark Buchanan)

Thu, 09 May 2013 13:43:20 +0000

In this deeply researched and piercingly intelligent book, physicist Mark Buchanan shows how a simple feedback loop can lead to major consequences, the kind predictable by mathematical models but hard for most people to anticipate. From his unique perspective, Buchanan argues that our basic assumptions about economic markets--that they are for the most part stable, with occasional interruptions--are simply wrong. Markets really act more like the weather: a brief heat wave can become a massive storm in a matter of a few days, or even hours.

The Physics of Finance reimagines the basics of how economics, with consequences that affect everyone.

This Explains Everything: Deep, Beautiful, and Elegant Theories of How the World Works (edited by John Brockman)

Thu, 09 May 2013 13:43:00 +0000

What is your favorite deep, elegant, or beautiful explanation?

This is the question John Brockman, publisher of Edge.org, posed to the world's most influential minds. Flowing from the horizons of physics, economics, psychology, neuroscience, and more, This Explains Everything presents 150 of the most surprising and brilliant theories of the way of our minds, societies, and universe work.

Systematicity: The Nature of Science (by Paul Hoyningen-Huene)

Thu, 09 May 2013 13:42:32 +0000

In Systematicity, Paul Hoyningen-Huene answers the question "What is science?" by proposing that scientific knowledge is primarily distinguished from other forms of knowledge, especially everyday knowledge, by being more systematic. "Science" is here understood in the broadest possible sense, encompassing not only the natural sciences but also mathematics, the social sciences, and the humanities. The author develops his thesis in nine dimensions in which it is claimed that science is more systematic than other forms of knowledge: regarding descriptions, explanations, predictions, the defense of knowledge claims, critical discourse, epistemic connectedness, an ideal of completeness, knowledge generation, and the representation of knowledge. He compares his view with positions on the question held by philosophers from Aristotle to Nicholas Rescher. The book concludes with an exploration of some consequences of Hoyningen-Huene's view concerning the genesis and dynamics of science, the relationship of science and common sense, normative implications of the thesis, and the demarcation criterion between science and pseudo-science.

The Great Animal Orchestra: Finding the Origins of Music in the World's Wild Places (by Bernie Krause)

Thu, 09 May 2013 13:42:18 +0000

Musician and naturalist Bernie Krause is one of the world's leading experts in natural sound, and he's spent his life discovering and recording nature's rich chorus. Searching far beyond our modern world's honking horns and buzzing machinery, he has sought out the truly wild places that remain, where natural soundscapes exist virtually unchanged from when the earliest humans first inhabited the earth.

Krause shares fascinating insight into how deeply animals rely on their aural habitat to survive and the damaging effects of extraneous noise on the delicate balance between predator and prey. But natural soundscapes aren't vital only to the animal kingdom; Krause explores how the myriad voices and rhythms of the natural world formed a basis from which our own musical expression emerged.

From snapping shrimp, popping viruses, and the songs of humpback whales-whose voices, if unimpeded, could circle the earth in hours-to cracking glaciers, bubbling streams, and the roar of intense storms; from melody-singing birds to the organlike drone of wind blowing over reeds, the sounds Krause has experienced and describes are like no others. And from recording jaguars at night in the Amazon rain forest to encountering mountain gorillas in Africa's Virunga Mountains, Krause offers an intense and intensely personal narrative of the planet's deep and connected natural sounds and rhythm.

The Great Animal Orchestra is the story of one man's pursuit of natural music in its purest form, and an impassioned case for the conservation of one of our most overlooked natural resources-the music of the wild.

