Complexity Digest 2011.21

2011/10/28

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

Subscribe to our new YouTube channel http://www.youtube.com/user/cxdig

For individual e-mail subscriptions go to Subscriptions.
Previous issue 2011.20 | Next issue 2011.22

Content

  1. Time-Critical Social Mobilization, Science
  2. ‘Complexity’ Predicts Nations’ Future Growth, Wall Street Journal
    1. Revealed - the capitalist network that runs the world, New Scientist
  3. Stuart Kauffman - The End Of A Physics Worldview: Heraclitus and the Watershed of Life, NECSI
  4. Nature-inspired collective intelligence in theory and practice, Information Sciences
  5. Justin Hall-Tipping: Freeing energy from the grid, TED.com
    1. Bunker Roy: Learning from a barefoot movement, TED.com
  6. Bombings, beheadings? Stats show a peaceful world, Physorg.com
  7. Cognitive robotics: Introduction to the special issue, New Ideas in Psychology
  8. Evolution of Networks for Body Plan Patterning; Interplay of Modularity, Robustness and Evolvability, PLoS Comput Biol
  9. Beyond the Mean Field in Host-Pathogen Spatial Ecology, arXiv
    1. Structural heterogeneity mediates the effect of community structure on cooperation, Complexity
  10. How Proteins Fold, Science
  11. All Scale-Free Networks Are Sparse, Phys. Rev. Lett.
  12. The effect of public health interventions on the spread of influenza among cities, Journal of Theoretical Biology
    1. Using network properties to predict disease dynamics on human contact networks, Proc. R. Soc. B
  13. Assessing Vaccination Sentiments with Online Social Media: Implications for Infectious Disease Dynamics and Control, PLoS Comput Biol
  14. The complexification of engineering, Complexity
  15. Self-similar scaling of density in complex real-world networks, arXiv
  16. Would you follow your own route description? Cognitive strategies in urban route planning, Cognition
  17. Social dynamics with peer support on heterogeneous networks, Eur. Phys. J. B
    1. Communication activity in social networks: growth and correlations, Eur. Phys. J. B
  18. Book Announcements
    1. The Structure of Complex Networks: Theory and Applications, Oxford University Press
    2. The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, Basic Books
    3. Thinking, Fast and Slow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux
    4. The Universe as Automaton: From Simplicity and Symmetry to Complexity, Springer
    5. The Business of Projects: Managing Innovation in Complex Products and Systems, Cambridge University Press
  19. Links & Snippets
    1. Other Publications
    2. Event Announcements
    3. Video Announcements
    4. Other Announcements

  1. Time-Critical Social Mobilization, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Abstract: The World Wide Web is commonly seen as a platform that can harness the collective abilities of large numbers of people to accomplish tasks with unprecedented speed, accuracy, and scale. To explore the Web’s ability for social mobilization, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) held the DARPA Network Challenge, in which competing teams were asked to locate 10 red weather balloons placed at locations around the continental United States. Using a recursive incentive mechanism that both spread information about the task and incentivized individuals to act, our team was able to find all 10 balloons in less than 9 hours, thus winning the Challenge. We analyzed the theoretical and practical properties of this mechanism and compared it with other approaches.
    • Source: Time-Critical Social Mobilization, Galen Pickard, Wei Pan, Iyad Rahwan, Manuel Cebrian, Riley Crane, Anmol Madan, Alex Pentland, DOI: 10.1126/science.1205869, Science Vol. 334 no. 6055 pp. 509-512, 2011/10/28

  2. ‘Complexity’ Predicts Nations’ Future Growth, Wall Street Journal Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: Economists at Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology have just released what they claim to be the crystal ball of economics: a model for predicting a nation’s future growth more accurately than any other techniques out there.
    “The Atlas of Economic Complexity” ranks 128 nations based on their “productive knowledge” " the skills, experience and general know-how that a given population acquires in producing certain goods. Countries with a high score in the report’s “economic complexity index” have acquired years of knowledge in making a variety of products and goods and also have lots of room for growth. Essentially, the more collective knowledge a country has in producing goods, the richer it is " or will be.
    See Also: The Atlas of Economic Complexity

    1. Revealed - the capitalist network that runs the world, New Scientist Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpt: AS PROTESTS against financial power sweep the world this week, science may have confirmed the protesters' worst fears. An analysis of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group of companies, mainly banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.
      The study's assumptions have attracted some criticism, but complex systems analysts contacted by New Scientist say it is a unique effort to untangle control in the global economy. Pushing the analysis further, they say, could help to identify ways of making global capitalism more stable.

