Complexity Digest 2002.33 August-17-2002

 Archive:  http://www.comdig.org, European Mirror:  http://www.comdig.de

Asian Mirror:  http://www.phil.pku.edu.cn/resguide/comdig/ (Chinese GB-Code)

"I think the next century will be the century of complexity." Stephen Hawking

  1. From Animals To Animats: Simulation of Adaptive Behavior 7 (SAB'02),Video/Audio Reports
  2. Simple Solution to Stock Market Woes: Kill Corporate Dividend Tax, Finance & Investment
    1. Diagrams To Help You Make Sense Of It All, Wall Street Follies
  3. Food & The Future, Nature
    1. Agricultural Sustainability And Intensive Production Practices, Nature
    2. Assessing The Risks Associated With New Agricultural Practices, Nature
    3. Towards Sustainability In World Fisheries, Nature
    4. Evolution, Consequences And Future Of Plant And Animal Domestication, Nature
  4. Science and Sustainability, Science
    1. Economic Reasons for Conserving Wild Nature, Science
    2. Water Scarcity: Forecasting the Future With Spotty Data, Science
    3. Science, Sustainability, and the Human Prospect, Science
  5. Europeans Try Air Fares Without the Fine Print, NYTimes
  6. The Neurology Of Social Cognition, Brain
  7. Two-level Evolution of Foraging Agent Communities, Biosystems
  8. An fMRI Study Of Intentional And Unintentional Violations Of Social Norms, Brain
  9. Neural Correlates Of Self-Reflection, Brain
  10. Precise Firing Events Are Conserved Across Neurons, J. Neuroscience
  11. Environmental Stimulus Perception and Control of Circadian Clocks. , Cur Op Neurobiology
    1. Effects Of Aging On Central And Peripheral Mammalian Clocks, PNAS
  12. A New Look At An Old Visual System: The Compound Eyes, J. Neurobiology
  13. Net Visionaries Seek New Vistas, Wired
  14. Reassessing The Evidence For The Earliest Traces Of Life, Nature
  15. How Many Species Of Prokaryotes Are There?, PNAS
    1. Estimating Prokaryotic Diversity And Its Limits, PNAS
  16. West Nile and Its Lessons for Doctors, NYTimes
  17. Surface-Responsive Materials, Science
    1. How Surface Topography Relates to Materials' Properties, Science
  18. Comment On "Experimental Violations Of Second Law Of Thermodynamics, arXiv
    1. Concentration Fluctuations In Mesoscopic Oscillating Chemical System, PNAS
  19. Complex Challenges: Global Terrorist Networks
    1. How Al Qaeda Slipped Away, Newsweek
    2. Hamdi Case Tests U.S. Government Resolve And Constitutional Limits, AP/CNN
    3. The Odds of That, NYTimes
    4. Anthrax Inquiry Draws Protest From Scientist's Lawyers, NYTimes
  20. Links & Snippets
    1. Other Publications
    2. Webcast Announcements
    3. Conference Announcements

1. From Animals To Animats: Simulation of Adaptive Behavior 7 (SAB'02),Video/Audio Reports

Contributing Editor's Note: The Seventh International Conference on the Simulation of Adaptive Behavior took place in Edinburgh, UK, last August from the 4th to the 11th. We present material with the permission of the organizers and speakers of the invited talks (including the ones of the Second Inernational Workshop on Epigenetic Robotics) and also of other talks related to Complexity.

 

2. A Simple Solution to Stock Market Woes: Kill the Corporate Dividend Tax, Finance & Investment, Wharton

Excerpt: On August 13, 2002, George W. Bush hosted the President’s Economic Forum at Baylor University with the stated goal to “foster discussion of new ideas for economic growth.” On top of his agenda should be the elimination of one of the most detrimental taxes in our economy – the corporate dividend tax. The sharp decline in cash dividends on common stocks over the past decade has been the major cause of the lack of earnings credibility and the woes bedeviling the stock market.