Maps & Macroscopes -- Gaining Insights from BIG Data: Katy Borner at TEDxBloomington

Wed, 08 May 2013 20:34:55 +0000

http://www.famaf.unc.edu.ar/lawnp2013/

Latin American Workshop on Nonlinear Phenomena, XIII LAWNP

Wed, 08 May 2013 19:32:54 +0000

You are cordially invited to participate in the thirteenth biennial Latin American Workshop on Nonlinear Phenomena, XIII LAWNP, to be held in Villa Carlos Paz, Córdoba, Argentina, from October 21 to October 25, 2013. The Workshop will begin on Monday noon and it will end on Friday at late evening. The main Workshop activities will be at the Portal del Lago Hotel located in a natural environment with an ideal atmosphere that promotes interactions between established senior scientists, junior researchers and PhD students.

Complex Networks 2013

Wed, 08 May 2013 15:11:35 +0000

Second International Workshop on Complex Networks and their Applications
Kyoto, Japan, 2-5 December 2013
http://complexnetworks.org

Complex systems: counterintuitive behavior and disproportionate causal effects

Thu, 02 May 2013 20:03:54 +0000

Presentation on the counterintuitive behavior and disproportionate causal effects of complex system. Illustration
using the the example of restaurant dynamics determined by the quality. The simulation is applied to Discrete Duty and Analogue Action.

ECCS'13: Satellite Meeting INFORMATION PROCESSING IN COMPLEX SYSTEMS (IPCS'13)

Thu, 02 May 2013 20:03:25 +0000

ECCS'13: Satellite Meeting
INFORMATION PROCESSING IN COMPLEX SYSTEMS (IPCS'13)

Wednesday September 18th, 2013
World Trade Center, Barcelona

All systems in nature have one thing in common: they process information. Information is registered in the state of a system and its elements, implicitly and invisibly. As elements interact, information is transferred. Indeed, bits of information about the state of one element will travel – imperfectly – to the state of the other element, forming its new state. This storage and transfer of information, possibly between levels of a multi level system, is imperfect due to randomness or noise. From this viewpoint, a system can be formalized as a collection of bits that is organized according to its rules of dynamics and its topology of interactions. Mapping out exactly how these bits of information percolate through the system could reveal new fundamental insights in how the parts orchestrate to produce the properties of the system. A theory of information processing would be capable of defining a set of universal properties of dynamical multi level complex systems, which describe and compare the dynamics of diverse complex systems ranging from social interaction to brain networks, from financial markets to biomedicine. Each possible combination of rules of dynamics and topology of interactions, with disparate semantics, would reduce to a single language of information processing.

WORKSHOP ON TIME DELAY SYSTEMS – Stability & Control in Applications

Wed, 01 May 2013 00:11:08 +0000

2013 EUROPEAN CONTROL CONFERENCE, ZURICH, SWITZERLAND

http://www.ecc13.ch

WORKSHOP ON TIME DELAY SYSTEMS – Stability & Control in Applications

http://www1.coe.neu.edu/~rifat/ECC_Workshop-WEB.pdf

July 16, 2013 – 9.00 am – 5.30 pm

Lecturers:

Fatihcan M. Atay, GERMANY

Dimitri Breda, ITALY

Wim Michiels, BELGIUM

Silviu-Iulian Niculescu, FRANCE

Hitay Ozbay, TURKEY

Rifat Sipahi, USA

Birdsong, Speech, and Language: Exploring the Evolution of Mind and Brain

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 20:03:05 +0000

Scholars have long been captivated by the parallels between birdsong and human speech and language. In this book, leading scholars draw on the latest research to explore what birdsong can tell us about the biology of human speech and language and the consequences for evolutionary biology. They examine the cognitive and neural similarities between birdsong learning and speech and language acquisition, considering vocal imitation, auditory learning, an early vocalization phase ("babbling"), the structural properties of birdsong and human language, and the striking similarities between the neural organization of learning and vocal production in birdsong and human speech. After outlining the basic issues involved in the study of both language and evolution, the contributors compare birdsong and language in terms of acquisition, recursion, and core structural properties, and then examine the neurobiology of song and speech, genomic factors, and the emergence and evolution of language.

Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (by Douglas Hofstadter and Emmanuel Sander)

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 20:02:42 +0000

Analogy is the core of all thinking.

