Complexity Digest 2011.19

2011/09/30

Editor-in-Chief: Carlos Gershenson
Founding Editor: Gottfried Mayer

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Previous issue 2011.18 | Next issue 2011.20

Content

  1. 10 Unsolved Mysteries, Scientific American
  2. The Food Crises: A quantitative model of food prices including speculators and ethanol conversion, arXiv
  3. The Lost Decade?, New York Times
  4. Naturalizing Information, Information
  5. Niall Ferguson: The 6 killer apps of prosperity, TED.com
    1. What we learned from 5 million books, TED.com
    2. Ben Goldacre: Battling Bad Science, TED.com
  6. Lots on Info, Not Always Accurate, Science
  7. Change and Aging Senescence as an Adaptation, PLoS ONE
  8. Quantifying the role of complexity in a system’s performance, Evolving Systems
  9. Dynamics of Information as Natural Computation, Information
  10. Diurnal and Seasonal Mood Vary with Work, Sleep, and Daylength Across Diverse Cultures, Science
  11. The Reinvention of Grand Theories of the Scientific/Scholarly Process, Perspectives on Science
  12. Neutrality in evolutionary algorithms… What do we know?, Evolving Systems
  13. Tracing Personalized Health Curves during Infections, PLoS Biol
  14. The role of diversity in the evolution of cooperation, Journal of Theoretical Biology
  15. Comparing Effectiveness of Top-Down and Bottom-Up Strategies in Containing Influenza, PLoS ONE
  16. The impact of projected increases in urbanization on ecosystem services, Proc. R. Soc. B
  17. Optimality in DNA repair, Journal of Theoretical Biology
  18. Traffic flow in a Manhattan-like urban system, arXiv
  19. Book Announcements
    1. Phase Transitions (Primers in Complex Systems), Princeton University Press
    2. The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest, Crown Business
    3. Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Melville House
    4. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Knopf
    5. Unexpected Consequences: Why The Things We Trust Fail, Praeger
  20. Links & Snippets
    1. Other Publications
    2. Event Announcements
    3. Webcast Announcements
    4. Other Announcements

  1. 10 Unsolved Mysteries, Scientific American Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: 1. How Did Life Begin?
    2. How Do Molecules Form?
    3. How Does the Environment Influence Our Genes?
    4. How Does the Brain Think and Form Memories?
    5. How Many Elements Exist?
    6. Can Computers Be Made Out of Carbon?
    7. How Do We Tap More Solar Energy?
    8. What Is the Best Way to Make Biofuels?
    9. Can We Devise New Ways to Create Drugs?
    10. Can We Continuously Monitor Our Own Chemistry?

  2. The Food Crises: A quantitative model of food prices including speculators and ethanol conversion, arXiv Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: Recent increases in basic food prices are severely impacting vulnerable populations worldwide. Proposed causes such as shortages of grain due to adverse weather, increasing meat consumption in China and India, conversion of corn to ethanol in the US, and investor speculation on commodity markets lead to widely differing implications for policy. A lack of clarity about which factors are responsible reinforces policy inaction. Here, for the first time, we construct a dynamic model that quantitatively agrees with food prices. The results show that the dominant causes of price increases are investor speculation and ethanol conversion. (…)

  3. The Lost Decade?, New York Times Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: The prognosis for the next few years is bad with a chance of worse. And the economic conditions are not even the scary part. The scary part is the political class’s inability to think about the economy in a realistic way. (…) No single one of these currents prolongs the crisis. It is the product of the complex interplay between them. To put it in fancy terms, the crisis is an emergent condition " even more terrible than the sum of its parts.

  4. Naturalizing Information, Information Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Abstract: Certain definitions of information can be seen to be compatible with each other if their relationships are properly understood as referring to different levels of organization in a subsumptive hierarchy. The resulting hierarchy, with thermodynamics subsuming information theory, and that in turn subsuming semiotics, amounts to a naturalizing of the information concept.
    • Source: Naturalizing Information, Stanley N. Salthe, DOI: 10.3390/info2030417, Information 2011, 2(3), 417-425, 2011/09/04

  5. Niall Ferguson: The 6 killer apps of prosperity, TED.com Next Article Bookmark and Share

    About this talk: Over the past few centuries, Western cultures have been very good at creating general prosperity for themselves. Historian Niall Ferguson asks: Why the West, and less so the rest? He suggests half a dozen big ideas from Western culture -- call them the 6 killer apps -- that promote wealth, stability and innovation. And in this new century, he says, these apps are all shareable.

