Complexity Digest 2007.35

13-Sep-2007

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Content

  1. Living in Societies, Science
    1. Evolution in the Social Brain, Science
    2. The Brain/Education Barrier, Science
  2. Social Components of Fitness in Primate Groups, Science
    1. Socially Induced Brain Differentiation In A Cooperatively Breeding Songbird, Proc. Biol. Sc.
  3. Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis, Science
    1. The Trouble with Men, Scientific American Magazine
  4. Prospection: Experiencing the Future, Science
    1. The Art of Virtual Persuasion, Science
  5. Will Super Smart Artificial Intelligences Keep Humans Around As Pets?, reasononline
    1. 2006: Celebrating 75 years of AI - History and Outlook: the Next 25 Years, arXiv
    2. Who Needs Hackers?, NY Times
  6. From Cool to Passé: Identity Signaling and Product Domains, Knowledge@Wharton
    1. The Wealth Of Nations - A Country's Competitive Edge Can Spread Industry To Industry, Like A Disease, Science News
  7. How Does Consciousness Happen?, Scientific American Magazine
  8. Adaptive Evolution Of Genes Underlying Schizophrenia, Proc. Biol. Sc.
    1. Schizophrenia Genes 'Favoured by Evolution', News@Nature
  9. The Perception of Rational, Goal-Directed Action in Nonhuman Primates, Science
    1. Psychology: Nonhuman Primates Demonstrate Humanlike Reasoning, Science
    2. Alex the Parrot, NY Times
  10. That's Life, NY Times
    1. Taxonomy: The Collector, Nature
  11. Life As We Know It - To Understand The Human Genome, Researchers Must Spread Their Wings To All Branches Of Life, Nature
    1. Crashing DNA's Ultraconservative Party, Nature
    2. Share Alike: Genes From Bacteria Found In Animals, Science News
  12. Redefining the Architecture of Memory, NY Times
  13. How Do You Like Your Genes? Biofabs Take Orders, NY Times
  14. Experimental Drugs on Trial, Scientific American Magazine
    1. Biomedicine: HIV Drug Shows Promise as Potential Cancer Treatment, Science
  15. Listening To Speech In The Presence Of Other Sounds, Phil. Tran. Biol. Sc.
    1. Temporal Precision In The Neural Code And The Timescales Of Natural Vision, Nature
    2. Reading Process Is Surprisingly Different That Previously Thought, ScienceDaily
  16. Muscular Thin Films for Building Actuators and Powering Devices, Science
    1. Pushing The Complexity Of Model Bilayers: Novel Prospects For Membrane Biophysics, Springer
  17. Dragging Of Inertial Frames, Nature
  18. The Changing Ecology Of Foreign Policy-Making In China, The China Quarterly
  19. Complex Challenges: Global Terrorist Networks
    1. The New Al-Qaeda Central, Washington Post
    2. Al-Qaeda's Return - The Terrorists Have A Sanctuary Once Again., Washington Post
  20. Links & Snippets
    1. Other Publications
    2. Webcast Announcements
    3. Conference Announcements
    4. Other Announcements

  1. Living in Societies, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: An awareness of one's position and the relationships of others in a group is a rarity among vertebrate species, yet it has proved so spectacularly influential in just one species--our own--that it has become a major factor in determining the ecology of an entire planet. Although we can describe behavior patterns and speculate about their evolutionary advantage, we also need to understand their contribution to a species' reproductive success. A new wave of research is investigating the primate social brain within this evolutionary context, often through studies of wild primates.
    • Source: Living in Societies, Caroline Ash, Gilbert Chin, Elizabeth Pennisi, Andrew Sugden, Science: 1337., 07/09/07

    1. Evolution in the Social Brain, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: The evolution of unusually large brains in some groups of animals, notably primates, has long been a puzzle. Although early explanations tended to emphasize the brain's role in sensory or technical competence (foraging skills, innovations, and way-finding), the balance of evidence now clearly favors the suggestion that it was the computational demands of living in large, complex societies that selected for large brains. However, recent analyses suggest that it may have been the particular demands of the more intense forms of pairbonding that was the critical factor that triggered this evolutionary development.