  3. Stuart Kauffman - The End Of A Physics Worldview: Heraclitus and the Watershed of Life, NECSI Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: At the dawn of Western philosophy and science, some 2,700 years ago, Heraclitus, declared that, "the world bubbles forth." There is, in this fragment of thought, a natural magic, a creativity beyond the entailing laws of modern physics. I believe Heraclitus was right about the evolution of the biosphere and human life. We live beyond entailing law in a natural magic we co-create.

  4. Nature-inspired collective intelligence in theory and practice, Information Sciences Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: When the first nature-inspired computational methods have appeared a few decades ago, they were welcomed by the scientific community with a mix of curiosity and scepticism. Over the years, however, these methods have shown their value not only for computer science, but also for several areas of engineering, as we witness more and more successful applications. As a consequence, a wide spectrum of applications and services has currently been developed and designed relying on various natural biological paradigms. The most known examples are swarm intelligence, evolutionary algorithms, and the artificial neural networks. These paradigms find their applications in the areas of network security, pervasive computing, mobile and embedded systems, pattern recognition, data classification and many others. (…)

  5. Justin Hall-Tipping: Freeing energy from the grid, TED.com Next Article Bookmark and Share

    About this talk: What would happen if we could generate power from our windowpanes? In this moving talk, entrepreneur Justin Hall-Tipping shows the materials that could make that possible, and how questioning our notion of 'normal' can lead to extraordinary breakthroughs.

    1. Bunker Roy: Learning from a barefoot movement, TED.com Next Article Bookmark and Share

      About this talk: In Rajasthan, India, an extraordinary school teaches rural women and men -- many of them illiterate -- to become solar engineers, artisans, dentists and doctors in their own villages. It's called the Barefoot College, and its founder, Bunker Roy, explains how it works.

  6. Bombings, beheadings? Stats show a peaceful world, Physorg.com Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: Yes, thousands of people have died in bloody unrest from Africa to Pakistan, while terrorists plot bombings and kidnappings. Wars drag on in Iraq and Afghanistan. In peaceful Norway, a man massacred 69 youths in July. In Mexico, headless bodies turn up, victims of drug cartels. This month eight people died in a shooting in a California hair salon.
    Yet, historically, we've never had it this peaceful.
    That's the thesis of three new books, including one by prominent Harvard psychologist Steven Pinker. Statistics reveal dramatic reductions in war deaths, family violence, racism, rape, murder and all sorts of mayhem.

  7. Cognitive robotics: Introduction to the special issue, New Ideas in Psychology Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: Much research in the cognitive sciences, including psychology, in the last two decades has shifted from the traditional cognitivist view of cognition as the internal, computational manipulation of representations of the outside world to a much more interactive view of cognition as embodied, situated and/or distributed activity, emergent from the interaction of brain, body and environment (material and social).
    Naturally, this development has also led to changes in how cognition is modeled. While the traditional artificial intelligence approach was first and foremost concerned with computer programs, recent research is increasingly focused on real and simulated robotic systems whose cognitive processes need to be grounded in sensorimotor interaction with the environment they are situated in. The papers included in this special issue on cognitive robotics reflect different approaches to and different aspects of this type of research, and discuss its relevance to theoretical psychology and cognitive science in general.
    • Source: Cognitive robotics: Introduction to the special issue, Tom Ziemke, Mark Bickhard, DOI: 10.1016/j.newideapsych.2011.02.002, New Ideas in Psychology Volume 29, Issue 3, Pages 201-202 Special Issue: Cognitive Robotics and Reevaluation of Piaget Concept of Egocentrism, 2011/12

  8. Evolution of Networks for Body Plan Patterning; Interplay of Modularity, Robustness and Evolvability, PLoS Comput Biol Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: An important question in evolutionary developmental biology is how the complex organisms we see around us have evolved, and how this complexity is encoded in their DNA. An often heard statement is that the gene regulatory networks underlying developmental processes are modular; that is, different functions are carried out by largely independent network parts. It is argued that this network modularity allows both for robust functioning and evolutionary tinkering, and that selection thus produces modular networks. Here we use a simulation model for the evolution of animal body plan patterning to investigate these ideas. (…)

  9. Beyond the Mean Field in Host-Pathogen Spatial Ecology, arXiv Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: Spatial extent---the possibility that what happens at point A cannot immediately affect what happens at point B---is a complicating factor in mathematical biology, as it creates the opportunity for spatial non-uniformity. This non-uniformity must change our understanding of evolutionary dynamics, as the same organism in different places can have different expected evolutionary outcomes. Since organism origins and fates are both determined locally, we must consider heterogeneity explicitly to determine its effects. We use simulations of spatially extended host-pathogen and predator-prey ecosystems to reveal the limitations of standard mathematical treatments of spatial heterogeneity. (…) In spatial contexts, invasive pathogen varieties can prosper initially but perish in the medium term, implying that the concepts of reproductive fitness and the Evolutionary Stable Strategy have to be modified for such systems.

