Complexity Digest 2009.09

2009/04/23

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

Contributing Editors Wanted
Interested members of the complexity community, please send an e-mail to editor@comdig.org . The role of contributing editors is to monitor potential sources of material for ComDig and submit content for its inclusion in ComDig issues.

For individual e-mail subscriptions go to Subscriptions.
Previous issue 2009.08 | Next issue 2009.10

Content

  1. Universality of Rank-Ordering Distributions in the Arts and Sciences, PLoS ONE
  2. Can evolution explain how minds work?, Nature
  3. The architecture of mutualistic networks minimizes competition and increases biodiversity, Nature
  4. Final warning from a sceptical prophet, Nature
  5. The Role of the Corporation in Supporting Local Development, The SoL e-Journal
  6. This title is false, Nature
  7. Leverage: The Root of All Financial Turmoil, Science
  8. Quantum chemistry: The little molecule that could, Nature
  9. Developmental biology: Two by two, Nature
  10. Stochastic cellular automata model of neural networks, arXiv
  11. A quantum probability explanation for violations of ‘rational’ decision theory, Proc. R. Soc. B
  12. Dialogue games that agents play within a society, Artificial Intelligence
  13. Big Brother has evolved, Nature
  14. Fusion's Great Bright Hope, Science
  15. Coevolution of competing systems: cooperation and inhibition, arXiv
  16. Learning, Evolution, and Population Dynamics, Advances in Complex Systems
  17. Time to sequence the 'red and the dead', Nature News
  18. Obesity: Be cool, lose weight, Nature
  19. Where Is My Quantum Computer?, Science
  20. Links & Snippets
    1. Other Publications
    2. Webcast Announcements
    3. Conference Announcements
    4. Other Announcements

  1. Universality of Rank-Ordering Distributions in the Arts and Sciences, PLoS ONE Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: Searching for generic behaviors has been one of the driving forces leading to a deep understanding and classification of diverse phenomena. Usually a starting point is the development of a phenomenology based on observations. Such is the case for power law distributions encountered in a wealth of situations coming from physics, geophysics, biology, lexicography as well as social and financial networks. This finding is however restricted to a range of values outside of which finite size corrections are often invoked. Here we uncover a universal behavior of the way in which elements of a system are distributed according to their rank with respect to a given property, valid for the full range of values, regardless of whether or not a power law has previously been suggested (...)

  2. Can evolution explain how minds work?, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt:
    J. FIELD
    Human societies have long used the capability of argumentation and dialogue to overcome and resolve conflicts that may arise within their communities. Today, there is an increasing level of interest in the application of such dialogue games within artificial agent societies. In particular, within the field of multi-agent systems, this theory of argumentation and dialogue games has become instrumental in designing rich interaction protocols and in providing agents with a means to manage and resolve conflicts.

  3. The architecture of mutualistic networks minimizes competition and increases biodiversity, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: These networks have been found to be highly nested5, with the more specialist species interacting only with proper subsets of the species that interact with the more generalist. We show that nestedness reduces effective interspecific competition and enhances the number of coexisting species. Furthermore, we show that a nested network will naturally emerge if new species are more likely to enter the community where they have minimal competitive load. Nested networks seem to occur in many biological and social contexts, suggesting that our results are relevant in a wide range of fields.

  4. Final warning from a sceptical prophet, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: In The Vanishing Face Of Gaia, Lovelock argues that model projections of the climate a century ahead are of little use. The models of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) extrapolate from a smooth trend of warming, yet the real climate system, complex and fully coupled to the biology of land and ocean, is unlikely to change in this simple way. It is more likely to flip from one state to another, with non-linear tipping points that the IPCC models are too simplistic to capture. Lovelock fears that the climate will shift to a new and considerably hotter regime, and that once underway, this shift will be irreversible.

  5. The Role of the Corporation in Supporting Local Development, The SoL e-Journal Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Summary: As a community, we were fortunate to have a tangible experience of "Bridging the Gulf" between "us" and "them" last April when about 400 people from around the world convened in Oman at SoL's 3rd Global Forum. At the Forum, Nobel Prize winner Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Grameen Bank, joined a diverse panel of SoL members from across sectors and around the world to look at the ways in which business can be reframed in order to help the poor. Taking a true systems perspective, Muhammad Yunus related the story behind Grameen Bank and shared his concept of "social business." Moderated by social researcher Laurent Marbacher, the panel also explored the idea of what human beings are capable of doing for local development, as well as how systems can enhance our capacities so that they can flourish. That conversation is summarized here as "The Role of the Corporation in Supporting Local Development."

