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Abstract: We use theory and methods from complexity science to examine dynamic patterns among activities undertaken by nascent entrepreneurs in the Panel Study of Entrepreneurial Dynamics. We develop hypotheses predicting that certain dynamic patterns in start-up activities will lead to the emergence of new firms when: (1) the rate of start-up activities is high, (2) start-up activities are spread out over time, and (3) start-up activities are concentrated later rather than earlier over time. All three hypotheses are confirmed. The paper concludes with some suggestions for the role of complexity science for furthering insights into the process of organization creation.
- Source: Complexity Dynamics of Nascent Entrepreneurship, Benyamin B. Lichtenstein, Nancy M. Carter, Kevin J. Dooley, William B. Gartner, DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusvent.2006.06.001, Journal of Business Venturing, Article in Press, Corrected Proof, 2006/09/11
Symmetry and Self-Organization in Complex Systems, arXiv 
Abstract: We show that, in contrast to classical random graph models, many real-world complex systems -- including a variety of biological regulatory networks and technological networks such as the internet -- spontaneously self-organize to a richly symmetric state. We consider the organizational origins of symmetry and find that growth with preferential attachment confers symmetry in highly branched networks. We deconstruct the automorphism group of some real-world networks and find that some, but not all, real-world symmetry can be accounted for by branching. We also uncover an intriguing correspondence between the size of the automorphism group of growing random trees and the random Fibonacci sequences.
The Complex Links Between Governance And Biodiversity, Conserv. Biol.
Abstract: We argue that two problems weaken the claims of those who link corruption and the exploitation of natural resources. The first is conceptual and the second is methodological. (...) Simple, atheoretical models linking corruption measures and natural resource use typically do not account for other important control variables pivotal to the relationship between humans and natural resources. By way of illustration of these two general concerns, we used statistical methods to demonstrate that the findings of a recent, well-known study that posits a link between corruption and decreases in forests and elephants are not robust to simple conceptual and methodological refinements. (...)
- Source: The Complex Links Between Governance And Biodiversity, C. B. Barrett - cbb2
cornell.edu, C. C. Gibson, B. Hoffman, M. D. Mccubbins, DOI: 10.1111/j.1523-1739.2006.00521.x, Conservation Biology, Oct. 2006, online 2006/07/24 - Contributed by Pritha Das - prithadas01yahoo.com
Is The U.S. Losing Its Competitive Edge?, Business Week online
Excerpts: In the World Economic Forum's global competitiveness ranking, the U.S. drops from first place to sixth thanks to its deficits and health care Americans aren't No. 1 anymore, and their government is largely to blame. That seems to be the bottom line of a new survey of global competitiveness in which the U.S. slipped from first to sixth place, behind Switzerland, Finland, Sweden, Denmark, and Singapore.
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Excerpts: Four intertwined and equally important strands comprise the committee's definition of proficiency in science. First, students should know, use, and interpret scientific explanations of the natural world. Second, they should be able to generate and evaluate scientific evidence and explanations. Third, they should understand the nature and development of scientific knowledge. And finally, students' work should include active participation in scientific collaboration and discussion. All K-8 education should offer students opportunities to engage in the four strands of science proficiency.
Taking Science To School: Learning And Teaching Science In Grades K-8, Committee on Science Learning
Excerpts: What is ¡§science¡¨ for a child? How do children learn about science and how to do science? Drawing on a vast array of work from neuroscience to classroom observation, Taking Science to School provides a comprehensive picture of what we know about teaching and learning science from kindergarten through eighth grade. By looking at a broad range of questions, this book provides a basic foundation for guiding science teaching and supporting students in their learning.
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Excerpts: Children are capable of understanding more science than many educators give them credit for. But those same teachers may not know enough to help their students learn what they need to know to compete in a global economy. That message comes from a new assessment of U.S. science education in elementary and middle schools from the National Academies' National Research Council (NRC).