    1. Structural heterogeneity mediates the effect of community structure on cooperation, Complexity Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Abstract: Emergence of cooperation in evolutionary prisoner's dilemma game strongly depends on the topology of underlying interaction network. We explore this dependence using community networks with different levels of structural heterogeneity, which are generated by a tunable upper-bound on the total number of links that any vertex can have. We study the effect of community structure on cooperation by analyzing a finite population analogue of the evolutionary replicator dynamics. We find that structural heterogeneity mediates the effect of community structure on cooperation. In the community networks with low level of structural heterogeneity, community structure has negative effect on cooperation. However, the positive effect of community structure on cooperation appears and enhances with increasing structural heterogeneity. Our work may be helpful for understanding the complexity of cooperative behaviors in social networks.

  10. How Proteins Fold, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Summary: Two reports in this issue probe single protein chains as they spontaneously unfold and refold. On page 517 of this issue, Lindorff-Larsen et al. (1) use state-of-the-art molecular dynamics (MD) simulations to elucidate the folding mechanisms of 12 different proteins. On page 512 of this issue, Stigler et al. (2) study the folding and unfolding of single calmodulin domains with single-molecule force spectroscopy. The results provide remarkable views of the folding process and address basic questions, such as whether proteins fold along pathways.
    • Source: How Proteins Fold, Tobin R. Sosnick, James R. Hinshaw, DOI: 10.1126/science.1214018, Science Vol. 334 no. 6055 pp. 464-465, 2011/10/28

  11. All Scale-Free Networks Are Sparse, Phys. Rev. Lett. Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Abstract: We study the realizability of scale-free networks with a given degree sequence, showing that the fraction of realizable sequences undergoes two first-order transitions at the values 0 and 2 of the power-law exponent. We substantiate this finding by analytical reasoning and by a numerical method, proposed here, based on extreme value arguments, which can be applied to any given degree distribution. Our results reveal a fundamental reason why large scale-free networks without constraints on minimum and maximum degree must be sparse.
    • Source: All Scale-Free Networks Are Sparse, Charo I. Del Genio, Thilo Gross, and Kevin E. Bassler, DOI: 10.1103/PhysRevLett.107.178701, Phys. Rev. Lett. 107, 178701, 2011/10/17

  12. The effect of public health interventions on the spread of influenza among cities, Journal of Theoretical Biology Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: We investigate the effectiveness of travel restrictions as a control against the spread of influenza [...] and two other control strategies: increasing the number of clinically ill individuals that are treated, and reducing the interval between infection and treatment of such individuals.

    1. Using network properties to predict disease dynamics on human contact networks, Proc. R. Soc. B Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpt: We show that although degree distribution is sufficient to predict disease behaviour on very sparse or very dense human contact networks, for intermediate density networks we must include information on clustering and path length to accurately predict disease behaviour. Using these three metrics, we were able to explain more than 98 per cent of the variation in endemic disease levels in our stochastic simulations.

  13. Assessing Vaccination Sentiments with Online Social Media: Implications for Infectious Disease Dynamics and Control, PLoS Comput Biol Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Summary: Sentiments about vaccination can strongly affect individual vaccination decisions. Measuring such sentiments - and how they are distributed in a population - is typically a difficult and resource-intensive endeavor. We use publicly available data from Twitter, a popular online social media service, to measure the evolution and distribution of sentiments towards the novel influenza A(H1N1) vaccine during the second half of 2009, i.e. the fall wave of the H1N1 (swine flu) pandemic. We find that projected vaccination rates based on sentiments expressed on Twitter are in very good agreement with vaccination rates estimated by the CDC with traditional phone surveys. Looking at the online social network, we find that both negative and positive opinions are clustered, and that an equivalent level of clustering of vaccinations in a population would strongly increase disease outbreak risks.

  14. The complexification of engineering, Complexity Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Abstract: This paper deals with the arrow of complexification of engineering. We claim that the complexification of engineering consists in (a) that shift throughout which engineering becomes a science; thus it ceases to be a (mere) praxis or profession; (b) becoming a science, engineering can be considered as one of the sciences of complexity. In reality, the complexification of engineering is the process by which engineering can be studied, achieved, and understood in terms of knowledge, and not of goods and services any longer. Complex engineered systems and bio-inspired engineering are so far the two expressions of a complex engineering.

