Complexity Digest 2008.21

22-May-2008

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Content

  1. Economics: The Promise of Prediction Markets, Science
  2. A Theory for the Formation of Large Agrarian Empires, SFI Working Papers
    1. The Neolithic Demographic Transition in the U.S. Southwest, SFI Working Papers
  3. The Evolution Of Music, Nature
    1. Godel, Escher, Chopin - Inuitive Links Between Musical Chords And Geometries, Science News
  4. Scientists Get A 2nd Life, Science News
  5. To How Many Politicians Should Government Be Left?, SFI Working Papers
    1. The Undeciders - More Decision-Makers Bring Less Efficiency, Science News
  6. New Insights Into The Dynamics Of The Brain's Cortex, ScienceDaily
    1. Free Choice Activates A Decision Circuit Between Frontal And Parietal Cortex, Nature
    2. Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain, NY Times
    3. Exploring The Mechanics Of Judgment, Beliefs: Technique Images Brain Activity When We Think Of Others, ScienceDaily
    4. Sleep Deprivation Affects Ability To Make Sense Of What We See, EurekAlert
  7. HIV Infection Stems from Few Viruses, U Alabama at Birmingham News Release
  8. Defeating Drug Resistance in Pathogens: Guidance from Evolutionary Theory, SFI Working Papers
    1. Google Health: A Quick Hands-On Look, Washington Post
    2. Pollution And Blood Clots - Particles May Pose Risk At Levels Present In Many U.S. Cities, Science News
  9. Simple Artificial Cell Created From Scratch To Study Cell Complexity, ScienceDaily
    1. Signal Transduction: The Rhodopsin Story Continued, Nature
  10. Entomology: A Mosquito Goes Global, Science
    1. Bring In The Replacements - Field Experiments Suggest Introduced Species Could Play Understudy For Extinct Ones, Science News
  11. I, Computer - Engineered Bacteria Become The First Living Computers, Science News
  12. Surface Tension Transport of Prey by Feeding Shorebirds: The Capillary Ratchet, Science
    1. Biophysics: The Intrigue of the Interface, Science
    2. The Energetic Cost of Climbing in Primates, Science
  13. Plant Biology: In Their Neighbour's Shadow, Nature
  14. Climate Change: Attributing Cause And Effect, Nature
  15. Self-Repairing Aircraft Could Revolutionize Aviation Safety, PhysOrg.com
    1. Stress and Fold Localization in Thin Elastic Membranes, Science
  16. More Missing Cosmic Matter Found, Space.com
    1. Physicists Demonstrate How Information Can Escape From Black Holes, ScienceDaily
  17. The Ant Colony Algorithm For Feature Selection In High-Dimension Gene Expression Data For Disease Classification, Math. Medi. & Biol.
  18. Obituary: Edward N. Lorenz (1917-2008) - Meteorologist And Father Of Chaos Theory., Nature
  19. Complex Challenges: Global Terrorist Networks
    1. Islamic Bankers Versus Islamic Terrorists, Kuwait Times
    2. Wider Antiterror Role for Elite Forces Rejected, NY Times
    3. Natural Security: Ecologist Says Evolution Offers Important Lessons for Security Policy, AAAS News
  20. Links & Snippets
    1. Other Publications
    2. Webcast Announcements
    3. Conference Announcements
    4. Other Announcements

  1. Economics: The Promise of Prediction Markets, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: The ability of groups of people to make predictions is a potent research tool that should be freed of unnecessary government restrictions. (...)

    Prediction markets have been used by decision-makers in the U.S. Department of Defense, the health care industry, and multibillion-dollar corporations such as Eli Lilly, General Electric, Google, France Telecom, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, Microsoft, Siemens, and Yahoo. (...)

    Unfortunately, however, current federal and state laws limiting gambling create significant barriers to the establishment of vibrant, liquid prediction markets in the United States.