    2. The Brain/Education Barrier, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: How could an international group of scientists communicate that there is superb developmental evidence that speaks directly to educational concerns, whereas brain science cannot yet do so? (...) It [ the Santiago Declaration, Ed.] summarizes knowledge about child development and early learning, the benefits of embedding learning in meaningful social contexts, the importance of active rather than passive learning, the need for sensitive and responsive environments, and the need for concern about how, not just what, children learn. We hope that this declaration (www.jsmf.org/declaration) will become a focal point for the discussion of evidence-based educational practice.

  2. Social Components of Fitness in Primate Groups, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: There is much interest in the evolutionary forces that favored the evolution of large brains in the primate order. The social brain hypothesis posits that selection has favored larger brains and more complex cognitive capacities as a means to cope with the challenges of social life. The hypothesis is supported by evidence that shows that group size is linked to various measures of brain size. But it has not been clear how cognitive complexity confers fitness advantages on individuals. Research in the field and laboratory shows that sophisticated social cognition underlies social behavior in primate groups.

    1. Socially Induced Brain Differentiation In A Cooperatively Breeding Songbird, Proc. Biol. Sc. Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpt: Birds living in social groups establish dominance hierarchies, and taking up the dominant position influences behaviour and physiological parameters. In cooperatively breeding white-browed sparrow weavers (Plocepasser mahali), the transition from subordinate helper to dominant breeder male induces the production of a new type of song. This song contains a large number of new syllables and differs in temporal pattern from duet songs produced by all other group members. Here we show that this change in social status of adult males affects the morphology of a behavioural control circuit, the song control system of songbirds that is composed of large neuron populations. (...)

  3. Humans Have Evolved Specialized Skills of Social Cognition: The Cultural Intelligence Hypothesis, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: Children who are 2 and a half years old deal with quantities, space, and causality as well as adult chimps but far surpass them on social learning tasks, communication, and theory of mind skills.

    Humans have many cognitive skills not possessed by their nearest primate relatives. The cultural intelligence hypothesis argues that this is mainly due to a species-specific set of social-cognitive skills, emerging early in ontogeny, for participating and exchanging knowledge in cultural groups.

    1. The Trouble with Men, Scientific American Magazine Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Sons are tough on their mothers. Whether it is heavier birth weights, amplified testosterone levels or simple, hair-raising high jinks, boys seem to take an extra toll on the women who gave birth to them. And by poring over Finnish church records from two centuries ago, Virpi Lummaa of the University of Sheffield in England can prove it: sons reduce a mother's life span by an average of 34 weeks.

  4. Prospection: Experiencing the Future, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: All animals can predict the hedonic consequences of events they've experienced before. But humans can predict the hedonic consequences of events they've never experienced by simulating those events in their minds. Scientists are beginning to understand how the brain simulates future events, how it uses those simulations to predict an event's hedonic consequences, and why these predictions so often go awry.

    1. The Art of Virtual Persuasion, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: For example, a week before the 2004 U.S. presidential election, Jeremy Bailenson and colleagues at Stanford University asked 240 volunteers to fill out surveys regarding the two main candidates, President George W. Bush and Senator John Kerry, while viewing side-by-side photographs of the two men. For a randomly selected third of the subjects, the researchers used software to merge Bush's photo with a photo of the subject, making Bush look more like the subject without the subject noticing.

  5. Will Super Smart Artificial Intelligences Keep Humans Around As Pets?, reasononline Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: As far as I could tell, many of the would-be progenitors of independent AIs at the Summit are concluding that the best way to create an AI is to rear one like one would rear a human child. "The only pathway is way we walked ourselves," argued Sam Adams who honchoed IBM's Joshua Blue Project. That project aimed to create an artificial general intelligence (AGI) with the capabilities of a 3-year old toddler. Before beginning the project, Adams and his collaborators consulted the literature of developmental psychology and developmental neuroscience to model Joshua.

    1. 2006: Celebrating 75 years of AI - History and Outlook: the Next 25 Years, arXiv Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: When Kurt Goedel layed the foundations of theoretical computer science in 1931, he also introduced essential concepts of the theory of Artificial Intelligence (AI). (...) Here we look back at important milestones of AI history, mention essential recent results, and speculate about what we may expect from the next 25 years, emphasizing the significance of the ongoing dramatic hardware speedups, and discussing Goedel-inspired, self-referential, self-improving universal problem solvers.

    2. Who Needs Hackers?, NY Times Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts:
      Lou Beach
      (...) "The threat is complexity itself.