    1. What we learned from 5 million books, TED.com Next Article Bookmark and Share

      About this talk: Have you played with Google Labs' Ngram Viewer? It's an addicting tool that lets you search for words and ideas in a database of 5 million books from across centuries. Erez Lieberman Aiden and Jean-Baptiste Michel show us how it works, and a few of the surprising things we can learn from 500 billion words.

    2. Ben Goldacre: Battling Bad Science, TED.com Next Article Bookmark and Share

      About this talk: Every day there are news reports of new health advice, but how can you know if they're right? Doctor and epidemiologist Ben Goldacre shows us, at high speed, the ways evidence can be distorted, from the blindingly obvious nutrition claims to the very subtle tricks of the pharmaceutical industry.

  6. Lots on Info, Not Always Accurate, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt:
    On the problematic relationship between information, knowledge, and wisdom, a comment by Albert Einstein seems to hit the mark. “Knowledge exists in two forms"lifeless, stored in books, and alive in the consciousness of men. The second form of existence is after all the essential one; the first, indispensable as it may be, occupies only an inferior position” (1). This is not among the numerous, well-chosen quotations that pack James Gleick's The Information. But it encapsulates a major theme of his lengthy study: how humanity attempts to derive meaning"knowledge, and even wisdom"from the flood of available information.

  7. Change and Aging Senescence as an Adaptation, PLoS ONE Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: Understanding why we age is a long-lived open problem in evolutionary biology. Aging is prejudicial to the individual, and evolutionary forces should prevent it, but many species show signs of senescence as individuals age. Here, I will propose a model for aging based on assumptions that are compatible with evolutionary theory.

  8. Quantifying the role of complexity in a system’s performance, Evolving Systems Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: In this work we studied the relationship between a system’s complexity and its performances in solving a given task. Although complexity is generally assumed to play a key role in an agent’s performance, its influence has not been deeply investigated in the past. To this aim we analysed a predator"prey scenario where a prey had to develop several strategies to counter an increasingly skilled predator. The predator has several advantages over the prey, thus requiring the prey to develop more and more complex strategies. (…) Our finding is that, in accordance to what was believed in literature, complexity is indeed necessary to solve non-trivial tasks.

  9. Dynamics of Information as Natural Computation, Information Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: Processes considered rendering information dynamics have been studied, among others in: questions and answers, observations, communication, learning, belief revision, logical inference, game-theoretic interactions and computation. This article will put the computational approaches into a broader context of natural computation, where information dynamics is not only found in human communication and computational machinery but also in the entire nature. Information is understood as representing the world (reality as an informational web) for a cognizing agent, while information dynamics (information processing, computation) realizes physical laws through which all the changes of informational structures unfold.

  10. Diurnal and Seasonal Mood Vary with Work, Sleep, and Daylength Across Diverse Cultures, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Abstract: We identified individual-level diurnal and seasonal mood rhythms in cultures across the globe, using data from millions of public Twitter messages. We found that individuals awaken in a good mood that deteriorates as the day progresses"which is consistent with the effects of sleep and circadian rhythm"and that seasonal change in baseline positive affect varies with change in daylength. People are happier on weekends, but the morning peak in positive affect is delayed by 2 hours, which suggests that people awaken later on weekends.

  11. The Reinvention of Grand Theories of the Scientific/Scholarly Process, Perspectives on Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Abstract: In the mid-twentieth century, the reigning understanding of the scientific process, logical positivism, disintegrated. Subsequently, there has been fragmentation in science studies (Hess 1997; Yearley 2005; Sismondo 2008; Restivo and Croissant 2008). Many have emphasized the postmodern theme that general theories or grand narratives are impossible. Despite a profusion of diversity, some sociologists and sociologically-minded philosophers of science continue to produce general theories of the scientific/scholarly process. Through textual analysis and interviews, we studied ten such theories empirically on eleven issues, assessing their compatibility or lack thereof with each other, aiming to determine whether a new general theory is emerging.

