Complexity Digest 2007.40

20-Oct-2007

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Content

  1. Father of Mechanism Design Wins Nobel, Business Week
  2. Neuroeconomics As A Natural Extension Of Bioeconomics: The Shifting Scope Of Standard Economic Theory, J. Bioecon.
    1. Part I: The Blow-Up, Technology Review
    2. Part II: The Blow-Up, Technology Review
    3. Wagging the Fat Tail, Absolute Return Letter
  3. Google Gives Some Hints About Social Network Plan, NY Times
  4. Shifty Talk: Probing The Process Of Word Evolution, Science News
    1. Quantifying The Evolutionary Dynamics Of Language, Nature
    2. Frequency Of Word-Use Predicts Rates Of Lexical Evolution Throughout Indo-European History, Nature
    3. Linguistics: An Invisible Hand, Nature
  5. Complexity and Self-organization, Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences
  6. The Benefits Of 80 Million Years Without Sex, Physorg.com
    1. Evolution: Stable Heterozygosity?, Science
    2. Evolutionary Genetics: Making The Most Of Redundancy, Nature
  7. The Human Disease Network, PNAS
    1. Network Medicine - From Obesity to the "Diseasome", New England Journal of Medicine
    2. Human Disease Classification In The Postgenomic Era: A Complex Systems Approach To Human Pathobiology, Molecular Systems Biology
  8. Moving Up The Charts: Drug-Resistant Bug Invades Military, Civilian Hospitals, Science News
  9. Invasive, Indeed - One Species - Homo Sapiens - Consumes Nearly A Quarter Of Earth's Natural Productivity, Science News
    1. Preferences For Symmetry In Human Faces In Two Cultures, Proc. Biol. Sc.
    2. Humans Perceive Others' Fear Faster Than Other Emotions, ScienceDaily
  10. Using Molecular Pathways to Assess Cancer Patients, Technology Review
    1. Cancer: Micromanagement Of Metastasis, Nature
    2. Tumour Invasion And Metastasis Initiated By MicroRNA-10b In Breast Cancer, Nature
    3. Chromosome Caps May Explain Cell Immortality, New Scientist
  11. Moose Use Roads As a Defence Against Bears, News@Nature
    1. Fear, Human Shields And The Redistribution Of Prey And Predators In Protected Areas, Biol. Lett.
    2. Herding Aphids -- How 'Farmer' Ants Keep Control Of Their Food, Innovations-report
    3. Rodent Sociality And Parasite Diversity, Biol. Lett.
  12. Atmosphere: Monsoon Mysteries, Science
  13. Dusty Winds Bursting Out Of Black Holes May Have Seeded Planets, Life, Science Daily
    1. New Worlds On The Horizon: Earth-Sized Planets Close To Other Stars, Science
  14. Lockheed Martin to Develop Automated Object Recognition Using Brain-Inspired Technology, CNN/PRNewswire
  15. Materials Science: Biomimetic Solutions To Sticky Problems, Science
    1. Virus-Built Electronics, Technology Review
  16. Laser Physics: A Phase It's Going Through, Nature
    1. Artificial-Atom Laser Debuts, PhysicsWorld.com
  17. Solid-State Physics: Response With A Twist, Nature
  18. Synergy Goes To War: A Bioeconomic Theory Of Collective Violence, J. Bioecon.
    1. The Geopolitical Foundations of Blackwater, InvestorsInsight
  19. Complex Challenges: Global Terrorist Networks
    1. Al-Qaeda In Iraq Reported Crippled - Many Officials, However, Warn Of Its Resilience, Washington Post
  20. Links & Snippets
    1. Other Publications
    2. Webcast Announcements
    3. Conference Announcements
    4. Other Announcements

  1. Father of Mechanism Design Wins Nobel, Business Week Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: Economist Leonid Hurwicz helped identify the fatal flaw in centrally planned economies, but the theory isn't easy on capitalism, either.