This is the simple but unorthodox premise that Pulitzer Prize–winning author Douglas Hofstadter and French psychologist Emmanuel Sander defend in their new work. Hofstadter has been grappling with the mysteries of human thought for over thirty years. Now, with his trademark wit and special talent for making complex ideas vivid, he has partnered with Sander to put forth a highly novel perspective on cognition.

We are constantly faced with a swirling and intermingling multitude of ill-defined situations. Our brain’s job is to try to make sense of this unpredictable, swarming chaos of stimuli. How does it do so? The ceaseless hail of input triggers analogies galore, helping us to pinpoint the essence of what is going on. Often this means the spontaneous evocation of words, sometimes idioms, sometimes the triggering of nameless, long-buried memories.

Why did two-year-old Camille proudly exclaim, “I undressed the banana!”? Why do people who hear a story often blurt out, “Exactly the same thing happened to me!” when it was a completely different event? How do we recognize an aggressive driver from a split-second glance in our rearview mirror? What in a friend’s remark triggers the offhand reply, “That’s just sour grapes”? What did Albert Einstein see that made him suspect that light consists of particles when a century of research had driven the final nail in the coffin of that long-dead idea?

The answer to all these questions, of course, is analogy-making—the meat and potatoes, the heart and soul, the fuel and fire, the gist and the crux, the lifeblood and the wellsprings of thought. Analogy-making, far from happening at rare intervals, occurs at all moments, defining thinking from top to toe, from the tiniest and most fleeting thoughts to the most creative scientific insights.

Like Gödel, Escher, Bach before it, Surfaces and Essences will profoundly enrich our understanding of our own minds. By plunging the reader into an extraordinary variety of colorful situations involving language, thought, and memory, by revealing bit by bit the constantly churning cognitive mechanisms normally completely hidden from view, and by discovering in them one central, invariant core—the incessant, unconscious quest for strong analogical links to past experiences—this book puts forth a radical and deeply surprising new vision of the act of thinking.

The Golden Ticket: P, NP, and the Search for the Impossible (by Lance Fortnow)

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 20:02:27 +0000

The P-NP problem is the most important open problem in computer science, if not all of mathematics. The Golden Ticket provides a nontechnical introduction to P-NP, its rich history, and its algorithmic implications for everything we do with computers and beyond. In this informative and entertaining book, Lance Fortnow traces how the problem arose during the Cold War on both sides of the Iron Curtain, and gives examples of the problem from a variety of disciplines, including economics, physics, and biology. He explores problems that capture the full difficulty of the P-NP dilemma, from discovering the shortest route through all the rides at Disney World to finding large groups of friends on Facebook. But difficulty also has its advantages. Hard problems allow us to safely conduct electronic commerce and maintain privacy in our online lives.

The Golden Ticket explores what we truly can and cannot achieve computationally, describing the benefits and unexpected challenges of the P-NP problem.

Time Reborn: From the Crisis in Physics to the Future of the Universe (by Lee Smolin)

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 20:01:59 +0000

What is time?

This deceptively simple question is the single most important problem facing science as we probe more deeply into the fundamentals of the universe. All of the mysteries physicists and cosmologists face—from the Big Bang to the future of the universe, from the puzzles of quantum physics to the unification of forces and particles—come down to the nature of time.

The fact that time is real may seem obvious. You experience it passing every day when you watch clocks tick, bread toast, and children grow. But most physicists, from Newton to Einstein to today’s quantum theorists, have seen things differently. The scientific case for time being an illusion is formidable. That is why the consequences of adopting the view that time is real are revolutionary.

Lee Smolin, author of the controversial bestseller The Trouble with Physics, argues that a limited notion of time is holding physics back. It’s time for a major revolution in scientific thought. The reality of time could be the key to the next big breakthrough in theoretical physics.