    • Source: Economics: The Promise of Prediction Markets, Kenneth J. Arrow, Robert Forsythe, Michael Gorham, Robert Hahn, Robin Hanson, John O. Ledyard, Saul Levmore, Robert Litan, Paul Milgrom, Forrest D. Nelson, George R. Neumann, Marco Ottaviani, Thomas C. Schelling, Robert J. Shiller, Vernon L. Smith, Erik Snowberg, Cass R. Sunstein, Paul C. Tetlock, Philip E. Tetlock, Hal R. Varian, Justin Wolfers, Eric Zitzewitz, Science : 877-878., 08/05/16

  2. A Theory for the Formation of Large Agrarian Empires, SFI Working Papers Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: Before the Industrial Revolution the greater part of the inhabitable world was occupied by small-scale societies and large territorial states were, comparatively speaking, a rarity. Nevertheless, between 3000 BCE and 1800 CE there were at least 60 agrarian "megaempires" that controlled at the peak an area equal to or greater than one million of squared kilometers. What were the social forces that kept together such huge agrarian states? A clue is provided by the empirical observation that over 90 percent of megaempires originated at steppe frontiers "zones of interaction" between nomadic pastorialists and settled agriculturalists. I propose a model for one route to megaempire. (...)

    1. The Neolithic Demographic Transition in the U.S. Southwest, SFI Working Papers Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Maize agriculture was practiced in the U.S. Southwest slightly before 2000 B.C., but had a negligible impact on population growth rates until the development or introduction of more productive landraces; the ability to successfully cultivate maize under a greater variety of conditions, with dry farming especially important; the addition of beans, squash, and eventually turkey to the diet; increased sedentism; and what we infer to be the remapping of exchange networks and the development of efficient exchange strategies in first-millenium-A.D. villages. (...) Independent genetic data derived from the mitochondrial genomes of present-day indigenous populations of the Southwest are also consistent with the hypothesis that a major demographic expansion occurred 1500-2000 years ago in the Southwest.

  3. The Evolution Of Music, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: Some argue that music is merely a side effect of traits that evolved for other functions. Our perceptual and cognitive abilities may have accidentally resulted in a system that finds pleasure and interest in musical stimulation. This idea should perhaps be the null hypothesis, and is by no means implausible. Music's perceptual basis could derive from general-purpose auditory mechanisms, its syntactic components could be co-opted from language, and its effect on our emotions could be driven by the acoustic similarity of music to other sounds of greater biological relevance, such as speech or animal vocalizations.

    1. Godel, Escher, Chopin - Inuitive Links Between Musical Chords And Geometries, Science News Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts:
      Shape of chords
      Familiar relationships between sets of musical notes, such as transposition between chords, directly translate into geometrical structures such as this Moebius strip - where each dot represents a whole class of equivalent two-note chords - or into more complex structures with many dimensions.

      Composers have an understanding of these geometries without realizing it, (...).

  4. Scientists Get A 2nd Life, Science News Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts:
    Students listen to microbiologist Joan Slonczewski discuss science and science fiction on the American Chemical Society's island.
    Online world opens up news ways to do and learn about science (...)

    Such "mixed world" events, gatherings that take place simultaneously in SL and real life, remove many of the long-standing barriers in science communication. "Chances are, the scientist would never have traveled all over the world to talk about his work, and nobody from South Carolina would have traveled such a great distance to listen to him," Scott says.

    Although SL is not the first online virtual world, experts say better Internet connections, more realistic graphics and a boom in the video industry are driving forces behind the new interest in using such environments, especially in the classroom.

  5. To How Many Politicians Should Government Be Left?, SFI Working Papers Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: The quality of governance of institutions, corporations and countries depends on the ability of efficient decision making within the respective boards or cabinets. Opinion formation processes within groups are size dependent. It is often argued - as now e.g. in the discussion of the future size of the European Commission - that decision making bodies of a size beyond 20 become strongly inefficient. We report empirical evidence that the performance of national governments declines with increasing membership and undergoes a qualitative change in behavior at a particular group size. (...)

    1. The Undeciders - More Decision-Makers Bring Less Efficiency, Science News Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: The team simulated committees as networks in which each member was a node. Before a vote, each member's opinion could be influenced by those of its immediate neighbors in the network; adjacent nodes could represent, for example, ministers belonging to the same political party. The simulation found that committees of 10 members or less could almost always reach a consensus (with one mysterious exception for the number 8). For larger committees, the chances of getting to a consensus were lower, and the chances decreased even more rapidly for committees of 20 or more. The results show that Parkinson's law is not an accident, but "a robust consequence of the opinion-formation model," Thurner says.
      Editor's Note: This "consequence" is a strong claim. At this point all one can claim is that the model and the observations happen to produce similar numerical outcomes.