    (...) Hurwicz won the Nobel for creating an intellectual framework that can evaluate the pros and cons of any possible economic mechanism. In a world riven between free markets, managed economies, and the "Third Way," Hurwicz and his co-recipients offer a neutral, pragmatic system for figuring out which mechanisms work and which ones don't. "They set up tools that will be of lasting value," says Paul Klemperer, an economist at Oxford University.


  2. Neuroeconomics As A Natural Extension Of Bioeconomics: The Shifting Scope Of Standard Economic Theory, J. Bioecon. Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: Neuroeconomics rightly has been claimed to be a natural extension of bioeconomics. One of the things bioeconomics investigates is what behavioral dispositions and what behavioral patterns evolutionary processes have produced. Neuroeconomics extends this to the study of evolved mechanisms that are at work in decision-making at the neural level of the brain. The paper argues that in another respect neuroeconomics and bioeconomics are discontinuous, however. Bioeconomics maintains that the applicability of standard economic theory's constrained maximization framework is not confined to human behavior. (...) By contrast, (...) all neuroeconomists seem to agree that human behavior is predicted poorly by standard economic theory (...).

    1. Part I: The Blow-Up, Technology Review Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts:
      Credit: Julien Pacaud
      No one quite knew why, yet, but the market's odd behavior would turn out to be closely linked to the work of the quants. In addition to creating arcane financial products, quants have been pushing the frontiers of computer-driven trading systems, and not enough of those systems were working the way they were supposed to--or, to put it more precisely, the way they were supposed to work turned out to be counterproductive in volatile times like these.

      Quants like the ones at the August conference were knee deep in the troubles threatening the global financial system.


    2. Part II: The Blow-Up, Technology Review Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts:
      Credit: Julien Pacaud
      How the financial engineers known as "quants" contributed to Wall Street's summer of scary numbers.

      The events of August were outliers, and they were of the quants' own making. (...) To begin with, quants were indirectly responsible for the boom in housing loans offered to shaky candidates.

      Derivatives allow banks to trade their mortgages like bubble-gum cards, and the separation of the holder of a loan from the writer of a loan tended to create an overgenerous breed of loan officer. The banks, in turn, were attracted by the enormous market for derivatives like CDOs.

    3. Wagging the Fat Tail, Absolute Return Letter Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Now, what investors really should worry about is what we call extreme risk - 3-6 SD (SD = Standard Deviation from average, Ed.) events which can potentially wipe out years of profits. This is often referred to as fat tail risk. (...)

      The problem is that recent years have been littered with 6, 7 and 8 SD events. A 7 SD event equals 1 every 3 billion years or approximately the lifetime of our planet. Since the 1998 Russian debt crisis, financial markets around the world have experienced at least 10 extreme shocks none of which were supposed to occur more than once every few billion years. (...)


  3. Google Gives Some Hints About Social Network Plan, NY Times Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: Just days ago, Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's chief executive, was warning that social networking may be a fad.

    Eric E. Schmidt, Google's chief executive, is far less dismissive.

    "People don't appreciate how many page views on the Internet are in social networks." Mr. Schmidt told a group of reporters at the end of its Zeitgeist conference, a two-day gathering of an eclectic mix of Google partners, competitors, social activists and politicians.

    Social networks, he said, account for an "enormous proportion" of Internet usage, he added.(...)


  4. Shifty Talk: Probing The Process Of Word Evolution, Science News Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: In fact, frequency of word usage exerts a "lawlike" influence on the rapidity of language evolution, the research teams conclude in the Oct. 11 Nature. This discovery offers a new tool for retracing the history of major language families, reconstructing ancient tongues, and predicting which words will undergo future alterations. (...)

    "Our results indicate that languages can evolve in such an orderly fashion that simple mathematical descriptions capture their behavior," Lieberman says. "A language's irregularities reveal the mechanisms shaping its evolution."


    1. Quantifying The Evolutionary Dynamics Of Language, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Human language is based on grammatical rules. Cultural evolution allows these rules to change over time. Rules compete with each other: as new rules rise to prominence, old ones die away. To quantify the dynamics of language evolution, we studied the regularization of English verbs over the past 1,200 years. Although an elaborate system of productive conjugations existed in English's proto-Germanic ancestor, Modern English uses the dental suffix, '-ed', to signify past tense6. Here we describe the emergence of this linguistic rule amidst the evolutionary decay of its exceptions, known to us as irregular verbs.

