Month: February 2017

Control of finite critical behaviour in a small-scale social system

Many adaptive systems sit near a tipping or critical point. For systems near a critical point small changes to component behaviour can induce large-scale changes in aggregate structure and function. Criticality can be adaptive when the environment is changing, but entails reduced robustness through sensitivity. This tradeoff can be resolved when criticality can be tuned. We address the control of finite measures of criticality using data on fight sizes from an animal society model system (Macaca nemestrina, n=48). We find that a heterogeneous, socially organized system, like homogeneous, spatial systems (flocks and schools), sits near a critical point; the contributions individuals make to collective phenomena can be quantified; there is heterogeneity in these contributions; and distance from the critical point (DFC) can be controlled through biologically plausible mechanisms exploiting heterogeneity. We propose two alternative hypotheses for why a system decreases the distance from the critical point.

 

Control of finite critical behaviour in a small-scale social system
Bryan C. Daniels, David C. Krakauer & Jessica C. Flack
Nature Communications 8, Article number: 14301 (2017)
doi:10.1038/ncomms14301

Source: www.nature.com

THE GOLDEN AGE – How to Build a Better Digital Society

As it turns out, we are in the middle of a revolution – the digital revolution. This revolution isn’t just about technology: it will reinvent most business models and transform all economic sectors, but, it will also fundamentally change the organization of our society. The best way to imagine this transition may be the metamorphosis of a caterpillar into a butterfly. In a few years, the world will look very different…

 

The Golden Age: How to Build a Better Digital Society

Dirk Helbing

Source: futurict.blogspot.mx

See Also: Chapter 1: At the Edge
http://futurict.blogspot.nl/2017/02/chapter-1-of-golden-ae.html

Don’t fear superintelligent AI

New tech spawns new anxieties, says scientist and philosopher Grady Booch, but we don’t need to be afraid an all-powerful, unfeeling AI. Booch allays our worst (sci-fi induced) fears about superintelligent computers by explaining how we’ll teach, not program, them to share our human values. Rather than worry about an unlikely existential threat, he urges us to consider how artificial intelligence will enhance human life.

Source: www.ted.com

Network Medicine: Complex Systems in Human Disease and Therapeutics

Big data, genomics, and quantitative approaches to network-based analysis are combining to advance the frontiers of medicine as never before. Network Medicine introduces this rapidly evolving field of medical research, which promises to revolutionize the diagnosis and treatment of human diseases. With contributions from leading experts that highlight the necessity of a team-based approach in network medicine, this definitive volume provides readers with a state-of-the-art synthesis of the progress being made and the challenges that remain.

Medical researchers have long sought to identify single molecular defects that cause diseases, with the goal of developing silver-bullet therapies to treat them. But this paradigm overlooks the inherent complexity of human diseases and has often led to treatments that are inadequate or fraught with adverse side effects. Rather than trying to force disease pathogenesis into a reductionist model, network medicine embraces the complexity of multiple influences on disease and relies on many different types of networks: from the cellular-molecular level of protein-protein interactions to correlational studies of gene expression in biological samples. The authors offer a systematic approach to understanding complex diseases while explaining network medicine’s unique features, including the application of modern genomics technologies, biostatistics and bioinformatics, and dynamic systems analysis of complex molecular networks in an integrative context.

By developing techniques and technologies that comprehensively assess genetic variation, cellular metabolism, and protein function, network medicine is opening up new vistas for uncovering causes and identifying cures of disease.

Source: www.amazon.com

Seafood prices reveal impacts of a major ecological disturbance

Coastal hypoxia is a growing problem worldwide, but economic consequences for fisheries are largely unknown. We provide evidence that hypoxia causes economic effects on a major fishery that was once the most valuable fishery in America. Our analysis is also a breakthrough in causal inference for coupled human-natural systems. Although establishing causality with observational data is always challenging, feedbacks across the human and natural systems amplify these challenges and explain why linking hypoxia to fishery losses has been elusive. We offer an alternative approach using a market counterfactual that is immune to contamination from feedbacks in the coupled system. Natural resource prices can thus be a means to assess the significance of an ecological disturbance.

Source: www.pnas.org