  12. Neutrality in evolutionary algorithms… What do we know?, Evolving Systems Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Abstract: Over the last years, the effects of neutrality have attracted the attention of many researchers in the Evolutionary Algorithms (EAs) community. A mutation from one gene to another is considered as neutral if this modification does not affect the phenotype. This article provides a general overview on the work carried out on neutrality in EAs. Using as a framework the origin of neutrality and its study in different paradigms of EAs (e.g., Genetic Algorithms, Genetic Programming), we discuss the most significant works and findings on this topic. This work points towards open issues, which we belive the community needs to address.

  13. Tracing Personalized Health Curves during Infections, PLoS Biol Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Summary: By concentrating on the relationship between health and microbe number over the course of infections, most pathogenic and mutualistic infections can be summarized by a small alphabet of curves, which has implications not only for basic research but for how we might treat patients.

  14. The role of diversity in the evolution of cooperation, Journal of Theoretical Biology Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: Understanding the evolutionary mechanisms that promote and maintain cooperative behavior is recognized as a major theoretical problem where the intricacy increases with the complexity of the participating individuals. [...] Here we discuss how social diversity, in several of its flavors, catalyzes cooperative behavior.

  15. Comparing Effectiveness of Top-Down and Bottom-Up Strategies in Containing Influenza, PLoS ONE Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: This research compares the performance of bottom-up, self-motivated behavioral interventions with top-down interventions targeted at controlling an “Influenza-like-illness”.

  16. The impact of projected increases in urbanization on ecosystem services, Proc. R. Soc. B Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: Our results illustrate the challenges of meeting, but also of predicting, future demands and patterns of ecosystem services in the face of increasing urbanization.

  17. Optimality in DNA repair, Journal of Theoretical Biology Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: DNA within cells is subject to damage from various sources. Organisms have evolved a number of mechanisms to repair DNA damage. The activity of repair enzymes carries its own risk, however, because the repair of two nearby lesions may lead to the breakup of DNA and result in cell death. We propose a mathematical theory of the damage and repair process in the important scenario where lesions are caused in bursts.
    • Source: Optimality in DNA repair, Richard M, Fryett M, Miller S, Booth I, Grebogi C, Moura A, DOI: 10.1016/j.jtbi.2011.08.024, Journal of Theoretical Biology, in Press, September 2011
    • Contributed by Segismundo

  18. Traffic flow in a Manhattan-like urban system, arXiv Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Abstract: In this paper, a cellular automaton model of vehicular traffic in Manhattan-like urban system is proposed. In this model, the origin-destination trips and traffic lights have been considered. The system exhibits three different states, i.e., moving state, saturation state and global deadlock state. With a grid coarsening method, vehicle distribution in the moving state and the saturation state has been studied. Interesting structures (e.g., windmill-like one, T-shirt-like one, Y-like one) have been revealed. A metastability of the system is observed in the transition from saturation state to global deadlock state. The effect of advanced traveller information system (ATIS), the traffic light period, and the traffic light switch strategy have also been investigated.

  19. Book Announcements Next Article Bookmark and Share

    1. Phase Transitions (Primers in Complex Systems), Princeton University Press Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Summary:
      Phase transitions - changes between different states of organization in a complex system - have long helped to explain physics concepts, such as why water freezes into a solid or boils to become a gas. How might phase transitions shed light on important problems in biological and ecological complex systems? Exploring the origins and implications of sudden changes in nature and society, this book examines different dynamical behaviors in a broad range of complex systems. Using many compelling examples, from ant colonies to human language, the book illustrates the power of simple models to reveal how phase transitions occur.

    2. The Penguin and the Leviathan: How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest, Crown Business Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Summary:
      For centuries, we as a society have operated according to a very unflattering view of human nature: that humans are universally and inherently selfish creatures. As a result, our most deeply entrenched social structures - our top-down business models, our punitive legal systems, our market-based approaches to everything from education reform to environmental regulation - have been built on the premise that humans are driven only by self interest. In the last decade, however, this fallacy has begun to unravel, as hundreds of studies have found that most people will act far more cooperatively than previously believed.