Copper Circuits Help Brain Function; Could Tweaking The Circuits Make Us Smarter?, PhysOrg.com
Excerpts: The flow of copper in the brain has a previously unrecognized role in cell death, learning and memory, according to research at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis. The researchers' findings suggest that copper and its transporter, a protein called Atp7a, are vital to human thinking. They speculate that variations in the genes coding for Atp7a, as well as other proteins of copper homeostasis, could partially account for differences in thinking among individuals. (...) We've found that copper modulates very critical events within the central nervous system that influence how well we think." (...)
Induction Of An Illusory Shadow Person, Nature
Excerpts: Stimulation of a site on the brain's left hemisphere prompts the creepy feeling that somebody is close by. The strange sensation that somebody is nearby when no one is actually present has been described by psychiatric and neurological patients, as well as by healthy subjects, but it is not understood how the illusion is triggered by the brain. Here we describe the repeated induction of this sensation in a patient who was undergoing presurgical evaluation for epilepsy treatment, as a result of focal electrical stimulation of the left temporoparietal junction: the illusory person closely 'shadowed' changes in the patient's body position and posture.
Brain Stimulation Creates Shadow Person, PhysOrg.com
Excerpts: Swiss scientists say they've found electrical stimulation of the brain can create the sensation of a "shadow person" mimicking one's bodily movements. (...) might help shed light on brain processes that contribute to the symptoms of schizophrenia, which can include the sensation that one's own actions are being performed by someone else.
Doctors evaluating a woman with no history of psychiatric problems found stimulation of an area of her brain called the left temporoparietal junction caused her to believe a person was standing behind her.
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Excerpts: (...) finds strong mental link between actions and words. Neuroscience is tackling a problem that obsessed Hamlet: What is the difference in our minds between talk and action? Less than you would expect, an international research group reports (...). The brain's premotor cortex shows the same activity pattern when subjects observe an action as when they hear words describing the same action, the study's authors said. "If you hear the word 'grasp,' it's actually the premotor cortex that's active, not just a separate, abstract semantic area in the brain," said (...).
Emotional Control Circuit Of Brain's Fear Response Discovered, ScienceDaily
Excerpts: (...) researchers have identified an emotional control circuit in the human brain which keeps emotionally intense stimuli from interfering with mental functioning. These results significantly enhance our understanding of the neurobiology underlying psychiatric disorders involving emotional control, such as post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) or depression. The research employed a novel test in which subjects were forced to detect and resolve attentional conflict created by emotionally powerful stimuli. Brain activity was monitored using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) that can detect moment-to-moment changes in neural activity. fMRI is a version of the widely-used clinical MRI scanning technique. (...)
Central Nervous System Control Of Food Intake And Body Weight, Nature
Excerpts: The capacity to adjust food intake in response to changing energy requirements is essential for survival. Recent progress has provided an insight into the molecular, cellular and behavioural mechanisms that link changes of body fat stores to adaptive adjustments of feeding behaviour. The physiological importance of this homeostatic control system is highlighted by the severe obesity that results from dysfunction of any of several of its key components. This new information provides a biological context within which to consider the global obesity epidemic and identifies numerous potential avenues for therapeutic intervention and future research.
Medicine: Sleep It Off, Nature
Excerpts: We've been told to eat less and move more to battle the growing obesity epidemic. But could getting more shuteye also be a way to fight the fat? Helen Pearson investigates. (...) But in Western society both are veering out of control: we starve ourselves of sleep and gorge ourselves on food. Now many biologists are asking whether our cavalier attitude to sleep could be at least partly responsible for our expanding bodies.
The idea is not as far fetched as it sounds, because there are plausible (if sketchy) biological mechanisms that could explain it.
Special Mechanisms For Symmetry Preferences In Human Face Perception, Proc. Biol. Sc.