    2. Frequency Of Word-Use Predicts Rates Of Lexical Evolution Throughout Indo-European History, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: No general linguistic mechanism has been advanced to explain this striking variation in rates of lexical replacement among meanings. Here we use four large and divergent language corpora (English, Spanish, Russian and Greek) and a comparative database of 200 fundamental vocabulary meanings in 87 Indo-European languages to show that the frequency with which these words are used in modern language predicts their rate of replacement over thousands of years of Indo-European language evolution. Across all 200 meanings, frequently used words evolve at slower rates and infrequently used words evolve more rapidly.

    3. Linguistics: An Invisible Hand, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Quantitative relationships between how frequently a word is used and how rapidly it changes over time raise intriguing questions about the way individual behaviours determine large-scale linguistic and cultural change.

  5. Complexity and Self-organization, Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Abstract: This article introduces some of the main concepts and methods of the science studying complex, self-organizing systems and networks, in a non-technical manner. Complexity cannot be strictly defined, only situated in between order and disorder. A complex system is typically modeled as a collection of interacting agents, representing components as diverse as people, cells or molecules. Because of the non-linearity of the interactions, the overall system evolution is generally unpredictable and uncontrollable. However, the system tends to self-organize, in the sense that local interactions eventually produce global coordination and synergy. The resulting structure can in many cases be modeled as a network, with stabilized interactions functioning as links connecting the agents. Such complex, self-organized networks typically exhibit the properties of clustering, being scale-free, and forming a small-world. These ideas have obvious applications in information science when studying networks of authors and their publications.
    • Source: Complexity and Self-organization, Francis Heylighen, Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, edited by Marcia J. Bates and Mary Niles Maack (Taylor & Francis, 2008)

  6. The Benefits Of 80 Million Years Without Sex, Physorg.com Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: Scientists have discovered how a microscopic organism has benefited from nearly 80 million years without sex.(...)

    Although other asexual organisms are known, they are thought to become extinct after relatively short time periods because they are unable to adapt. Therefore, how bdelloid rotifers have survived for tens of millions of years has been a mystery to scientists.

    Bdelloids typically live in freshwater pools. However, if deprived of water they enter a dehydrated state in which they can remain for many years, surviving almost complete water loss. They then revive, having suffered no ill effect, once water becomes available again.

    1. Evolution: Stable Heterozygosity?, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Bdelloid rotifers (see the figure), comprising some 380 described species, are common aquatic invertebrates with highly unusual properties, most famously their putatively ancient asexuality and ability to survive desiccation at any life stage. If truly asexual, their evolutionary success may hold the answer to why nearly all higher eukaryotes reproduce sexually and why asexual eukaryotes, arising occasionally from sexual ones, are almost always evolutionarily short-lived. On page 268 of this issue, Pouchkina-Stantcheva et al. present evidence of functional divergence between two copies of a gene expressed in bdelloids during desiccation.

    2. Evolutionary Genetics: Making The Most Of Redundancy, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Single genes, chromosomal regions and even entire genomes can undergo duplication. What good can come of these extra copies? Evolution seems to use several tricks to take advantage of the situation.

  7. The Human Disease Network, PNAS Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: A network of disorders and disease genes linked by known disorder-gene associations offers a platform to explore in a single graph-theoretic framework all known phenotype and disease gene associations, indicating the common genetic origin of many diseases. Genes associated with similar disorders show both higher likelihood of physical interactions between their products and higher expression profiling similarity for their transcripts, supporting the existence of distinct disease-specific functional modules. We find that essential human genes are likely to encode hub proteins and are expressed widely in most tissues.
    • Source: The Human Disease Network, Kwang-Il Goh, Michael E. Cusick, David Valle, Barton Childs, Marc Vidal, Albert-Laszlo Barabasi, PNAS, vol. 104 No 21 8685-8690, 07/05/22

    1. Network Medicine - From Obesity to the "Diseasome", New England Journal of Medicine Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: To understand various disease mechanisms, it is not sufficient to know the precise list of "disease genes"; instead, we should try to map out the detailed wiring diagram of the various cellular components that are influenced by these genes and gene products. Such network-based thinking has already provided insights into the pathogenesis of several diseases. For example, a recent study suggested that 18 of the 23 genes known to be associated with ataxia are part of a highly interlinked subnetwork; in another example, a reverse-engineered subnetwork indicated that the androgen-receptor gene might be used to detect the aggressiveness of primary prostate cancer.