  6. New Insights Into The Dynamics Of The Brain's Cortex, ScienceDaily Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: Using mathematics and a computer model of brain activity, (...) has shown a direct link between activity in the cortex and the microscopic structure of this neuronal network. Building on the existing body of research, Galán's work indicates that the spontaneous activity of small neuronal networks in the cortex consists of highly structured patterns rather than random "noise," shedding light on previous speculations. Galán proved that these structured patterns are inextricably shaped by the network connectivity. "The activity patterns can be used to inform researchers about the anatomy of the underlying neuronal network," Galán explains. (...)

    1. Free Choice Activates A Decision Circuit Between Frontal And Parietal Cortex, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: We often face alternatives that we are free to choose between. Planning movements to select an alternative involves several areas in frontal and parietal cortex that are anatomically connected into long-range circuits. These areas must coordinate their activity to select a common movement goal, but how neural circuits make decisions remains poorly understood. (...). We find that correlations in spike and local field potential (LFP) activity between these areas are greater when monkeys are freely making choices than when they are following instructions. We propose that a decision circuit featuring a sub-population of cells in frontal and parietal cortex may exchange information to coordinate activity between these areas.

    2. Older Brain Really May Be a Wiser Brain, NY Times Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts:
      Yarek Waszu
      But for most aging adults, (...), much of what occurs is a gradually widening focus of attention that makes it more difficult to latch onto just one fact, like a name or a telephone number. (...)

      "It may increase the amount of information available to the conscious mind."

      For example, in studies where subjects are asked to read passages that are interrupted with unexpected words or phrases, adults 60 and older work much more slowly than college students.

    3. Exploring The Mechanics Of Judgment, Beliefs: Technique Images Brain Activity When We Think Of Others, ScienceDaily Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: How do we know what other people are thinking? How do we judge them, and what happens in our brains when we do? MIT neuroscientist Rebecca Saxe is tackling those tough questions and many others. Her goal is no less than understanding how the brain gives rise to the abilities that make us uniquely human--making moral judgments, developing belief systems and understanding language. It's a huge task, but "different chunks of it can be bitten off in different ways," she says. (...) "These are extremely abstract kinds of concepts, although we use them fluently and constantly to get around in the world," says Saxe.

    4. Sleep Deprivation Affects Ability To Make Sense Of What We See, EurekAlert Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Neuroscience researchers (...) have shown for the first time what happens to the visual perceptions of healthy but sleep-deprived volunteers who fight to stay awake, like people who try to drive through the night.

      The scientists found that even after sleep deprivation, people had periods of near-normal brain function in which they could finish tasks quickly. However, this normalcy mixed with periods of slow response and severe drops in visual processing and attention, (...).

      ¡§Interestingly, the team found that a sleep-deprived brain can normally process simple visuals, like flashing checkerboards.

  7. HIV Infection Stems from Few Viruses, U Alabama at Birmingham News Release Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: A new study reveals in unprecedented detail the genetic identity of versions of HIV responsible for sexual transmission. In 80 percent of the study's newly infected patients, a single HIV variant caused transmission, (...). The detail provides important clues in the ongoing search for an effective HIV/AIDS vaccine. (...)

    The UAB study is the first to use genetic analysis and mathematical modeling to identify precisely those viruses responsible for HIV transmission. (...)

    The UAB team said their work would lead to new research on how different HIV genes and proteins work together to make a virus biologically fit for transmission and for growth in the face of mounting immunity.

  8. Defeating Drug Resistance in Pathogens: Guidance from Evolutionary Theory, SFI Working Papers Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Abstract: Many of the greatest challenges in medicine and public health involve the evolution of drug resistance by pathogenic microbes. Recent advances in the theory of natural selection suggest there are two broad classes of pathogen traits that can be targeted by drugs or vaccines. The first class, consisting of traits that benefit the individual pathogen cell produces a strong evolutionary response and the rapid emergence of pathogen resistance. The second class, consisting of group-beneficial traits, produces a weaker evolutionary response and less drug resistance. While most previous drug development has targeted the first class, it would be advantageous to focus on the second class as targets for drug and vaccine development. Specific examples and test cases are discussed.

    1. Google Health: A Quick Hands-On Look, Washington Post Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: The big competition here is between Google Health and Microsoft's HealthVault. (Revolution Health is more of an information portal at this point, and who is going to trust their health insurance company?). Whereas HealthVault's strengths seem to lie in tying together different health information silos on the back end, Google Health is focusing more initially on the consumer side. It is trying to do an end-run around the health establishment by trying to get consumers to manually load their own medical information into their profiles.

