Complexity Digest 2008.01

03-Jan-2008

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Content

  1. Innovative Minds Don't Think Alike, NY Times
    1. Internet Opens Elite Colleges to All, Washington Post
  2. Giving Disorganized Boys the Tools for Success, NY Times
    1. Professor's Little Helper, Nature
  3. Consciousness, Brains and the Replica Problem, arXiv
  4. Mapping Professional Networks, Technology Review
  5. What's Your Consumption Factor?, NY Times
    1. Concerns Rise with Water of Three Gorges Dam, NPR-ME
    2. Foolish Book Review: "The Origin of Wealth", The Motley Fool
  6. So Many Crimes, and Reasons to Not Cooperate, NY Times
    1. A Tale of Political Dirty Tricks Makes the Case for Election Reform, NY Times
  7. A Lifesaving Checklist, NY Times
  8. Stimulating Muscles May Improve Musician's Dystonia, Innovations-report
  9. Duetting Birds Found To Be Unfaithful, Nature News
    1. How To Make A Zombie Cockroach, Nature News
  10. Will Beetles Inherit The Earth? Evolutionary Study Reveals Their Long-term Success, ScienceDaily
    1. A Short Introduction to the Basic Mechanisms of Complexity Increase in Evolution, arXiv
  11. On the Optimality of the Standard Genetic Code: The Role of Stop Codons, arXiv
  12. What Factors Contribute To An Ownership Advantage?, Biol. Lett.
    1. Adult Male Chimpanzees Don't Stray Far From The Home, ScienceDaily
  13. Toward A Rosetta Stone For Microbes' Secret Language, Science Daily
  14. Drug Target To Stop Cancer Spread, BBC News
  15. Stranger That Fiction: Parallel Universes Beguile Science, PhysOrg.com
    1. A Lab Model Of The Early Universe, Nature News
    2. Two Constants To Rule Us All, Nature News
    3. Is Time Slowing Down?, New Scientist
  16. Life, Information, Entropy, And Time: Vehicles For Semantic Inheritance, Complexity
  17. Guiding A Self-Adjusting System Through Chaos, Complexity
  18. From Complex Conflicts To Stable Cooperation: Cases In Environment And Security, Complexity
    1. Systems Engineering Without An Engineer: Why We Need Systems Biology, Complexity
  19. Complex Challenges: Global Terrorist Networks
    1. Is It War? - The Presidential Candidates On Terrorism, Washington Post
    2. Stonewalled by the C.I.A., NY Times
  20. Links & Snippets
    1. Other Publications
    2. Webcast Announcements
    3. Conference Announcements
    4. Other Announcements

  1. Innovative Minds Don't Think Alike, NY Times Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: It's a pickle of a paradox: As our knowledge and expertise increase, our creativity and ability to innovate tend to taper off. Why? Because the walls of the proverbial box in which we think are thickening along with our experience. (...)

    When experts have to slow down and go back to basics to bring an outsider up to speed, she says, "it forces them to look at their world differently and, as a result, they come up with new solutions to old problems."

    1. Internet Opens Elite Colleges to All, Washington Post Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: There has never been a more exciting time for the intellectually curious.

      The world's top universities have come late to the world of online education, but they're arriving at last, creating an all-you-can eat online buffet of information.

      And mostly, they are giving it away.

      MIT's initiative is the largest, but the trend is spreading. More than 100 universities worldwide, including Johns Hopkins, Tufts and Notre Dame, have joined MIT in a consortium of schools promoting their own open courseware. You no longer need a Princeton ID to hear the prominent guests who speak regularly on campus, just an Internet connection. This month, Yale announced it would make material from seven popular courses available online, with 30 more to follow.

  2. Giving Disorganized Boys the Tools for Success, NY Times Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts:
    Jim Wilson/The New York Times Ana Homayoun tutoring Robert Gittings, a sixth grader, above, teaching him how to organize his classwork.
    With girls outperforming boys these days in high school and college, educators have been sparring over whether there is a crisis in the education of boys. Some suggest the need for more single-sex schools, more male role models or new teaching techniques. Others are experimenting with physical changes in classrooms that encourage boys to move around, rather than trying to anchor them to their seats. (...)

    The tutors say their main focus is organizational skills because boys seem generally to have more difficulty getting organized and multitasking than girls do.