    3. Debt: The First 5,000 Years, Melville House Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Summary:
      Every economics textbook says the same thing: Money was invented to replace onerous and complicated barter systems-to relieve ancient people from having to haul their goods to market. Here anthropologist David Graeber presents a stunning reversal of conventional wisdom. He shows that for more than 5,000 years, since the beginnings of the first agrarian empires, humans have used elaborate credit systems to buy and sell goods-that is, long before the invention of coins or cash. It is in this era, Graeber argues, that we also first encounter a society divided into debtors and creditors.

    4. The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires, Knopf Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Summary:
      According to Columbia professor Wu, the great information empires of the 20th century have followed a clear and distinctive pattern: after the chaos that follows a major technological innovation, a corporate power intervenes and centralizes control of the new medium--the master switch. Wu chronicles the turning points of the century' s information landscape: those decisive moments when a medium opens or closes, from the development of radio to the Internet revolution. To Wu, subjecting the information economy to the traditional methods of dealing with concentrations of industrial power is an unacceptable control of our most essential resource.

    5. Unexpected Consequences: Why The Things We Trust Fail, Praeger Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Summary:
      The world is full of wonderful products and services that occasionally disappoint and even harm us. This book explores the reasons these failures occur, examining them from technological, human, and organizational perspectives. Using more than 40 recent catastrophic events to illustrate its points, the book discusses structural and machine failure, but also the often-overlooked failure of people and of systems related to information technology, healthcare, and security. Faulty technology played a surprisingly small part in many of the scrutinized disasters, but cognitive factors and organizational dynamics, including ethics, are major contributors to most unexpected and catastrophic failures.

  20. Links & Snippets Next Article Bookmark and Share

    1. Other Publications Next Article Bookmark and Share

      1. The ubiquity of small-world networks, Qawi K. Telesford, Karen E. Joyce, Satoru Hayasaka, Jonathan H. Burdette, Paul J. Laurienti, 2011/09/26, arXiv:1109.5454

    2. Event Announcements Next Article Bookmark and Share

      1. SCIENCE FOR THE ENVIRONMENT - ENVIRONMENT FOR SOCIETY, Aarhus, Denmark, 2011/10/5-6
      2. The Third International Conference on Social Informatics (SocInfo2011), Singapore, 2011/10/6-8
      3. SSS 2011 - 13th International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems, Grenoble, France, 2011/10/10-12
      4. EPIA2011 - 15th Portuguese Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Lisbon, Portugal, 2011/10/10-13
      5. XII Latin American Workshop on Nonlinear Phenomena (LAWNP-2011), San Luis Potosi, Mexico, 2011/10/10-15
      6. Complexity in Business Conference, Washington, DC, USA, 2011/10/14
      7. 2nd International Business Complexity & the Global Leader Conference, Boston, MA, USA, 2011/10/17-19
      8. Third World Congress on Nature and Biologically Inspired Computing (NaBIC2011), Salamanca, Spain, 2011/10/19-21
      9. AMBIENT 2011: The First International Conference on Ambient Computing, Applications, Services and Technologies and SIMUL 2011: The Third International Conference on Advances in System Simulation, Barcelona, Spain, 2011/10/23-28
      10. 3rd International Joint Conference on Computational Intelligence, Paris, France, 2011/10/24-26
      11. Second Australasian Workshop on Computation in Cyber-Physical Systems (CompCPS-2011), Sydney, Australia, 2011/10/28
      12. Complex Adaptive Systems: Energy, Information, and Intelligence, AAAI Fall Symposium; Arlington, VA, 2011/11/4-6
      13. Workshop on Complex Systems as Computing Models (WCSCM2011), Mexico City, Mexico, 2011/11/9-10
      14. VI Congreso Bienal Internacional Complejidad 2012, Havana, Cuba, 2012/01/10-13
      15. 38th International Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Computer Science, Špindlerův Mlýn, Czech Republic, 2012/01/21"27
      16. The Dynamics of Disease, Workshop in Medical Systems Biology, Manchester, UK, 2011/11/28-12/02
      17. 4th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - ICAART 2012, Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal, 2012/02/6-8
      18. evostar - the main european events on evolutionary computation eurogp, evocop, evobio, evomusart and evoapplications, Málaga, Spain, 2012/03/11-13
      19. IWSOS'12 (Sixth International Workshop on Self-Organizing Systems), Delft, The Netherlands, 2012/03/15-16
      20. 5th International Nonlinear Science Conference 2012, Barcelona, Spain, 2011/03/15-17
      21. Collective Intelligence 2012, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2012/04/18-20
      22. ALife XIII: The Thirteenth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems, Lansig, Michigan, USA, 2012/08/19-22
      23. ECCS'12: European Conference on Complex Systems, Brussels, Belgium, 2012/09/3-7