      Change is the fuel of business, but it also introduces complexity", Mr. Antonopoulos said, whether by bringing together incompatible computer networks or simply by growing beyond the network's ability to keep up.

      "We have gone from fairly simple computing architectures to massively distributed, massively interconnected and interdependent networks," he said, adding that as a result, flaws have become increasingly hard to predict or spot. Simpler systems could be understood and their behavior characterized, he said, but greater complexity brings unintended consequences.

  6. From Cool to Passé: Identity Signaling and Product Domains, Knowledge@Wharton Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts:
    There is a fine line between cool and not-so-cool.
    In other work, Berger examined the 2004 yellow wristband phenomenon. A research team at Stanford first sold the bands to students living in one dorm. A week later, researchers began selling the wristbands in a neighboring dorm with a stronger academic focus and a social reputation as a "geek" dorm. A week after the wristbands were adopted by the "geeks," there was a 32% drop in students wearing the bands at the first dorm. The idea is "that people in the original dorm abandoned the wristband to avoid other students thinking they were similar to the geeks," Berger says.


    1. The Wealth Of Nations - A Country's Competitive Edge Can Spread Industry To Industry, Like A Disease, Science News Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts:
      HIDDEN LINKS. In the product space network above, nodes represent products. The more closely products are linked, the more likely they are to be produced and exported by the same countries. Each node's size represents the total world trade in that product, and the nodes' colors follow an older classification of products. Hidalgo/Science
      By analyzing global export data on numerous categories of goods, the two economists calculated, for each pair of categories, the probability that if a country is good at exporting one type of product, it will also be good at exporting the other. When that probability is high, those two products have a short "distance" between them. When the probability is low, the products are far apart. (...)

      Instead, the map shows how industries gather in clusters according to how likely it is that that those industries thrive in the same countries. (...)


  7. How Does Consciousness Happen?, Scientific American Magazine Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: How brain processes translate to consciousness is one of the greatest unsolved questions in science. Although the scientific method can delineate events immediately after the big bang and uncover the biochemical nuts and bolts of the brain, it has utterly failed to satisfactorily explain how subjective experience is created.

    As neuroscientists, both of us have made it our life's goal to try to solve this puzzle. We share many common views, including the important acknowledgment that there is not a single problem of consciousness.

  8. Adaptive Evolution Of Genes Underlying Schizophrenia, Proc. Biol. Sc. Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: Schizophrenia poses an evolutionary-genetic paradox because it exhibits strongly negative fitness effects and high heritability, yet it persists at a prevalence of approximately 1% across all human cultures. Recent theory has proposed a resolution: that genetic liability to schizophrenia has evolved as a secondary consequence of selection for human cognitive traits. This hypothesis predicts that genes increasing the risk of this disorder have been subject to positive selection in the evolutionary history of humans and other primates. We evaluated this prediction using tests for recent selective sweeps in human populations and maximum-likelihood tests for selection during primate evolution. (...)

    1. Schizophrenia Genes 'Favoured by Evolution', News@Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpt: The genes that underpin schizophrenia may have been favoured by natural selection, according to a survey of human and primate genetic sequences. The discovery suggests that genes linked to the debilitating brain condition conferred some advantage that allowed them to persist in the population Ñ although it is far from clear what this advantage might have been.

  9. The Perception of Rational, Goal-Directed Action in Nonhuman Primates, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: Apes, as well as New and Old World monkeys, can analyze goal-directed actions and infer the underlying rationale.

    Humans are capable of making inferences about other individuals' intentions and goals by evaluating their actions in relation to the constraints imposed by the environment. This capacity enables humans to go beyond the surface appearance of behavior to draw inferences about an individual's mental states. Presently unclear is whether this capacity is uniquely human or is shared with other animals.

    1. Psychology: Nonhuman Primates Demonstrate Humanlike Reasoning, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Monkeys may see, hear, and speak no evil, but they do seem to understand a person's intentions. We constantly judge the actions of those around us, assessing what others are trying to do, and why, to decide the best course of action for ourselves. Experiments reported on page 1402 now suggest that this supposedly unique human attribute is shared by chimps and at least two monkey species. The finding suggests that this skill and the enabling neuronal circuitry date back at least 40 million years, predating the evolution of the unique social system or language of humans.

