Month: November 2016

Minorities report: optimal incentives for collective intelligence

Collective intelligence is the ability of a group to perform more effectively than any individual alone. Diversity among group members is a key condition for the emergence of collective intelligence, but maintaining diversity is challenging in the face of social pressure to imitate one’s peers. We investigate the role incentives play in maintaining useful diversity through an evolutionary game-theoretic model of collective prediction. We show that market-based incentive systems produce herding effects, reduce information available to the group and suppress collective intelligence. In response, we propose a new incentive scheme that rewards accurate minority predictions, and show that this produces optimal diversity and collective predictive accuracy. We conclude that real-world systems should reward those who have demonstrated accuracy when majority opinion has been in error.

Richard P. Mann, Dirk Helbing

Source: arxiv.org

A Data Driven Network Approach to Rank Countries Production Diversity and Food Specialization

By Chengyi Tu, Joel Carr & Samir Suweis

The easy access to large data sets has allowed for leveraging methodology in network physics and complexity science to disentangle patterns and processes directly from the data, leading to key insights in the behavior of systems. Here we use country specific food production data to study binary and weighted topological properties of the bipartite country-food production matrix. This country-food production matrix can be: 1) transformed into overlap matrices which embed information regarding shared production of products among countries, and or shared countries for individual products, 2) identify subsets of countries which produce similar commodities or subsets of commodities shared by a given country allowing for visualization of correlations in large networks, and 3) used to rank country fitness (the ability to produce a diverse array of products weighted on the type of food commodities) and food specialization (quantified on the number of countries producing a specific food product weighted on their fitness). Our results show that, on average, countries with high fitness produce both low and high specializion food commodities, whereas nations with low fitness tend to produce a small basket of diverse food products, typically comprised of low specializion food commodities.

Source: journals.plos.org

Science of the World Wide Web

Ten years ago, Wikipedia was still in its infancy (and totally dismissed by the establishment), Facebook was still restricted to university users, Twitter was in beta testing, and improving search capabilities was the topic that dominated Web conference research agendas. There were virtually no smartphones, online surveillance of activity and data storage was largely unknown beyond security services, and no one knew that being a data scientist was one day going to be “the sexiest job in the world”

Science of the World Wide Web
James Hendler, Wendy Hall
Science 11 Nov 2016:
Vol. 354, Issue 6313, pp. 703-704
DOI: 10.1126/science.aai9150

Source: science.sciencemag.org

Shaking up the Tree of Life

In 2010 a comparison between a Neandertal genome and genomes from people today turned up evidence of ancient liaisons, a discovery that belied the common idea that animal species can’t hybridize or, if they do, will produce infertile offspring—think mules. Such reproductive isolation is part of the classic definition of a species. This discovery brought credence to other work in plants, Darwin’s finches in the Galápagos Islands, tropical butterflies, mosquitoes, and a few other animals showing that hybridization was not just common, but also important in shaping evolution. The techniques that revealed the Neandertal and Denisovan legacy in our own genome are now making it possible to peer into the genomic histories of many organisms to check for interbreeding. As more examples are discovered, researchers are questioning the definition of species and rethinking whether the tree of life is really a “net” of life.

Shaking up the Tree of Life
Elizabeth Pennisi
Science 18 Nov 2016:
Vol. 354, Issue 6314, pp. 817-821
DOI: 10.1126/science.354.6314.817

Source: science.sciencemag.org

Circularity and the Micro-Macro-Difference

Context: Referring to a recent proposition by Kauffman about the “fundamental nature of circularity in cybernetics and in scientific work in general,” I try to advance this insight with the help of system scientific concepts and a computational model. Problem: Often circularity seems to be taken as a metaphor that does not provide a firm epistemological base that fosters analysis. Method: The methodology builds on mathematics, computer-based modeling, and reasoning. Results: By building on conceptual suggestions for grasping the micro-macro difference of complex systems in terms of computational power, circularity can be conceived of as an emerging macro-level phenomenon. Implications: I show that the seemingly irritating – and traditionally evaded – concept of circularity is a fundamental and ubiquitous phenomenon in complex systems that can be grasped on a firm physical basis open to computational analysis. The proposal could support constructivist reasoning and help to eventually bridge the disconcerting gap between the humanities and natural sciences. Constructivist content: Circularity is a fundamental principle in the conception of second-order cybernetics and in particular in the observation of observing systems, as suggested by von Foerster. Trying to set it up on a firm analytical basis could advance the constructivist approach and further support it in becoming the contemporary scientific epistemology it deserves to be.

Füllsack M. (2016) Circularity and the Micro-Macro-Difference. Constructivist Foundations 12(1): 1–10. Available at http://constructivist.info/12/1/001.fuellsack

Source: www.univie.ac.at