    2. Pollution And Blood Clots - Particles May Pose Risk At Levels Present In Many U.S. Cities, Science News Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts:
      Because air pollution particles that fall into the PM10 range are too small to see with the naked eye, an apparently clear sky could host toxic concentrations of them
      Air pollution dramatically boosts an individual's risk of developing deep vein thrombosis, a new study indicates. People with DVT typically develop clots in the leg or thigh. If those clots break off and travel, especially to the lungs, organ damage or death may follow.

      The new study focused on exposure to airborne particles 10 micrometers and smaller, known as PM10. Created largely as part of combustion exhaust, these particles are so small that they can be inhaled deeply into the lungs.

  9. Simple Artificial Cell Created From Scratch To Study Cell Complexity, ScienceDaily Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: A team of Penn State researchers has developed a simple artificial cell with which to investigate the organization and function of two of the most basic cell components: the cell membrane and the cytoplasm--the gelatinous fluid that surrounds the structures in living cells. The work could lead to the creation of new drugs that take advantage of properties of cell organization to prevent the development of diseases. (...) "Many scientists are trying to understand cells by turning off genes, one at a time, and are observing the effects on cell function, but we're doing the opposite," said (...)

    1. Signal Transduction: The Rhodopsin Story Continued, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Determination of the architecture of an invertebrate photoreceptor protein, squid rhodopsin, is a notable event. It illuminates the mechanism of invertebrate vision and a ubiquitous intracellular signalling system. (...)

      Finally, Murakami and Kouyama's structure will be particularly helpful for those investigating the action of human melanopsin, which - on the basis of sequence similarity - is more closely related to invertebrate than to vertebrate rhodopsin. Melanopsin is the photoreceptor that is required for setting our biological clock(...).

  10. Entomology: A Mosquito Goes Global, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: The water the used tires hold is an ideal place for eggs and larvae, Reiter says; and even if it evaporates, the Asian tiger mosquito's eggs are so drought-resistant that they can survive until the tires reach their destination. (Mosquito species like Anopheles gambiae, a malaria vector, could never pull this off.)

    The mosquitoes imported into the United States probably came from Japan, (...). Like their Japanese counterparts, Asian tiger mosquitoes were able to survive cold winters because their eggs respond to shortening days by going into a state of dormancy called diapause.

    1. Bring In The Replacements - Field Experiments Suggest Introduced Species Could Play Understudy For Extinct Ones, Science News Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Mauritius, a remote island in the Indian Ocean, lost many of its unique creatures after Europeans colonized the island in the 17th century. Besides its most famous extinction, the dodo, the island has lost giant tortoises, pigeons, fruit bats and a giant lizard, says Dennis M. Hansen, a tropical ecologist at Stanford University. Those die-offs now threaten many of the island's plants, especially the species that depend on frugivores to disperse their seeds. (...)


  11. I, Computer - Engineered Bacteria Become The First Living Computers, Science News Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts:
    BURNT PANCAKE PROBLEMHow many flips does it take to get these pancakes sorted? A colony of E. coli may be able to sort it out.iStockphoto
    Researchers genetically engineered the bacterium E. coli to coax its DNA into computing a classic mathematical puzzle known as the burned pancake problem. Molecules of DNA have the natural ability to store and process information, and scientists have been performing computations with bare DNA molecules in lab dishes since the mid-1990s. But the new research, reported online in the Journal of Biological Engineering, is the first to do DNA computation in living cells.

    "Imagine having the parallel processing power of a million computers all in the space of a drop of water," (...)


  12. Surface Tension Transport of Prey by Feeding Shorebirds: The Capillary Ratchet, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: The variability of bird beak morphology reflects diverse foraging strategies. One such feeding mechanism in shorebirds involves surface tension-induced transport of prey in millimetric droplets: By repeatedly opening and closing its beak in a tweezering motion, the bird moves the drop from the tip of its beak to its mouth in a stepwise ratcheting fashion. We have analyzed the subtle physical mechanism responsible for drop transport and demonstrated experimentally that the beak geometry and the dynamics of tweezering may be tuned to optimize transport efficiency.

    1. Biophysics: The Intrigue of the Interface, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: In water too deep to stand, the bird spins on the surface, creating a vortex that draws up water and food particles (6). As it spins, it dips its beak into the water, capturing a drop of fluid and food between the halves of the beak (7). The bird then rapidly scissors its beak through a small angle. The beak is never fully closed, but the drop nonetheless moves upward to the mouth. It is here that surface tension comes into play. As the beak opens, the drop is stretched, and its contact lines with the beak's surface retreat. But the contact line nearest the beak's tip retreats more than the contact line nearest the mouth. As a result, the drop moves incrementally toward the mouth.