  6. This title is false, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: The [paradoxical] result, like a dog chasing its tail, should be familiar to anyone who has thought about a gene network or biological process. Common descriptions of biological interactions, such as 'This gene represses itself' or 'gene A activates gene B. Gene B inhibits gene A', are similarly self-referential, potentially causing endless cycles.
    • Source: This title is false, Mark Isalan & Matthew Morrison, DOI: 10.1038/458969a, Nature 458, 969, 2009/04/22

  7. Leverage: The Root of All Financial Turmoil, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: During the 1990s, physicists flocked to Wall Street and other financial hubs, eager to turn their analytical skills and phenomenological mindset to the problem of making a killing. Now that the world's stock markets are in retreat, they've turned to explaining why markets crash. According to one new analysis, leverageâ€"the practice by hedge funds and other investors of borrowing money to buy investmentsâ€"is the root of many nettlesome properties of financial markets that classical economics cannot explain, including a propensity to crash.

  8. Quantum chemistry: The little molecule that could, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: Yet the simplest molecules of all, the diatomics, which have a mere two atoms, still present puzzles and surprises. A case in point is the beautiful experiment by Bendkowsky et al., described on page 1005 of this issue. The authors used the delicate techniques of ultracold atomic physics to create and detect molecules made up of two rubidium atoms that are bound together by a ghostly quantum-mechanical force field at distances as large as 100 nanometres â€" greater than the size of a small virus.

  9. Developmental biology: Two by two, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: This is not the first time that these villagers have sacrificed their body fluids for science. Mohammad Pur Umri has become somewhat famous, not for the milk or mustard that provides the villagers with their livelihood, but for its prolific production of identical â€" monozygotic â€" twins. Globally, only 1 in every 250 to 300 births are identical twins. In Umri, roughly one in ten is of this type, births that the villagers â€" including the twin village leaders â€" call "gifts from God".

  10. Stochastic cellular automata model of neural networks, arXiv Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Abstract: We propose a new class of stochastic dynamical models of neural networks with complex architectures enabling us to describe activation of neural networks by an external stimulation, pacemakers or due to spontaneous activity. These models have a complex phase diagram with self-organized active neural states, hybrid phase transitions, and a rich array of activities including decaying and stable oscillations, stochastic resonance, and avalanches. We find that even networks of 50 neurons reveal oscillations remarkably robust against fluctuations which are generally strong in small systems.

  11. A quantum probability explanation for violations of ‘rational’ decision theory, Proc. R. Soc. B Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: Two experimental tasks in psychology, the two-stage gambling game and the Prisoner's Dilemma game, show that people violate the sure thing principle of decision theory. These paradoxical findings have resisted explanation by classical decision theory for over a decade. A quantum probability model, based on a Hilbert space representation and Schrödinger's equation, provides a simple and elegant explanation for this behaviour. (...)

  12. Dialogue games that agents play within a society, Artificial Intelligence Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: Human societies have long used the capability of argumentation and dialogue to overcome and resolve conflicts that may arise within their communities. Today, there is an increasing level of interest in the application of such dialogue games within artificial agent societies. In particular, within the field of multi-agent systems, this theory of argumentation and dialogue games has become instrumental in designing rich interaction protocols and in providing agents with a means to manage and resolve conflicts. However, to date, much of the existing literature focuses on formulating theoretically sound and complete models for multi-agent systems. Nonetheless, in so doing, it has tended to overlook the computational implications of applying such models in agent societies, especially ones with complex social structures. (...)
    • Source: Dialogue games that agents play within a society, Nishan C. Karunatillake, Nicholas R. Jennings, Iyad Rahwan, Peter McBurney, DOI: 10.1016/j.artint.2009.02.002, Artificial Intelligence Volume 173, Issues 9-10, Pages 935-981, 2009/06

  13. Big Brother has evolved, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: Although CCTV is passive â€" you get spotted only if you are in front of a camera â€" other tools now offer constant surveillance. They are best described as human-tracking systems: devices that allow the electronic monitoring of individuals 24 hours a day, using geographic information systems (GIS), Global Positioning System (GPS) receivers and two-way communication. The technology has been around for a while. Courier companies, for example, use tracking systems to monitor goods in transit. What is new is the extent to which they are being used to monitor the movement of people, in some cases without their knowledge.

  14. Fusion's Great Bright Hope, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: The building housing it is 10 stories high and covers an area the size of three football fields; for a very brief instant, its beams deliver a power of 500 terawatts, more than the power-generating capacity of the entire United States.
    If all goes according to plan, some time in 2010 the power of those beams will be directed at a small beryllium sphere filled with hydrogen isotopes. The resulting implosion will crush the hydrogen to a temperature and pressure higher than in the core of the sun. If NIF's scientists get everything right, the hydrogen isotopes will do what they do in the sun: fuse together into helium nuclei and release a huge store of energy.
    • Source: Fusion's Great Bright Hope, Daniel Clery, DOI: 10.1126/science.324.5925.326, Science Vol. 324. no. 5925, pp. 326 - 330, 2009/04/17

  15. Coevolution of competing systems: cooperation and inhibition, arXiv Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: Using a set of heterogeneous competing systems with intra-system cooperation and inter-system unfair competition, we show how the coevolution of the system parameters (degree of cooperation and unfair competition) depends on the external supply of resources. This kind of interactions are found in social, economic, ecological and biochemical systems; as an illustration we consider the competition between drug-selling gangs.