    2. Human Disease Classification In The Postgenomic Era: A Complex Systems Approach To Human Pathobiology, Molecular Systems Biology Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Contemporary classification of human disease derives from observational correlation between pathological analysis and clinical syndromes. Characterizing disease in this way established a nosology that has served clinicians well to the current time, and depends on observational skills and simple laboratory tools to define the syndromic phenotype. Yet, this time-honored diagnostic strategy has significant shortcomings that reflect both a lack of sensitivity in identifying preclinical disease, and a lack of specificity in defining disease unequivocally.

  8. Moving Up The Charts: Drug-Resistant Bug Invades Military, Civilian Hospitals, Science News Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: A common bacterium is becoming more virulent and drug resistant in hospitals. The Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) now ranks Acinetobacter baumannii on its list of "bad bugs" alongside two perennial chart toppers, vancomycin-resistant Enterococcus faecium and methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus.

    The reported cases of nasty A. baumannii infections "may be just the tip of the iceberg," says Robert Bonomo of Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland. "I don't think the statistics ... do justice to the current problem. I hear people saying, 'It's all over my hospital.'"

  9. Invasive, Indeed - One Species - Homo Sapiens - Consumes Nearly A Quarter Of Earth's Natural Productivity, Science News Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts:
    LAND GRAB. About half of the 15.6 billion metric tons of carbon that people remove from Earth's ecosystems each year is harvested in the form of crops. Photodisc
    The team estimates that if people weren't around to alter the landscape, the world's natural vegetation would absorb enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to lock away about 65.5 billion metric tons of carbon each year. However, in 2000, the year for which the data were compiled, Earth's vegetation locked away only about 59.2 billion metric tons of carbon, or 9.6 percent less than it should have, says Erb. Of that smaller carbon total, human activities removed about 15.6 billion metric tons - a whopping 23.8 percent - from the world's ecosystems. A little more than half of the carbon that people appropriated was harvested and used as food, forage, and wood, (...).

    1. Preferences For Symmetry In Human Faces In Two Cultures, Proc. Biol. Sc. Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpt: Many studies show agreement within and between cultures for general judgements of facial attractiveness. Few studies, however, have examined the attractiveness of specific traits and few have examined preferences in hunter-gatherers. The current study examined preferences for symmetry in both the UK and the Hadza, a hunter-gatherer society of Tanzania. We found that symmetry was more attractive than asymmetry across both the cultures and was more strongly preferred by the Hadza than in the UK. The different ecological conditions may play a role in generating this difference. Such variation in preference may be adaptive if it reflects adaptation to local conditions. (...)

    2. Humans Perceive Others' Fear Faster Than Other Emotions, ScienceDaily Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: You may not be fully dressed without a smile, but a look of horror will make a faster first impression. Vanderbilt University researchers have discovered that the brain becomes aware of fearful faces more quickly than those showing other emotions."There are reasons to believe that the brain has evolved mechanisms to detect things in the environment that signal threat. One of those signals is a look of fear," David Zald, (...) said. "We believe that the brain can detect certain cues even before we are aware of them, so that we can direct our attention to potentially threatening situations in our environment." (...)

  10. Using Molecular Pathways to Assess Cancer Patients, Technology Review Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts:
    Pathways to cancer: Pictured above are two protein networks whose activity is associated with an increased risk of the spread of breast cancer. At top is a protein network associated with cell growth, survival, and division; at bottom, a protein network associated with tumors' ability to shape surrounding tissue. Credit: Trey Ideker, UCSD
    The first complete map of protein interactions in human cells could lead to better treatment for breast cancer.