    2. The Energetic Cost of Climbing in Primates, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Primates are exceptional among mammals for their climbing abilities and arboreal lifestyles. Here we show that small primates (less than 0.5 kilogram) consume the same amount of mass-specific energy (COTTOT) whether climbing or walking a given distance. COTTOT decreases with increasing body size for walking but does not change for climbing. This divergence of COTTOT is likely due to fundamental differences in the biomechanical determinants of the costs of climbing versus walking. These results have important implications for understanding the origins of primates, suggesting that small early primates may have been able to move into a novel arboreal niche without increasing metabolic costs.

  13. Plant Biology: In Their Neighbour's Shadow, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: They can't move away from shade, so plants resort to a molecular solution to find a place in the sun. The action they take is quite radical, and involves a reprogramming of their development. (...)

    So even if plants have to compete - for example, for sunlight with their neighbours - they do so by modulating their own growth rather than by directly preventing that of others. Indeed, a reduction in the quality of light causes shade-avoidance syndrome, a physiological response leading to stem elongation, fewer branches and earlier flowering.

  14. Climate Change: Attributing Cause And Effect, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: The climate is changing, and so are aspects of the world's physical and biological systems. It is no easy matter to link cause and effect - the latest attack on the problem brings the power of meta-analysis to bear. (...).

    The authors make the case using what is known as the 'joint attribution' approach. They first show that the observed correspondence between impacts and warming would be very unlikely to occur if patterns of temperature change were the result of natural climate variability. They then argue that human influence has a role because observed large-scale climate change can be attributed to human influence on the climate system.

  15. Self-Repairing Aircraft Could Revolutionize Aviation Safety, PhysOrg.com Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts:
    No hollow achievement: hollow glass fibres embedded in carbon fibre reinforced plastic could be the key to safer flying. Photo by EPSRC
    A new technique that mimics healing processes found in nature could enable damaged aircraft to mend themselves automatically, even during a flight. (...)

    The technique works like this. If a tiny hole/crack appears in the aircraft (e.g. due to wear and tear, fatigue, a stone striking the plane etc), epoxy resin would 'bleed' from embedded vessels near the hole/crack and quickly seal it up, restoring structural integrity. By mixing dye into the resin, any 'self-mends' could be made to show as coloured patches that could easily be pinpointed during subsequent ground inspections, and a full repair carried out if necessary.

    1. Stress and Fold Localization in Thin Elastic Membranes, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Thin elastic membranes supported on a much softer elastic solid or a fluid deviate from their flat geometries upon compression. We demonstrate that periodic wrinkling is only one possible solution for such strained membranes. Folds, which involve highly localized curvature, appear whenever the membrane is compressed beyond a third of its initial wrinkle wavelength. Eventually the surface transforms into a symmetry-broken state with flat regions of membrane coexisting with locally folded points, reminiscent of a crumpled, unsupported membrane. We provide general scaling laws for the wrinkled and folded states and proved the transition with numerical and experimental supported membranes.

  16. More Missing Cosmic Matter Found, Space.com Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: After an extensive search, astronomers say they have definitely found half of the universe's missing normal matter in the spaces between galaxies. (...)

    The missing part of baryonic matter has largely escaped detection because it is too hot to be seen in visible light but too cool to be seen in X-rays. Dubbed the "intergalactic medium," or IGM, it extends essentially throughout all of space like a cosmic spider web. (...)


    1. Physicists Demonstrate How Information Can Escape From Black Holes, ScienceDaily Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpt: Physicists at Penn State have provided a mechanism by which information can be recovered from black holes, those regions of space where gravity is so strong that, according to Einstein's theory of general relativity, not even light can escape. The team's findings pave the way toward ending a decades-long debate sparked by renowned physicist Steven Hawking. In the 1970s, Hawking showed that black holes evaporate by quantum processes; however, he asserted that information, such as the identity of matter that is gobbled up by black holes, is still permanently lost. At the time, Hawking's assertion threatened to turn quantum mechanics (...).