  15. Self-similar scaling of density in complex real-world networks, arXiv Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: Despite their diverse origin, networks of large real-world systems reveal a number of common properties including small-world phenomena, scale-free degree distributions and modularity. Recently, network self-similarity as a natural outcome of the evolution of real-world systems has also attracted much attention within the physics literature. Here we investigate the scaling of density in complex networks under two classical box-covering renormalizations-network coarse-graining-and also different community-based renormalizations. The analysis on over 50 real-world networks reveals a power-law scaling of network density and size under adequate renormalization technique, yet irrespective of network type and origin.

  16. Would you follow your own route description? Cognitive strategies in urban route planning, Cognition Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Highlights: - We address route choice and planning strategies in familiar urban Environments. - Verbal and behavioral data reflect differences between planning Situations. - En-route planning is direction-based; in-advance planning based on salient streets. - Strategy choice is highly adaptive, influenced by perceptual information available. - Route directions and planned routes are furthermore affected by communicability.

  17. Social dynamics with peer support on heterogeneous networks, Eur. Phys. J. B Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Abstract: Human behavior often exhibits a scheme in which individuals adopt indifferent, neutral, or radical positions on a given topic. The mechanisms leading to community formation are strongly related with social pressure and the topology of the contact network. Here, we discuss an approach to model social behavior which accounts for the protection by alike peers proportional to their relative abundance in the closest neighborhood. We explore the ensuing non-linear dynamics emphasizing the role of the specific structure of the social network, modeled by scale-free graphs. We find that both coexistence of opinions and consensus on the default position are possible stationary states of the model. In particular, we show how these states critically depend on the heterogeneity of the social network and the specific distribution of external control elements.

    1. Communication activity in social networks: growth and correlations, Eur. Phys. J. B Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpt: We investigate the timing of messages sent in two online communities with respect to growth fluctuations and long-term correlations. We find that the timing of sending and receiving messages comprises pronounced long-term persistence. Considering the activity of the community members as growing entities, i.e. the cumulative number of messages sent (or received) by the individuals, we identify non-trivial scaling in the growth fluctuations which we relate to the long-term correlations. We find a connection between the scaling exponents of the growth and the long-term correlations which is supported by numerical simulations based on peaks over threshold. In addition, we find that the activity on directed links between pairs of members exhibits long-term correlations, indicating that communication activity with the most liked partners may be responsible for the long-term persistence in the timing of messages. (…)

  18. Book Announcements Next Article Bookmark and Share

    1. The Structure of Complex Networks: Theory and Applications, Oxford University Press Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Summary:
      This book deals with the analysis of the structure of complex networks by combining results from graph theory, physics, and pattern recognition. The book is divided into two parts. 11 chapters are dedicated to the development of theoretical tools for the structural analysis of networks, and 7 chapters are illustrating, in a critical way, applications of these tools to real-world scenarios. The first chapters provide detailed coverage of adjacency and metric and topological properties of networks, while the second part of this book is devoted to the analysis of genetic, protein residue, protein-protein interaction, intercellular, ecological and socio-economic networks.

    2. The Folly of Fools: The Logic of Deceit and Self-Deception in Human Life, Basic Books Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Summary:
      Whether it's the planning of an offensive war, a romantic relationship or an office dispute, there are many opportunities to lie and self-deceive, but deceit and self-deception carry the costs of being alienated from reality and can lead to disaster. So why does deception play such a prominent role in our everyday lives? In short, why do we deceive? In his bold new work, prominent biological theorist Robert Trivers unflinchingly argues that self-deception evolved in the service of deceit, the better to fool others. We do it for biological reasons, in order to help us survive and procreate. (...)

    3. Thinking, Fast and Slow, Farrar, Straus and Giroux Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Summary:
      Daniel Kahneman, recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences for his seminal work in psychology that challenged the rational model of judgment and decision making, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. Kahneman exposes the extraordinary capabilities-and also the faults and biases-of fast thinking, and reveals the pervasive influence of intuitive impressions on our thoughts and behavior. (...)
      • Source: Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011/10/25
      • Contributed by Anton Joha - antonjohaagmail.com

    4. The Universe as Automaton: From Simplicity and Symmetry to Complexity, Springer Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Summary:
      This booklet is an essay at the interface of philosophy and complexity research, trying to inspire the reader with new ideas and new conceptual developments of cellular automata. Going beyond the numerical experiments of Wolfram, it is argued that cellular automata must be considered complex dynamical systems in their own right, requiring appropriate analytical models in order to find precise answers and predictions in the universe of cellular automata. Indeed, eventually we have to ask whether cellular automata can be considered models of the real world and, conversely, whether there are limits to our modern approach of attributing the world.