    Researchers at the University of California, San Diego, have created a map of all known protein networks in human cells and shown that it can be used to better assess whether a patient's breast cancer will spread. Their work, though in its early stages, could lead to better diagnostic tests that spare patients toxic treatments, such as chemotherapy, if they are unnecessary. The researchers also expect that their approach will be widely applicable to other diseases, including other cancers and diabetes.

    1. Cancer: Micromanagement Of Metastasis, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Although they were discovered only in the early 1990s, many regulatory functions of microRNAs - naturally occurring short RNA sequences - have already been reported. The latest news is that they mediate cancer spread.

      To successfully spread, or metastasize, a tumour cell must complete a complex set of processes, including invasion, survival and arrest in the circulatory system, and colonization of foreign organs1. How are these events regulated? In a paper published in this issue (page 682), Ma et al. propose that microRNAs (miRNAs), which regulate levels of messenger RNAs (mRNAs), coordinate some of the intricate gene-expression programmes implicated in cancer metastasis.

    2. Tumour Invasion And Metastasis Initiated By MicroRNA-10b In Breast Cancer, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: MicroRNAs have been implicated in regulating diverse cellular pathways. Although there is emerging evidence that some microRNAs can function as oncogenes or tumour suppressors, the role of microRNAs in mediating cancer metastasis remains unexplored. Here we show, using a combination of mouse and human cells, that microRNA-10b (miR-10b) is highly expressed in metastatic breast cancer cells and positively regulates cell migration and invasion. Overexpression of miR-10b in otherwise non-metastatic breast tumours initiates robust invasion and metastasis.

    3. Chromosome Caps May Explain Cell Immortality, New Scientist Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Telomeres, the supposedly "dead" sections of DNA that cap the ends of chromosomes, are showing definite signs of life.

      Telomeres shorten every time a cell divides until they reach a critical length - at which point the cell dies through a process called apoptosis. Cancers sometimes develop when the telomerase enzyme gets switched on and rebuilds the telomeres, making the cells immortal.

      Telomeres had been assumed to contain inactive DNA. Now Joachim Lingner of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Lausanne and his colleagues have found that they behave like genes in that they make RNA copies of themselves (...).

  11. Moose Use Roads As a Defence Against Bears, News@Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt:
    Some animals seem to take comfort in roads.
    US National Park Service
    A drive through Yellowstone National Park these days is like going on a photo safari: elk, bison, deer, big horn and moose hang out so close to the roads that it's easy to spot them. Research now shows this isn't because the area is jam-packed with animals: some mammals seem to be attracted to the roads as a shield against predators.

    1. Fear, Human Shields And The Redistribution Of Prey And Predators In Protected Areas, Biol. Lett. Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Protected areas form crucial baselines to judge ecological change, yet areas (...) are under intense economic and political pressures to accommodate massive human visitation and attendant infrastructure. An unintended consequence is the strong modulation of the three-way interaction involving people, predators and prey, a dynamic that questions the extent to which animal distributions and interactions are independent of subtle human influences. Here, I capitalize on the remarkable 9-day synchronicity in which 90% of moose neonates in the Yellowstone Ecosystem are born, to demonstrate a substantive change in how prey avoid predators; birth sites shift away from traffic-averse brown bears and towards paved roads. (...)

    2. Herding Aphids -- How 'Farmer' Ants Keep Control Of Their Food, Innovations-report Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Chemicals on ants' feet tranquilise and subdue colonies of aphids, keeping them close-by as a ready source of food, says (...). The study throws new light on the complex relationship between ants and the colonies of aphids whose sugary secretions the ants eat. Scientists had previously established that certain types of aphids live in colonies where they are used as a food source by a neighbouring colony of ants. The ants have been known to bite the wings off the aphids in order to stop them from getting away and depriving the ants of one of their staple foods: the sugar-rich sticky honeydew (...).