What if the laws of physics themselves were not timeless? What if they could evolve? Time Reborn offers a radical new approach to cosmology that embraces the reality of time and opens up a whole new universe of possibilities. There are few ideas that, like our notion of time, shape our thinking about literally everything, with huge implications for physics and beyond—from climate change to the economic crisis. Smolin explains in lively and lucid prose how the true nature of time impacts our world.

http://www.soms.ethz.ch/workshop2013

Workshop 2013 - ETH Risk Center: Vulnerability and resilience of supply chains

Mon, 29 Apr 2013 14:30:03 +0000

Workshop 2013 - ETH Risk Center: Vulnerability and resilience of supply chains
ETH Zurich (Switzerland), September 12-13, 2013

Topics
Supply chains as economic networks and “critical infrastructures”
Response to external shocks and inherent instabilities
Risk reduction, disaster response management, and insurance issues
The following questions will be addressed:
What kinds of hazards are there? What are the challenges?
What does the interaction of regulators and the industry look like during a critical event?
What are the critical parts in supply chains seen from the different perspectives? How can one identify them, what could be improved?

Speakers
The following speakers have already confirmed
Prof. Dr. Yossi Sheffi, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Prof. Dr. Paul Schönsleben, ETH Zurich
Prof. Dr. ManMohan Sodhi, Cass Business School London
Prof. Dr. Anna Nagurney, University of Massachusetts
Prof. Dr. Uta Jüttner, Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts
Dr. Till Becker, Jacobs University Bremen
Dr. Robert de Souza, Executive Director of the The Logistics Institute - Asia Pacific (TLI - Asia Pacific)
Dr. Kamil Mizgier, UBS
Adrian Clements, General Manager Asset Risk Management, ArcelorMittal
Paul Kriegbaum, Fraport AG

Erik Brynjolfsson: The key to growth? Race with the machines

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 19:02:48 +0000

As machines take on more jobs, many find themselves out of work or with raises indefinitely postponed. Is this the end of growth? No, says Erik Brynjolfsson -- it’s simply the growing pains of a radically reorganized economy. A riveting case for why big innovations are ahead of us … if we think of computers as our teammates. Be sure to watch the opposing viewpoint from Robert Gordon.

Complexity Digest's insight:
Interesting views and data about human-machine symbiosis.

The Hand, an Organ of the Mind

Tue, 23 Apr 2013 17:15:16 +0000

"Cartesian-inspired dualism enforces a theoretical distinction between the motor and the cognitive and locates the mental exclusively in the head. This collection, focusing on the hand, challenges this dichotomy, offering theoretical and empirical perspectives on the interconnectedness and interdependence of the manual and mental. The contributors explore the possibility that the hand, far from being the merely mechanical executor of preconceived mental plans, possesses its own know-how, enabling “enhanded” beings to navigate the natural, social, and cultural world without engaging propositional thought, consciousness, and deliberation.

The contributors consider not only broad philosophical questions—ranging from the nature of embodiment, enaction, and the extended mind to the phenomenology of agency—but also such specific issues as touching, grasping, gesturing, sociality, and simulation. They show that the capacities of the hand include perception (on its own and in association with other modalities), action, (extended) cognition, social interaction, and communication. Taken together, their accounts offer a handbook of cutting-edge research exploring the ways that the manual shapes and reshapes the mental and creates conditions for embodied agents to act in the world".

Alessandro Vespignani on Cambridge Nights

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 19:26:35 +0000

Alessandro Vespignani talks with us about networks and epidemic spreading.

Marta Gonzalez on Cambridge Nights

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 19:25:30 +0000

Marta Gonzalez talks with us about how big data can be used to understand human mobility and the diffusion of online technologies.

Stephen Wolfram: Talking about the Computational Future at SXSW 2013

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 16:33:18 +0000

Transcript of Stephen Wolfram’s SXSW 2013 presentation. Discusses his vision of what computation will do for people in the future. Not only as it applies to science and knowledge discovery, but also as it pertains to personal well-being.