 

Excerpt: ImClone, Martha Stewart, Merrill Lynch, Enron, Arthur Anderson, Global Crossing, Tyco, WorldCom, Adelphia, et. al.

Updated with new information as of August 15 (Enron round-trip trades, Grubman resignation)

 

3. Food & The Future, Nature

Excerpt: Bovine spongiform encephalopathy, genetically modified (GM) crop plants, antibiotics and hormones in animal feed, the impact of agriculture on biodiversity, fast food and globalization, famine in Africa - food is news. One strand unites these issues,(…): 'sustainability'. The world's population continues to grow, yet resources are finite. Our mission is to squeeze more crops from the same patch of ground, while preserving that patch in a state fit to pass on to further hungry generations. The quest for sustainability is the theme of this Insight.

 

Excerpts: A doubling in global food demand projected for the next 50 years poses huge challenges for the sustainability both of food production and of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems (…). Agriculturalists are the principal managers of global useable lands and will shape, perhaps irreversibly, the surface of the Earth in the coming decades. New incentives and policies for ensuring the sustainability of agriculture and ecosystem services will be crucial if we are to meet the demands of improving yields without compromising environmental integrity or public health.

 

Excerpt: One key challenge for the twenty-first century is how to produce the food we need, yet ensure the landscape we want. Genetically modified crops have focused our attention on how to answer this question for one part of agriculture. The same principles could be applied to assess environmental impacts of future land-use change in a much broader context.

 

Excerpts: Fisheries have rarely been 'sustainable'. Rather, fishing has induced serial depletions, long masked by improved technology, geographic expansion and exploitation of previously spurned species lower in the food web. With global catches declining since the late 1980s, continuation of present trends will lead to supply shortfall, for which aquaculture cannot be expected to compensate, and may well exacerbate. Reducing fishing capacity to appropriate levels will require strong reductions of subsidies. Zoning the oceans into unfished marine reserves and areas with limited levels of fishing effort would allow sustainable fisheries, (…).

  • Towards Sustainability In World Fisheries, Daniel Pauly, Villy Christensen, Sylvie Guénette, Tony J. Pitcher, U. Rashid Sumaila, Carl J. Walters, R. Watson & Dirk Zeller, Nature 418, 689 - 695 (2002); doi:10.1038/nature01017

 

Excerpt: Domestication interests us as the most momentous change in Holocene human history. Why did it operate on so few wild species, in so few geographic areas? Why did people adopt it at all, why did they adopt it when they did, and how did it spread? The answers to these questions determined the remaking of the modern world, as farmers spread at the expense of hunter-gatherers and of other farmers.

 

4. Science and Sustainability, Science

Excerpts: When the World Summit on Sustainable Development convenes in Johannesburg, South Africa, at the end of August, it will serve as a powerful reminder that science and technology are at the core of both the world's greatest problems and its most promising opportunities. The summit also will emphasize that countries lacking a vibrant science and technology enterprise are doomed to lag behind (…). The summit will challenge the developed world to help bring the power of science to bear on bridging the ever-widening gap between rich and poor countries.

 

Excerpt: On the eve of the World Summit on Sustainable Development, it is timely to assess progress over the 10 years since its predecessor in Rio de Janeiro. Loss and degradation of remaining natural habitats has continued largely unabated. However, evidence has been accumulating that such systems generate marked economic benefits, which the available data suggest exceed those obtained from continued habitat conversion. We estimate that the overall benefit:cost ratio of an effective global program for the conservation of remaining wild nature is at least 100:1.
  • Economic Reasons for Conserving Wild Nature, Andrew Balmford, Aaron Bruner, Philip Cooper, Robert Costanza, Stephen, Farber, Rhys E. Green, Martin Jenkins, Paul Jefferiss, Valma Jessamy, Joah Madden, Kat Munro, Norman Myers, Shahid Naeem, Jouni Paavola, Matthew Rayment, Sergio Rosendo, Joan Roughgarden, Kate Trumper, and R. Kerry Turner, Science 2002 297:950

 

Summary: While global water models warn of parched days ahead, scientists worry that another pressing scarcity is information. In countries rich and poor, water data are often based on patchy estimates; along with confusion, water miscalculations have brought nasty surprises. And the knowledge gap shows little sign of improving.