Excerpts: Symmetrical human faces are attractive and it has been proposed that humans have a specialized mechanism for detecting symmetry in faces and that sensitivity to symmetry determines symmetry preferences. Here, we show that symmetry preferences are influenced by inversion, whereas symmetry detection is not and that within individuals the ability to detect facial symmetry is not related to preferences for facial symmetry. Taken together, these findings suggest that symmetry preferences are indeed driven by a mechanism that is independent of conscious detection. (...) Unconscious mechanisms determining face preferences may explain why the reasons behind attraction are often difficult to articulate (...).
Evolution's Child: Fossil Puts Youthful Twist On Lucy's Kind, Science News
Excerpts: As fossil hunters crossed a dusty slope of Ethiopia's Dikika region on Dec. 10, 2000, one noticed a child's face bones poking out of the ground. Now, after years of painstaking work to remove the ancient individual's skull and some of the other bones from sandstone, researchers have announced that this discovery represents the oldest and most complete fossil child in our evolutionary family.
Palaeoanthropology: A Precious Little Bundle, Nature
Excerpts: The three-million-year old skeleton of a three-year-old child provides an outstanding resource to understand the development of a human ancestor that seems to have both walked upright and climbed through trees. The fragile bones of infants rarely survive long enough to make it into the hominin fossil record. But if they do, they provide precious evidence about the growth and development of the individual and its species.
Grow Your Own Limbs, Wired News
Excerpts: "We have to show we can do that in a mammal by 24 months -- and by 48 months we have to show that we can actually regrow digits," said Stephen Badylak, director of the Center for Pre-Clinical Tissue Engineering at the University of Pittsburgh's McGowan Institute for Regenerative Medicine, and a principal investigator for his team. "This is really a Star Wars-type project." Mammals can't naturally regenerate limbs or digits beyond the fetal stage. Amphibians like salamanders and newts, however, can regrow limbs, eyes and even spinal cords. So the scientists are on a hunt for the molecular signals responsible for controlling that regenerative ability.
Stem Cells: A New Route To Rejuvenation, Nature
Excerpts: Embryonic stem cells are prized for their ability to mature into all the specialized adult cell types. It may now be possible to reprogramme adult body cells to have the characteristics of stem cells. It is relatively easy to grow an entire plant from a small cutting, but it seems inconceivable that the diverse tissues such as nerve and muscle in mammals like ourselves could be regenerated directly from a single adult tissue.
Why Does The Songbird Sing?, Science Now
Excerpts:  Something to sing about. By scrutinizing the zebra finch genome, researchers hope to dissect the biological mechanisms of vocal learning. Credit: NICOLLE RAGER FULLER |
Almost all animals that communicate vocally do it by instinct. The zebra finch is one exception: Young males learn their love songs from their fathers. Now a research team reports the identification of 33 genes related to singing in this songbird. Experts say the work harbingers a new era of using powerful genomic tools to probe the biology of vocal learning--and perhaps reveal the secret of why so few animals do it.Many researchers see parallels between the way birds learn songs and humans learn language.
Massive Stars May Slim Down In Eruptive Bursts, Science News
Excerpts: All massive stars lead short lives. (...) they lose much of that mass via a steady, outgoing wind. Eventually, they die a fiery death in an explosion called a supernova. (...)Until the explosion, the stars burn hydrogen at their cores, transforming it into helium. (...)
Instead of the weight-loss-by-wind theory, researchers now propose that most extremely massive stars slim down by undergoing extraordinarily violent eruptions (...).
Determining when in its life a massive star spews material is crucial for understanding the chemical composition of the universe.
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Excerpts: George, who is 39, single and light-hearted, is looking for friends on the Internet.
He has gifts: the ability to speak in 40 languages and with 2000 people at the same time.
There's just one quirk: he doesn't really exist.
George is a piece of software, arguably the best of the speaking "chatbots" or talking robots, and he's recently received the Loebner prize in Britain, a scientific award recognising the machines best capable of matching the most realistic human dialogues with their own.