Dan Ariely: What makes us feel good about our work?

Fri, 12 Apr 2013 15:30:44 +0000

What motivates us to work? Contrary to conventional wisdom, it isn't just money. But it's not exactly joy either. It seems that most of us thrive by making constant progress and feeling a sense of purpose. Behavioral economist Dan Ariely presents two eye-opening experiments that reveal our unexpected and nuanced attitudes toward meaning in our work.

https://sites.google.com/site/complexnetworks13/

Complex Networks 2013

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 16:37:05 +0000

Second International Workshop on Complex Networks and their Applications

COMPLEX NETWORKS 2013

Kyoto, Japan, 2-5 December 2013

http://networkfactory2013.wordpress.com

Network Factory 2013 - A Network Science Summer School

Wed, 10 Apr 2013 14:56:22 +0000

Networks are ubiquitous and the scientific discipline of network science has flourished in the last decade. As a means to study complex interactions, two particular application areas are social and information science. On the one hand side, the www as a pool of hyper-linked information can be represented with the help of networks (and this representation is the basis for google’s Page-rank algorithm), on the other hand side services like facebook, twitter or flickr provide the means for people to establish social networks of never-seen size – and hence provide the basis for what is now called computational sociology.

The scope of this this summer school is to provide PhD students and early PostDocs with a comprehensive 1-week insight into the “power of networks” in an information science and social media setting. In Six to nine lectures, established and well-known researchers (from Europe, US and Asia) will present cutting-edge research as well as provide the participants with valuable insight into challenges and methods.

The Summer School will take place from 10th to 15th June in Höllviken (south of Sweden, 1h by train from Copenhagen, Denmark), right after NetSci 2013.

http://lipari.dipmat.unict.it/LipariSchool/ComplexSystems/

Dynamic Networks and Social Behavior | Lipari School on Computational Complex Systems

Mon, 08 Apr 2013 14:20:59 +0000

Lipari School on Computational Complex Systems Jacob T. Schwartz International School for Scientific Research

Dynamic Networks and Social Behavior
July 6 - July 13, 2013, Lipari Island

http://ai.vub.ac.be/events/cortona-2013

Music and the Origins of Language | International Summer School on Agent-based Computational Models of Creativity

Thu, 04 Apr 2013 14:22:23 +0000

The school is intended for postdocs, lecturers and predocs with a background in computer science (artificial intelligence) or computational linguistics (corpus linguistics or natural language processing) and a strong interest in music and the origins of language. There will be background lectures that introduce concepts from biology, anthropology, psychology, music theory and linguistics that are helpful to understand the nature of creativity, the role and intimate relations between language and music, and the mechanisms underlying cultural evolution. It contains technical lectures on the fundamental computational components required for language processing and technical ateliers to learn how to set up evolutionary linguistics experiments. Participants have the opportunity to present their latest research in a poster session. The school also features artistic ateliers in which participants create new creative works and engage in performance.

Music and the Origins of Language
International Summer School on Agent-based Computational Models of Creativity, 15 – 20 September 2013 in Cortona (Italy)

Stewart Brand: The dawn of de-extinction. Are you ready?

Wed, 03 Apr 2013 20:09:00 +0000

Throughout humankind's history, we've driven species after species extinct: the passenger pigeon, the Eastern cougar, the dodo ... But now, says Stewart Brand, we have the technology (and the biology) to bring back species that humanity wiped out. So -- should we? Which ones? He asks a big question whose answer is closer than you may think.

http://businesscomplexity.com/bizcom2013/

Business Complexity & the Global Leader Conference: Rethinking Policy and Practice in Today's Financial System

Tue, 02 Apr 2013 20:25:24 +0000

Bringing leaders from around the globe in science and practice from across disciplines together to explore and advance our understanding of complex systems in our modern world and the implications for opportunity and risk.
Boston, MA, 2013-4-29