  17. The Ant Colony Algorithm For Feature Selection In High-Dimension Gene Expression Data For Disease Classification, Math. Medi. & Biol. Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: The use of gene expression data to diagnose complex diseases represents an exciting area of medicine; however, such data sets are often noisy, requiring the selection of feature subsets to obtain maximum classification accuracy. Due to the high dimensions of many expression data sets, filter-based methods are commonly used, but often yield inconsistent results. Optimization algorithms can outperform filter methods, but often require preselection of features to achieve good results. To address the problems of many commonly used feature selection methods, the ant colony algorithm (ACA) is proposed for use on data sets with large numbers of features. (...)

  18. Obituary: Edward N. Lorenz (1917-2008) - Meteorologist And Father Of Chaos Theory., Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: In his book The Essence of Chaos, Lorenz recounts how he came to discover the extreme sensitivity of his model to small changes. Wishing to repeat his simulation, he restarted it with numbers that had been printed out for the start conditions, and left it to go down the hall to fetch a cup of coffee. On his return, he found that the result was nothing like the previous one. He soon identified the reason: the numbers from the print-out were rounded off. In the course of a coffee break, that small error had propagated with exponential speed to change the result completely.

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

    1. Islamic Bankers Versus Islamic Terrorists, Kuwait Times Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: The terrorist attacks on London by Bin Laden and his group, as unfortunate and brutal as they were, were not only wrong and un-Islamic, but also superficial in the sense that they had no structural impact on the interaction of Islam with the world.

      What Islamic bankers are doing is winning back the responsibility of presenting Islam on the world stage from Islamic terrorists. The war is now between institutions like Kuwait Finance House and groups like Al-Qaeda.

    2. Wider Antiterror Role for Elite Forces Rejected, NY Times Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: The military's elite Special Operations Command has quietly stepped back from a controversial plan that gave it the authority to carry out secret counterterrorism missions on its own around the world.

      The decision culminates four years of misgivings within the military that the command, with its expertise in commando missions and unconventional war, would use its broader mandate too aggressively, by carrying out operations that had not been reviewed or approved by the regional commanders.

    3. Natural Security: Ecologist Says Evolution Offers Important Lessons for Security Policy, AAAS News Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Referring to FEMA's response to Hurricane Katrina as "the first major post-9/11 test of [the Department of] Homeland Security" and "a failure," Sagarin said that FEMA's relocation into another department might have affected its response because it lost its ability to make rapid, on-the-ground decisions.

      Sagarin said that an organization like FEMA that operates in complex and situation-diverse environments clearly benefits from having autonomy to perform its services with less central authority or management from above. A biological example of this system, he continued, is the human immune system.


  20. Links & Snippets Next Article Bookmark and Share

    1. Other Publications Next Article Bookmark and Share

      1. A Mathematical Model for Optimal Tuning Systems, Larry Polansky, Daniel Rockmore, Kimo Johnson, and Douglas Repetto, SFI Working Papers, DOI: SFI-WP 08-05-023
      2. Maximum Entropy Approach to Central Limit Distributions of Correlated Variables, Stefan Thurner and Rudolf Hanel, SFI Working Papers, DOI: SFI-WP 08-05-020
      3. Science And Religion: Rethinking History for a New Islamic Science, Jane H. Murphy, 08/05/16, Science : 876.
      4. Circadian Rhythms: Integrating Circadian Timekeeping with Cellular Physiology, Marie C. Harrisingh, Michael N. Nitabach, 08/05/16, Science : 879-880. Models of circadian timekeeping mechanisms in plants, flies, and mammals are expanding to include intracellular small-molecule signals.
      5. Chemistry: To Be Or Not To Be Localized, Kiyoshi Ueda, 08/05/16, Science : 884-885. The hole created by emission of a core electron in a diatomic molecule resides in an entangled state.
      6. Turbulence and Magnetic Fields in the Large-Scale Structure of the Universe, Dongsu Ryu, Hyesung Kang, Jungyeon Cho, Santabrata Das, 08/05/16, Science : 909-912. Simulations suggest that shock waves in the early universe could have amplified small magnetic fields into the large, complex intergalactic fields we see today.
      7. Evolutionary Search For Cellular Automata Logic Gates With Collision-Based Computing, E. Sapin, L. Bull, 17; 14, 2008, Complex Systems
      8. Nonlinearity is 20 Years Old in 2008!, J P Keating and A I Neishtadt, 2008/01, Nonlinearity 21(1), DOI: 10.1088/0951-7715/21/1/E01
      9. Video Games And Violence, 2008/05/15, Innovations-report
      10. Einstein Letter Sells For £170,000: Nobel Physicist Dismisses Bible As 'Childish', G. Dixon, 2008/05/16, vnunet.com
      11. Boffins Take Gigapixel Photos Using Ordinary Camera: Robotic Arm Takes Multiple Pictures Of The Same Scene, I. Thomson, 2008/05/16, vnunet.com
      12. Clear Investment Decisions With The Use Of Fuzzy Logic, 2008/05/16, Innovations-report
      13. MIT Creates New Material For Fuel Cells: Increases Power Output By More Than 50 Percent, 2008/05/16, Innovations-report
      14. The Evolution Of Photosynthesis…Again?, J. McGuire, 2008/05/16, Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences, DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2008.0056
      15. Review. Electrons, Life And The Evolution Of Earth's Oxygen Cycle, P. G. Falkowski, L. V. Godfrey, 2008/05/16, Philosophical Transactions: Biological Sciences, DOI: 10.1098/rstb.2008.0054
      16. Crystal (Eye) Ball: Visual System Equipped With 'Future Seeing Powers', 2008/05/16, ScienceDaily & DOE/Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
      17. Thermodynamics Of Natural Selection I: Energy Flow And The Limits On Organization, E. Smith, 2008/05/21, online 2008/02/16, Journal of Theoretical Biology, DOI: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2008.02.010
      18. Some Open Problems in Real and Complex Dynamical Systems, Yu Ilyashenko, 2008/07, Nonlinearity 21(7), DOI: 10.1088/0951-7715/21/7/T01
      19. US Economic Statecraft In East Asia, M. Kelton - maryanne.keltonaflinders.edu.au, May 2008, online 2008/04/05, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, DOI: 10.1093/irap/lcn001