Virtual Bees Help Robots See In 3d, New Scientist
Excerpts:  Areas of interest are picked out by the virtual honeybees (Image: Gustavo Olague) |
Robot explorers could identify points of interest by mimicking the way bees alert others of promising foraging spots. (...) The honey bee software starts by randomly assigning explorer bees to different parts of an image. After identifying features of potential interest, these explorers recruit other virtual bees, known as "harvesters", to investigate in more detail. The explorers recruit harvesters in proportion to their interest in an area, meaning the most promising areas get the most attention.
Mathematical Physics: Search Research, Nature
Excerpts: How does one best search for non-replenishable targets at unknown positions? An optimized search strategy could be applied to situations as diverse as animal foraging and time-sensitive rescue missions. Operations research ¡X the field that uses mathematical methods to optimize complex real-world structures and processes ¡X grew out of the analysis of military problems during the Second World War. One such question was the optimization problem 'How to hunt a submarine'1, the analysis of which had to take several factors into account.
The Big Gamble On Electronic Voting, NY Times
Excerpts: HANGING chads made it difficult to read voter intentions in 2000. Hotel minibar keys may do the same for the elections in November. The mechanics of voting have undergone a major change since the imbroglio that engulfed presidential balloting in 2000. Embarrassed by an election that had to be settled by the Supreme Court, Congress passed the Help America Vote Act of 2002, which provided funds to improve voting equipment.
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Excerpts: Can liberal interventionism build liberal democracy? This manuscript examines the military interventions undertaken by the U.S., U.K., France, and the UN in the post-World War II era to see if they had a positive impact on democracy in target countries. Empirical analysis centers on multivariate time series (...) from 1946 to 1996. (...) We find little evidence that military intervention by liberal states helps to foster democracy in target countries. Although a few states have democratized in the wake of hostile U.S. military interventions, the small number of cases involved makes it difficult to draw generalizable conclusions from the U.S. record. (...)
- Source: Forging Democracy At Gunpoint, J. Pickering, M. Peceny, DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-2478.2006.00413.x, International Studies Quarterly, Sep. 2006, online 2006/09/11
- Contributed by Atin Das - dasatinyahoo.co.in
Complex Challenges: Global Terrorist Networks
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Excerpts: It [single-cause explanations of terrorism, Ed.] gets us nowhere, because complex social events are never caused by one thing. Any particular event -- whether a war, economic recession, treaty negotiation, or instance of terrorism -- is always the product of the combined influence of an incalculable number of factors. (...) So sometimes poverty might be an important cause of terrorism, and sometimes not, depending on what else is going on.
(...) participants in terrorism tend to be men in their twenties or thirties who are ferociously angry because of powerful feelings of humiliation.
Mozart Sacrificed To Muslims, The Australian
Excerpts: The bloodstained King of Crete stumbles onstage and holds aloft the decapitated heads of Poseidon, Jesus, Buddha and the prophet Mohammed. "The Gods are dead!" he calls out (...).
"What kind of message is this sending to the Arabs on the street? Frankly, it is a racist decision because it is tantamount to saying that all Arabs cannot wait to blow themselves up in Europe." (...)
Some dramatists believe the cancellation of the opera will become part of a pattern, with theatres across Europe quietly tidying up their repertoires.
Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat, NY Times
Excerpts: A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks. The classified National Intelligence Estimate attributes a more direct role to the Iraq war in fueling radicalism than that presented either in recent White House documents or in a report released Wednesday by the House Intelligence Committee, (...).
Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Fuels Terror, LA Times
Excerpts: The conflict spreads extremism and serves as a laboratory for deadly tactics, says a bleak analysis by 16 U.S. intelligence units.
Intelligence officials have also pointed to the flow of Muslims from other countries, including Europe, to Iraq to join the insurgency. Those who survive the fighting often leave and return to their home countries with dangerous new experience in urban fighting, bomb-making and - perhaps most important - credibility with other potential Muslim recruits.