    2. Alex the Parrot, NY Times Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Thinking about animals - and especially thinking about whether animals can think - is like looking at the world through a two-way mirror. There, for example, on the other side of the mirror, is Alex, the famous African Grey parrot who died unexpectedly last week at the age of 31. But looking at Alex, who mastered a surprising vocabulary of words and concepts, the question is always how much of our own reflection we see. What you make of Dr. Irene Pepperberg's work with Alex depends on whether you think Alex's cognitive presence was real or merely imitative.

  10. That's Life, NY Times Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: (...) The Encyclopedia of Life, which one day will provide single-portal access to all knowledge of living organisms.

    Why bother making such an effort? Because each species from a bacterium to a whale is a masterpiece of evolution. Each has persisted, its mix of genes slowly evolving, for thousands to millions of years. And each is exquisitely adapted to its environment and interlocks with a legion of other species to form the ecosystems upon which our own lives ultimately depend. We need to properly explore Earth's biodiversity if we are to understand, preserve and manage it.

    1. Taxonomy: The Collector, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: What we do is tap into the accumulated knowledge of taxonomists and draw together their understanding of all the different names that have ever been used for an organism, and extend this to cover typographical errors, vernacular names, (...)

      We've built the system so that you can have any browsing structure in place. So if you want to change from the hierarchy provided by the Catalogue of Life [an attempt to index all known species] to that provided by GenBank [a database of all published DNA sequences], you just click on the alternative classification.

  11. Life As We Know It - To Understand The Human Genome, Researchers Must Spread Their Wings To All Branches Of Life, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: The paper in question focuses on segments of 'ultraconserved' DNA - sections that have stayed exactly the same throughout recent vertebrate evolution, and are identical in humans, rats and mice (see page 10). The available evidence suggests that this extreme example of DNA conservation is no accident: the sequence stays because there is a strong selective force weeding out mutations in it. In other words, it is likely to be important to its host.

    Yet when researchers (...) removed four pieces of ultraconserved DNA from different mice, it had absolutely no effect on the rodents.

    1. Crashing DNA's Ultraconservative Party, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Genetic sequences preserved through evolutionary selection might not be functional.

      A colony of mice whose very existence defies logic could rewrite our understanding of human evolution, health and disease, researchers say. The laboratory mice lack stretches of DNA that scientists believed were essential for survival. And yet they eat, grow and reproduce normally. There seems to be nothing wrong with them despite their genetic deficiencies, says Nadav Ahituv, a human geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco, who created them through two painstaking years of breeding experiments.

    2. Share Alike: Genes From Bacteria Found In Animals, Science News Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Some insects and roundworms pick up DNA from bacteria living within their cells, new research shows.

      The DNA transfer occurs in the animals' egg cells, so the genetic modification passes between generations. The mechanism therefore provides an alternative to mutation of existing DNA as a way for the species to acquire new genetic traits.

      Gene swapping is ubiquitous among bacteria and other single-celled organisms. Even plants and fungi are known to occasionally adopt a piece of foreign DNA. But scientists thought that multicellular animals picked up genes from bacteria only rarely.

  12. Redefining the Architecture of Memory, NY Times Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts:
    Jim Wilson/The New York Times At I.B.M.'s research lab in San Jose, Calif., Stuart S. P. Parkin is working on a device that could increase chip data storage by 10 to 100 times.
    If the racetrack idea can be made commercial, he will have done what has so far proved impossible - to take microelectronics completely into the third dimension and thus explode the two-dimensional limits of Moore's Law, the 1965 observation by Gordon E. Moore, a co-founder of Intel, that decrees that the number of transistors on a silicon chip doubles roughly every 18 months.(...)

    This is just a hint, but it suggests that I.B.M. may think that racetrack memory could blur the line between storage and computing, providing a key to a new way to search for data, as well as store and retrieve data.

  13. How Do You Like Your Genes? Biofabs Take Orders, NY Times Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: Customers usually place orders - a sequence of hundreds of As, Cs, Gs and Ts - through a biofab's Web site or by e-mail. "It's really not possible to take an order like that over the phone or even by fax," said Jeremy Minshull, president of DNA2.0.

    Manufacturing is a prime example of what is called mass customization, highly automated production with every single product being different.