    5. The Business of Projects: Managing Innovation in Complex Products and Systems, Cambridge University Press Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Summary:
      Cutting-edge reading for academics, students and professionals interested in project management. Business activities today are often project-based and it is vital to know how to manage complex products and systems (CoPS). Firms managing projects can coordinate with customers and suppliers, while their own organization becomes less bureaucratic, more fluid and adaptable. Uniquely the book shows how projects enable strategy, innovation, capability building and organisational renewal in leading businesses. Resource-based theory is extended to look at high-value capital goods projects with examples from telecommunications, medical, and engineering contexts.

  19. Links & Snippets Next Article Bookmark and Share

    1. Other Publications Next Article Bookmark and Share

      1. Chemical Basis of Metabolic Network Organization, Zhu Q, Qin T, Jiang Y-Y, Ji C, Kong D-X, et al., 2011/10/13, PLoS Comput Biol 7(10): e1002214, DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1002214
      2. Dynamical graphs for the SI epidemiological model, Jose L. Herrera and Gilberto Gonzalez-Parra, 2011/10/18, arXiv:1110.4070
      3. Emergence and self-organization in partially ordered sets, Sergio Pissanetzky, 2011/10/22, Complexity Early View, DOI: 10.1002/cplx.20389
      4. Time-Scale and Noise Optimality in Self-Organized Critical Adaptive Networks, Christian Kuehn, 2011/10/25, arXiv:1110.5433

    2. Event Announcements Next Article Bookmark and Share

      1. Complex Adaptive Systems: Energy, Information, and Intelligence, AAAI Fall Symposium; Arlington, VA, 2011/11/4-6
      2. Workshop on Complex Systems as Computing Models (WCSCM2011), Mexico City, Mexico, 2011/11/9-10
      3. The Dynamics of Disease, Workshop in Medical Systems Biology, Manchester, UK, 2011/11/28-12/02
      4. Network Frontier Workshop 2011, Evanston, IL, USA, 2011/12/01-02
      5. New England Complex Systems Institute Winter School, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2012/01/02-13
      6. 41th Winter Meeting on Statistical Physics, Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico, 2012/01/3-6
      7. VI Congreso Bienal Internacional Complejidad 2012, Havana, Cuba, 2012/01/10-13
      8. 38th International Conference on Current Trends in Theory and Practice of Computer Science, Špindlerův Mlýn, Czech Republic, 2012/01/21-27
      9. 4th International Conference on Agents and Artificial Intelligence - ICAART 2012, Vilamoura, Algarve, Portugal, 2012/02/6-8
      10. evostar - the main european events on evolutionary computation eurogp, evocop, evobio, evomusart and evoapplications, Málaga, Spain, 2012/03/11-13
      11. IWSOS'12 (Sixth International Workshop on Self-Organizing Systems), Delft, The Netherlands, 2012/03/15-16
      12. 5th International Nonlinear Science Conference 2012, Barcelona, Spain, 2011/03/15-17
      13. IPCAT 2012: Ninth International Conference on Information Processing in Cells and Tissues, Cambridge, United Kingdom, 2012/03/31-04/02
      14. Collective Intelligence 2012, Cambridge, MA, USA, 2012/04/18-20
      15. 2012 IEEE World Congress on Computational Intelligence, Brisbane, Australia, 2012/06/10-15
      16. GECCO 2012, Philadelphia, USA, 2012/07/7-11
      17. ALife XIII: The Thirteenth International Conference on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems, Lansig, Michigan, USA, 2012/08/19-22
      18. 12th International Conference on Parallel Problem Solving From Nature (PPSN2012), Taormina, Italy, 2012/09/1-5
      19. ECCS'12: European Conference on Complex Systems, Brussels, Belgium, 2012/09/3-7

    3. Video Announcements Next Article Bookmark and Share

      1. Complexity Digest videos.
      2. Lakeside Labs videos.
      3. FuturICT videos.
      4. IFISC@uib.es seminars.
      5. ASSYST Digital Library.
      6. TED Talks.
      7. Edge Videos
      8. CERN Webcast Service.
      9. Dean LeBaron's Video Casts.

    4. Other Announcements Bookmark and Share


Also available in: Simple HTML format | TXT format | TXT format with links | Print