    3. Rodent Sociality And Parasite Diversity, Biol. Lett. Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: The risk of parasitism is considered to be a general cost of sociality and individuals living in larger groups are typically considered to be more likely to be infected with parasites. However, contradictory results have been reported for the relationship between group size and infection by directly transmitted parasites. We used independent contrasts to examine the relationship between an index of sociality in rodents and the diversity of their macroparasites (...). We found that the species richness of directly transmitted ectoparasites, but not endoparasites, decreased significantly with the level of rodent sociality. (...) Our finding may also result from beneficial outcomes of social living (...).

  12. Atmosphere: Monsoon Mysteries, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: The Asian summer monsoon, manifested in all its glory and fury over the Indian subcontinent, is the largest seasonal abnormality of the global climate system: During the monsoon, the equatorial region is colder than the regions to the north. The summer monsoon rains that result are critical for food production, water supply, and the economic well-being of the Asian society. There is thus great interest in predicting the waxing and waning of the Asian monsoon.

  13. Dusty Winds Bursting Out Of Black Holes May Have Seeded Planets, Life, Science Daily Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts:
    Dusty grains -- including tiny specks of the minerals found in the gemstones peridot, sapphires, and rubies -- can be seen blowing in the winds of a quasar, or active black hole, in this artist's concept. (Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/T. Pyle (SSC))
    New findings from NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope suggest that space dust -- the same stuff that makes up living creatures and planets -- was manufactured in large quantities in the winds of black holes that populated our early universe.

    The findings are a significant new clue in an unsolved mystery: where did all the dust in the young universe originate?

    "We were surprised to find what appears to be freshly made dust entrained in the winds that blow away from supermassive black holes," said Ciska Markwick-Kemper of the University of Manchester, (...)

    1. New Worlds On The Horizon: Earth-Sized Planets Close To Other Stars, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: The search for habitable planets like Earth around other stars fulfills an ancient imperative to understand our origins and place in the cosmos. The past decade has seen the discovery of hundreds of planets, but nearly all are gas giants like Jupiter and Saturn. Recent advances in instrumentation and new missions are extending searches to planets the size of Earth but closer to their host stars. There are several possible ways such planets could form, and future observations will soon test those theories.

  14. Lockheed Martin to Develop Automated Object Recognition Using Brain-Inspired Technology, CNN/PRNewswire Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: he Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) and the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency awarded Lockheed Martin a $4.9-million, 18-month program to use brain-inspired technologies to develop a system that will speed an image analyst's job by 100 times.

    Called Object Recognition via Brain-Inspired Technology (ORBIT), the system will use electro-optical (EO), light detection and ranging (LIDAR), and brain-inspired technologies to automatically recognize objects in urban environments from ground and aerial surveillance.

  15. Materials Science: Biomimetic Solutions To Sticky Problems, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: Many biological surfaces have remarkable properties, some of which have inspired materials science. For example, Velcro was developed from the interlocking mechanism of the seeds of burdock that readily attach to one's clothes as one walks through the countryside. Similarly, self-cleaning materials have been developed based on the "Lotus effect" (the way in which water drops roll off the superhydrophobic leaves of lotus plants, taking dirt particles away with them).

    1. Virus-Built Electronics, Technology Review Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts:
      Tiny building blocks: A small vial contains a billion viruses, each with a slightly different genetic modification. These can be screened to determine which of them will bind to specific inorganic materials, such as those used in rechargeable batteries. Credit: Porter Gifford
      Assembling nanomaterials with the help of innocuous viruses could lead to threadlike batteries and photovoltaics that can be woven into clothing. (...)

      In producing this novel fiber, the researchers have demonstrated a completely new way of making nanomaterials, one that uses viruses as microscopic building blocks. Belcher, a professor of materials science and biological engineering at MIT, says the approach has two main advantages. First, in high concentrations the viruses tend to organize themselves, lining up side by side to form an orderly pattern.

  16. Laser Physics: A Phase It's Going Through, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: When we observe laser light, we typically measure its intensity, and so wave amplitude. The phase, which encodes further details of the laser's internal workings, was obscure - but fresh light is being shed on it. (...)