    The machines that string together bases make so many mistakes that they cannot make a full gene flawlessly. So the companies make shorter oligos and splice them together. Error checking is crucial.

  14. Experimental Drugs on Trial, Scientific American Magazine Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: Abigail Burroughs was only 21 when she died. If her father and his supporters get their wish, however, she will attain a kind of immortality, joining Brown, Griswold, Roe and Miranda in the band of ordinary citizens whose personal travails have permanently changed the way Americans live.

    A lawsuit, Abigail Alliance for Better Access to Developmental Drugs v. Andrew von Eschenbach, contends that government regulations kept Burroughs from obtaining potentially lifesaving experimental cancer medicines that her doctor recommended, violating her constitutional right to defend her life.


    Editor's Note:

    Besides the long time it takes to complete a clinical trials, some promising drugs will not undergo that procedure because the expected profit for the drug company is too low (e.g. drugs that cannot be patented) to make a clinical trial economically justifiable.

    1. Biomedicine: HIV Drug Shows Promise as Potential Cancer Treatment, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Broder, former director of NCI, in the 1980s helped discover the first anti-HIV drug to come to market, AZT, which at the time was an abandoned anticancer agent.

      Dennis hopes to enroll 45 patients, all of whom have solid tumors that do not respond to treatment. Dennis initially wants to determine whether cancer patients can tolerate nelfinavir at higher doses than used to treat HIV. "The maximum tolerated dose and toxicities of nelfinavir have never been established in humans,"

  15. Listening To Speech In The Presence Of Other Sounds, Phil. Tran. Biol. Sc. Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: Although most research on the perception of speech has been conducted with speech presented without any competing sounds, we almost always listen to speech against a background of other sounds which we are adept at ignoring. Nevertheless, such additional irrelevant sounds can cause severe problems for speech recognition algorithms and for the hard of hearing as well as posing a challenge to theories of speech perception. A variety of different problems are created by the presence of additional sound sources: detection of features that are partially masked, (...).

    1. Temporal Precision In The Neural Code And The Timescales Of Natural Vision, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: The timing of action potentials relative to sensory stimuli can be precise down to milliseconds in the visual system, even though the relevant timescales of natural vision are much slower. The existence of such precision contributes to a fundamental debate over the basis of the neural code and, specifically, what timescales are important for neural computation. (...), here we demonstrate that the relevant timescale of neuronal spike trains depends on the frequency content of the visual stimulus, and that 'relative', not absolute, precision is maintained (...).

    2. Reading Process Is Surprisingly Different That Previously Thought, ScienceDaily Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Being able to read competently is one of the most important skills we need (...). Analysing the way we read can offer valuable insights into how we process visual information. (...) However, until now most assumed that when we read both eyes look at the same letter of a word concurrently. Now ground-breaking research (...) has shown that this is not actually the case. They found that our eyes are actually up to something much more exciting when we read - our eyes look at different letters in the same word and then combine the different images through a process known as fusion. (...)

  16. Muscular Thin Films for Building Actuators and Powering Devices, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: Patterning of muscle cells grown on centimeter-scale, flexible substrates allows the free films to form actuators with complex three-dimensional shapes.

    We demonstrate the assembly of biohybrid materials from engineered tissues and synthetic polymer thin films. The constructs were built by culturing neonatal rat ventricular cardiomyocytes on polydimethylsiloxane thin films micropatterned with extracellular matrix proteins to promote spatially ordered, two-dimensional myogenesis. The constructs, termed muscular thin films, adopted functional, three-dimensional conformations when released from a thermally sensitive polymer substrate and were designed to perform biomimetic tasks by varying tissue architecture, thin-film shape, and electrical-pacing protocol.

    1. Pushing The Complexity Of Model Bilayers: Novel Prospects For Membrane Biophysics, Springer Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpt: As an interface between different biological compartments, membranes guarantee an efficient exchange of matter, energy and/or signals. For this purpose, such an interface has to be designed as a very dynamic system, yet with a non-random distribution of its components, lipids and proteins. A delicate balance of lipid and protein interactions is the basis of tightly regulated mechanisms to concentrate molecules at the site of interest at a specific time and, thereby, exclude unwanted components. In order to elucidate this highly intricate architecture, the top-down approach-by looking at the intact cell-is best complemented by a bottom-up strategy, (...).