 

Excerpt: When we set out the theme for the 2002 American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Meeting, "Science in a Connected World," we thought of the ways in which the fates of nations were intertwined as never before and of the role of science in shaping communication. I was mindful of the enormous challenges that faced a world that had grown so rapidly in population, individual consumption levels, and changing technologies. In the months that followed, the shock delivered by the September 11th events brought home with unimagined force the ways in which our collective neglect of these relationships had helped to bring about the dangerous and unstable state of the world in which we find ourselves. The problems we face seem cruelly compounded, but their root causes remain unchanged.

 

5. Europeans Try Air Fares Without the Fine Print, NYTimes

Excerpt: This summer, British Airways, the largest airline in Europe, has done what almost no American full-service carrier has been willing to do, despite the industry's enormous losses: radically simplify its fare structure to keep business travelers from defecting to low-cost competitors. (...)

But industry experts, not to mention passengers, are praising the European airlines for at least trying to fix complex fare structures that have driven many travelers to low-cost carriers or other modes of transportation.

 

6. The Neurology Of Social Cognition, Brain

Contributing Editor's Note: Damage to the systems that impact emotion, feeling and/or memory leads to compromise one's ability to make advantageous decisions. The part of the brain responsible called ventromedial (VM) region in the prefrontal cortex.  The VM region links the systems involved in judgement/decision making together, and therefore when damaged there are alterations of emotional experience and social functioning.

Excerpts: Specifically, evidence suggests that the VM region serves as a link between (i) a certain category of event based on memory records in high order association cortices and (ii) effector structures that produce an emotional response, and also (iii) the substrates of feeling. During judgement/decision-making, category events are brought to ‘working memory’, which includes several processes. However, maintaining an active representation of memory over a delay period involves the dorsolateral sector of the prefrontal cortex. Effector structures that mediate the emotional response are in the brainstem, whereas neural representations of feelings are thought to involve the insula, surrounding parietal cortices, and the cingulate.

 

7. Two-level Evolution of Foraging Agent Communities , Biosystems

Abstract: This paper presents simulation results of artificial foraging agent communities. The goal of each agent in the community is to find food. Once a food source is found, agents eat portions of it and carry some other portions to the nest (in a manner similar to ants) until the food is depleted. Agents may also communicate food positions when they are near each other. They are given a set of genes that control several characteristics, such as their activity, memory, scepticism, lying, etc. These genes are recombined and propagated by means of sexual reproduction. When one nest is superpopulated with agents, it can break in two nests. Agents can communicate only with those belonging to the same nest, which gives rise to emergent situations of competition and cooperation between the agents in the same nest, as well as competition between different nests. Other emergent phenomena such as the propagation of rumours are also studied.

 

8. An fMRI Study Of Intentional And Unintentional Violations Of Social Norms, Brain

Abstract: The aim of this investigation was to identify neural systems supporting the processing of intentional and unintentional transgressions of social norms. Using event-related fMRI, we addressed this question by comparing neural responses to stories describing normal behaviour, embarrassing situations or violations of social norms. Processing transgressions of social norms involved systems previously reported to play a role in representing the mental states of others, (…). These data suggest that social behavioural problems in patients (…) may be a consequence of dysfunction within the systems identified in light of their possible role in processing whether particular social behaviours are, or are not, appropriate.

 

9. Neural Correlates Of Self-Reflection, Brain

Abstract: The capacity to reflect on one’s sense of self is an important component of self-awareness. In this paper, we investigate some of the neurocognitive processes underlying reflection on the self using functional MRI. Eleven healthy volunteers were scanned with echoplanar imaging using the blood oxygen level-dependent contrast method. The task consisted of aurally delivered statements requiring a yes–no decision. Individual analyses revealed consistent anterior medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate activation for all participants. These data (…) suggest that the medial prefrontal and posterior cingulate cortex are part of a neural system subserving self-reflective thought.