    1. Professor's Little Helper, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts:
      NIKOS/ZEFA/CORBIS, Morning pick-me-up: will drugs that help you stay alert become as widely acceptable as coffee?
      Today there are several drugs on the market that improve memory, concentration, planning and reduce impulsive behaviour and risky decision-making, and many more are being developed. Doctors already prescribe these drugs to treat cognitive disabilities and improve quality of life for patients with neuropsychiatric disorders and brain injury. The prescription use of such drugs is being extended to other conditions, including shift-workers. Meanwhile, off-label and non-prescription use by the general public is becoming increasingly commonplace.
      • Source: Professor's Little Helper, Barbara Sahakian, Sharon Morein-Zamir, DOI: 10.1038/4501157a, Nature 450, 1157-1159, 07/12/20

  3. Consciousness, Brains and the Replica Problem, arXiv Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Abstract: Although the conscious state is considered an emergent property of the underlying brain activity and thus somehow resides on brain hardware, there is a non-univocal mapping between both. Given a neural hardware, multiple conscious patterns are consistent with it. Here we show, by means of a simple {em gedankenexperiment} that this has an important logic consequence: any scenario involving the transient shutdown of brain activity leads to the irreversible death of the conscious experience. In a fundamental way, unless the continuous stream of consciousness is guaranteed, the previous self vanishes and is replaced by a new one. deployment.

  4. Mapping Professional Networks, Technology Review Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts:
    Keeping contacts close: IBM's Atlas tool, which works in conjunction with its Connections software, aims to help professionals network more efficiently within large companies. Its My Net component (shown above) helps people visualize how closely they're staying in touch with professional contacts. The closer a contact is to the center of the circle, the more frequently the user communicates with her. Credit: IBM
    IBM's Atlas tool aims to help businesses visualize connections between colleagues.

    The social graph--an image of a person's connections to friends, family, and colleagues--has been in the news since Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg suggested earlier this year that this information could be invaluable to businesses looking to spread their products to a large audience. (See "Building onto Facebook's Platform.") Now IBM is exploring how different visualizations of the social graph could be useful within businesses, as a way of helping people work more efficiently and make better connections.

  5. What's Your Consumption Factor?, NY Times Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts:
    Oliver Munday
    Per capita consumption rates in China are still about 11 times below ours, but let's suppose they rise to our level. Let's also make things easy by imagining that nothing else happens to increase world consumption - that is, no other country increases its consumption, all national populations (including China's) remain unchanged and immigration ceases. China's catching up alone would roughly double world consumption rates. Oil consumption would increase by 106 percent, for instance, and world metal consumption by 94 percent.


    1. Concerns Rise with Water of Three Gorges Dam, NPR-ME Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts:
      Anthony Kuhn, NPR Rocky cliffs loom over the waters of the Little Three Gorges in Wushan County.
      Next year, China is expected to reach a milestone when the giant reservoir behind Three Gorges Dam on the Yangtze River reaches its maximum height.

      Beijing has long touted the dam - the biggest hydroelectric plant in the world -X as a way to stop flooding, increase river shipping and generate clean power.

      But in September, officials publicly admitted that the project could lead to environmental disasters, prompting speculation that China's leaders wanted to distance themselves from the project.

    2. Foolish Book Review: "The Origin of Wealth", The Motley Fool Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: The book builds on ideas from the Santa Fe Institute, and there are plenty of logical exercises inside to support evolution's central role in economics -- and in the strategies needed to survive a while longer. After all, as Beinhocker points out, only 18 of today's Forbes 100 companies were on the original list in 1917. And most of those have struggled just to survive, as only General Electric has outperformed the broader market over the last 90 years.

  6. So Many Crimes, and Reasons to Not Cooperate, NY Times Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts:
    Sylwia Kapuscinski for The New York Times
    As the most violent neighborhood in one of the nation's most dangerous cities, the Whitman Park section of Camden is on the front lines of the struggle with witness intimidation. An array of powerful forces converge here to discourage people from cooperating with the investigation of crimes - crimes committed against their own homes, their own neighbors, their own children.

    Drugs are sold openly from street corners and abandoned row houses. Gunfire is a neighborhood soundtrack. And the competing gangs that control Whitman Park have made it clear that the price for defying them is death.

    1. A Tale of Political Dirty Tricks Makes the Case for Election Reform, NY Times Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: In New Hampshire's hotly contested 2002 Senate race, Democratic get-out-the-vote phone banks were jammed with incoming calls on Election Day. The Republican John Sununu, won re-election by under 20,000 votes, and Allen Raymond, a Republican Party operative, went to jail for his role in the jamming.