  17. Dragging Of Inertial Frames, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: Frame-dragging phenomena, which are due to mass currents and mass rotation, have been called gravitomagnetism because of a formal analogy of electrodynamics with the general theory of relativity (in the weak field and slow motion approximation). Whereas an electric charge generates an electric field and a current of electric charge generates a magnetic field, in newtonian gravitational theory the mass of a body generates a gravitational field but a current of mass, for example the rotation of a body, would not generate any additional gravitational field.

  18. The Changing Ecology Of Foreign Policy-Making In China, The China Quarterly Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: China's rapidly proliferating global interests and evolving political environment have begun to change the international and domestic context for its foreign policy-making. This article explores the changing inputs into and processes associated with foreign policy-making in China today. It does this by analysing the shifting fortunes of "peaceful rise," one of the first new foreign policy concepts to be introduced under the Hu Jintao administration. The authors draw several implications from this narrow debate for understanding contemporary foreign policy-making in China. (...)

  19. Complex Challenges: Global Terrorist Networks Next Article Bookmark and Share

    1. The New Al-Qaeda Central, Washington Post Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: When Osama bin Laden resurfaced Friday in a 26-minute videotaped speech, his most important message was one left unsaid: We have survived. The last time bin Laden showed his face to the world was three years ago, in October 2004. Since then, al-Qaeda's core leadership -- dubbed al-Qaeda Central by intelligence analysts -- has grown stronger, rebuilding the organizational framework that was badly damaged after the U.S.-led invasion of Afghanistan, according to counterterrorism officials in Pakistan, the United States and Europe.

    2. Al-Qaeda's Return - The Terrorists Have A Sanctuary Once Again., Washington Post Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Yet as the United States mourns and commemorates the worst act of terrorism ever carried out on U.S. soil, and reflects thankfully on the fact that it has not been repeated, there are ominous signs that al-Qaeda is back as a coherent, global force capable of inflicting damage on the United States. Al-Qaeda never really went away, of course, as grieving families of its victims from London to Baghdad can attest. But the emergence of the first authentic Osama bin Laden video in three years, the arrest of German-based al-Qaeda operatives near Frankfurt,(...)

  20. Links & Snippets Next Article Bookmark and Share

    1. Other Publications Next Article Bookmark and Share

      1. The Stress Of Relaxation, H. C. Hartzell, Science 317, 1331-1332 (2007)Two modes of activation explain how an enzyme controls blood vessel responses to oxidative stress, hormones, and neurotransmitters.
      2. A Basal Dromaeosaurid and Size Evolution Preceding Avian Flight, Alan H. Turner, Diego Pol, Julia A. Clarke, Gregory M. Erickson, Mark A. Norell, 07/09/07, Science: 1378-1381. A small Cretaceous dinosaur from Mongolia represents the basal divergence of the lineage leading to birds and shows that dinosaur size varied in this lineage.
      3. Vasorelaxation - Hydrogen Peroxide and Blood Pressure, L. Bryan Ray, 07/09/11, Sci. STKE 2007 (403), tw330, DOI: 10.1126/stke.4032007tw330
      4. E. Coli Metabolomics: Capturing The Complexity Of A "Simple" Model, M. Robert - mrobertattck.keio.ac.jp, T. Soga, M. Tomita, 2007/04/14, Springer Book Series, DOI: 10.1007/4735_2007_0221
      5. Mobility Promotes and Jeopardizes Biodiversity in Rock-paper-scissors Games, Tobias Reichenbach, Mauro Mobilia, and Erwin Frey, 2007/09/03, arXiv [Nature 448, 1046-1049 (2007)], DOI: 0709.0217
      6. Britain Gets Hybrid Embryo Go-ahead, Michael Hopkin, 2007/09/05, News@Nature, DOI: 10.1038/news070903-12
      7. Mobile Phones Put Patients In Peril: Electromagnetic Interference Can Shut Down Medical Equipment, R. Jaques, 2007/09/06, vnunet.com
      8. A Dog In The Hand Scares Birds In The Bush, 2007/09/06, Innovations-report
      9. More Global View Required In Criminology, 2007/09/06, Innovations-report
      10. Neural Representation Of Spectral And Temporal Information In Speech, E. D. Young, 2007/09/07, Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences, DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2007.2151
      11. Microfluidic Chambers Advance The Science Of Growing Neurons, 2007/09/07, ScienceDaily & University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
      12. Adult Brain Can Change, Study Confirms, 2007/09/09, ScienceDaily & Massachusetts Institute of Technology
      13. Colour Contrast Is 'Seen' By The Brain Early Doors, 2007/09/10, Innovations-report
      14. Specific Brain Protein Required For Nerve Cell Connections To Form And Function, 2007/09/10, ScienceDaily & University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
      15. Optimizing Chaos-Based Signals For Complex Radar Targets, T. L. Carroll, Sep. 2007, online 2007/08/01, Chaos: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Nonlinear Science, DOI: 10.1063/1.2751392