    2. Webcast Announcements Next Article Bookmark and Share

      1. 7th Intl Conf on Complex Systems (ICCS), Boston, MA, 07/10/28-11/02
      2. Reseau Nationale des Systemes Complexes , (in French), 2007
      3. World Economic Forum , Davos, Switzerland, 08/01/22-27
      4. TED Talks, TED Conferences LLC , since 2006
      5. Talking Robots: The PodCast on Robotics and AI, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland, 06/11/03
      6. Potentials of Complexity Science for Business, Governments, and the Media 2006, Budapest, Hungary, 06/08/03-05
      7. 6th Intl Conf on Complex Systems (ICCS), Boston, MA, 06/06/25-30
      8. Artificial Life X, 10th Intl Conf on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems, Bloomington, IN, USA. 2006/06/03-07
      9. 6th Understanding Complex Systems Symposium, Urbana-Champaign, Il, 06/05/15-18
      10. Ralph Abraham on Complexity Digest, , Calcutta, India, 05/12/27
      11. An Afternoon with Michael Crichton, Washington, 05/11/06
      12. Illuminating the Shadow of the Future, Ann Arbor, Mi 05/09/23-25
      13. Open Network of Centres of Excellence in Complex Systems - Brainstorming Meeting, Paris, France 05/09/19-23
      14. Complexity, Science & Society Conference 2005, U. Liverpool, UK 2005/09/11-14
      15. ECAL 2005 - VIIIth European Conference on Artificial Life, Canterbury, Kent, UK 2005/09/5-9
      16. T. Irene Sanders, Executive Director and Founder, The Washington Center for Complexity & Public Policy, 05/08/27, QuickTime video (10:38 min), Podcast
      17. 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
      18. Understanding Complex Systems - Computational Complexity and Bioinformatics, Virtual Conference Network, Urbana-Champaign, Il, UIUC, 05/05/16-19
      19. 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
      20. 1st European Conference on Complex Systems, Torino, Italy, 04/12/5-7
      21. From Autopoiesis to Neurophenomenology: A Tribute to Francisco Varela (1946-2001), Paris, France, 2004/06/18-20
      22. Evolutionary Epistemology, Language, and Culture, Brussels, Belgium, 04/05/26-28
      23. International Conference on Complex Systems 2004, Boston, 04/05/16-21
      24. Nonlinear Dynamics And Chaos: Lab Demonstrations, Strogatz, Steven H., Internet-First University Press, 1994
      25. CERN Webcast Service, Streamed videos of Archived Lectures and Live Events
      26. Dean LeBaron's Archive of Daily Video Commentary, Ongoing Since February 1998
      27. Edge Videos