    Their laser is a quantum cascade laser, which is composed of numerous layers of two or more semiconductors. Under the influence of a d.c. electrical voltage (known as a bias), electrons in atoms of the semiconductor material fall down a staircase of quantum-mechanical levels, giving out a photon at each step (...).

    1. Artificial-Atom Laser Debuts, PhysicsWorld.com Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: The first laser to be built from an artificially-engineered quantum system has been unveiled by researchers in Japan. The microwave laser (maser) is also unique because it uses a single artificial atom - a tiny piece of superconductor - to create a coherent field of multiple photons. This is unlike conventional lasers, which use many atoms or molecules. The researchers believe that the breakthrough could lead to the development of very small, tuneable devices that could be integrated onto chips as microwave sources or amplifiers (Nature 449 588).

  17. Solid-State Physics: Response With A Twist, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: The behaviour of ferromagnetic and ferroelectric materials in a magnetic or electric field makes them easy to spot. But for their more recently discovered counterpart, ferrotoroidic materials, things become complex.

  18. Synergy Goes To War: A Bioeconomic Theory Of Collective Violence, J. Bioecon. Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: Synergy - here defined as otherwise unattainable combined effects that are produced by two or more elements, parts or individuals - has played a key causal role in the evolution of complexity, from the very origins of life to the evolution of humankind and complex societies. This theory - known as the 'Synergism Hypothesis' - also applies to social behavior, including the use of collective violence for various purposes: predation, defense against predators, the acquisition of needed resources and the defense of these resources against other groups and species. (...) The biological, psychological and cultural underpinnings of collective violence are far more subtle and complex. (...)

    1. The Geopolitical Foundations of Blackwater, InvestorsInsight Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: Blackwater works for the State Department in a capacity defined as noncombat, protecting diplomats and other high-value personnel from assassination. The Army, bogged down in its own operations, lacks the manpower to perform this obviously valuable work. That means that Blackwater and other contract workers are charged with carrying weapons and moving around the battlefield, which is everywhere. They are heavily armed private soldiers carrying out missions that are combat in all but name -- and they are completely outside of the chain of command.

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

    1. Al-Qaeda In Iraq Reported Crippled - Many Officials, However, Warn Of Its Resilience, Washington Post Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: The U.S. military believes it has dealt devastating and perhaps irreversible blows to al-Qaeda in Iraq in recent months, leading some generals to advocate a declaration of victory over the group, which the Bush administration has long described as the most lethal U.S. adversary in Iraq.

      But as the White House and its military commanders plan the next phase of the war, other officials have cautioned against taking what they see as a premature step that could create strategic and political difficulties for the United States.

  20. Links & Snippets Next Article Bookmark and Share

    1. Other Publications Next Article Bookmark and Share

      1. Coactivation of Receptor Tyrosine Kinases Affects the Response of Tumor Cells to Targeted Therapies, Jayne M. Stommel, Alec C. Kimmelman, Haoqiang Ying, Roustem Nabioullin, Aditya H. Ponugoti, Ruprecht Wiedemeyer, Alexander H. Stegh, James E. Bradner, Keith L. Ligon, Cameron Brennan, Lynda Chin, Ronald A. DePinho, 07/10/12, Science: 287-290. In glioblastoma cancer cells, drugs that work by inhibiting receptor tyrosine kinases are more powerful in combination than when administered alone., DOI: 10.1126/science.1142946
      2. Does Sex Induce a Phase Transition?, P.M.C. de Oliveira, S. Moss de Oliveira, D. Stauffer, S. Cebrat and A. Pekalski, 2007/10/08, arXiv, DOI: 0710.1357
      3. Fear, Human Shields And The Redistribution Of Prey And Predators In Protected Areas, J. Berger, 2007/10/09, Biological Letters, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2007.0415
      4. MIT Finds New Hearing Mechanism: Discovery Could Lead To Improved Hearing Aids, 2007/10/11, Innovations-report
      5. Geneva Votes For Quantum Cryptography: Swiss National Elections Count On Cutting Edge Security, I. Williams, 2007/10/12, vnunet.com
      6. Greenland Is Melting At Record Speed, 2007/10/12, Innovations-report
      7. The Model Epidemic Fights Against A Real One, 2007/10/12, Innovations-report
      8. Brain Circuits Used In Sensation Of Touch Identified, 2007/10/12, ScienceDaily & Emory University
      9. Not Just Science Fiction: 'Electromagnetic Wormhole' Possible, Say Mathematicians, 2007/10/13, ScienceDaily & University of Rochester
      10. Why Is The Ocean Salty?, 2007/10/14, ScienceDaily & University of Wisconsin-Madison
      11. A Novel Vision-Based Finger-Writing Character Recognition System, L. Jin, D. Yang, Li-X. Zhen, J.-C. Huang, Jun. 2007, Journal of Circuits, Systems, and Computers, DOI: 10.1142/S0218126607003757
      12. Does Film Criticism Affect Box Office Earnings? Evidence From Movies Released In The U.S. In 2003, T. King, Sep. 2007, online 2007/07/05, Journal of Cultural Economics, DOI: 10.1007/s10824-007-9041-z