Links & Snippets
Other Publications
- Living Beings As Informed Systems: Towards a Physical Theory of Information, Antonio Leon, 2005/09/19, arXiv, DOI: q-bio.PE/0609028
- Newton, Einstein and A Monstrous Calf, 2005/09/21, physics web
- Most 10 Year-Olds Have A Mobile Phone: 'I'm In The Playground', M. Chapman, 2006/09/20, vnunet.com
- Road Wends Its Way Through Stomach, 2006/09/20, Innovations-report
- Nonlinear Mechanics Of Soft Fibrous Networks, A. Kabla, L. Mahadevan, 2006/09/20, Journal of The Royal Society Interface, DOI: 10.1098/rsif.2006.0151
- You Don't Need A Big Lottery Win For Long Term Happiness ... But A Few Thousand Helps, 2006/09/20, ScienceDaily & University of Warwick
- ATM Passwords Found Online: Up To 70,000 US Cash Machines Vulnerable, A. Charlesworth, 2006/09/22, vnunet.com
- Lighting Up The Heart, 2006/09/22, Innovations-report
- Cydonia -- The Face On Mars?, 2006/09/22, ScienceDaily & European Space Agency
- Ancient Birds Flew On All-Fours, 2006/09/22, ScienceDaily & University of Calgary
- Hollywood Versus The Internet: The Media And Entertainment Industries In A Digital And Networked Economy, A. Currah - andrew.currahworc.ox.ac.uk, Aug. 2006, Journal of Economic Geography, DOI: 10.1093/jeg/lbl006
- Population Dynamics Of Infectious Diseases: A Discrete Time Model, M. K. Olia - olimadanwec.ufl.edu, M. Venkataraman, P. A. Klein, L. D. Wendland, M. B. Brown, Sep. 2006, online 2006/06/14, Ecological Modelling, DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2006.04.007
- Ecological Footprint Accounting Based On Emergy-A Case Study Of The Chinese Society, B. Chen, G.Q. Chen - gqchenpku.edu.cn, Sep. 2006, online 2006/06/23, Ecological Modelling, DOI: 10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2006.04.022
Webcast Announcements
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Potentials of Complexity Science for Business, Governments, and the Media 2006, Budapest, Hungary, 06/08/03-05
- 6th Intl Conf on Complex Systems (ICCS), Boston, MA, 06/06/25-30
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Artificial Life X,
10th Intl Conf on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems, Bloomington, IN, USA. 2006/06/03-07
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6th Understanding Complex Systems Symposium, Urbana-Champaign, Il, 06/05/15-18
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Ralph Abraham on Complexity Digest, , Calcutta, India, 05/12/27
- An Afternoon with Michael Crichton, Washington, 05/11/06
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Illuminating the Shadow of the Future, Ann Arbor, Mi 05/09/23-25
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Open Network of Centres of Excellence in Complex Systems - Brainstorming Meeting, Paris, France 05/09/19-23
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Complexity, Science & Society Conference 2005, U. Liverpool, UK 2005/09/11-14
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ECAL 2005 - VIIIth European Conference on Artificial Life,
Canterbury, Kent, UK 2005/09/5-9
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T. Irene Sanders, Executive Director and Founder, The Washington Center for Complexity & Public Policy, 05/08/27, QuickTime video (10:38 min), Podcast
- 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
- Understanding Complex Systems - Computational Complexity and Bioinformatics, Virtual Conference Network, Urbana-Champaign, Il, UIUC, 05/05/16-19
- 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
- World Economic Forum , Davos, Switzerland, 05/01/26-30
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1st European Conference on Complex Systems, Torino, Italy, 04/12/5-7
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From Autopoiesis to Neurophenomenology: A Tribute to Francisco Varela (1946-2001), Paris, France, 2004/06/18-20
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Evolutionary Epistemology, Language, and Culture, Brussels, Belgium, 04/05/26-28
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International Conference on Complex Systems 2004, Boston, 04/05/16-21
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Nonlinear Dynamics And Chaos: Lab Demonstrations, Strogatz, Steven H., Internet-First University Press, 1994
- CERN Webcast Service, Streamed videos of Archived Lectures and Live Events