    3. Conference Announcements Next Article Bookmark and Share

      1. Brittle Fracture and Plastic Slip: from the Atomistic to the Engineering Scale, Udine, Italy, 08/05/26-30
      2. CHAOS2008 Chaotic Modeling and Simulation International Conference, Chania, Crete, Greece, 08/06/03-06
      3. Creating Cultures of Engagement in Health Care: New Models for Addressing Conflict, Disruption and Avoidance in Health Care, Omaha, Nebraska, 08/06/03-05
      4. International Conference on Chaos, Complexity & Conflict, Omaha, NE, 08/06/05-07
      5. 4th Organization Studies Summer Workshop: "Embracing Complexity: Advancing Ecological Understanding in Organization Studies", Pissouri, Cyprus, 08/06/05-07
      6. Cambridge Healthtech Institute's Tenth Annual... Applying Systems Biology, San Francisco, CA, 08/06/09-11
      7. AUTOMATA 2008, EPSRC Workshop Cellular Automata Theory and Applications, Bristol, UK, 08/06/12-14
      8. Intl Summer School on "Modelling and Optimization in Micro- and Nano- Electronics" - MOMINE 2008, Ragusa, Sicily, Italy, 08/06/14-28
      9. NECSI Summer School, Cambridge, MA, 08/06/16-07/04,
      10. 9th Intl Mathematica Symposium, Maastricht, The Netherlands, 08/06/20-24
      11. The 14th Intl Conf on Auditory Display (ICAD), Paris, France, 08/06/24-27
      12. 8th Intl Conf of Sociocybernetics - Complex Social Systems, Interdisciplinarity And World Futures, Ciudad de Mexico, Mexico, 08/06/24-28
      13. "Is complexity the new framework for management and public policy in the 21st century?" Complexity Society Workshop, Manchester, UK, 08/06/26
      14. The 3rd Intl Symp on Knowledge Communication and Peer Reviewing: KCPR 2008, Orlando, Florida, USA, 08/06/29-07/02
      15. The 3rd Intl Symp on Knowledge Communication and Conferences: KCC 2008, Orlando, Florida, USA, 08/06/29-07/02
      16. 7th Intl Summer School and Conf "Let's Face Chaos through Nonlinear Dynamics", Maribor, Slovenia, 08/06/29-07/13
      17. The 12th World Multi-Conf on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics: WMSCI 2008, Orlando, Florida, USA, 08/06/29-07/02
      18. From Animals To Animats 10 - The 10th Intl Conf on the Simulation Of Adaptive Behavior (SAB'08), Osaka, Japan, 08/07/07-12
      19. Complex Systems and Social Simulations, CEU Summer University, Budapest, Hungary, 08/07/07-18
      20. 2008 Gordon Research Conf on Oscillations & Dynamic Instabilities in Chemical Systems, Waterville, ME, 08/07/13-18
      21. Nonlinear Fracture Mechanics Models, Udine, Italy, 08/07/14-18
      22. 1st Intl Workshop on Nonlinear Dynamics and Synchronization (INDS'08), Klagenfurt, Austria, 08/07/18-19
      23. Scratch@MIT,Cambridge, MA, 08/07/24-26
      24. 8th Intl Conf on Epigenetic Robotics: Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems, Brighton, UK, 08/07/31-08/02
      25. On the Edge: Healthcare in the Age of Complexity, Kansas City, MO, 08/08/03-05
      26. Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology & Life Sciences 18th Annl Intl Conf, Richmond, Virginia, USA, 08/08/08-10
      27. Stochastic Resonance 2008, Perugia, Italy, 08/08/17-21
      28. 4th Intl Conf on Natural Computation (ICNC'08) - 5th Intl Conf on Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery (FSKD'08), Jinan, China, 08/08/25-27
      29. Intl Conf DEscribing COmplex Systems (DECOS), Zadar, Croatia, 08/09/03-07
      30. 5th European Conference on Complex Systems, Jerusalem, Israel, 08/09/14-19
      31. EPOS 2008, III Edition of Epistemological Perspectives on Simulation, Lisbon, Portugal, 08/10/02-03
      32. International Congress on Complex Thought, Hermosillo , Sonora , Mexico, 08/10/21-24
      33. 2nd Intl Congress of Complex Systems in Sport (2nd ICCSS) and 10th European Workshop of Ecological Psychology. (10th EWEP), Funchal, in Madeira Island, Portugal, 08/11/05-08
      34. COMPLEX'2009, First Intl Conf on Complex Systems: Theory and Applications, Shanghai, China, 09/02/23-25

    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


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