    3. Webcast Announcements Next Article Bookmark and Share

      1. FuturICT videos, ongoing.
      2. IFISC@uib.es seminars, ongoing.
      3. Complex Systems: The Challenge of Prediction, Yaneer Bar-Yam, NECSI and MIT/ESD Seminar, 2011/04/08
      4. Lakeside Research Days 2010.
      5. Smarter Cities NYC. Posted on 2009/10/05
      6. ASSYST Digital Library. Since 09/09
      7. Complex Systems Teleconferences. Since 09/09
      8. Symmetry Festival 2009, Budapest, Hungary, 09/08/1-4.
      9. International Workshop on Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economic Systems, Zurich, Switzerland, 09/06/8-12
      10. Memorial Service for Dr Gottfried Mayer, Founding Editor Complexity Digest, Taipei, Taiwan (1954-2009). Video [RM], 09/02/13
      11. Making Connections: In Memory and Celebration of the Life of Dr. Gottfried Mayer (1954-2009). Video [RM] [MPG], 09/02/13
      12. Eulogy for Gottfried Mayer by Dean LeBaron [WMV, 25 Mb], [RM, 10 Mb], 09/02/10
      13. Can Ants Solve Traffic Jams?, Danielle Parsons, Slatev.com, 08/07/22
      14. Reseau Nationale des Systemes Complexes , (in French), 2007
      15. World Economic Forum , Davos, Switzerland, 08/01/22-27
      16. TED Talks, TED Conferences LLC , since 2006
      17. Talking Robots: The PodCast on Robotics and AI, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland, 06/11/03
      18. Potentials of Complexity Science for Business, Governments, and the Media 2006, Budapest, Hungary, 06/08/03-05
      19. 6th Intl Conf on Complex Systems (ICCS), Boston, MA, 06/06/25-30
      20. Artificial Life X, 10th Intl Conf on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems, Bloomington, IN, USA. 2006/06/03-07
      21. 6th Understanding Complex Systems Symposium, Urbana-Champaign, Il, 06/05/15-18
      22. Illuminating the Shadow of the Future, Ann Arbor, Mi 05/09/23-25
      23. Open Network of Centres of Excellence in Complex Systems - Brainstorming Meeting, Paris, France 05/09/19-23
      24. Complexity, Science & Society Conference 2005, U. Liverpool, UK 2005/09/11-14
      25. ECAL 2005 - VIIIth European Conference on Artificial Life, Canterbury, Kent, UK 2005/09/5-9
      26. T. Irene Sanders, Executive Director and Founder, The Washington Center for Complexity & Public Policy, 05/08/27, QuickTime video (10:38 min), Podcast
      27. 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
      28. Understanding Complex Systems - Computational Complexity and Bioinformatics, Virtual Conference Network, Urbana-Champaign, Il, UIUC, 05/05/16-19
      29. 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
      30. 1st European Conference on Complex Systems, Torino, Italy, 04/12/5-7
      31. From Autopoiesis to Neurophenomenology: A Tribute to Francisco Varela (1946-2001), Paris, France, 2004/06/18-20
      32. Evolutionary Epistemology, Language, and Culture, Brussels, Belgium, 04/05/26-28
      33. International Conference on Complex Systems 2004, Boston, 04/05/16-21
      34. Nonlinear Dynamics And Chaos: Lab Demonstrations, Strogatz, Steven H., Internet-First University Press, 1994
      35. CERN Webcast Service, Streamed videos of Archived Lectures and Live Events
      36. Dean LeBaron's Archive of Daily Video Commentary, Ongoing Since February 1998
      37. Edge Videos

    4. Other Announcements Bookmark and Share


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