      Mr. Raymond has now written a book about his experiences, "How to Rig an Election: Confessions of a Republican Operative." In it, he paints a picture of the corruption of modern politics that should leave no doubt about the creativity and cynicism of operatives like Mr. Raymond or the need for tough new election-reform legislation.

  7. A Lifesaving Checklist, NY Times Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: A year ago, researchers at Johns Hopkins University published the results of a program that instituted in nearly every intensive care unit in Michigan a simple five-step checklist designed to prevent certain hospital infections. It reminds doctors to make sure, for example, that before putting large intravenous lines into patients, they actually wash their hands and don a sterile gown and gloves. (...)

    Yet this past month, the Office for Human Research Protections shut the program down. (...) by introducing a checklist and tracking the results without written, informed consent from each patient and health-care provider, they had violated scientific ethics regulations.

  8. Stimulating Muscles May Improve Musician's Dystonia, Innovations-report Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: Therapy that stimulates the hand muscles may help treat the condition called musician's dystonia, a movement disorder that causes muscles spasms in musicians, according to a study (...). Musician's dystonia occurs in musicians who have practiced particular complicated movements for years. The muscle spasms are usually painless and generally occur only when playing the instrument. For the study, researchers applied low-amplitude vibration to the hand muscles in 24 people (...). Using transcranial magnetic stimulation, the researchers evaluated the reaction in the sensorimotor area of the brain back to the muscle during vibration of a single hand muscle. (...)

  9. Duetting Birds Found To Be Unfaithful, Nature News Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts:
    Birds like California towhees that sing together don't necessarily stick together.JIM ZIPP / SCIENCE PHOTO LIBRARY
    She found that although female birds sang with the same male every day, more than one-quarter of their chicks were not fathered by her 'husband'.

    "I've never caught a female in the act of cheating, they're very secretive about their trysts," says Benedict. But the duetting pairs copulate regularly together, she says.

    Ornithologists "perceived the beautiful harmonies of these birds as creating a sense of fidelity, but I suspected we were missing something", says Daniel Mennill of the University of Windsor in Ontario.

    1. How To Make A Zombie Cockroach, Nature News Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts:
      Sting in the brain: a toxic injection renders cockroaches submissive.Libersat
      Researchers discover how wasps' venom makes roaches their slaves.(...)

      The wasp, which lives in tropical regions of Africa, India and the Pacific Islands, relies on cockroaches for its grisly life cycle. But unlike many venomous predators, which paralyse their victims before eating them or dragging them back to their lair, the wasp's sting leaves the cockroach able to walk, but unable to initiate its own movement.


  10. Will Beetles Inherit The Earth? Evolutionary Study Reveals Their Long-term Success, ScienceDaily Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: Most modern-day groups of beetles have been around since the time of the dinosaurs and have been diversifying ever since, says new research. There are approximately 350,000 species of beetles on Earth, and probably millions more yet to be discovered, accounting for about 25% of all known life forms on the planet. The reason for this large number of beetle species has been debated by scientists for many years, but never resolved. Now a team of scientists has shown that large numbers of modern-day beetle lineages evolved very soon after the first beetles originated, and have persisted ever since. (...)

    1. A Short Introduction to the Basic Mechanisms of Complexity Increase in Evolution, arXiv Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Abstract: The four basic mechanisms of complexity increase, heteromapping, coupled selection, coarse graining, and hierarchization, are the inevitable course to complexity. The form of complexity, i.e. the specific property of entities, is the embodiment of evolution and hence the product of these basic mechanisms. The whole evolution is a gigantic hierarchy. The great difference between various evolutionary entities in the form and degree of complexity is only due to their different levels in the hierarchy.

  11. On the Optimality of the Standard Genetic Code: The Role of Stop Codons, arXiv Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Abstract: The genetic code markup is the assignment of stop codons. The standard genetic code markup ensures the maximum possible stability of genetic information with respect to two fault classes: frameshift and nonsense mutations. There are only 528 (about 1,3% of total number) optimal markups in the set of markups having 3 stop codons. Among the sets of markups with 1,2,...,8 stop codons, the standard case having 3 stop codons has maximum absolute number of optimal markups.