  16. Learning, Evolution, and Population Dynamics, Advances in Complex Systems Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: We study a complementarity game as a systematic tool for the investigation of the interplay between individual optimization and population effects and for the comparison of different strategy and learning schemes. The game randomly pairs players from opposite populations. It is symmetric at the individual level, but has many equilibria that are more or less favorable to the members of the two populations. Which of these equilibria is then attained is decided by the dynamics at the population level. (...)

  17. Time to sequence the 'red and the dead', Nature News Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: "Now it is possible to entertain sequencing the genomes of other extinct and endangered species, and the benefits could be huge." Referring to the 'Red List' of highly endangered species drawn up by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), Schuster suggests that researchers should plan for sequencing "the red and the dead: a suite of carefully chosen endangered and extinct species."

  18. Obesity: Be cool, lose weight, Nature Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: To lose weight, would you rather diet, exercise or subject yourself to cool temperatures? The last choice is not such an odd one, as adult humans have brown fat tissue that burns calories in response to cold.

  19. Where Is My Quantum Computer?, Science Next Article Bookmark and Share

    Excerpt: The quantum computer is already here. Demonstration versions are available from several companies (1, 2), and high-performance versions have been (3) and are currently being (4) constructed. Although these devices are referred to as quantum cryptography or quantum key distribution systems (5), they operate on similar principles as does a quantum computer.
    • Source: Where Is My Quantum Computer?, P. Hemmer and J. Wrachtrup, DOI: 10.1126/science.1170912, Science Vol. 324. no. 5926, pp. 473 - 474, 2009/04/24

  20. Links & Snippets Next Article Bookmark and Share

    1. Other Publications Next Article Bookmark and Share

      1. Quality and safety are rarely simple, David P Stevens, 2009/04/03, Qual. Saf. Health Care 2009;18;82-83, DOI: 10.1136/qshc.2009.032797
      2. Improving the simple, complicated and complex realities of community-acquired pneumonia, S K Liu, K Homa, J R Butterly, K B Kirkland and P B Batalden, 2009/04/03, Qual. Saf. Health Care 2009;18;93-98, DOI: 10.1136/qshc.2008.028514
      3. Female Fertility and Longevity, Josh Mitteldorf, 2009/04/11, arXiv:0904.1815
      4. On Pattern and Evolution, Frederick W. Cummings, 2009/04/20, arXiv:0904.3111

    2. Webcast Announcements Next Article Bookmark and Share

      1. Memorial Service for Dr Gottfried Mayer, Founding Editor Complexity Digest, Taipei, Taiwan (1954-2009). Video [RM], 09/02/13

      2. Making Connections: In Memory and Celebration of the Life of Dr. Gottfried Mayer (1954-2009). Video [RM] [MPG], 09/02/13