 

10. Precise Firing Events Are Conserved Across Neurons, J. Neuroscience

Abstract: Sensory neurons can respond to dynamic stimuli with temporally precise firing events. In the lateral geniculate nucleus (LGN) of the thalamus, we found previously that when a flickering visual stimulus was repeated, individual cells fired action potentials at the same time in every trial to within 1 msec. We now show that these precise firing events are also reproducible across cells of the same class. Therefore, the mechanisms for producing precise timing must be conserved within a cell class. (…) cortical neurons would require only a few generic processing mechanisms to extract the fine temporal information (…).

 

11. Environmental Stimulus Perception and Control of Circadian Clocks. , Current Opinion in Neurobiology

Abstract: Circadian rhythms are regulated by clocks located in specific structures of the central nervous system, such as the suprachiasmatic nucleus (SCN) in mammals, and by peripheral oscillators present in various other tissues. Recent discoveries have elucidated the control of central and peripheral clocks by environmental signals. The major synchronizer in animals is light. In mammals, a subset of retinal ganglion cells receive light signals that are transmitted to the SCN via the retinohypothalamic tract. Photoreception is probably elicited by a novel opsin, melanopsin, although cryptochromes may also play a role. These signals feed directly to the SCN master clock, which then provides timing cues to peripheral clocks. In contrast to mammals, peripheral tissues in the fly and in the fish are directly photoreceptive. However, alternative routes exist. Some peripheral clocks in mammals can be specifically entrained in an SCN-independent manner by restricting food during the light period.

 

12. A New Look At An Old Visual System: The Compound Eyes, J. Neurobiology

Abstract: (…) the structural evolution of the arthropod visual system is an important topic in the new debate on arthropod relationships, and entomostracan crustaceans play a key role in this discussion. Therefore, we explored the proliferation of neuronal stem cells and the developmental expression of synaptic proteins in the developing optic neuropils of the brine shrimp (…) from hatching to adulthood. Our results indicate that the cellular material that gives rise to the visual system (compound eyes and two optic ganglia) is contributed by the mitotic activity of neuronal stem cells that are arranged in three band-shaped proliferation zones.

 

13. Net Visionaries Seek New Vistas, Wired

Excerpts: "The system has to be capable of dealing with delay and frequent disconnection," Cerf said. "(…) the interplanetary network is an example of a much more general concept we call delay-tolerant networks. "Some of the ideas we're pursuing will have utility on Earth in the mobile environment, where connectivity is often episodic (…)."

His [Tim Berners-Lee's, Ed.] vision of what he calls the Semantic Web is of an Internet full of data meaningful to computers as well as to humans. (…) This data would allow precise searches fulfilling precise needs, which are now impossible.

 

14. Reassessing The Evidence For The Earliest Traces Of Life, Nature

Excerpts: The isotopic composition of graphite is commonly used as a biomarker in the oldest (>3.5 Gyr ago) highly metamorphosed terrestrial rocks. Earlier studies (…) suggested the presence of a vast microbial ecosystem in the early Archean. (…) Here we show that graphite occurs abundantly in secondary carbonate veins (…). These metasomatic rocks, which clearly lack biological relevance, were earlier thought to be of sedimentary origin and their graphite association provided the basis for inferences about early life. The new observations thus call for a reassessment of previously presented evidence (..).

 

15. How Many Species Of Prokaryotes Are There?, PNAS

Excerpts: The microorganisms classified in the two prokaryotic domains of the tree of life, Bacteria and Archaea, possess immense metabolic diversity, and their activities are critical in processes ranging from sewage treatment to regulating the composition of the atmosphere. Especially in light of the rate of modern climate change, it is essential to understand how microbial communities affect ecosystem functioning and how human activities, such as agriculture, waste management, and climate modification, affect microbial communities. Thus discovering and understanding the diversity of microbial communities (…) is a high priority in ecology.