- Dean LeBaron's Archive of Daily Video Commentary, Ongoing Since February 1998
- Edge Videos
Conference Announcements
3rd Intl Congress of Nanotechnology 2006 (ICNT 2006) , San Francisco, 06/10/30-11/02
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13th Herbstakademie COGNITION AND EMBODIMENT, Monte Verità, Switzerland, 06/10/05-08
- Art & Artificial Life International Competition VIDA 9.0 , Deadline: 06/10/16
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Weaving Smart Networks: Building Capacity for Positive Change in Organizations and Communities, Washington, DC USA, 06/10/12-13
- 2006 Wolfram Technology
Conference,Champaign, Illinois, 06/10/12-14
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6th Intl Conf on Simulated Evolution and Learning , Hefei, China, 06/10/15-18
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Regulomics Symposium: Focus on Systems Biology, Boston, MA, 06/10/23-26
- 8th Annual Intl Leadership Association Conference: Leadership at the Crossroads,
Chicago, IIinois, USA, 06/11/01-05
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Creating Interdisciplinary Cultures: Insights from Complexity Science and Relationship Centered Care, Indiana USA, 06/11/17-19
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Self-Organization And Morphogenesis In Biological Systems ,
Schloss Ringberg, Germany. 06/12/03-06
- Japan Mathematica Conference 2006, Tokyo, Japan, 06/12/12
- 2006 IEEE/WIC/ACM Intl Workshop on
Interaction between Agents and Data Mining (IADM-06), Hongkong, China, 06/12/18
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NECSI Winter School 2007, Cambridge, MA, 07/01/08-19
- Logic, Computability and Randomness 2007 , Buenos Aires, Argentina, 07/01/10-13
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Managing Complex Organizations in a Complex World, Cambridge, MA, 07/01/25-26
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3rd International Workshop on Complexity and Philisophy, Stellenbosch, South Africa, 07/02/22-23
- Complexity and Organizational Resilience
The Village, Pohnpei, Micronesia, 07/05
- 2nd Intl Conf on Built Environment Complexity - Embracing complexity thinking in built environments, Cape Town South Africa, 07/05/21-25
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ECO 2007 Summit: Ecological Complexity and Sustainability: Challenges and Opportunities for 21st-Century Ecology, Beijing, China, 07/05/22-27
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2007 IEEE/ICME Intl Conf on Complex Medical Engineering-CME2007, Beijing, China, 07/05/23-27
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Summer School In Complexity Science, London, UK, 07/07/08-17
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ECAL 2oo7 - 9th European Conference on Artificial Life
, Lisbon, Portugal, 07/09/10-14
Call for Papers - Course/Book Announcements
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Special Issue of the Artificial Life journal on the Evolution of Complexity,
Call for Papers
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Digital Graphics for Quantitative Finance,
Lineplot Productions, 2006
Why create movies of financial models? Because key stakeholders often don't understand them. The mathematical, data-intensive sphere of quantitative financial analysis can be a black box even for many in the industry. It is vital for users of this analysis to appreciate, understand and buy into, often literally, these difficult and important concepts.
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Life: An Introduction to Complex Systems Biology, Kunihiko Kaneko, Springer Series: Understanding Complex Systems, 2006
What is life? Has molecular biology given us a satisfactory answer to this question? And if not, why, and how to carry on from there? This book examines life not from the reductionist point of view, but rather asks the question: what are the universal properties of living systems and how can one construct from there a phenomenological theory of life that leads naturally to complex processes such as reproductive cellular systems, evolution and differentiation? The presentation has been deliberately kept fairly non-technical so as to address a broad spectrum of students and researchers from the natural sciences and informatics.
- Chaos and Complexity
Resources for Students and Teachers, 06/03/01