  12. What Factors Contribute To An Ownership Advantage?, Biol. Lett. Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: In most taxa, owners win fights when defending a territory against intruders. We calculated effect sizes for four factors that potentially contribute to an 'owner advantage'. We studied male fiddler crabs Uca mjoebergi, where owners won 92% of natural fights. Owners were not more successful because they were inherently better fighters (r=0.02). There was a small effect (r=0.18) of the owner's knowledge of territory quality (food availability) and a medium effect (r=0.29) of his having established relations with neighbours (duration of active tenure), but neither was statistically significant. (...)

    1. Adult Male Chimpanzees Don't Stray Far From The Home, ScienceDaily Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: When it comes to choosing a place to live, male chimpanzees in the wild don't stray far from home, according to a new report. The researchers found that adult male chimps out on their own tend to follow in their mother's footsteps, spending their days in the same familiar haunts where they grew up. Male chimpanzees are generally very social, but how they use space when they are alone might be critical to their survival, the researchers said. (...) They suspect that sticking to places they know well might give chimpanzees an advantage when searching for food. (...)

  13. Toward A Rosetta Stone For Microbes' Secret Language, Science Daily Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts:
    Decoding the chemical language of bacteria will help researchers fight antibiotic-resistant infections and dangerous biofilms (shown) that foul medical implants. (Credit: USDA)
    Scientists are on the verge of decoding the special chemical language that bacteria use to "talk" to each other, British researchers report. That achievement could lead to new treatments for antibiotic-resistant bacteria, including so-called superbugs that infect more than 90,000 people in the United States each year, they note. (...)

    Microbes release small molecules that enable millions of individuals in a population to coordinate their behavior.

    Disease-causing bacteria use this language to decide when to infect a person or other host.

  14. Drug Target To Stop Cancer Spread, BBC News Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts:
    Cancer cells can spread through the body
    A protein called Tes is able to block a second protein, Mena, from helping cancer cells "crawl" away from the initial tumour.

    The London Research Institute team says this knowledge should help in the design of new drug treatments to anchor a tumour in one site.

    "Cancer cells use many complex processes when they break away from their tumour and spread to other areas of the body", Dr Lesley Walker of Cancer Research UK


  15. Stranger That Fiction: Parallel Universes Beguile Science, PhysOrg.com Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: A staple of mind-bending science fiction, the possibility of multiple universes has long intrigued hard-nosed physicists, mathematicians and cosmologists too.

    We may not be able -- as least not yet -- to prove they exist, many serious scientists say, but there are plenty of reasons to think that parallel dimensions are more than figments of eggheaded imagination. The specter of shadow worlds has been thrown into relief by the December release of "The Golden Compass," a Hollywood blockbuster adapted from the first volume of Philip Pullman's classic sci-fi trilogy, "His Dark Materials". (...)


    1. A Lab Model Of The Early Universe, Nature News Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts:
      Can you model what happened after the Big Bang in your lab?
      When cooled to just 150 microkelvin above absolute zero, helium-3 becomes a superfluid and begins to take on some odd traits: ghostly 'quasi-particles' are formed that can flit effortlessly through the frigid liquid. And the entire system can undergo 'symmetry breaking' - a phenomenon also thought to have led to the creation of every force we see today except gravity. It also tends to settle into one of two phases, which physicists label A and B.

    2. Two Constants To Rule Us All, Nature News Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts:
      What units are needed to describe all this...?NASA
      Physicists whittle down the number of truly fundamental constants.

      How many physical constants does it take to describe the Universe? The answer, according to a team of physicists in Brazil, is just two.

      The two can be chosen, according to taste, from a list of three: the speed of light, the strength of gravity, and Planck's constant, which relates the energy to the frequency of a particle of light, (...).

      Once two constants have been chosen from that list, they say, those are the only parameters that need have units of measurement ascribed to them.

    3. Is Time Slowing Down?, New Scientist Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: It now seems that time could disappear from our universe - and we may already have found evidence of its forthcoming demise.

      When astronomers observed a decade ago that supernovae are apparently spreading apart faster as the universe ages, they assumed that something must be causing the expansion of the universe to speed up. But so far, nobody has been able to explain where the "dark energy" causing this acceleration comes from.


  16. Life, Information, Entropy, And Time: Vehicles For Semantic Inheritance, Complexity Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Author's Summary: The biosphere depends on two main fluxes, - of energy and of information. Attempts to bring both fluxes into the same thermodynamic formalism fail because one component of information transmission, the semantic content or "meaning of the message", cannot be evaluated using standard physical measurement. Recognition of this non-thermodynamic component brings into focus several areas considered problematic to science, but allows new insights into topics like biological complexity, emergence, consciousness, and evolution at organismal and cultural levels.