 

Excerpts: The absolute diversity of prokaryotes is widely held to be unknown and unknowable (…). However, it is not necessary to count every species in a community to estimate the number of different taxa therein. (…) Consequently, we can estimate the bacterial diversity on a small scale (oceans 160 per ml; soil 6,400-38,000 per g; sewage works 70 per ml). (…), thus the entire bacterial diversity of the sea may be unlikely to exceed 2 × 106, while a ton of soil could contain 4 × 106 different taxa.

 

16. West Nile and Its Lessons for Doctors, NYTimes

Excerpts: (…) picture is beginning to emerge of how a virus carves a new ecological niche (...).

If alert veterinarians and practicing physicians had not sought to identify the cause of the deaths of crows and of human encephalitis in New York City in 1999, health officials would probably have included the human cases in the large "cause undetermined" category of encephalitis. If West Nile had not been recognized until this year, scientists might have missed the evolving pattern and even concluded that the virus had been here a long time.

 

17. Surface-Responsive Materials, Science

Excerpt: Synthetic polymers offer a wealth of opportunities to design responsive materials triggered by external stimuli. Changing the length, chemical composition, architecture, and topology of the chains allows response mechanisms and rates to be easily manipulated; and devices based on the entropy of the chains, surface energies, and specific segmental interactions can readily be made. Although numerous applications exist, intriguing possibilities are emerging that have tremendous potential to further developments in surface-responsive materials.

A classic example of a responsive material is an elastic band.

 

Excerpt: The first is in the realm of biological and biomedical materials, in which the shape of a surface controls its interaction with biological components; for example, whether bacteria will grow on a particular surface--a subject of interest to anyone who wishes to keep surfaces hygienic or their teeth clean! The second important developing area is that of nanocomposites and nanostructured materials, which frequently combine soft matter with metals or ceramics for applications as diverse as electronics, packaging, and information storage.

 

18. Comment On "Experimental Violations Of Second Law Of Thermodynamics, arXiv

Excerpts: The statement made by the second law concerns the average entropy production, because the second law is related to the average heat transfer between system and bath. Thus, opposite to what the authors claim, their data fully confirm the validity of the second law.

This insight in the meaning of the second law goes back to Maxwell, who invented his so-called Maxwell demon with the motivation to pick a hole in the second law of thermodynamics, or, more precisely, to show that the second law has only a statistical nature. (…)

It remains to stress that none of formulations of the second law known to us ever claimed that unaveraged entropy production or unaveraged work must be positive.

 

19. Complex Challenges: Global Terrorist Networks

Excerpts: As they made their way through the valley, local men treated them like conquering heroes, offering them food and shelter. (...)

Some European and Arab intelligence experts believe, in fact, that Al Qaeda has mutated into a form that is no less deadly and even more difficult to combat. (...)

He and his groups would set off at nightfall, following old smuggling paths through the mountains. (...)One of the Saudis said Osama bin Laden and his son Abdullah had left Tora Bora around Dec. 1 "for an unknown place."

 

Excerpts: The government maintains the power to classify someone an enemy combatant resides with the president and that courts have little role to play. The Justice Department (…), refusing to give him details about Hamdi's alleged activities or capture that the judge has said he needs.

"If the government succeeds in this case, if its arguments are upheld it would mean that anybody, anytime could be labeled an enemy combatant by the attorney general and arrested in the middle of the night and locked away in a military brig," (…).

 

Editor's Note: Of course any good conspirators would like to invoke coincidences to distract from their conspiracies. On the other hand, it seems that child protégés are at a special disposition to later "see patterns" in random events that can be interpreted as conspiracies.

Excerpts: In paranoid times like these, people see connections where there aren't any. Why the complex science of coincidence is a conspiracy theorist's worst nightmare.