    2. Webcast Announcements Next Article Bookmark and Share

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

    3. Conference Announcements Next Article Bookmark and Share

      1. Processes Of Emergence Of Systems And Systemic Properties. Towards A General Theory Of Emergence. , Castel Ivano (Trento), 07/10/18-20
      2. 2nd Annual Conf on The Physics, Chemistry and Biology of Water, West Dover, Vermont. 07/10/18-21
      3. Smithsonian conference, Creating a Sustainable Future in a Complex World, Washington, DC, 07/10/27
      4. Intl Conf on Complex Systems 2007, Boston, MA, USA, 07/10/28-11/02
      5. The Huntsville Simulation Conference 2007, Huntsville, Alabama, 07/10/30-11/01
      6. 2007 IEEE/WIC/ACM Intl Joint Conf on Web Intelligence and Intelligent Agent Technology (WI-IAT'07), Silicon Valley, USA, 07/11/02-05
      7. Theory In Cognitive Neuroscience, Wildbad Kreuth (Bavaria), Germany, 07/11/04-07
      8. 7th Intl Conf on Epigenetic Robotics: Modeling Cognitive Development in Robotic Systems , Piscataway, NJ, 07/11/05-07
      9. KSS 2007 - 8th Intl Symposium on Knowledge and Systems Sciences, Ishikawa prefecture, Japan, 07/11/05-07
      10. NetLogo Workshop at Agent 2007 Conference, Evanston, IL, USA, 07/11/12-14
      11. Australia New Zealand Systems Conference 2007 "Systemic development: Local solutions in a global environment", Auckland, New Zealand, 07/12/02-05
      12. The 3rd Indian Intl Conf on Artificial Intelligence (IICAI-07), Pune, INDIA, 07/12/17-19
      13. The 1st Conf on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-08), Memphis, Tennessee, USA, 08/03/01-03
      14. The 3rd International Nonlinear Sciences Conference (INSC), Tokyo, Japan, 08/03/13-15
      15. 19th European Meeting On Cybernetics And Systems Research, (EMCSR 2008), Vienna, Austria, 08/03/25-28
      16. 2nd KES Intl Symp on Agent and Multi-Agent Systems : Technologies and Applications, Incheon, Korea, 08/03/26-28
      17. 1st Intl Conf on Social Entrepreneurship & Complexity, Garden City, NY, USA, 08/04/10-12
      18. The 12th World Multi-Conf on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics: WMSCI 2008, Orlando, Florida, USA, 08/06/29-07/02
      19. From Animals To Animats 10 - The 10th Intl Conf on the Simulation Of Adaptive Behavior (SAB'08), Osaka, Japan, 08/07/07-12
      20. Stochastic Resonance 2008, Perugia, Italy, 08/08/17-21

    4. Other Announcements Bookmark and Share

      1. " Wolfram Research is Now the Official Math Brain Trust for the Hit CBS Series NUMB3RS. 07/10/05
      2. 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

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

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