  17. Guiding A Self-Adjusting System Through Chaos, Complexity Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Abstract: The authors studied the parametric controls of self-adjusting systems with numerical models. The authors investigated the situation where the target dynamics changes slowly and passes through a chaotic region. The authors found that feedback destabilizes controls if the target is chaotic. If the control is unstable, the system migrates to the closest nonchaotic target, i.e., it adapts to the edge of chaos. For weak controls, the deviation between system dynamics and target is larger, but the system dynamics is less chaotic and therefore more predictable.
    • Source: Guiding A Self-Adjusting System Through Chaos, A. W. Hübler - hubler.alfredagmail.com, K. C. Phelps, DOI: 10.1002/cplx.20204, Complexity, Nov.-Dec. 2007, Online 2007/11/31
    • Contributed by Pritha Das - prithadas01ayahoo.com

  18. From Complex Conflicts To Stable Cooperation: Cases In Environment And Security, Complexity Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpts: Conflict is a dynamic and complex form of human interaction, often emerging from incompatible actions, values, and goals (...). Conflicts are an expression of and a contribution to system instability and may lead to chaotic escalation between adversaries, causing a breakdown of social and natural systems. To resolve conflicts, the actors can adjust their actions toward cooperatively stabilizing their interaction and form stable coalitions. To study the dynamics of conflict and the evolution of cooperation, we introduce an integrated framework for modeling the interaction of multiple actors who pursue objectives by allocating their resources to various action paths. (...)

    1. Systems Engineering Without An Engineer: Why We Need Systems Biology, Complexity Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpt: In this review, we address the justification for creating a new scientific discipline, and suggest possible goals for systems biology. We argue that systems biology is distinct from genomics and bioinformatics, as well as older disciplines such as medicine, evolutionary biology, and traditional molecular biology. Systems biology has the potential to address questions about the quantitative behavior and design of biological systems, which are not the central focus of other areas of biology. We discuss spontaneously arising biological oscillators as an example of a phenomenon that requires a systems-biological explanation. (...)

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

    1. Is It War? - The Presidential Candidates On Terrorism, Washington Post Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: It's not true that the Democrats view al-Qaeda as a threat best managed by law enforcement. Hillary Rodham Clinton and Barack Obama unambiguously define the fight against terrorist networks as a global war, and even John Edwards, (...) adds that "there is no question that we must confront terrorist groups such as al-Qaeda with the full force of our military might." The Democrats, however, downplay Islamic extremism, as opposed to terrorist networks, as a threat. Ms. Clinton even omits the word "Islam" from her discussion of terrorism.

    2. Stonewalled by the C.I.A., NY Times Next Article Bookmark and Share

      Excerpts: In a lunch meeting on Dec. 23, 2003, George Tenet, the C.I.A. director, told us point blank that we would have no such access. During the meeting, we emphasized to him that the C.I.A. should provide any documents responsive to our requests, even if the commission had not specifically asked for them. Mr. Tenet replied by alluding to several documents he thought would be helpful to us, but neither he, nor anyone else in the meeting, mentioned videotapes.