The law of large numbers says that with a large enough denominator -- in other words, in a big wide world -- stuff will happen, even very weird stuff. (…) Given that there are 280 million people in the United States, he says, ''280 times a day, a one-in-a-million shot is going to occur.''

 

Editor's Note: A number of events that could possibly be strange coincidences link Steven J. Hatfill -a U.S. biological warfare expert- to the post-9/11 anthrax letter bio-terror attacks.

Excerpts: (…) some biowarfare experts in and out of government have spoken quietly of him [Steven J. Hatfill, Ed.] as fitting their profile of the anthrax attacker: a knowledgeable person worried enough about the nation's vulnerability to germ weapons to send anthrax spores to the news media and Senate as a warning. By this theory, the attacker's motivation was never to kill or hurt but rather to alert the nation to a looming threat.

In 1979 and 1980, while he was in Rhodesia, thousands of black tribesmen became infected with anthrax.

 

20. Links & Snippets

20.1 Other Publications
  1.  Responses To Single Pulse Electrical Stimulation Identify Epileptogenesis In The Human Brain In Vivo, A. Valentín, M. Anderson, G. Alarcón, J. J. García Seoane, R. Selway, C. D. Binnie & C. E. Polkey, Brain, Vol. 125, No. 8, 1709-1718, August 2002
  2.  Identifying Functional Relationships Among Human Genes By Systematic Analysis Of Biological Literature, Y. Tao & R. L. Leibel, BMC Bioinformatics, 3 (1):16, 2002
  3. Electrophysiological Response During Source Memory Decisions In Older And Younger Adults, J. Dywan, S. Segalowitz, A. Arsenault, Brain and Cognition, Vol. 49, No. 3, pp.:322-340(19), August 2002
  4. Adult Age Differences In Visual Word Identification: Functional Neuroanatomy By Positron Emission Tomography, D. J. Madden, L. K. Langley, L. L. Denny, T. G. Turkington, J. M. Provenzale, T. C. Hawk &  R. E. Coleman, Brain and Cognition, Vol. 49, No. 3, pp.:297-321(25), August 2002
  5. Inverse Scattering With Partial Information On The Potential, T. Aktosun, R. Weder, J. Math. Analysis and Appl., Vol. 270, No. 1, pp:247-266(20), June 2002
  6. Pre- And Postsynaptic Mechanisms In Hebbian Activity-Dependent Synapse Modification, M. Li, M. Jia, L. Yang, V. Dunlap, P. G. Nelson, J. Neurobiology, Vol. 52, Issue 3, pp:241-250, 6 Aug 2002
  7. Spontaneous Versus Reinforced Olfactory Discriminations, C. Linster, B. A. Johnson, A. Morse, E. Yue & M. Leon, J. Neuroscience, 22(16):6842-6845, August 15, 2002
  8. Genetic Influence On Quantitative Features Of Neocortical Architecture, M. Kaschube, F. Wolf, T. Geisel & S. Löwel, J. Neuroscience, 22(16):7206-7217, August 15, 2002
  9. Physiology Of The Auditory Afferents In An Acoustic Parasitoid Fly, M. L. Oshinsky & R. R. Hoy, J. Neuroscience, 22(16):7254-7263, August 15, 2002
  10. Network Self-Organization Through "Small-Worlds" Topologies , M. Bucolo, L. Fortuna and M. La Rosa, Chaos, Solitons & Fractals .14 (7). 2002. pp. 1059-1064
  11. Structure of the Golgi and Distribution of Reporter Molecules at 20{degrees}C Reveals the Complexity of the Exit Compartments', Mark S. Ladinsky, Christine C. Wu, Shane McIntosh, J. Richard McIntosh, Kathryn E. Howell, Mol. Biol. Cell 2002 August 1; 13(8): p. 2810-2825

 