      3. Eulogy for Gottfried Mayer by Dean LeBaron [WMV, 25 Mb], [RM, 10 Mb], 09/02/10

      4. Can Ants Solve Traffic Jams?, Danielle Parsons, Slatev.com, 08/07/22

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

    3. Conference Announcements Next Article Bookmark and Share

      1. 7th Annual Bio-IT World Conference & Expo, 09/04/27-29, Boston, MA
      2. Morphogenesis in Living Systems, Paris, France, 09/05/14-16
      3. 2nd Chaotic Modeling and Simulation International Conference (CHAOS2009), Chania, Crete, Greece, 09/06/01-05
      4. International Workshop on Coping with Crises in Complex Socio-Economic Systems, Zurich, Switzerland, 09/06/8-13
      5. NECSI Summer School, Cambridge, MA, USA, 09/06/08-26
      6. 20th Intl Conf on Noise and Fluctuations, Pisa, Italy, 09/06/14-19
      7. First International Workshop on Morphogenetic Engineering, Paris, France, 09/06/19
      8. 17th Intl Workshop on Nonlinear Dynamics of Electronic Systems (NDES 2009), Rapperswil, Switzerland, 09/06/21-24
      9. First Latin American Conference on Computing and Philosophy, Mexico City, Mexico, June 22-23, 2009
      10. Emergence in Chemical Systems, , Anchorage, Alaska, 09/06/22-26
      11. From Systemic Thinking to Systems Design and Systems Practice, Xanthi, Greece, 09/06/24-27
      12. International Conference on Computational Aspects of Social Networks - CASoN 2009, Fontainebleau, France, 09/06/24-27
      13. CCSA 2009 The 3rd International Conference on Complex Systems and Applications, University of Le Havre, France. 09/06/29-07/02
      14. 7th Intl Conf on Computing, Communications and Control Technologies: CCCT 2009, Orlando, Florida, USA. 09/07/10-13
      15. Complex Systems and Social Simulations, Budapest, Hungary, 09/07/13-24
      16. Second International Workshop on Nonlinear Dynamics and Synchronization (INDS'09), Klagenfurt, Austria, 09/07/20-21
      17. The 19th Annual Intl Conf Society for Chaos Theory in Psychology & Life Sciences , Milwaukee, WI USA, 09/07/23-25
      18. 2009 Intl Conf of the System Dynamics Society, Albuquerque, New Mexico, 09/07/26-30
      19. Swarm Cognition Workshop, Amsterdam, The Netherlands, 09/07/29
      20. 5th Intl Conf on Fractals and Dynamic Systems in Geoscience, Townsville, Australia, 09/08/13-14
      21. Darwin Meets von Neumann: European Conference on Artificial Life 2009, Budapest, Hungary, 09/09/13-16
      22. IEEE International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing Systems , San Francisco, California, 09/09/14-18
      23. 6th Conference of the European Social Simulation Association, Guilford, UK, 09/09/14-18
      24. European Conference on Complex Systems 2009 (ECCS'09), University of Warwick, UK, 09/09/21-25
      25. International Workshop on Natural Computing, Himeji, Japan, 09/09/23-25
      26. The 2009 International Conference on Adaptive & Intelligent Systems (ICAIS'09), Klagenfurt, Austria, 09/09/24-26
      27. Complexity Theories of Cities have come of Age, Delft Netherlands, 09/09/24-27
      28. Natural and Biomimetic Mechanosensing, Dresden, Germany, 09/10/26-28
      29. The 11th International Symposium on Stabilization, Safety, and Security of Distributed Systems (SSS 2009) , Lyon, France, 09/11/03-06
      30. 9th International Conference on Intelligent Systems Design and Applications, Pisa, Italy, 09/11/30-12/02
      31. World Congress on Nature & Biologically Inspired Computing (NaBIC 2009), Coimbatore, India, 09/12/9-11
      32. 5th Biennial Convention about the philosophical, epistemological, and methodological implications of the Theory of Complexity, Havana, Cuba, 10/01/6-8

    4. Other Announcements Bookmark and Share

      • Postdoc positions: The C3 - Centro de Ciencias de la Complejidad, a new interdisciplinary, inter-institutional research center based at the Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico (UNAM) plans to have several openings for postdoctoral candidates in the coming months. The center currently has affiliated to it more than 50 researchers and 40 students from all the major scientific disciplines. The main research topics at the moment are: Genetic networks and Systems Biology, Ecological Complexity, Social Complexity and Computational Intelligence. Salary will be in the region of 20-25,000 pesos per month.
        Interested candidates are asked to send a CV, a statement of research interests and the names of at least three potential referees to:
        Dr. Chris Stephens (Ecological Complexity and Computational Intelligence) stephens@nucleares.unam.mx
        Dra. Elena Alvarez-Buylla (Systems Biology) eabuylla@gmail.com
        Dr. Gustavo Martinez-Mekler (Social Complexity and other areas) mekler@ce.fis.unam.mx

      • New Book: Complexity: A Guided Tour, by Melanie Mitchell. Oxford University Press, 2009.
        What enables individually simple insects like ants to act with such precision and purpose as a group? How do trillions of individual neurons produce something as extraordinarily complex as consciousness? What is it that guides self-organizing structures like the immune system, the World Wide Web, the global economy, and the human genome? These are just a few of the fascinating and elusive questions that the science of complexity seeks to answer.
        In this remarkably accessible and companionable book, leading complex systems scientist Melanie Mitchell provides an intimate, detailed tour of the sciences of complexity, a broad set of efforts that seek to explain how large-scale complex, organized, and adaptive behavior can emerge from simple interactions among myriad individuals. Comprehending such systems requires a wholly new approach, one that goes beyond traditional scientific reductionism and that re-maps long-standing disciplinary boundaries. Based on her work at the Santa Fe Institute and drawing on its interdisciplinary strategies, Mitchell brings clarity to the workings of complexity across a broad range of biological, technological, and social phenomena, seeking out the general principles or laws that apply to all of them. She explores as well the relationship between complexity and evolution, artificial intelligence, computation, genetics, information processing, and many other fields.
        Richly illustrated and vividly written, Complexity: A Guided Tour offers a comprehensive and eminently comprehensible overview of the ideas underlying complex systems science, the current research at the forefront of this field, and the prospects for the field's contribution to solving some of the most important scientific questions of our time.


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