  20. Links & Snippets Next Article Bookmark and Share

    1. Other Publications Next Article Bookmark and Share

    2. Webcast Announcements Next Article Bookmark and Share

      1. 7th Intl Conf on Complex Systems (ICCS), Boston, MA, 07/10/28-11/02
      2. Reseau Nationale des Systemes Complexes , (in French), 2007
      3. World Economic Forum , Davos, Switzerland, 07/01/24-28
      4. TED Talks, TED Conferences LLC , since 2006
      5. Talking Robots: The PodCast on Robotics and AI, Ecole Polytechnique Federale de Lausanne, Switzerland, 06/11/03
      6. Potentials of Complexity Science for Business, Governments, and the Media 2006, Budapest, Hungary, 06/08/03-05
      7. 6th Intl Conf on Complex Systems (ICCS), Boston, MA, 06/06/25-30
      8. Artificial Life X, 10th Intl Conf on the Simulation and Synthesis of Living Systems, Bloomington, IN, USA. 2006/06/03-07
      9. 6th Understanding Complex Systems Symposium, Urbana-Champaign, Il, 06/05/15-18
      10. Ralph Abraham on Complexity Digest, , Calcutta, India, 05/12/27
      11. An Afternoon with Michael Crichton, Washington, 05/11/06
      12. Illuminating the Shadow of the Future, Ann Arbor, Mi 05/09/23-25
      13. Open Network of Centres of Excellence in Complex Systems - Brainstorming Meeting, Paris, France 05/09/19-23
      14. Complexity, Science & Society Conference 2005, U. Liverpool, UK 2005/09/11-14
      15. ECAL 2005 - VIIIth European Conference on Artificial Life, Canterbury, Kent, UK 2005/09/5-9
      16. T. Irene Sanders, Executive Director and Founder, The Washington Center for Complexity & Public Policy, 05/08/27, QuickTime video (10:38 min), Podcast
      17. North American Society for the Psychology of Sport and Physical Activity 2005 Conference, Virtual Conference Network, St. Pete's Beach, Florida, 05/06/09-11
      18. Understanding Complex Systems - Computational Complexity and Bioinformatics, Virtual Conference Network, Urbana-Champaign, Il, UIUC, 05/05/16-19
      19. Nonlinearity, Fluctuations, and Complexity, with a celebration of the 65th birthday of Gregoire Nicolis. , Complexity Session, Universite' Libre de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium, 05/03/16
      20. 1st European Conference on Complex Systems, Torino, Italy, 04/12/5-7
      21. From Autopoiesis to Neurophenomenology: A Tribute to Francisco Varela (1946-2001), Paris, France, 2004/06/18-20
      22. Evolutionary Epistemology, Language, and Culture, Brussels, Belgium, 04/05/26-28
      23. International Conference on Complex Systems 2004, Boston, 04/05/16-21
      24. Nonlinear Dynamics And Chaos: Lab Demonstrations, Strogatz, Steven H., Internet-First University Press, 1994
      25. CERN Webcast Service, Streamed videos of Archived Lectures and Live Events
      26. Dean LeBaron's Archive of Daily Video Commentary, Ongoing Since February 1998
      27. Edge Videos

    3. Conference Announcements Next Article Bookmark and Share

      1. Winter School 2008: Chemical Discrimination and Localization using Biologically Based Olfactory Processing, San Diego, CA, 08/01/10-12
      2. Evolution and Physics Concepts, Models and Applications, Bad Honnef, Germany, 08/01/21-23
      3. The 1st Conf on Artificial General Intelligence (AGI-08), Memphis, Tennessee, USA, 08/03/01-03
      4. The 3rd Intl Nonlinear Sciences Conference (INSC), Tokyo, Japan, 08/03/13-15
      5. 19th European Meeting On Cybernetics And Systems Research, (EMCSR 2008), Vienna, Austria, 08/03/25-28
      6. 2nd KES Intl Symp on Agent and Multi-Agent Systems : Technologies and Applications, Incheon, Korea, 08/03/26-28
      7. 2nd Applied Neuroscience Meeting, Monterrey, Mexico, 08/04/03-06
      8. Fumee 1 - 1St Futures Meeting - Understanding Anticipatory Systems, Rovereto (Italy), 08/04/10-12
      9. 1st Intl Conf on Social Entrepreneurship & Complexity, Garden City, NY, USA, 08/04/10-12
      10. CHAOS2008 Chaotic Modeling and Simulation International Conference, Chania, Crete, Greece, 08/06/03-06
      11. International Conference on Chaos, Complexity & Conflict, Omaha, NE, 08/06/05-07
      12. Cambridge Healthtech Institute's Tenth Annual... Applying Systems Biology, San Francisco, CA, 08/06/09-11
      13. 9nd Intl Mathematica Symposium, Maastricht, The Netherlands, 08/06/20-24
      14. The 14th Intl Conf on Auditory Display (ICAD), Paris, France, 08/06/24-27
      15. The 12th World Multi-Conf on Systemics, Cybernetics and Informatics: WMSCI 2008, Orlando, Florida, USA, 08/06/29-07/02
      16. From Animals To Animats 10 - The 10th Intl Conf on the Simulation Of Adaptive Behavior (SAB'08), Osaka, Japan, 08/07/07-12
      17. Stochastic Resonance 2008, Perugia, Italy, 08/08/17-21
      18. 1st Intl Workshop on Nonlinear Dynamics and Synchronization (INDS'08), Klagenfurt, Austria, 08/07/18-19

    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
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        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:
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        Guilderland, NY 12084 USA
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        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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