    2. Webcast Announcements Next Article Bookmark and Share

      1. Reseau Nationale des Systemes Complexes , (in French), 2007
      2. World Economic Forum , Davos, Switzerland, 07/01/24-28
      3. TED Talks, TED Conferences LLC , since 2006
      4. Talking Robots: The PodCast on Robotics and AI, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland, 06/11/03
      5. Potentials of Complexity Science for Business, Governments, and the Media 2006, Budapest, Hungary, 06/08/03-05
      6. 6th Intl Conf on Complex Systems (ICCS), Boston, MA, 06/06/25-30
      7. Artificial Life X, 10th Intl Conf on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems, Bloomington, IN, USA. 2006/06/03-07
      8. 6th Understanding Complex Systems Symposium, Urbana-Champaign, Il, 06/05/15-18
      9. Ralph Abraham on Complexity Digest, , Calcutta, India, 05/12/27
      10. An Afternoon with Michael Crichton, Washington, 05/11/06
      11. Illuminating the Shadow of the Future, Ann Arbor, Mi 05/09/23-25
      12. Open Network of Centres of Excellence in Complex Systems - Brainstorming Meeting, Paris, France 05/09/19-23
      13. Complexity, Science & Society Conference 2005, U. Liverpool, UK 2005/09/11-14
      14. ECAL 2005 - VIIIth European Conference on Artificial Life, Canterbury, Kent, UK 2005/09/5-9
      15. T. Irene Sanders, Executive Director and Founder, The Washington Center for Complexity & Public Policy, 05/08/27, QuickTime video (10:38 min), Podcast
      16. North American Society for the Psychology of Sport and Physical Activity 2005 Conference, Virtual Conference Network, St. Pete's Beach, Florida, 05/06/09-11
      17. Understanding Complex Systems - Computational Complexity and Bioinformatics, Virtual Conference Network, Urbana-Champaign, Il, UIUC, 05/05/16-19
      18. Nonlinearity, Fluctuations, and Complexity, with a celebration of the 65th birthday of Gregoire Nicolis. , Complexity Session, Universite' Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium, 05/03/16
      19. 1st European Conference on Complex Systems, Torino, Italy, 04/12/5-7
      20. From Autopoiesis to Neurophenomenology: A Tribute to Francisco Varela (1946-2001), Paris, France, 2004/06/18-20
      21. Evolutionary Epistemology, Language, and Culture, Brussels, Belgium, 04/05/26-28
      22. International Conference on Complex Systems 2004, Boston, 04/05/16-21
      23. Nonlinear Dynamics And Chaos: Lab Demonstrations, Strogatz, Steven H., Internet-First University Press, 1994
      24. CERN Webcast Service, Streamed videos of Archived Lectures and Live Events
      25. Dean LeBaron's Archive of Daily Video Commentary, Ongoing Since February 1998
      26. Edge Videos