20.2 Coming and Ongoing Webcasts

  1. Audio Files Available From Smallpox Vaccination Forum, The National Academies' Institute of Medicine, 02/08/08
  2. Brookings Report Urges Congress to Revise President Bush's Homeland Security Proposal, A Brookings Press Briefing, 02/07/15, Event Video
  3. International Conference on Complex Systems (ICCS2002), Nashua, NH, 02/06/09-14 (video + mp3 downloadable audio)
  4. Understanding Complex Systems: Symposium Complexity in Physical and Biological Structures, Medicine & Ecology, Department of Physics, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 02/05/13-15
  5. ROBOT: The Future of Flesh and Machine, Rodney A. Brooks, MIT AI Lab, Talk given at the School of Cognitive and Computing Sciences of the University of Sussex, May 14th, 2002.
  6. Dean LeBaron's Archive of Daily Video Commentary, Ongoing Since February 1998

 

20.3 Conference Announcements 

  1. Transforming Government: Challenges, Strategies, Programs, McLean, VA, August 22-23, 2002
  2. 7th Experimental Chaos Conference, San Diego, USA, 02/08/25-29
  3. Econophysics Conference, Denpasar, Bali, Indonesia, 02/08/29-31
  4. Self-Organisation and Evolution of Social Behaviour, Monte Verità, Switzerland, 02/09/08-13
  5. Complex Systems (CS02) Complexity with Agent-Based Modeling, Chuo University, Tokyo, Japan, 02/09/10-12
  6. 3rd Intl NAISO Symposium on Engineering Of Intelligent Systems (EIS 20020), Malaga, Spain, 02/09/24-27
  7. Seminar on Non-equilibrium Phenomena and Phase Transitions in Complex Systems, Avila, Spain, 02/09/24-28.
  8. ACRI 2002, 5th Intl Conf on Cellular Automata for Research and Industry, Geneva, Switzerland, 02/10/09-11 
  9. Healthy Organizations & Leadership: What We Can Learn From Complexity Science, Flemington, NJ, 02/09/ 27-28
  10. Dynamical Systems Methods for Advanced Diagnosis and Prognosis, 39th Annual Technical Meeting of the Society of Engineering Science, University Park, Pennsylvania, 02/10/13-16
  11. New:  Artificial Worlds, Camden, ME, 02/10/18-20
  12. 4th Asia-Pacific Conference on Simulated Evolution And Learning (SEAL'02), 9th International Conference on Neural Information Processing (ICONIP'02), International Conference on Fuzzy Systems and Knowledge Discovery (FSKD'02), Singapore, 02/11/18-22
  13. New: Dynamical Neuroscience X: From Experiments and Models to Brain Theory, Orlando, Florida, 02/11/01-02
  14. International Conference on Systems, Development and Self-Organization (ICSDS'2002 ),Beijing, 02/11/30-12/01
  15. Managing the Complex IV, Naples , FL, 02/12/07-10
  16. New:  23rd Army Science Conference (ASC): "Transformational Science & Technology for the Army....a race for speed and precision.", Orlando Fl, 02/12/02-05
  17. Artificial Life VIII, UNSW, Sydney, Australia, 02/12/09-13
    1. 1st Workshop on the Modelling of Dynamical Hierarchies in Alife (WDH 2002)
  18. Hawaii International Conference On System Sciences (HICSS-36), Big Island, Hawaii, 03/01/06-09
  19. INSC 2003, International Nonlinear Sciences Conference Research and Applications in the Life Sciences,Vienna, Austria, 03/02/07-09
  20. 21st ICDE World Conference on Open Learning and Distance Education, Hong Kong, 03/06/01-05
  21. 2003 Genetic and Evolutionary Computation Conference (GECCO-2003), Chicago, IL,03/07/12-16
  22. New: 2003 AAAI Spring Symposium Series, Computational Synthesis: From Basic Building Blocks To High Level Functionality, Stanford, 03/03/24-27

 

Complexity Digest is an independent publication available to organizations that may wish to repost ComDig to their own mailing lists. ComDig is published by Dean LeBaron and edited by Gottfried J. Mayer. For individual free e-mail subscriptions send requests to: subscriptions@comdig.org.