    3. Conference Announcements Next Article Bookmark and Share

      1. ECAL 2007 - 9th European Conference on Artificial Life, Lisbon, Portugal, 07/09/10-14
      2. NOLTA 2007 - Intl Symposium on Nonlinear Theory and its Applications, Vancouver, Canada, 07/09/16-19
      3. Itl. Conf. on Applications in Nonlinear Dynamics, Poipu Beach, Koloa (Kauai), Hawaii, 07/09/24-27
      4. 3rd Edition of the Econophysics Colloquium , Ancona, Italy, 07/09/27-29
      5. European Conference on Complex Systems 2007 (ECCS'07), Dresden, Germany, 07/10/01-05
      6. Processes Of Emergence Of Systems And Systemic Properties. Towards A General Theory Of Emergence. , Castel Ivano (Trento), 07/10/18-20
      7. 2nd Annual Conf on The Physics, Chemistry and Biology of Water, West Dover, Vermont. 07/10/18-21
      8. Smithsonian conference, Creating a Sustainable Future in a Complex World, Washington, DC, 07/10/27
      9. Intl Conf on Complex Systems 2007, Boston, MA, USA, 07/10/28-11/02
      10. 2007 IEEE/WIC/ACM Intl Joint Conf on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT'07), Silicon Valley, USA, 07/11/02-05
      11. Theory In Cognitive Neuroscience, Wildbad Kreuth (Bavaria), Germany, 07/11/04-07
      12. 7th Intl Conf on Epigenetic Robotics: Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems , Piscataway, NJ, 07/11/05-07
      13. KSS 2007 - 8th Intl Symposium on Knowledge and Systems Sciences, Ishikawa prefecture, Japan, 07/11/05-07
      14. NetLogo Workshop at Agent 2007 Conference, Evanston, IL, USA, 07/11/12-14
      15. Australia New Zealand Systems Conference 2007 "Systemic development: Local solutions in a global environment", Auckland, New Zealand, 07/12/02-05
      16. The 3rd Indian Intl Conf on Artificial Intelligence (IICAI-07), Pune, INDIA, 07/12/17-19
      17. The 1st Conf on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-08), Memphis, Tennessee, USA, 08/03/01-03
      18. The 3rd International Nonlinear Sciences Conference (INSC), Tokyo, Japan, 08/03/13-15
      19. 19th European Meeting On Cybernetics And Systems Research, (EMCSR 2008), Vienna, Austria, 08/03/25-28
      20. The 12th World Multi-Conf on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics: WMSCI 2008, Orlando, Florida, USA, 08/06/29-07/02
      21. From Animals To Animats 10 - The 10th Intl Conf on the Simulation Of Adaptive Behavior (SAB'08), Osaka, Japan, 08/07/07-12
      22. Stochastic Resonance 2008, Perugia, Italy, 08/08/17-21

    4. Other Announcements Bookmark and Share

      1. A short notice from Dean LeBaron

        Dear ComDig Readers,

        Our editor, Dr. Gottfried Mayer, is affectionately esteemed by many of you -- as readers, you know he devotes himself unselfishly to widening our knowledge of complexity science. He was recently diagnosed with advanced colon cancer and given a timetable of a very few years. Knowing Gottfried, you can imagine that, in addition to the customary processes of chemotherapy, he would explore other frontier therapies, especially those arising out of interdisciplinary applications of complexity. These are expensive ... if he can find them.

        Many of you have sent your good wishes and indicated your desire to assist. With Gottfried's permission, I am posting this note with information, below, about how to send contributions to him. Please indicate the source since Gottfried will want to express his warm gratitude.

        I know that Gottfried, the good scientist that he is, will explain from time to time what he is doing and what the results are ... and we will follow his progress with great interest and hope.

        Dean LeBaron
        Publisher, Complexity Digest

        Bank Information:

        If your contribution is made by check:
        Please mail the check, payable to "Gottfried Mayer", to:
        Manufacturers & Traders Trust
        2080 Western Avenue
        20 Mall
        Guilderland, NY 12084 USA
        (on the back of the check, please write: "For Deposit Only: Account # 983 338 3814")

        If your contribution is made by wire:
        Manufacturers & Traders Trust
        2080 Western Avenue
        20 Mall

        Guilderland, NY 12084 USA
        SWIFT Code# MANTUS33
        UID: 209 791
        ABA routing # 022 00 00 46 [for US wire transfers]
        Account # 983 338 3814
        Ref. Gottfried Mayer

      2. Intl Master of Science in Methods For Management Of Complex Systems - Academic Year 2007-2008, Institute for Advanced Study, Pavia, Italy, 08/01/01
      3. News notes on Agent-based Computational Economics (ACE) for July 2007 are now available on-line, 07/08/04
      4. National Humanities Center Launches Humanities/Sciences Website, 07/04, As part of its ongoing "Autonomy, Singularity, Creativity: The Human & The Humanities" project (ASC), the National Humanities Center makes public a new website for the initiative which significantly expands the potential pool of humanists and scientists engaged in the exploration and examination of topics surrounding the question of human being.

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